Tactics take place in fissures created in the panoptic gaze, which portends to be austere, totalizing, and omniscient. This panoptic gaze, in relation to the city, could be conceived quite easily as a map: a map of the city. We look at a map of a city and assume a view from on high. For de Certeau, the city is New York, and the view is from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. This eye from above is a fiction, birthed by Renaissance painters who "represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed" (de Certeau, 92). The construction which has emerged from that period and carried through Modernity has been that of a celestial eye, a god-like eye.
Metaphorically, though, I think conceptualizing the Internet as a city, and thus, linking it to de Certeau's walking in the city, has its advantages.
The Internet is a city of darkness, a city where we each have our own tiny flashlights, and in the process of surfing illuminate only what we see in front of us. Links represent the terminators of these arcs of light. Beyond them, we cannot be sure of what lies. The titles of links give us an idea, but a link which says "disney.com" might lead somewhere else entirely. Within this city in perpetual blackout, enclaves are set up. Along the darkened streets, anyone can set up shop. Some choose not to be noticed or located. Others burn brightly with the collected light of many visitors. From out of the darkness, hackers make hit-and-fade attacks against websites, defacing them, taking advantage of fissures, breaks in surveillance. Undetected, they recede back into the cover of darkness. Human agency is required to make any sense of the Internet ... maps do not exist except momentarily in the minds of those who enact the process of walking down the street by linking across various documents and pages.