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8 Taylor<br />
Gemeinschaft are used to distinguish between feelings of belonging to an abstract<br />
society and a more intimate community respectively. New Web-based social<br />
movements have arguably produced a hybrid combination of both affinities. Their<br />
sense of belonging is abstract in the sense that it often refers to a sense of solidarity<br />
stretched by global distances, yet group solidarity is also nurtured by those same<br />
global communications that serve to reinforce awareness of the particularities of<br />
local struggles.<br />
Social movements have become exactly that – movements - but often of<br />
socially relevant information rather than actual physical bodies of people (although<br />
the two categories may be combined in Web-facilitated protest events such as<br />
World Trade Organization demonstrations). Such new groups may be usefully<br />
understood as the affective groups Maffesoli (1996) describes as neo-tribes. In<br />
contrast to capitalism’s “iron cage of rationality,” new affective relationships are<br />
built upon a non-logical emotional basis, and in a more proactive version of<br />
Baudrillard’s inertly fatal masses of postmodernity. For Maffesoli, such neo-tribes<br />
have a certain “underground puissance”: ‘The rational era is built on the principle<br />
of individuation and of separation, whereas the empathetic period is marked by the<br />
lack of differentiation, the “loss” in a collective subject: in other words, what I shall<br />
call neo-tribalism.’ (Maffesoli 1996: 11) The new neo-tribes do not fit easily into<br />
the classificatory categories of the system that would absorb them: ‘Their outlines<br />
are ill-defined: sex, appearance, lifestyles – even ideology – are increasingly<br />
qualified in terms (“trans”, “meta”) that go beyond the logic of identity and/or binary<br />
logic.’ (ibid: 11) These new social movements ironically use the binary-based<br />
circulation systems of capitalism for their own non-binary purposes that in another<br />
semantic irony can perhaps be understood best in terms of a web.<br />
FROM NETWORKS TO WEBS<br />
The terminals of the <strong>net</strong>work society are static. The bonding, on the<br />
other hand, of web weavers with machines is nomadic. They form<br />
communities with machines, navigate in cultural worlds attached<br />
to machines. These spiders weave not <strong>net</strong>works, but webs, perhaps<br />
electronic webs, undermining and undercutting the <strong>net</strong>works.<br />
Networks need walls. Webs go around the walls, up the walls, hide<br />
in the nooks and crannies and corners of where the walls meet …<br />
Networks are shiny, new, flawless. Spiders’ webs in contrast,<br />
attach to abandoned rooms, to disused objects, to the ruins, the<br />
disused and discarded objects of capitalist production. Networks<br />
are cast more or less in stone; webs are weak, easily destroyed.<br />
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