ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an account of the Prague plateau, a carnivalesque contestation of the IMF WB meeting held in September 2000. Our account draws on a range of sources including direct observation and video capture, interviews with activists from the Czech Republic, United Kingdom and United States, Czech, print media coverage, samizdat materials, activist video accounts and Indymedia sites. Through these diverse sources, we are able to capture something of the multi-layered nature of the meanings and processes structuring this plateau, rendering the underlying complexity visible. Analytically we focus upon the relationship between various forms of technological mediation widely regarded as central to global protests. CMC technologies are central to theoretical accounts emphasising the importance of network actors (Castells 1996, Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004) as emergent phenomena. Our account reveals the continuing importance of technologies that are more ‘mundane’, face-work contacts and mobilities through which a ‘virtual network’ is transformed into concrete acts of contestation. In this context the representation of acts of contestation within the public sphere assume a position of centrality in a struggle for legitimacy over world (dis)order. Understanding the dynamics of such contestation is dependent upon a degree of immersion within the network of networks operating as a ‘shadow realm’ (Welsh 2002) constituting subterranean structures which otherwise remain invisible.
