With the advent of the internet, McLuhan's concept of the “global village” became a popular metaphor (a cliché, really) to describe the increasingly interconnected planet. McLuhan envisioned a future where people would be free to experience and live among many cultures at once, slipping out of the confines of geography and borders on a stream of electrons. A small country like the Netherlands had a role to play, not as individuals surfing global cultures but as a tribe with jointly-developed ideas about how culture on the network and networked culture should operate. Thanks to Provo and the squatters’ movement, Amsterdam had long contained a city within a city (or, a village within a village)—a tight-knit community of artists and activists who were staunch believers in autonomy and personal freedom within a cooperative community.

Squatters had developed ways to crack into the urban fabric and carve out new spaces—new temporary autonomous zones—within the established order. As these squatters, together with artists and activists, moved into a virtual space (i.e., a media space), urban tactics became media tactics. The playing field had changed but the values of openness, democracy, participation, interaction, and autonomy survived. So, when it came time to enter the “global village,” these artists and activists (and hackers) entered as a tribe, not as individuals. In 2001 David Garcia described the Next 5 Minutes as a “tribal gathering of indymedia,” and, indeed, networked events, including N5M, helped guide the tribe through the transition from city space to cyberspace by creating platforms that fostered both local tribal unity as well as a utopian hope of connecting to like-minded people around the globe. As networked culture developed in Amsterdam, the concerns of the local—and the tribe—were always balanced against the ways that tribe reached out to the wider world.

The internet art that developed in Europe in the mid-1990s, particularly the work associated with the Net.art movement, united old tribe members and new ones.