I'm going to talk about fight club. The premise of fight club is a promising one - an underground, decentralized yet coordinated confederation of the disaffected, their very anonymity a vehicle for effective anarchist action. Pranks that take their politics very seriously. An idea goes out -- pee in the soup at the grand soirees and $100-a-plate dinners of the rich. An idea goes out -- dip vermicelli in an open tube of liquid cement, then break it off in the keyholes of office doors. An idea goes out -- gum up the engines of bulldozers by pouring a solution of sugarwater into the gas tank. An idea goes out -- and then, some ideas become action. But when, and where, and by whom? No. The first rule of fight club is . . .

Maybe you saw the movie, or read the book, and thought, well, the thing about fighting might be stupid, but what a great idea for subversion! Maybe it reminded you of some other things you've read. Maybe it reminded you of monkeywrenching. And maybe it reminded you of some things closer to home.

In its early days, the internet, and then later the world wide web, was touted as exactly this kind of decentralized yet coordinated anonymous network, a forum for the democratic dissemination of ideas, a perfect vehicle for (information about) effective anarchist action. Yet its early promise seemed cut short when it was sent to military school to learn to behave better -- well, ok, it was born a military brat after all -- and emerged (to mix more metaphors) as just another bit of urban real estate, another space colonized by advertising, another place where relationship and communication could be forced into an economic straightjacket.

But it had been imperfectly socialized. The pressure to conform split its personality, and the first impish, less controlled persona still peeks out from time to time, not always announcing its presence loudly, but persisting nonetheless. www.®^TMark.com is one such presence, a squat on a far-flung block where preliminary sketches and outlines of the revolution are being drawn up. A site for the dissemination of anarchist ideas and pranks, anyone can submit an idea to ®^TMark (pronounced "artmark"), and then anyone anywhere can invest anonymously, either with money or with action, to carry it out. The only caveat is that the implementation of the idea not injure a person.

One of the most visible ideas supported by ®^TMark was the site www.voteauction.com , the master's thesis project of James Baumgartner, an MFA candidate (now graduate) from RPI in upstate New York. Voteauction.com, an ironic comment on the overt graft and economic perversion of our electoral system, was a website where you could allegedly offer your vote for sale to the highest bidder. Coinciding with the 2000 presidential election, the site directly addressed the fact that our democracy is run as a business, with candidates sold at a profit margin to the wealthiest consumers, who then kick back money to keep certain issues viable while bankrupting others. Voteauction.com criticized this B2B business model as archaic, wasteful and inefficient, and offered instead a more streamlined approach along the lines of such popular person-to-person internet trading sites as eBay.

Created as satire, voteauction.com was quickly seized upon by certain government officials and the media as a perversion of the electoral process, and the site was shut down; its creator sued. Last Saturday's presentation at Other Cinema was a benefit to raise money for Baumgartner's (literal) thesis defense, the legal fees of which have mounted into the thousands. After its shutdown, the site was sold to an Austrian buyer for one Euro, renamed vote-auction.com and rehosted as www.voteauction.de/, (now inactivated). From the publicity standpoint, of course, Baumgartner's project has been wildly successful, as notoriety is the best kind of press.

Other ®^TMark projects have included the Barbie Liberation Organization (B.L.O.), which switched the voiceboxes of Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls and put them back on the shelves for sale, and The etoy Fund, a series of protests and online actions to support the european art site www.etoy.com in its David-and-Goliath struggle to prevent a hostile takeover of its name by the now-defunct eToys.com. The range of pranks suggested is extremely wide; I encourage you to visit the rtmark website and consider the extensive scrolling tables of HTML'd ideas, some funny, some intriguing, and some . . . useful.

The evening continued with a slate of Negativland videos, dense collages of sound and imagery that use the frenetic jump cuts and cartoon pastiches of the music and entertainment industries to expose the politics underpinning such enterprises. Demystification is your best entertainment value.

The final segment of Saturday's meeting featured a selection of documentary prank videos, offbeat, informational, and often hilarious how-to manuals on culture jamming, from the details of billboard alteration to revealing your fax machine's secret identity as an instrument of revenge.

Then the minutes were read and the meeting adjourned for another week, turning the attendees back out into the night and into their regular lives. But, hopefully, with a twist. With disaffection so prevalent and access so easy, fight club is growing. If you're interested, you now know where to go, in cyberspace and in RL. Check out a meeting or two. Just keep one thing in mind: the first rule of fight club is . . .