Much is made of the difference between 'virtual' and 'actual'. Otherthan asserting a distinction between 'unreal' and the 'real', the uses ofsuch oppositions demonstrates the real workings of a conflict between different approaches to and mappings of space, as both cyberspace and landscape.The singular experience of the net consists in making manifest a particular sense and use of space-including the so-called 'real' space of the world's surface-that has no place in officially-sanctioned, or rather petrified, maps and models.

At the end of the 20th century, nationalism had flourished to becomethe planetary system, covering every centimetre of the globe, administeredby various inter-nationalisms, including the agencies of the United Nations.As landscape, space is delimited by nation-states. Migration policies (border controls) were largely non-existent prior to the 20th C. The consolidation of nation-states that mostly took place in the 19th and 20th centuries-and the tyranny of citizenship (always founded on and premised on exclusions) that was their corollary-meant that the 20th C was fated to be the century of the 'refugee problem', as the UN and many NGOs prefer to apprehendit. movement in every sense

In the second half of the 20th C, a movement emerged in every sense. Currently estimated at over 50 million people, very often existing and moving clandestinely, this is the largest movement in history. Out of necessity and desire it refuses the cages and enclosures, the pass lawsthat regulate and control the paths between them, and creates the greatest challenge to the principal role of the nation-state: the 'right' of nation-states (whether as one nation or 'united' nations) to allocate, regulate and control bodies for the purposes of a capitalist production.It connects to a long line of struggles against the geopolitical inscriptions of capitalist production and imperial economy: the enclosure of the commons in England, the laying down of fence-lines for imperial agriculture,the forcing of indigenous peoples into missions and reserves alongside the passage of 'anti-nomadic' laws, to name but a few and only those most familiar to locals.

Previous centuries were marked by the journeys of colonial powers acrossthe globe in search of imperial expansion and consolidation. By contrast,the second half of the 20th C was significant for reversing this process.During that time, people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began moving in significant numbers, relative to pre-ww2 periods, to Canada, the US,the EU countries and Australia. It is as a response to these movements that,by the late 1990s, the US (1996), Australia (1992), and the EU (1997) all passed some of the most vicious border laws imaginable. Like all border laws,these were not meant to stop people from moving. Rather, they tried to recreate the conditions of the global sweatshops (the so-called 'third world')in the face of the threat to their precondition: border controls. In this way,the distinction between 'third' and 'first' worlds is increasingly a division internal to countries. The illegalisation of undocumented workers inplaces like the US and Australia means that they continue to be a reserve for hyper-exploitation, much the same as if they had remained in, say, Mexicoor Vietnam, as documented workers. In a broad sense, this movement consists of the undocumented, those without papers or sans papier. In other registers it, or parts of it, is composedof 'refugees', 'illegal immigrants', 'asylum seekers', 'economic refugees', 'stateless persons', 'non-persons'-but all these words are categorisations from the perspective of the nation-state, many formally sanctioned bythe UN, of the degree to which discrimination and exclusion are authorisedin particular cases or of the exact point at which one feels authorisedto perform the role of border cop.

visibility, media and mediation

Whereas real space was generally visible only by way of official mappings, of legal routes and national territories, the actual paths of this movement of flight and escape became visible in cyberspace, whether as the circulation of struggles of those without papers, or in chatrooms andacross emails that connected people on the move and as they moved, with information, friends and contacts, or simply as experimentation witha language that was not premised on national borderlines. On the net, ideasof space did not parallel that of national space. Here, those who are juridical 'non-persons' in a world dominated by citizenship found a media for communication.

The 'virtualisation' of the movement against the enclosures is not a function of its unreality, but a result of a history of figuration andthe processes by which movements are designated, recognised, given stampsof approval as oppositional-or not. There are those who refuse to acknowledge that it is indeed a movement, or those who can only recognise movementswhen they are designated as such by the media or the self-appointed officialsof mediation. Indeed, for a long time, since the Bolsheviks in 1920 adopted Woodrow Wilson's inter-nationalist doctrine of the 'self-determinationof nations'-since that is, they became little more than ambassadors forvarious nation-states (pro-China, pro-Soviet, pro-Cuba, etc.), in turn regarding flight from such states as traitorous-many could only imagine struggleas the struggle for more nationalisms. In short, many would only recognise movements if they appeared in the manner of their opposite: i.e., as enclosure rather than movement, as capture rather than freedom. In doingso, they had a deft hand in the invisibility of this movement, or at best,could only approach it as latter-day missionaries seeking out converts amongstthe dislocated, or as another means to prove their indispensability as mediators between the state and the insubordinate.

But aspirations for mediation have some difficulty being sustained onthe net, not least because if one were to accept a version of communicationand media such as that which operates on indymedia, it is difficult if not impossible to assure the delimited, fixed and mediatory model that claimsto representation rely on, and which remain the format of, especially, mainstream news media outlets. The net make any equations between mediaas communication and mediation as representation, and the integrative expectations of the latter, difficult to sustain. That is not unrelatedto the very possibility of the net making manifest a movement that, sinceit has no leaders or representatives, would otherwise be characterised mindless bodies in search of missionaries and representatives-the 'non-persons'of juridical space re-figured as the non-agents of political practice. (Even so, I'm not suggesting that the net is solely responsible for the de-coupling of mediation from media. The end of mediation is an historical moment, some refer to it as neo-liberalism, where the trade-off between integration and concessions was no longer possible, reducing mediationdown into a moment of repression and little else. This is why, for instance,the pre-condition of claims to representation are overwhelmed by and indistinguishable from the question of discipline: self-styled representatives of detainees or 'refugees', for instance, are asked whether they can ensure their ostensible constituency's pacification or, if they cannot, they are expected to denounce the actions of detainees or, on occasion, have inaugurated their claims to representation by insistingon the "need to integrate" detainees, as if the problem stems from detainees being too much on the outside of the circuits of representation. In any case, mediation is no longer, if it ever was, capable of granting concessions or relief.) nomadic and netactive

"ŠChiapas was increasingly subjected to all manner of transnational influences. During the 1980s and early 1990s, it became a crossroadsfor NGO activists, Catholic liberation-theology priests and Protestant evangelists, Guatemalan migrants and refugees, guerrillas coming and going from Central America, and criminals trafficking in weapons and narcotics. This exposure to transnational forces was stronger and more distinctive in Chiapasthan in two other nearby states-Oaxaca and Guerrero-that were often thought tobe likely locales for guerrilla insurgencies (and had been in the past).And this helps explain why Chiapas, and not another state, gave rise to an insurgency that became a netwar." - Rand Corporation http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR880/MR880.ch16.pdf

The Rand Corporation commentary, cited above, indicates something ofthe relationship between the experience of movement and netactivism in generating the particular strategies of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Rather than an echo of Microsoft's publicity dream of a borderless world without dissension and the exploitation of bodies are made invisible, the nethas seen the emergence of a language and subjectivity that is antagonisticto the enclosure of the commons, in both landscape and on the net, whereopen source meets open borders, undocumented meets techno-nomadic, and the emergence of trading posts and routes that are neither officially-sanctioned nor reducible to exchange and calculation. Here, there is antagonismto the fantasy of a world without bodies (Microsoft), a world where bodies are distributed according to pass laws and confined by borders, and more importantly still, the possibility of a practice that doesn't assumeit is 'our' role to grant intellects to mindless bodies.

by way of a conclusion

Some projects which give a sense of some of the above more fully:

border="0" location="yes" http://make-world.org

teleportica http://www.teleportacia.org/

bordercartograph http://www.moneynations.ch/cartographes/eng/index.htm

online action against deportation http://go.to/online-demo

http://stop-depclass.scene.as

xborder http://antimedia.net/xborder/

For an indication of proposals to draft conventions for cyberspace that re-assert national boundaries, see "Sea, Space, Cyberspace: Borderless Domains", V. A. Cebrowski, 1999, US Naval Military College, at www.nwc.navy.mil/