Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that I have a
Speaker 1: podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I am
Speaker 1: your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and every week I bring you
Speaker 1: stories of rebellion or I don't know, whatever I think
Speaker 1: is cool, which is mostly rebellion. But it's not always
Speaker 1: just that. I am multifaceted. There's facets of me that
Speaker 1: like music, although I usually talk about bands that are
Speaker 1: really political, but sometimes I whatever. I'm not defending this.
Speaker 1: I like my show and you might too. Otherwise you
Speaker 1: might not be listening to part two of an episode.
Speaker 1: This is part two of a two parter that's tied
Speaker 1: into a broader project I am doing talking about well,
Speaker 1: it's part two of talking about the Battle of Seattle
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety nine, but it's part to something or
Speaker 1: other of a larger thing. I am doing about the
Speaker 1: alter globalization movement, about the fight against neoliberalism and basically
Speaker 1: radical politics at the turn of the millennium. I have
Speaker 1: a producer. My producer's name is Sophie. Sophie isn't on
Speaker 1: the call because there's no guest. It's just me and
Speaker 1: a microphone. But Sophie is still here with us today
Speaker 1: and also listening in on the call while not live
Speaker 1: but later editing. It is our audio engineer, Eva hi Eva,
Speaker 1: and our theme music was written for us by n Woman.
Speaker 1: And so where we left our heroes. I talked about
Speaker 1: the five different groups that came together to well, they
Speaker 1: didn't come together, the five different groups of various levels
Speaker 1: of interacting with each other that were all different, diverse
Speaker 1: coalitions themselves of various groups that all went to Seattle
Speaker 1: to try to stop the World Trade Organization from on
Speaker 1: democratically making decisions to got the world for profit. So
Speaker 1: everyone was getting ready and then they went to Seattle.
Speaker 1: That's what we're going to talk about this time, We're
Speaker 1: actually going to get there. Imagine that an entire episode
Speaker 1: of context. No one's ever heard of Margaret doing that.
Speaker 1: So people were like, you know, it's not enough to
Speaker 1: do a day of action or even like several days
Speaker 1: of action. Because of the summit was several days long.
Speaker 1: People wanted to get started early to build up momentum.
Speaker 1: They called for nine days of action before the protests
Speaker 1: even started. It was billed as a street theater convergence
Speaker 1: by Dan. Dan got like a two week lease on
Speaker 1: a building for one thousand dollars. I feel like I
Speaker 1: must be missing a zero here, but I really think
Speaker 1: it was one thousand dollars. I read that they're like
Speaker 1: total budget for all of the protest stuff was about
Speaker 1: twenty grand total or something. I'm not sure it's a
Speaker 1: really good return on investment. I'm just saying anyway, they
Speaker 1: got a lease on his building and they open it
Speaker 1: up as a convergence center, which is a staple of
Speaker 1: protests at the time. Basically, you rent out a building
Speaker 1: and that's where you have your meetings and you make
Speaker 1: art and occasionally you hide from police and hope you
Speaker 1: don't all get mass arrested. That's the one that you
Speaker 1: actually like pay for and then like other places, are
Speaker 1: squatted by people who are a little bit more risk tolerant.
Speaker 1: The welcome center was called four to twenty the Denny
Speaker 1: Space because it was at four to twenty East Denny
Speaker 1: Way in a former night club, and yes, people did
Speaker 1: already use four twenty as the weed number in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine. I went back and double checked. I was
Speaker 1: pretty sure because I was alive during that time, but
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know Wikipedia says that four
Speaker 1: to twenty was popularized in nineteen ninety one by High
Speaker 1: Times magazine, and that's why there's a Wikipedia article in
Speaker 1: today's sources. So I wanted to double check that people
Speaker 1: got themselves a conversion space. And over nine days leading
Speaker 1: up to the protests, several thousand people came through. They
Speaker 1: put on action after action to help inform local folks
Speaker 1: about the upcoming protests and help get people organized and
Speaker 1: build up momentum and get practice walking around with giant
Speaker 1: puppets and stuff and like stilt walkers and clowns, and
Speaker 1: I bet there was fire breathing, I don't know. On
Speaker 1: November twenty first, there was a big parade through a neighborhood.
Speaker 1: On November twenty second, Global Exchange protested sweatshop labor in
Speaker 1: front of the gap, and folks dropped a banner from
Speaker 1: the building that read sweatshops free trade or corporate slavery.
Speaker 1: One night, people did what's called a newspaper rap, where
Speaker 1: you print a fake front page on a newspaper and
Speaker 1: go around to all the newspaper boxes and put your
Speaker 1: cover on the papers inside. They somehow did this to
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand copies in one night of the newspaper,
Speaker 1: the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and basically they put a fake
Speaker 1: front page that talks about how badly the paper was covering.
Speaker 1: The wto the fact that they did this to twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand papers in one night is so amazing. There's
Speaker 1: like so much truth to the many hands make light
Speaker 1: work thing, which is actually it's funny. It's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that writing fiction or making movies about this
Speaker 1: kind of thing is so hard because Western storytelling is
Speaker 1: so this is complete tangent, but it's interesting to me,
Speaker 1: so maybe you'll like it. Western storytelling is so built
Speaker 1: on individuals, individual characters that it really struggles with building
Speaker 1: tension and plot and moving things forward with groups. And
Speaker 1: it's hard to get an audience to like it when
Speaker 1: you do it because you have to break so many
Speaker 1: of the rules. And that's why. For example, there's a
Speaker 1: movie about the Battle of Seattle called The Battle of Seattle,
Speaker 1: and it's not a particularly good movie. It's not quite
Speaker 1: as bad as I thought it was going to be.
Speaker 1: I always avoided watching it, and I've read a book
Speaker 1: critiquing it. It's in the sources, but it focuses on
Speaker 1: these like individual leaders, and that's just not an effective
Speaker 1: way to understand this, especially when you're talking about twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand copies of a newspaper. That's not something three
Speaker 1: people do anyway. There were parades and marches everywhere for days,
Speaker 1: and they were all of the hits of the era,
Speaker 1: like the radical cheerleaders who crashed a mainstream parade, or
Speaker 1: a four hundred person strong critical mass bike ride, critical
Speaker 1: mass bike rides or well, they're just called critical masses.
Speaker 1: It's where you get together a critical mass of people
Speaker 1: on bicycles to sort of ride together in the streets,
Speaker 1: and it's a bike rights style of protest, but it
Speaker 1: also gets used a lot in other protests, especially during
Speaker 1: this era. Two women dropped a banner from the retaining
Speaker 1: wall of I five, the big interstate that runs through Seattle,
Speaker 1: reading shut down the WTO. According to the source I
Speaker 1: read about it like one of the women's moms was
Speaker 1: like cheering her on from the side, and that's cool.
Speaker 1: There's puppets, and there's stilt walkers and clowns, and there's
Speaker 1: marching bands and shit marching around thousands strong. In the
Speaker 1: build up to the protests, the police are largely hands
Speaker 1: off during all of this time. As best as I understand,
Speaker 1: both the mayor and the chief of police were like,
Speaker 1: we do not want to turn this into a shit show.
Speaker 1: We just need to keep our heads down, make sure
Speaker 1: that they don't like doing anything real bad. We'll just
Speaker 1: get through this. That seemed to be the attitude that
Speaker 1: the state was taking in response. So they didn't come
Speaker 1: down and beat up all the stilt walkers in clowns,
Speaker 1: because that's also a bad image, although that'll happen later.
Speaker 1: Seventy five people squatted an abandoned building downtown and opened
Speaker 1: it up to house activists coming into town. So basically
Speaker 1: like if you show up a loan and are like,
Speaker 1: I don't know where to go, They're like, go to
Speaker 1: the squad. You can go stay at the squad. And
Speaker 1: they managed to hold the building the entire length of
Speaker 1: the wto although not without tents, standoffs, and a number
Speaker 1: of confrontations and a lot of negotiations with lawyers and shit.
Speaker 1: At one point, riot cops surrounded the building. They were like,
Speaker 1: you all leave or get arrested. Only fifteen squatters stayed inside.
Speaker 1: Then the cops were chased off by reinforcements from the
Speaker 1: four to twenty space. Basically, they're like, it's coming down
Speaker 1: to the wire, it's all going to happen. But then
Speaker 1: like tons of people from the conversion space come and
Speaker 1: converge on this area, and the cops are like, never mind,
Speaker 1: we don't want to do this. Through a friendly lawyer,
Speaker 1: squatters negotiated to hold the building through the length of
Speaker 1: the WTO and then hand it off to a homeless
Speaker 1: advocacy group. In exchange, the squatters were like, we'll sign
Speaker 1: waivers saying if we get hurt in the building, it's
Speaker 1: not the landlord's fault. I actually don't expect that the
Speaker 1: landlord held up his side of this bargain, but I
Speaker 1: am not sure. I didn't find a follow up about
Speaker 1: what happened. And then on November twenty ninth, the WTO
Speaker 1: sort of began. There were no WTO meetings that day,
Speaker 1: but there was a big reception party for the arriving delegates.
Speaker 1: The WTO wanted to fly under the radar as much
Speaker 1: as possible and just kind of do this gala behind
Speaker 1: closed doors, but activists weren't going to let that happen.
Speaker 1: The Rainforest Action Network used their climbing skills to hang
Speaker 1: a startlingly large banner, like literally professional like activists nonprofits
Speaker 1: hang really large, impressively large banners. They hung this banner
Speaker 1: off of one hundred and seventy foot crane. It had
Speaker 1: two arrows. One pointed one way and read democracy, and
Speaker 1: the other pointed the other way and said wto. As
Speaker 1: protests began to ramp up on the twenty ninth, hundreds
Speaker 1: of people dressed as sea turtles roamed around downtown. This
Speaker 1: is like an environmentalist group, folks talking about how laws
Speaker 1: are being changed in a way that destroys the environment
Speaker 1: and kills all the sea turtles. And they would go
Speaker 1: around dress as sea turtles talking with people about the wto.
Speaker 1: Five thousand people led by faith leaders marched circles around
Speaker 1: the building where the opening reception was happening, so they
Speaker 1: did not get to meet silently. And then I don't
Speaker 1: think people probably got too much sleep that night because
Speaker 1: the next day the shutdown began. But you know what
Speaker 1: comes before the shutdown. Actually, there probably wasn't a lot
Speaker 1: of advertising in the radical media at the time. This
Speaker 1: was probably the most advertising adverse group of radicals in history. Honestly,
Speaker 1: that was their whole thing. They did not like this.
Speaker 1: One of the main magazines we all read was Adbusters. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's not the current era, because I like feeding my dog.
Speaker 1: Here's ads and we're back. So they were going to
Speaker 1: shut down the WTO through direct action, and the way
Speaker 1: they did it was somewhat simple and very very effective.
Speaker 1: The fundamental building block of most direct action groups, especially
Speaker 1: in horizontal movements, is the affinity group. These are tight
Speaker 1: knit groups of friends, usually five to fifteen people, who
Speaker 1: make decisions by consensus amongst one another and are willing
Speaker 1: to take risks together. This model, as I understand it,
Speaker 1: has roots going back to the anarchist organizing in Spain
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties leading up to and during the
Speaker 1: Spanish Civil War. The affinity group model is very good
Speaker 1: for decentralized direct actions. You gather representatives from each affinity
Speaker 1: group into a spokes council and they can make plans together.
Speaker 1: The organizing for n thirty, as the day of action
Speaker 1: was called November thirtieth, was intentionally completely transparent. They didn't
Speaker 1: like post meeting notes to the Internet. I mean, actually
Speaker 1: they might have, but I'm not aware of it. But
Speaker 1: they were not trying to hide what they were doing.
Speaker 1: They would say, you know, plug into the following framework.
Speaker 1: This is the framework we're currently deciding on it. This
Speaker 1: is how it's going. They announced months ahead of time
Speaker 1: exactly how they were going to shut down the WTO.
Speaker 1: Here are the seven principles they worked with, because again
Speaker 1: I think that people should know how stuff gets done.
Speaker 1: And I am paraphrasing these seven principles from the organizer
Speaker 1: and writer David Solnett, who has his own biases, but
Speaker 1: so does everyone one clear what and why logic to
Speaker 1: quote the Direct Action Network quote, we are planning a
Speaker 1: large scale, well organized, high visibility action to shut down
Speaker 1: the World Trade Organization on Tuesday, November thirtieth. The World
Speaker 1: Trade Organization has no right to make undemocratic, unaccountable, destructive
Speaker 1: decisions about our lives, our communities, and the earth. We
Speaker 1: will non violently and creatively block them from meeting. So
Speaker 1: very clear about the what and why. Two broadly publicized.
Speaker 1: They set up a website, They printed one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: colored postcards. They emailed every email list of every organization.
Speaker 1: They had a road show people they showed people how
Speaker 1: to plug in three mass training and mass organization, and
Speaker 1: thousands of people from all sorts of activist spheres went
Speaker 1: to direct action trainings. Four decentralization. There were some core principles,
Speaker 1: but things were organized by affinity groups coming together to
Speaker 1: form clusters so they were able to make decisions spontaneously
Speaker 1: and quickly, and arresting organizers wasn't going to stop shit.
Speaker 1: Five Action agreements. They agreed that people would be nonviolent
Speaker 1: and not do property destruction. Six open organizing. By organizing openly,
Speaker 1: you're actually much more resistant against infiltration and stuff because
Speaker 1: when things aren't secret, when the secrets get out, that's
Speaker 1: not a problem because you knew the secrets were going
Speaker 1: to get out, and yeah, if plans get leaked in
Speaker 1: their public whatever. Seven Media and framing. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of work done talking to medio using very specific framing.
Speaker 1: To be honest, the media didn't really use the framing
Speaker 1: they suggested, and I don't know how effective this particular
Speaker 1: one was, but so it goes they did do a
Speaker 1: lot of their own medium, so maybe that was effective.
Speaker 1: Those are the seven principles. They did all this organizing
Speaker 1: in the open, and what they did is they divided
Speaker 1: the area that they wanted to shut down into thirteen
Speaker 1: pie slices, and an affinity groups joined clusters, which are
Speaker 1: larger organizing groups, and each cluster took one of the
Speaker 1: pie slices. So like you and your seven friends might
Speaker 1: agree to join some like lockdown intersection alongside four other
Speaker 1: affinity groups, for example, exactly how you all behaved would
Speaker 1: be up to your affinity group and your cluster, and
Speaker 1: you would democratically determine how your actions would work in
Speaker 1: conjunction with other people's actions, for example. And I am
Speaker 1: definitely using this example because I think it's a funny name.
Speaker 1: A cluster that called itself Flaming Dildos agreed to shut
Speaker 1: down the spot right next to the Inner State that
Speaker 1: ran underneath the convention center. Overall, the direct action protesters
Speaker 1: were young. According to David Solnett, they were quote students,
Speaker 1: Earth firsters and young people who really went out there
Speaker 1: in the front, but not exclusively. There were significant numbers
Speaker 1: of middle aged people and a few old folks. No
Speaker 1: one was sure what would happen. They spent like six
Speaker 1: months planning this thing, and they had their very specific
Speaker 1: plan about what they were going to do, and they'd
Speaker 1: spent all this effort and they had no idea what
Speaker 1: was going to happen. They figured they would disrupt things.
Speaker 1: They also figured they'd probably get mass arrested pretty quickly
Speaker 1: and the WTO meetings would continue. But these actions were
Speaker 1: more than disruptive. The World Trade Organization wasn't even able
Speaker 1: to hold its opening ceremonies because at seven am or so,
Speaker 1: people went to the convention center and started blockading intersections
Speaker 1: and all the entrances to the building. They put up
Speaker 1: a fifty foot tripod with someone locked at the top.
Speaker 1: They would drag cement barrels. When I say drag, they
Speaker 1: were probably on dollies. I don't actually know, but that's
Speaker 1: the way that I would whatever. I've moved to cement
Speaker 1: barrel and I did it on a fucking dolly. It's
Speaker 1: the only time sealed toed boots ever came into I
Speaker 1: wore steal too boots every day of my life in
Speaker 1: my twenties, and one time it was really useful anyway. Whatever,
Speaker 1: So they would drag cement barrels into the street that
Speaker 1: people then like, it's a barrel full of cement with
Speaker 1: like a pipe running through it, with like a piece
Speaker 1: of rebar in the pipe, so that if you put
Speaker 1: a carabiner on a chain around your wrist. You can
Speaker 1: reach in and clip the carabiner to the rebar in
Speaker 1: the center of the thing. And now you can't get out,
Speaker 1: or rather now people can't get you out. I mean
Speaker 1: they can torture you and try and get you too.
Speaker 1: Just what they're going to do spoiler alert. But anyway,
Speaker 1: it's an activist staple. There was also people dragging dumpsters
Speaker 1: into the street. There were cars that were turned into
Speaker 1: lock boxes. There were giant puppets everywhere. There was a
Speaker 1: human chain around the convention. They blocked off parking garages, hotels,
Speaker 1: and underground tunnels. Delegates for the wto wearing ID tags
Speaker 1: that said delegate were chased off. Cops tell delegates they
Speaker 1: can't help them. Like the delegates to go out and
Speaker 1: be like, hey, how do I get in? The cops like,
Speaker 1: I don't think you can, buddy. The Secretary of State
Speaker 1: of the United States, Madeline Albright, was trapped in her
Speaker 1: hotel by the protests and the governor can't mobilize enough
Speaker 1: forces to get her out. The protesters have planned three waves.
Speaker 1: The most arrestable affinity groups go out first. Arrestable means
Speaker 1: like you're kind of planning to get arrested, or you're
Speaker 1: very willing to get arrested. The arrestable affinity groups go
Speaker 1: first to lockdown, and then a second wave was to
Speaker 1: arrive to support these lockdowns just by being present and
Speaker 1: clogging up the streets with numbers. The third wave was
Speaker 1: the People's Assembly, which was basically more NGO type groups,
Speaker 1: non governmental organization type groups that picked direct action support
Speaker 1: over the Big Labor March. The Big Labor March was
Speaker 1: happening elsewhere, and it was pretty much designed not to
Speaker 1: interfere directly the Big Labor March, though it did require
Speaker 1: a decent number of police, which meant fewer police were
Speaker 1: available to stop the action. And like best as I
Speaker 1: can tell, you're talking about this massive disparity. You're talking
Speaker 1: about about four hundred police officers to police this entire
Speaker 1: like thousands and thousands of people strong direct action, which
Speaker 1: is wasn't enough police. Well, it depends on what your
Speaker 1: goals are. I'm not in favor of the police in
Speaker 1: this particular context, but from the police's point of view,
Speaker 1: it was not enough police. And then the police, well
Speaker 1: before anyone started breaking shit, hours beforehand, police just fucking
Speaker 1: went wild on people. Why this happened? At least one
Speaker 1: conjecture about why this has happened in a report that's
Speaker 1: in the show notes, that was quoted in a Crime
Speaker 1: Think article, Why this happened is actually sort of interesting,
Speaker 1: but not as interesting as these deals. And Rebecca, so,
Speaker 1: policing in the US and presumably everywhere has always been
Speaker 1: pretty massively and not just in a like Margaret doesn't
Speaker 1: like the concept of police in prison sort of way,
Speaker 1: but in a way in which police have been tied
Speaker 1: into organized crime in various ways in various places since
Speaker 1: more or less the beginning of modern policing. Corruption isn't
Speaker 1: always even throughout the ranks, and Seattle had this famously
Speaker 1: corrupt police department in the sixties and seventies, but by
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine it was led by people who are
Speaker 1: trying to reform out that corruption, and a lot of
Speaker 1: the crooked cops didn't want to get reformed. Specifically, they
Speaker 1: wanted to embarrass the police chief. While the city had
Speaker 1: been saying it was going to respect free speech and
Speaker 1: be a bit hands off during the protests, you know,
Speaker 1: only arrest people who like breached a certain perimeter and
Speaker 1: try not to arrest on violent people. The rank and
Speaker 1: file police were spreading the word that protesters are basically
Speaker 1: there to try and kill them, Like they were like,
Speaker 1: we think five or six of us are going to
Speaker 1: die tomorrow, you know. And they complained about how the
Speaker 1: brass wanted to be too soft on the protesters. They
Speaker 1: also figured if they could turn the whole thing into
Speaker 1: a riot, it would embarrass the hell out of the
Speaker 1: mayor and the chief of police, and so the police
Speaker 1: had every reason to start shit. Basically. That is one
Speaker 1: way it has been presented by someone who was actually
Speaker 1: there and involved in organizing. I also have this suspicion
Speaker 1: that it's like like cops are more violent when they're outnumbered.
Speaker 1: Cops are more violent when they are trying to be
Speaker 1: in control of a situation that they don't have absolute control,
Speaker 1: like when you have a protest. That's just more about
Speaker 1: like kettling and containment. It's because the police just wildly
Speaker 1: outnumber everyone. Whatever. When the opening ceremonies to the wto
Speaker 1: are canceled, the cops start some shit. They fire tear
Speaker 1: gas into the crowd of people locked down in the streets.
Speaker 1: They open up with pepper spray canisters like the fire
Speaker 1: extinguisher style ones. They open up with baton rounds which
Speaker 1: are shot out of basically grenade launchers. And what's funny
Speaker 1: about all this now is like, yeah, of course the
Speaker 1: cops did that living in twenty twenty five, or you
Speaker 1: might be living in the future in the United States, Like,
Speaker 1: of course the cops are like pepper spray is their
Speaker 1: middle name, but they don't like it as much as
Speaker 1: hitting people with stuff more directly. This wasn't the usual
Speaker 1: thing in nineteen ninety nine. For all of this to happen,
Speaker 1: This was shocking to people. And they're doing this everywhere
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety nine at these protests, the cops are
Speaker 1: just attacking people everywhere, but they can't stop all the
Speaker 1: protests because the lockdowns are now supported by this like
Speaker 1: mass number of kind of rowdy crowd that is like
Speaker 1: down for direct action, even if they're not like the
Speaker 1: black block or whatever. In most of the accounts of
Speaker 1: Seattle that I've read written by organizers, you've got the
Speaker 1: kind of like good and noble nonviolent direct actionists who
Speaker 1: kind of take the abuse from the police. And then
Speaker 1: you've got the black block that's a totally separate entity
Speaker 1: and like ne'er the Twains shall meet. Based on first
Speaker 1: hand accounts, I suspect that this isn't the case universally.
Speaker 1: The non violent blockaders confronted by police violence, they stand
Speaker 1: up to that more their supporters right the lockdown people
Speaker 1: are locked down, but they're not just like, oh, you're
Speaker 1: HEARDing me. This sucks. People block the streets with dumpsters,
Speaker 1: They throw rocks and bottles at the cops, and some
Speaker 1: of them cheer when they hear about the arrival of
Speaker 1: the black block, which now because that was their agreement
Speaker 1: is that they would wait and only go do their
Speaker 1: shit if the police attacked. Now they're doing their shit.
Speaker 1: The one hundred to two hundred people are now running
Speaker 1: rampage through the downtown shopping district, attacking the symbols of
Speaker 1: capital directly. The block armed with hammers and crowbars and
Speaker 1: spray paint, broke a lot of windows at Nike stores
Speaker 1: and Starbucks and shit like that, and by most of
Speaker 1: the narratives, I was able to find some unaffiliated local
Speaker 1: youth took advantage of the situation to do some light looting.
Speaker 1: There wasn't exactly complete solidarity between the block and the
Speaker 1: DAN protesters, and one report says they engaged in light scuffling,
Speaker 1: which was probably people yelling like, we're not violent at
Speaker 1: the Black Block and the Black Block being like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't care, and then just I don't know, to
Speaker 1: round out the image of everything that's happening, you've got
Speaker 1: the Infernal Noise Brigade. I love the Infernal Noise Brigade.
Speaker 1: I don't know what group to lump them in with.
Speaker 1: They probably organize their DAN I don't know, but they're
Speaker 1: kind of Black Block, but they're they're not DAN. They're
Speaker 1: not the Black Block. They are the Infernal Noise Brigade.
Speaker 1: The Turn of the Millennium's most influential radical marching band.
Speaker 1: This is a marching band wearing all black gas masks
Speaker 1: with black and green flags that they use which is
Speaker 1: probably a reference to green anarchism, but with black and
Speaker 1: green flags that they use for semaphore communication, like like
Speaker 1: literally they coordinate as a block where they're like, now
Speaker 1: we're moving this way, and you can tell because the
Speaker 1: flags are doing this, and they know what they're doing
Speaker 1: in the middle of these riots, and they play this
Speaker 1: almost industrial music on their marching band instruments so in
Speaker 1: all of this, the outnumbered police are rioting, but they
Speaker 1: aren't regaining control of the streets because protesters are moving
Speaker 1: more quickly than the police. People who are locked down
Speaker 1: are attacked but not arrested, since there's no way to
Speaker 1: get them out. This has been presented in a couple
Speaker 1: different ways. I believe the version of the story where
Speaker 1: it wasn't that the city was like, no, don't arrest anyone,
Speaker 1: although the city had been like, try to be hands off,
Speaker 1: but rather the police were so outnumbered and so strategically
Speaker 1: outmatched that they couldn't really arrest people that day, because
Speaker 1: how the hell would you get someone out if you
Speaker 1: arrested them. And then, on top of it all, the
Speaker 1: twenty thousand person labor march hit down town, and the
Speaker 1: police let that happen because supposedly, again there's so many
Speaker 1: accounts of all of this, it has been conjectured that
Speaker 1: the police wanted this more moderate march to come through
Speaker 1: because they figured it would like kind of overwhelm the
Speaker 1: radicals and take them away from the blockades. Basically, the
Speaker 1: opposite happened. The rank and file of the union were
Speaker 1: much more radical than their leaders, and they bolstered the protests.
Speaker 1: By one pm, the National Guard was called up and
Speaker 1: cops were driving hundreds of miles at top speed to
Speaker 1: reach the city. It's a big state, Washington, and so
Speaker 1: like Washington State police were like driving four hundred miles
Speaker 1: or whatever. Soon enough, the city was basically out of
Speaker 1: tear gas. Supposedly they only ordered about a quarter of
Speaker 1: what they should have. Again, these are the sorts of
Speaker 1: problems that that's not true. I guess sometimes the state
Speaker 1: runs out of tear gas still. But a state of
Speaker 1: emergency was declared. Gas masks were confiscated, a curfew was imposed,
Speaker 1: protest signs were stolen, and then kind of as the
Speaker 1: evening went on, many people started getting arrested, including local
Speaker 1: residents on their own stoops asking police what the hell
Speaker 1: was going on. As night fell, protesters set a bonfire
Speaker 1: and in an intersection and held it. I've seen this
Speaker 1: played up as a bonfire and downplayed as a lightly
Speaker 1: smoking dumpster. Every story, everyone has a story to tell.
Speaker 1: Everyone wants to be like, no, we were totally peaceful,
Speaker 1: and other people want to be like, we fucking ran
Speaker 1: those streets. The protesters largely left of their own volition,
Speaker 1: their work done that first day. The next day things
Speaker 1: turned around. This is also a very common thing at
Speaker 1: multi day protests, as the first day the protesters have
Speaker 1: a certain advantage as the police are sort of caught
Speaker 1: off guard, and then the second day the police are
Speaker 1: real mad that they got caught off guard and they
Speaker 1: get a little wilder, just bad, because they were already
Speaker 1: pretty wild that first day. The next day, a martial
Speaker 1: law model was in place. There was a no protest
Speaker 1: zone being enforced, a civil emergency had been declared, and
Speaker 1: basically you could just get arrested if they didn't like
Speaker 1: the look of you. It was the next day that
Speaker 1: people were mass arrested, starting at seven point thirty in
Speaker 1: the morning. They targeted anyone they assumed as a ring leader,
Speaker 1: which isn't a particularly effective strategy against horizontal protests. Still,
Speaker 1: they couldn't arrest enough people. People clogged the streets and
Speaker 1: blockaded downtown Seattle, and by day three the police ran
Speaker 1: out of transportation to get protesters out, partly because the
Speaker 1: protesters would refuse to leave the buses that they were on,
Speaker 1: and they would also they would fuck up their own
Speaker 1: booking by not giving their names, not carrying ID Basically,
Speaker 1: protesters agreed ahead of time to do something called jail
Speaker 1: solidarity if they were arrested. This is a tactic I've
Speaker 1: had some success with myself. Everyone agrees that if they
Speaker 1: are arrested, they will refused to identify themselves, and they
Speaker 1: also agree to other conditions depending on you all agree
Speaker 1: ahead of time to what your conditions are. But you
Speaker 1: might be like, we're not going to walk on your
Speaker 1: own power. We're going to make them drag all hundreds
Speaker 1: of us, or we're going to like smudge our fingerprints
Speaker 1: or make funny faces when they photograph us. This chokes
Speaker 1: up the jail bureaucracy rather quickly, making it harder for
Speaker 1: the police to determine who was arrested where, doing what,
Speaker 1: and making it much harder to single out individuals for
Speaker 1: elevated charges. Often, when everyone in a mass arrest does
Speaker 1: jail solidarity, every single person walks out of jail a
Speaker 1: few days later without any charges. The time I did it,
Speaker 1: we all agreed to not give our names until certain
Speaker 1: conditions were met, like we wanted group trials, we want
Speaker 1: a pre trial release, and they couldn't separate us within
Speaker 1: the jails, And in the end they got so sick
Speaker 1: of us, they just let the lot of us out
Speaker 1: without any charges, and most people didn't even go to
Speaker 1: an arraignment check. She is funny because then I was like,
Speaker 1: I was never actually like booked at all. I was
Speaker 1: just kind of held in a cell. There's not really
Speaker 1: a lot of legal things to say about that. Also,
Speaker 1: the other thing is that usually then after these mass arrests,
Speaker 1: people successfully sue, and a lot of movement infrastructure is
Speaker 1: built from suing the cities for violating their rights. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: back to Seattle, they were coordinating with a dedicated legal
Speaker 1: team that worked from the outside to help get everyone out.
Speaker 1: Protesters sang on the buses and they fed each other
Speaker 1: with snacks from their bags. Presumably the people who were
Speaker 1: doing the feeding were the people able to get out
Speaker 1: of their plastic cuffs. More than four hundred cases were
Speaker 1: dropped by the city when the city couldn't figure out
Speaker 1: who had been arrested when, and for two days, protesters
Speaker 1: camped outside the jail, and eventually the legal support team
Speaker 1: came to an agreement with the city and protesters began
Speaker 1: to identify themselves. Basically, they're like, all right, our conditions
Speaker 1: have been met, will give our aims now. Folks got
Speaker 1: out soon enough and by January ninety percent of the
Speaker 1: cases were dropped. The police chief and several other highatt
Speaker 1: police officials resigned after all of this. Meanwhile, there were
Speaker 1: solidarity marches all over the world. They were thousands strong
Speaker 1: in India because it was France and the French love
Speaker 1: and excuse to riot. Seventy five thousand people in eighty
Speaker 1: cities were marching. There was like hundreds of miners fighting cops.
Speaker 1: There was a street party in Times Square. Some people
Speaker 1: like overturned a cop car in London. After all of
Speaker 1: the protests in Seattle, the media worked overtime to discredit
Speaker 1: the protesters. They did this by focusing on the actions
Speaker 1: of about forty black block vandals and ignoring about forty
Speaker 1: thousand other people. Yet, despite all the negative coverage that
Speaker 1: these protests got, when BusinessWeek ran a poll in January
Speaker 1: two thousand, month or so later, they found that fifty
Speaker 1: two percent of Americans were empathetic with the protesters. And
Speaker 1: I would like to remind everyone again, much like the
Speaker 1: burning down of the police precinct in the twenty twenty Uprising,
Speaker 1: those are higher numbers than what presidents get during elections.
Speaker 1: The World Trade Organization is never really recovered from this
Speaker 1: disastrous meeting. Unfortunately, I only have so much time in
Speaker 1: my life, and in my week I focused on the
Speaker 1: protests and the protest impact on the World Trade Organization.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping as I continue to talk about the ultra
Speaker 1: globalization movement, I can also talk about the way that
Speaker 1: the meetings broke down internally as people felt disrespected from
Speaker 1: developing nations and things like that. I don't know as
Speaker 1: much about that right now to include it with detail,
Speaker 1: but yeah, the World Trade Organization has never really recovered.
Speaker 1: They've continued to meet, and they've continued to run a
Speaker 1: foul of protesters, and the ultra globalization movement was just
Speaker 1: getting started. But that's a story for another day. I
Speaker 1: want to end with some excerpts from a memoir about
Speaker 1: Seattle written by an anonymous participant. This was published by
Speaker 1: Crime Think. If you want to look in our sources
Speaker 1: quote seeing each other there we discovered we were part
Speaker 1: of a worldwide movement. This infused us with an incredible
Speaker 1: momentum and sense of purpose. Suddenly we knew we were
Speaker 1: going to change the world, and we had a model
Speaker 1: for how to do so. The events of that one
Speaker 1: week in Seattle were more real to us than all
Speaker 1: the years that had led up to them, even for
Speaker 1: those of us who were not there. And then that
Speaker 1: same person wrote another bit. And this is the bit
Speaker 1: I'm going to close on. It's a little bit of
Speaker 1: a long quote. It is fucking worth it quote. I
Speaker 1: can't do it. I can't tell you what it felt
Speaker 1: like any more than a bird could tell me what
Speaker 1: it feels like to fly. I can tell you my story,
Speaker 1: but it's only my head talking. My heart can't write,
Speaker 1: and my guts don't have lips. I cannot truly explain
Speaker 1: how it felt to taste X in every breath as
Speaker 1: the invisible forces of privilege and coercive power finally lost control.
Speaker 1: How it felt to stare down the world's most ruinous
Speaker 1: and abusive bullies and watch them blink. How it felt
Speaker 1: to fall in love with tens of thousands of people
Speaker 1: at once, to not know what would happen next, to
Speaker 1: become dangerous. And that is a tragedy that haunts me
Speaker 1: as I write every one of these words, because if
Speaker 1: somehow I could share with you what it felt like
Speaker 1: for ten days in Seattle, you would never settle for
Speaker 1: anything less again. You would kick in your TV, run
Speaker 1: outside buck naked, tear up the freeway with your bare hands,
Speaker 1: flip tanks upside down, and dance with panda bears through
Speaker 1: the streets. The barbarians would emerge from exile to knock
Speaker 1: down Heaven's door, and the dead would rise up from
Speaker 1: their coffins and cubicles. And once you got a taste
Speaker 1: of the sublime joy of reclaiming control of your life
Speaker 1: and your world, of regaining your lost kinship with a
Speaker 1: human community of which you are an integral component, of
Speaker 1: realizing your wildest dreams and desires, you would do whatever
Speaker 1: it takes to make it happen again. And I like
Speaker 1: that for a lot of reasons. I like even that
Speaker 1: they say this was more real to us than all
Speaker 1: the years that led up to them, even for those
Speaker 1: of us who were not there. I wasn't there in Seattle.
Speaker 1: I joined this movement in two thousand and two after
Speaker 1: people said it was done and dying and there was
Speaker 1: only the tiniest remnants left, and that those tiny remnants
Speaker 1: that were left completely upended my life. I dropped out
Speaker 1: of college and I traveled to every protest I could.
Speaker 1: In some ways, I was chasing that high, that feeling
Speaker 1: of being in community with strangers, accomplishing something real in
Speaker 1: a way that so much of what happens in our
Speaker 1: lives doesn't feel real, and you don't even know that
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel real until you feel reality. And that's
Speaker 1: not to say that like protests is the only thing
Speaker 1: and that's the only way to feel it at all.
Speaker 1: It's I mean, you know, like psychologically it could be
Speaker 1: like peak experiences or peak experiences you can get them
Speaker 1: at a fucking anime convention, but like there's still something
Speaker 1: to it. And then I was wildly sad about it
Speaker 1: as the movement fell apart, and I felt we had
Speaker 1: accomplished nothing. And then I read an essay. I'm sure
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about this a bunch more times
Speaker 1: in this series. I read an essay by David graeber
Speaker 1: rest in piece called the Shock of Victory about how
Speaker 1: protesters and activists and anarchists don't know when we've won,
Speaker 1: and it talked about the ways in which these protests,
Speaker 1: the alter globalization movement defeated the neoliberal consensus, even if
Speaker 1: most of the meetings that we went to. We didn't
Speaker 1: shut down our short term goal. We didn't usually accomplish
Speaker 1: our long term goal of recreating society and having a
Speaker 1: social revolution we didn't accomplish. But our medium term goals
Speaker 1: of destroying the neoliberal agenda we accomplished. Not me, right,
Speaker 1: not me as a character in a movie of it, right,
Speaker 1: but as part of this global movement of largely led
Speaker 1: by and done by people in the quote unquote global
Speaker 1: South to stop their countries from being completely gutted. And
Speaker 1: you know, we didn't completely stop destruction, but we stopped
Speaker 1: so much of it. I'm gonna take that with me
Speaker 1: to my grave. Anyway. The Overly Earnest Hour with Margaret
Speaker 1: Kiljoy is done. If you want more overly earnest stuff,
Speaker 1: I have a substack that you can subscribe to for
Speaker 1: free or if you pay me more. You can read
Speaker 1: more personal anecdotes, including act If you go back in archives,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of me writing about that period of
Speaker 1: my life, my early twenties, my late teens and early
Speaker 1: twenties and what it felt like to be a squad
Speaker 1: protester or whatever. And also, okay, my latest book, The
Speaker 1: Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice is three interconnected short stories,
Speaker 1: and most of them are much more about magic in
Speaker 1: a more direct way where there's like demons and stuff involved.
Speaker 1: But one of the stories is about falling in love
Speaker 1: at a demonstration like this, in this case the Miami
Speaker 1: demonstrations of twenty twenty three. So I don't know. You
Speaker 1: can read that book, or you can play the tabletop
Speaker 1: roleplaying game Defenders of the Wild, which is also a
Speaker 1: board game. But there's also a role playing game book
Speaker 1: and I helped write that. And I will talk to
Speaker 1: you all next week. I might be talking about this
Speaker 1: stuff more. I might take a break and talk about
Speaker 1: something else for a while. We'll see. By everyone, Cool
Speaker 1: People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of pool
Speaker 1: Zone Me. For more podcasts and cool Zone media, visit
Speaker 1: our website goalzonemedia dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 1: the five or radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts.