QUEBEC, April 22 -- "Where are you," I screamed from my cellphone into his. There was a pause and then, "A Green Zone -- St. Jean and St. Claire."

Green Zone is protest speak for an area free of tear gas or police clashes. There are no fences to storm, only sanctioned marches. Green Zones are safe, you're supposed to be able to bring your kids to them. "Okay," I said. "See you in 15 minutes."

I had barely put on my coat when I got another call: "Jaggi's been arrested. Well, not exactly arrested. More like kidnapped." My first thought was that it was my fault: I had asked Mr. Singh to tell me his whereabouts over a cellphone. Our call must have been monitored, that's how they found him.

If that sounds paranoid, welcome to Summit City.

Less than an hour later, at the Comité Populaire St-Jean Baptiste community centre, a group of six swollen-eyed eyewitnesses read me their hand-written accounts of how the most visible organizer of yesterday's direct action protest against the free-trade area of the Americas was snatched from under their noses. All say Mr. Singh was standing around talking to friends, urging them to move further away from the breached security fence. They all say he was trying to de-escalate the police standoff.

"He said it was getting too tense," said Mike Staudenmaier, a U.S. activist who was talking to Mr. Singh when he was grabbed from behind, then surrounded by three large men.

"They were dressed like activists," said Helen Nazon, a 23-year-old from Quebec City, with hooded sweatshirts, bandannas on their faces, flannel shirts, a little grubby. "They pushed Jaggi on the ground and kicked him. It was really violent."

"Then they dragged him off," said Michele Luellen. All the witnesses told me that when Mr. Singh's friends closed in to try to rescue him, the men dressed as activists pulled out long batons, beat back the crowd and identified themselves: "Police!" they shouted. Then they threw him into a beige van and drove off. Several of the young activists have open cuts where they were hit.

Three hours after Mr. Singh's arrest, there was still no word of where he was being held.

Throwing activists into unmarked cars and nabbing them off streets is not supposed to happen in Canada. The strange thing is that, in Jaggi Singh's short career as an antiglobalization activist, it has happened to him before -- during the 1997 protests against the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit.

The day before the protests took place, Mr. Singh was grabbed by two plainclothes police officers while walking alone on the University of British Columbia campus, thrown to the ground, then stuffed into an unmarked car.

The charge, he later found out, was assault. Mr. Singh had apparently talked so loudly into a megaphone some weeks before that it had hurt the eardrum of a nearby police officer.

The charge, of course, was later dropped, but the point was clearly to have Mr. Singh behind bars during the protest, just as he will no doubt be in custody for today's march. He faced a similar arrest at the G-20 summit in Montreal.

In all of these bizarre cases, Jaggi Singh has never been accused of vandalism, of planning or plotting violent actions. Anyone who has seen him at the barricades, crumbling or otherwise, knows that his greatest crime is giving good speeches.

That's why I was on the phone with Mr. Singh minutes before his arrest -- trying to persuade him to come to the Peoples' Summit teach-in that I was co-hosting to tell the crowd of 1,500 what was going on in the streets.

He had agreed, but then determined it was too difficult to cross the city.

I can't help thinking the fact that this young man has been treated as a terrorist, repeatedly and with no evidence, might have something to do with his brown skin, and the fact that his last name is Singh. No wonder his friends say that this supposed threat to the state doesn't like to walk alone at night.

After collecting all the witness statements, the small crowd begins to leave the community centre to attend a late-night planning meeting. In an instant, the halls are filled with red-faced people, their eyes streaming with tears, frantically looking for running water.

The tear gas has filled the street outside the centre, and has entered the corridors. "This is no longer a Green zone! Les flics (the police) s'en viennent!" So much for making it to my laptop at the hotel.

Denis Belanger, who was kind enough to let me use the community centre's rickety PC to write this column, notices that the message light is flashing on the phone. It turns out that the police have closed in the entire area, no one is getting out.

"Maybe I'll spend the night," Mr. Belanger said. Maybe I will too.

When the top two executives at BMG Entertainment resigned this weekend, it revealed a deep schism in the way multinational companies see the Internet's culture of sharing. Despite all the attempts to turn the Net into a giant shopping mall, the default ethos still seems to be anti-shopping: on the Internet, we may purchase things here and there, but we share ceaselessly: ideas, humour, information, and yes, music files.

So here's the real debate as it goes down in the boardroom: is this culture of online swapping and trading a threat to the heart of the profit motive, or is it an unprecedented profit-making opportunity, a chance to turn sharing itself into an enormously profitable sales tool?

When the five major record labels, under the umbrella of the Recording Industry Association of America, launched a lawsuit against Napster, they threw their lot decidedly into the first camp: file-sharing is theft of copyright, pure and simple, and it must be stopped.

But then last week, something very strange happened: Bertelsmann, owner of BMG Entertainment (one of the five companies behind the RIAA lawsuit), struck a deal with Napster (hence the BMG resignations). The two companies are going to launch a file-sharing site where music fans pay a membership fee in exchange for access to BMG music. Once it's off the ground, Bertelsmann will pull out of the lawsuit.

At the press conference, Thomas Middelhoff, chairman and chief executive of Bertelsmann, pitted himself against the suits over at Time Warner and Sony who just don't get the Net. "This is a call for the industry to wake up," he said.

So what's going on? Has Bertelsmann, a $17.6-billion media conglomerate (which owns my publisher, pretty much everyone else's) decided to join the cyber-hippies who chant that "information wants to be free"? I somehow doubt it. More likely, Bertelsmann knows what more and more corporations understand: that after many failed attempts to use the Net as a direct sales tool, it may just turn out that the process of trading information is the Net's ultimate commercial use.

Napster defenders argue that they don't pirate CDs, but rather swap music within an online community the way communities of friends swap mixed tapes. They get to know and trust one another's taste and, they argue, they end up buying more music because they are exposed to more of it. They also say they have been driven to create this alternative by inflated CD prices and the hideously homogenous rotation of pop on video stations and commercial radio.

What's taking place on sites like Napster is a high tech version of something very old: people talking to other people directly about what they like. It used to be called "word of mouth," in the Internet age it's called "word of mouse." It's the X factor that can create a true phenomenon, like the Blair Witch Project, and which marketers can't seem to purchase or control, witness the Blair Witch sequel.

Or can they? Trying to understand, systematize and harness this most human of all behavious (how and why we talk to each other) has become something of a corporate obsession. Books such as "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell, "The Anatomy Of Buzz" by Emanuel Rosen and "Unleashing the Ideavirus" by Seth Godin offer quasi-scientific explanations for how ideas spread: less by advertising than by regular people who are respected by their peers. Gladwell calls them "connectors" and "mavens," Godin calls them "sneezers," Rosen calls them "network hubs."

Based on this theory, a marketing school has developed that encourages companies to treat consumers as if they were journalists or celebrities: feed them free stuff, and watch them do your marketing for you, gratis. Put more bluntly, turn the ultimate anti-commodity -- human communication, between friends, inside communities of trust -- into a commercial transaction.

This is the irony of the record industry's crackdown on Napster. At The same time as the legal arms of record companies are pummeling file-sharing sites, their marketing arms are warmly embracing these same on-line communities for their "peer-on-peer" potential. They've been paying firms like ElectricArtists to strategically circulate free music samples and video clips in the hopes of turning music fans into battalions of unpaid cyber Avon Ladies.

Bertelsmann itself used these techniques of "online seeding" to launch BMG artist Christina Aguilera: ElecticArtists gave away music samples to chatty Britney Spears fans, who then bombarded their online friends with the great news: She's been cloned!!

When Bertelsmann made a deal with Napster last week, they were betting on a future in which sharing -- when carefully controlled by marketers -- is the Internet's "killer app": a global network of online brand-babble where authentic communities used to be.

The Internet as a giant Tupperware party. Are you ready?

What seems to most enrage the delegates to the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Prague this week is the idea that they even have to discuss the basic benefits of free-market globalization.

That discussion was supposed to have stopped in 1989, when the Wall fell and history ended. Only here they all are -- old people, young people, thousands of them -- literally storming the barricades of their extremely important summit.

And as the delegates peer over the side of their ill-protected fortress at the crowds below, scanning signs that say "Capitalism Kills," they look terribly confused. Didn't these strange people get the memo? Don't they understand that we all already decided that free-market capitalism was the last, best system? Sure, it's not perfect, and everyone inside the meeting is awfully concerned about all those poor people and the environmental mess, but it's not like there's a choice -- is there?

For the longest time, it seemed as if there were only two political models: Western capitalism and Soviet communism. When the USSR collapsed, that left only one alternative, or so it seemed. Institutions like the World Bank and IMF have been busily "adjusting" economies in Eastern Europe and Asia to help them get with the program: privatizing services, relaxing regulation of foreign corporations, building huge export industries.

All this is why it is so significant that yesterday's head-on attack against the ideology ruling the World Bank and the IMF happened here, in the Czech Republic. This is a country that has lived through both economic orthodoxies, where the Lenin busts have been replaced by Pepsi logos and McDonald's arches.

Many of the young Czechs I met this week say that their direct experience with communism and capitalism has taught them that the two systems have something in common: They both treat people as if they are less than fully human. Where communism saw them only as potential producers, capitalism sees them only as potential consumers; where communism starved their beautiful capital, capitalism has overfed it, turning Prague into a Velvet Revolution theme park.

The experience of growing up disillusioned with both systems helps explain why so many of the activists behind this week's protests call themselves "anarchists." Anarchism is an ideology that defines itself by being fiercely non-ideological. It rejects externally imposed rules and argues that we are impoverished, as individuals and as communities, by overwork and overconsumption.

Most of us carry a mess of negative biases about anarchists. But the truth is that most are less interested in hurling projectiles than in finding ways to lead simple, autonomous lives. They call it "freedom."

So what do the lifestyle choices of a small (but growing) radical subculture have to do with the allegations being made against the World Bank and the IMF? Everything.

Far from simply demanding debt relief, the mass protests against the Bank and Fund are now driven by more fundamental demands: the elimination of both institutions, and of the economic beliefs that drive their every decision.

Over the past decade, a critical mass of communities in poor countries have questioned the Bank's belief that large-scale "development" always equals "improvement."

The people coming forward have been displaced by World-Bank-funded mega-dams and had their water systems polluted by World-Bank-funded mines.

Are these people Communists? A few. But most aren't capitalists either. They are tapping into something different, and much older. The young anarchists in Prague, also gathered here from around the world, have tapped into it too.

The Indian writer Arundhati Roy put it best, writing about her crusade against a World-Bank-funded dam: "Perhaps what the 21st century has in store for us is the dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small."

In New York City last week, leaders of 150 countries gathered for yet another meeting on globalization. Unlike all the other high-level meetings on the same theme, there weren't raucous crowds of environmentalists, workers and human-rights advocates outside, yelling about all the issues that have been bungled by the politicians inside. Why miss a perfectly protestable opportunity like this, in easily accessible, downtown New York?

Because the Millennium Summit wasn't hosted by one of the many international agencies whose sole mission is to open up markets for free trade, while assuring a wary public that economic growth will magically eliminate poverty and save our ailing planet.

This meeting was hosted by the United Nations, which, by its mandate, places human and ecological needs ahead of the voracious demands of the market. Imperfect as the UN system may be, it is generally viewed by critics of globalization as a ray of moral hope on the international stage. More significantly, many activists assume that when the time comes to stop pointing out the failures of corporate-driven globalization and to start advancing an alternative, the UN agencies will be there to help.

For instance, the International Labour Organization, with its treaties asserting the right to form unions and to earn a living wage, could be reformed to be more than a collection of well-meaning documents and could actually enforce labour rights across borders. The UN environmental agencies could play similar roles regulating polluters, with real sanctions for violators.

Only there's a problem: If the time ever comes to seriously consider this more active, regulatory role for the UN, it may be too late. That is the conclusion of the research paper Tangled Up in Blue, released recently by the Transnational Resource and Action Center (TRAC) and presented at a conference in New York.

The paper chronicles a set of policy decisions that are steering the UN away from its potential role as an independent regulator of transnational corporations and toward a model where the UN is just as entangled in corporate interests as all the other international financial agencies.

Two years ago, Secretary-General Kofi Annan began warning business leaders that globalization was losing its credibility because of the widening disparity between rich and poor. Pointing to the growing number of protesters, he began to float a proposal: If multinationals wanted to avoid a whole new set of trade rules governing labour and environmental standards, they should sign onto his Global Compact, a set of voluntary ethical guidelines drawn from UN declarations and conventions.

If companies agree to these guidelines in principle, and there is no monitoring to make sure they are followed and no economic sanctions if the guidelines are broken, individual corporations are welcomed into a "partnership" with the UN. The companies get the public relations boost of being associated with the olive branches, and the UN gets new financial partners to help it close the global wealth and health gap (not to mention to the gap of unpaid U.S. dues and of declining international aid).

When Mr. Annan launched the Global Compact in New York on July 26, representatives from roughly 50 companies were by his side. Two of the companies that have endorsed the compact are Nike and Shell: fittingly, the transnationals whose track records are most directly responsible for triggering the anti-corporate backlash the Global Compact is now trying to diffuse.

Nike's use of sweatshop labour in Southeast Asia and Shell's human-rights and environmental record in Nigeria have convinced a great many people that the inequalities of the global economy are not growing pains that can be fixed with some gentle prodding and voluntary codes. Rather, these companies have provided graphic evidence that the current economic boom is being built on the ability of multinationals to exploit inequality, whether it's cheap labour in China or lax environmental standards in Africa. (A fact that might explain why the companies now rushing to partner with the UN under its voluntary code have vigorously resisted attempts to set enforceable labour and environmental standards at every turn.)

In this sea of doublespeak, the UN could, at the very least, be a beacon of moral clarity, vigorously defending the high standards of decency laid out in its conventions, treaties and declarations. At the most, it could be trying to expand its reach to enforce those standards with the same enthusiasm that the World Trade Organization now rules against Brazilian aircraft subsidies. As the TRAC report states, "The UN could be a counterbalance to the WTO and corporate globalization."

Unfortunately, Kofi Annan, afraid that the UN "will be left behind" by history, has clearly shown his bias for an institution that is incapable of regulating corporations because it is in business with them. And if the international community ever decides it wants a different kind of UN, one that brokers a Global New Deal instead of settling for a humanitarian niche in a corporate Brave New World, it could well be too late. By then, the option of a strong, independent UN will have long since disappeared.

I wasn't thrilled that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service quoted my book, No Logo, in its new report on the anti-globalization "threat." In some of the circles in which I travel, being a de facto CSIS informant is a political liability. But there it is on Page 3: No Logo helping CSIS to understand why those crazy kids keep storming trade meetings.

Usually, I welcome any and all readers, but I have this sneaking suspicion that, a few months from now, this report is going to be used to justify smashing in the heads of some very good friends of mine.

In April, Quebec City, Canada will play host to the most significant free-trade summit since the World Trade Organization negotiations collapsed in Seattle last December. At the Summit of the Americas, 34 states will meet with the purpose of launching the Free Trade Area of the Americas -- a version of the North American free-trade agreement for the entire hemisphere (except, of course, Cuba).

The CSIS report is designed to assess the threat that anti-corporate protests pose to the summit. But, interestingly, it does more than paint activists as latent terrorists (though it does that, too). It also makes a somewhat valiant effort to understand the issues behind the anger.

The report notes, for instance, that protesters are enraged by "the failure to approve debt relief for poor countries." They believe that many corporations are guilty of "social injustice, unfair labor practices ... as well as lack of concern for the environment," and that the institutions governing trade are "interested only in the profit motive." It's not a bad summary, really (infiltrating all those teach-ins paid off). The report even pays the protesters a rare compliment: According to CSIS, they not only know their stuff, they are "becoming more and more knowledgeable about their subject."

Sure, these observations are made in the spirit of know thy enemy, but at least CSIS is listening. Which is more than you can say for Canada's Minister of International Trade. In an address to the Inter-American Development Bank this month, Pierre Pettigrew set out a bizarre George Lucas-style dynamic in which free traders are the forces of global order and its critics the forces of "global disorder." These sinister foes aren't motivated by "idealism" -- as the CSIS report states -- but are driven by a selfish desire "to exclude others from the kind of prosperity we enjoy." And they don't have some legitimate concerns -- they don't have a clue. "Globalization, quite simply, is part of the natural evolutionary process," Mr. Pettigrew said. "It goes hand in hand with the progress of humanity, something which history tells us no one can stand in the way of."

If the government is worried that protesters are going to ruin its party in Quebec City, it should start by admitting that Mother Nature doesn't write international trade agreements, people do. Better yet, instead of "monitoring the communications of protesters," as the CSIS reports calls for, the discussion should be dragged out of the cloak-and-dagger domain of intelligence reports and the next eight months should be devoted to an open, inclusive debate on whether we want NAFTA for the hemisphere.

There is a precedent. In 1988, there was such a debate over NAFTA. But back then, the pros and cons of trade deregulation were theoretical: it was a war, essentially, of competing predictions.

Now, we are in a position to examine the track record. We can ask ourselves: Have the NAFTA rulings allowed us to protect our culture? Has the labor side agreement protected the rights of factory workers in Canada and Mexico? Has the environmental side agreement given us the freedom to freely regulate polluters? Have human rights, from Chiapas to L.A. to Toronto, been strengthened?

We can also look at the proportion of our GDP that relies on trade, and at the standard of living for average citizens (stagnant). Then we can ask ourselves: Is this the best economic system we can imagine? Are we satisfied with more of the same? Do really we want NAFTA x 34? Such debate in itself would be evidence of a healthy democracy, but we could go even further. Our entry in the FTAA could become a core issue in the next election and -- here's a crazy idea -- we could vote on it.

It won't happen, of course. Democracy will be relegated to a petty haggling over tax cuts. The critics of our economic path will become more disenfranchised, and more militant. And the job of the police will be to protect our politicians from real politics, even if it means turning Quebec City into a fortress impervious to protesters.

Setting the stage for this use of force, the CSIS report concludes that, "given the virulent anti-globalization rhetoric ... the threat of summit-associated violence in Quebec City cannot be ruled out." Perhaps it can't. But given the virulent anti-activist rhetoric, and the collusion of our politicians, the threat of police violence in Quebec City is virtually guaranteed.