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Networked social movements 357version of RCADE) strongly criticized the logic of electoral representation,suggesting that very few people identify with political parties: “We are thuscreating a new political culture, a new way of doing politics, based on grassrootscitizen participation.” An MRG-based militant later confided that hestopped voting after becoming involved with grassroots movements, explainingthat “I am building an alternative political system, and that is much moreimportant.” When I specifically asked another activist from XCADE whatmight replace representative democracy, he was unsure, but thought it wasimportant to create a more directly democratic system from below:One of the things that most motivates me these days is trying to figure out how toorganize democracy at the beginning of the twenty-first century given the new technologicalinfrastructure at our disposal. How do we deepen our local democraticpractices – at work and in our neighborhoods – and transfer that spirit to the globallevel?Whereas directly democratic forms of participation have historically been tiedto local contexts, new networking technologies and practices are facilitatinginnovative experiments with grassroots democracy coordinated at local,regional, and global scales. Among the more radical global justice activists,networks represent much more than technology and organizational form; theyalso provide new cultural models for radically reconstituting politics and societymore generally. In this sense, grassroots, network-based movements can beviewed as democratic laboratories, generating the political norms and formsmost appropriate for the information age.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in Barcelona from June 2001 toAugust 2002, including travel to Brussels, Genoa, Leiden, Madrid, PortoAlegre, Seville, Strasbourg, and Zaragoza, as part of my doctoral dissertationentitled “Digital Age Activism: Anti-Corporate Globalization and the CulturalLogic of Transnational Networking,” completed in May 2004. Previous fieldworkwas also carried out in San Francisco, Prague, and Seattle betweenNovember 1999 and June 2001. Barcelona-based research and subsequentwriting were supported by a Dissertation Field Research Grant from theWenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc., a DissertationField Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council (withAndrew W. Mellon Foundation funding) and a Simpson Memorial Fellowshipfrom the Institute for International Studies at the University of California,Berkeley. I would like to thank Manuel Castells and Aihwa Ong for their valuablecomments on previous drafts.