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Free flow, the compression of time and space, deterritorialization, nomadism, are some of the events through which information technologies have transformed the phenomenology of our lived experiences. Money, labor, activism circulate beyond borders with diverse outcomes. Welcome to the world of networks, to the global and local sites where digital transactions occupy the space long ago vacated by the real.

In "Electronic Markets and Activist Networks," Saskia Sassen lays the panorama of the intertwined relationship between the local and the global within the digital landscape. "The global capital market […] this electronic, transjuridictional, globally interconnected market is actually embedded in a set of dense localized environments and specific social logics rather than being a seamless global electronic space." She signals that the issue at stake in global activism is exactly the opposite, that is, "how the local can be embedded in the non-local […] global networks and global agendas. […] The technologies, the institutions and the imaginaries that mark the current global digital context inscribe local political practice with new meanings and new potentialities." (http://www.makeworlds.org/node/view/94)

Online activism, covering the range from email campaigns to virtual sit-ins, marks the transnationalization of protest and the amplification of gestures towards the disruption of the flow of capital and the smoothness of the systems, emulating civil traditional disobedience practices such as blockage and sit-ins.