The only force propelling the message was the collective action of those who thought it was worth forwarding. 'Although the press has presented my battle with Nike as a David versus Goliath parable, the real story is the battle between a company like Nike, with access to the mass media, and a network of citizens on the Internet who have only micromedia at their disposal. 'I never expected my conversation with Nike to be so widely distributed the email began to proliferate without my participation,' he wrote in The Nation on April 9 2001.

On February 28, he was invited on to NBC's Today Show to debate with Vada Manager, director of global issues management at Nike. Peretti, meanwhile, was receiving 500 messages a day, sent from Australia, Asia, Africa and South America. By the next day, Peretti's email had been forwarded until it reached an engineer at rival custom shoe company Customatix, who emailed Peretti back within days, it had been picked up by tech blog Lot 49, the San Jose Mercury News, Village Voice, TIME, the Guardian, the Independent, MetaFilter, Slashdot and Salon, eventually, in his reckoning, reaching millions of people.