From the cramped, book-lined dining room of his modest bungalow, Rene Amy wages war against the Pasadena Unified School District via modem.
The 37-year-old father of two school-age children badgers bureaucrats and catalogs mini-scandals on his World Wide Web site, a quirky digital newsletter where investigative reporting meets Mad magazine.
"Audit the PU$D," Amy demands on the first page. A few clicks away, he documents $4,000 worth of bar tabs run up by district employees and details how school employees accessed Internet porn sites. Posted nearby is the transcript of a routine by the British comedy troupe Monty Python.
Amy's activism follows a hallowed American tradition--that of the lone gadfly who shows up at public meetings to rail at elected leaders over everything from obscure procedural violations to wasteful spending, trying to rouse a complacent public. Usually, their arguments are ignored and they go home frustrated.
But Amy is a gadfly with gigabytes, and like other community activists who have gone online, his perch on the information superhighway has given him new reach. While once their rants and pleas were heard only by the unfortunates whose jobs require they sit through interminable city council or school board meetings, this new Gadfly Nation can communicate directly with anyone in town with a computer and modem as well as network with like-minded activists across the country.
Amy and others like him who used to be dismissed as ineffective nuisances are now on the "forefront of a revolution," said Terry Francke, director of the California First Amendment Coalition, which often gives legal advice to local activists. "If [activists] use [the Internet] as an extension of their efforts to get attention to the causes they wage, then it can be very powerful."
Many of these fledgling revolutionaries remain voices in the wilderness, their crusades unnoticed in cyberspace as they were in the city council chambers. But in cities from Pasadena to Stamford, Conn., Internet activism is slowly making an impact--sometimes small, sometimes dramatic--on local politics.
That impact comes from the Internet's unique ability to spread information, said the creator of a Web site dedicated to stopping the conversion of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County into a commercial airport.
