Chapter One


Going Viral


MoveOn, the Web, and the Peacenik Crusade


On the morning of September 11, 2001, a young man named David Pickering was at his parents' home in Brooklyn--he had graduated from the University of Chicago a few months earlier and was looking for a job--when he heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center. He went outside to see what was happening across the East River. Astonished by the sight, Pickering, an aspiring filmmaker, grabbed his video camera and hopped on the subway; unlike the thousands of people struggling to flee Manhattan, he was actually trying to make his way closer to Ground Zero. He got as far as an elevated train platform with a view of the burning towers. And there he stood as the buildings fell.
All day and night, Pickering shot interviews with people on the street, trying to get a sense of what they were feeling. They were stunned, horrified, angry, and confused. Of course, Pickering felt some of the same things himself, but as he reflected on what happened, an idea came to him: September 11 was an opportunity, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, for peace, if only the U.S. government could be persuaded not to defend itself militarily. "It was this incredible moment in which all doors were opened and the world was seeming to come together," he told me from Paris, where he was attending La Femis, the French national film school. "I had this feeling that it would be a shame if that were spoiled by a spirit of vengeance."
The next day, Pickering put his thoughts into writing. He drafted a petition imploring President George W. Bush and other world leaders to show "moderation and restraint" in responding to the attacks. He asked Bush "to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence or destruction."
That evening, September 12, Pickering sent the petition to about thirty friends, asking that they "sign" the document--electronically, of course--and send it on to others. By the next morning, he told me, there were between 3,000 and 4,000 signatures. Then a friend from the University of Chicago posted the petition on the school's student server. A couple of days later, there were nearly 30,000 signatures.
One of the people who saw the petition was a young liberal activist named Eli Pariser. A 2000 graduate of Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Pariser was working for More Than Money, a left-leaning Cambridge-based nonprofit educational organization. He, too, opposed military retaliation for the terrorist attacks, and he had set up his own website on September 12--he called it 9-11peace.org--with a message similar to Pickering's. Looking for a way to attract attention, Pariser e-mailed Pickering to suggest they combine their efforts. Pickering quickly agreed.
That's when the project took off. Within a month, about 500,000 people, perhaps half of them in the United States and the rest around the world, had signed the petition. Nearly every day, Pariser came up with new statements, and new petitions, to send out, and each of them managed to attract thousands of signatures. A born political rabble-rouser--the child of Vietnam War protesters, he is said to have started his picketing-and-demonstrating career at the age of seven--Pariser aggressively promoted the cause in ways that hadn't occurred to the introspective Pickering.
Soon it paid off. Thousands of miles away, in Berkeley, California, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, the husband-and-wife founders of the left-wing activist website MoveOn.org, were reading...

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