Lori Wallach: I learned about direct action and was radicalized by the notion that sometimes you just need to be fucking ungovernable. You must physically interrupt power. That methodology we learned from our Latin American partners. That was not where I came from. I came from a political culture of protesting to make people pay attention. That was also the Ralph Nader methodology—or you sue them. The Latin American methodology was that if you did any of those things, you may disappear. The first thing you do is fuck the place up! You start by smashing things, becoming ungovernable and scaring the living crap out of the elites so they realize they have to make settlements with you. You don't start by asking nicely. For many people around the world, there is still a very high cost to protest. Part of what led us to realize that Seattle had to be a moment was because it was, relatively speaking, safe to do it there. The likelihood that someone would be kidnapped or murdered to make examples of them, dropping someone from a helicopter, is not something we had to deal with. In so many other places, that was not the case. We felt an obligation because the U.S. had helped cause the problem of the WTO and we were in a safe place to take it down.
— from One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the WTO Protests, by DW Gibson (emphasis mine)
Jim Pugel: The AFL-CIO was going to have a march with tens of thousands of people. Busloads from all over the United States were going to come in and begin their march at the Seattle Center, come down Fourth Avenue, and because they were unions, they wanted to make a U-turn from Fourth Avenue on Union Street. The Secret Service said no way, that goes right into the convention center and that's exactly where all the delegates are going to be. We can't have them march up Union.
So I went to Maud Daudon and said let's rename Pine Street, which is two blocks north of Union; let's rename Pine Street for the day “Union Way." She actually got signs made up, legal street signs. They took down "Pine Street" signs and put up blue "Union Way" signs.
Maud Daudon: It was classic Seattle and, in retrospect, looked so naïve. It had been that kind of relationship that had been a trustful relationship probably since the '60s, between protesters and police in Seattle.
Lisa Fithian: With lockboxes, you have a tube made out of stainless steel or PVC pipe. There's a pin that's welded down through the middle of the tube. When people are going to lockdown, they wear a chain around their wrist with a carabiner. They put their arm in the tube and open the carabiner and hook it onto the pin. There's no way the police can pull them out because they're latched. Some people would take those tubes and wrap them in chicken wire and duct tape, because if you add a lot of stuff like that, it can make the tube harder to cut through.
John Sellers: It's a conduit. There is no way for anyone to pull your arm out of there without breaking your wrist but if you need to unclip for an emergency, you can get out. No one can take you out without cutting the thing apart. Earth First! would bury a whole car in a road and fill it with concrete and then have people lock themselves in that way, put their arm down into it, and clip into place so that logging trucks couldn't come along and lift them out. They'd have to unbury a whole car and do it without breaking people's arms.
The nice thing is that if everybody's wearing one lockbox that they are already clipped into on their right hand, they can all have a carabiner on their left hand too, so it doesn't matter who they bump into, they can plug into one another. We called it a "human molecule" because you could break off fifteen people to encircle a fire engine, something like that. It is infinitely configurable if everybody is dressed correctly. It's the most effective, low-cost way to sustain a human presence somewhere and lock people safely together.
i assume ppl still use these but i haven’t personally seen them in action? no doubt cops now would not hesitate to break ppl’s arms
