Protest Is Dead. Long Live Protest.

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This unity of medium and message is singularly lacking in the case of the antiwar movement. It would be one thing if Iraqi civilians were resisting U.S. tanks nonviolently (like African Americans in the 1950s, the average Iraqi citizen bears the greatest burden of U.S. policy). When a middle-aged war opponent signs a form or pays a modest fine after blocking the steps of the courthouse, however, or when an aging hippie with a multimillion-dollar film career speaks from a podium, it lacks a certain power.

The first step toward building a movement is getting people's attention, which is not easy. There's no doubt that during the 'Battle in Seattle,' the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization, street demonstrators found some visceral satisfaction in smashing windows at a McDonald's or a Nike store, but the acts themselves were unimaginative and overshadowed the cause.

One example of a successful anticorporate campaign is the Bubble Project (www.thebubbleproject.com), launched in 2002 when Ji Lee, a thirtysomething New York ad man fed up with his trade, printed thousands of stickers shaped like blank cartoon bubbles and then slapped them on posters and billboards around the city -- an open invitation for passers-by to fill in the blank.

The results, documented in Lee's book Talk Back (Mark Batty, 2006), were hilarious, subversive, and encouraged participation. Now there are bubble commentaries around the world, ranging from the political (a grinning model on an insurance company billboard asks, 'Why doesn't the government insure our health?') to the absurd (the Starbucks mermaid asks, 'Have you seen my nipples?'). Although he has been fined a few times for vandalism, Lee isn't a revolutionary -- he's simply trying to 'transform the corporate monologue into a public dialogue,' he says.

'The idea is to look for cracks in the system and exploit them,' says Steven Kurtz, a founder of the group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), best known for its 1994 book The Electronic Disturbance (Autonomedia), an early critique of the Internet that called for digital disobedience.

One CAE project in Halifax, Nova Scotia, featured a fake cultural tour -- complete with glossy brochures, commemorative icons, and LCD displays -- that highlighted injustices in that city, including a sewage-infested Halifax harbor. One display was mistaken for a bomb and the police's terrorism squad took charge. By the end of the day, the harbor was at a standstill. The larger public pegged police paranoia and antiterrorist overkill as the real culprits.

The Yes Men, undercover impersonators who pose as corporate spin doctors and show up to speak at big business retreats, turn the rhetoric of globalism on its head. A group called Improv Everywhere deploys hundreds of slow-motion shoppers to jam up the pace of commerce in retail outlets like Home Depot. The Center for Tactical Magic has dozens of tricks in its bag, including a 'tactical ice cream unit' that hands out propaganda -- and ice cream -- from a cart that doubles as a high-tech communications unit during protests. These groups aren't always linking their actions to a broader strategy for change, but their creativity is inspiring.

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