Chicano artist and tactical media practitioner Ricardo Dominguez, along with the members of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT)—Brett Stalbaum, a net-artist; Carmin Karasic, a computer scientist; and Stefan Wray, a media scholar-—actively joined the Zapatista network in April of 1998. Since 1994, they had been following the Zapatista conflict via listservs and websites.

In response to this conflict, Dominguez had created a performance in 1996 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Rabinal Achi/Zapatista Port Action in which he and fellow artist Ron Rocco combined digital technologies to educate students about the Zapatistas’ use of media. The performance linked the contemporary conflict between the Zapatistas and the government with the story of Rabinal Achi, a 15th. century Mayan drama portraying the clash between two Mayan groups. Dominguez used the online medium to build a real-time performance that would simulate physical presence in cyberspace. Rabinal Achi’s performance was the staging area for what would become The Electronic Disturbance Theater.

After the Zapatista armed insurrection of 1994, the conflict reached another high point: on December 22, 1997, forty-five indigenous people (Tzotzil), some of whom were members of the activist group Las Abejas (The Bees), were slaughtered by Mexican paramilitary forces while attending a prayer service in a church in the small town of Acteal, Chiapas.

Activists around the world circulated the news about the Acteal massacre and worked collaboratively to design an action in order to disseminate information and to repudiate the brutal action carried out by the Mexican government.

Dominguez staged a “grito” [a call for action] on a listserv, and he was rapidly contacted by an Italian net group, The Anonymous Digital Coalition (ADC). The group came up with the idea of what they called a “netstrike,” a form of digital demonstration that mirrored the civil disobedience tactic known as “sit-in,” an expression of peaceful dissent in which people gather at a site and disrupts business as usual through collective presence.

Thus, in January of 1998, immediately following the massacre of December 1997, the call for the action that the ADC named “Netstrike for Zapata” reached different online communities:
"In solidarity with the Zapatista movement we welcome all the netsurfers with the ideals of justice, freedom, solidarity and liberty within their hearts, to sit-in the day 29/01/1998 from 4:00 p.m. GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) to 5:00 p.m. GMT in the following five web sites, symbols of Mexican neoliberalism: Bolsa Mexicana de Valores, Grupo Financiero Bital, Grupo Financiero Bancomer, Banco de Mexico, Banamex." (Quoted by Ricardo Dominguez in http://www.medialounge.net/lounge/workspace/crashhtml/mr/2.htm. Accessed July 18, 2000)

The call for net-action also included technical instructions on how protestors were supposed to use their computers: participants were told to enter in their navigation browsers the addresses (URLs) of the sites listed in the announcement and, once there, to manually hit the “return” or “enter” button multiple times per hour, with intervals of a few seconds between requests. In choosing the action’s targets—five financial institutions that are “symbols of Mexican neoliberalism”—the call proposed a collective action and simultaneously disseminated important information about the alliances behind the Acteal massacre, attributed by the government to “unknown” paramilitary forces.

The Netstrike for Zapata and EDT’s search for collective action beyond text were the first attempts to be carried out in the 1990s when the Internet was brand-new. Back in 1994 no one knew the potential of the Web for extending activism beyond information. The ADC set the ground to turn the Internet from medium to site, providing the metaphor (sit-in) and the mechanism (repeated page requests) to transform activist engagement from information distribution to a concrete protest.

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