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

Mike Dolan: Some of the rank and file realized what was going on. They were like, "I didn't come this far to miss this piece. Here's where the action is!" God bless the rank and file because that added to our numbers on the street. Suddenly in the crowd on the street there were the anarchists, the protesters, the turtles, and now all the labor people.
The cops had never seen anything like it.
Of course, I knew most of the cop leadership and they were like, "What the fuck?"

I said, "Well, I warned you!"

We owned downtown Seattle. We had it. It was the cops who were pissing in alleyways because they couldn't get out. They were locked up. We had the police surrounded, not the other way around.

Jim Pugel: Annette Sandberg called me and said, "The State Department said, 'You have to clear this street at all costs" - she gave a couple of intersections that were most critical "because Madeleine Albright has to get out of her hotel and into the convention center:™ I said, "What do you mean 'at all costs?" She said, "Whatever it takes, clear it."

I said, "Okay, well, will Albright indemnify me against any lawsuit later on?"

There was a pause and Annette said, "Let me check." Annette and I'd been sued in the past in federal court, over actions some of my officers had taken on past protests, so I knew what you're allowed to do and what you could lose a lawsuit over.

She checked with head of security for the U.S. Department of State and came back and said, "No, they won't indemnify you."

I said, "Man, we're going to have to, I mean, literally break heads. We can't do that."

But they kept saying, "You've got to clear the intersections!" State Department, Secret Service, FBI-they all have their role and thats to protect their primary protectee. They don't care about the impact on anything else.

this is the kind of shit you read and it’s like, wow, there really is often just a few people and things standing between the kind of shit we see all too often, and the state is trying to eliminate those as much as possible

Mike Dolan: I'm retreating from tear gas and pepper spray with my eyes ablaze, my face on fire. I'm going slightly downhill, and one of the medics from one of the affinity groups comes up to me. She's part of Solnit's crew and she's just pouring water into my eyes and asking if I'm okay. There were so many of those medics out there, I love that.

So, now I'm a little bit better and at one point I find myself standing in front of this restaurant and Colin Hines comes out. He sees me and he goes, "Michael, look at you. I mean, you're all messed up." I said, "Yes, Colin, it's bad out here!"

Colin Hines: Mike was much more of a brave, in-the-middle-of-it chap.

Mike Dolan: He said, "Well, let's take you back to the hotel and get you washed up. But first, I want you to meet someone." He points to this woman and says, "This is Julie Christie."

Colin Hines: As the water cleared from his eyes, he saw her. So he said, "Julie Christie! I'm a huge fan of yours." And she said, I’m a huge fan of yours, Mike."

Mike Dolan: What the fuck do you say? It was Julie Christie, the ac-tres! Far from the Madding Crowd! My original fantasy in the flesh!

David Solnit: There is a great essay called "Black Flag Over Seattle" by Paul deArmond, looking at network theory. His analysis, which I agree with, is that we had better information and were better organized in Seattle than the police. Because we were self-organized in independent decision-making units that had lots of horizontal com-munication, we were better able than the police to adapt to changes, make quick decisions, and take care of each other. They had bad information and a hierarchical command structure. We were much more fluid. I think decentralization with a high level of coordination is important. It's partly a political thing. We saw the WTO as the ultimate hierarchical, antidemocratic institution where small groups of rich people and corporations would make decisions affecting billions of people. We were trying to create models where we practiced ordinary people having a say in the things that mattered.

Often when people say "decentralization," they mean disbursement. It's actually more organized than a hierarchical system. There are more people who have more information and are invested and understand the decisions whereas with the police, it was only the mayor and the police chief who understood and told what the decisions were, But with us, we had consensus. Everyone said, "We think that's the best solution. We agree to that." We are more bought into our decisions, more informed, and more capable of being really resilient.

Filary McQuie: The cops called us in for an emergency meeting and the city said, "You need to call it off. You know, you need to stop." We're like, "We can't stop. We told you we were going to shut it down."

And they said, "Well, we didn't think you were actually going to shut it down. We didn't take it seriously."

Han Shan: They had started to use some of the kinds of tactics that they had trained with and did not use on the 30th. They would get eight guys: one in the front, three on one side of him, three on the other side, and one in the back. They'd move quickly through protest lines and grab somebody, then turn around and back out. Impressive football fucking stuff-like something you'd draw on a whiteboard. They did these snatches and they'd grab people who they thought were leaders or organizers or who had comms or whatever. Unfortu-nately, they got really good at it and eventually they did it to me. It happened so quickly, I was near the front lines and suddenly a gang of scary black-clad storm troopers grabbed me, pulled me through the lines, and I was like, "Oh, here it is. It's finally happening—I'm getting arrested."

But after they grabbed me, the guys melted away and it was Pugel standing in front of me and he was like, "Sorry, Han. I was trying to
call you, but you just weren't picking up your phone." He didn't arrest me. He just wanted to talk some more.

Jim Brunner: I do remember a lot of other cities looking at Seattle and the lesson they drew was: just smash it. Smash the protests and instigators before they're able to do anything. Smother it. Which, I think, leads to questions about the militarization of the police forces.

[…]

John Nichols: What was the story of Eugene Victor Debs and his principled opposition to World War One? He got arrested, went to jail. They jailed him in the Atlanta penitentiary. What was the story of the civil rights movement? A noble, nonviolent movement seeking to overturn hundreds of years of enslavement, segregation, Jim Crow, all of the violence and cruelty. And what did it become? A story of Bull Connor turning the fire hoses on young protesters. It's the story of the police not protecting civil rights activists, and, in fact, maybe even being involved in violent assaults on those activists. The Vietnam War protests again, people seeking to change U.S. foreign policy, proposing a whole new approach to the world, an end to the Cold War, a beginning of an emphasis on diplomacy and peacemaking—-being confronted with police officers, National Guard troops. And you finally end up with Kent State and Jackson State, where you have people being shot in the streets.

This is what happens when grassroots movements, that are often led by young people and that really seek to achieve a great deal of change in a very short amount of time, the reaction of power is to say, "No." And the way that power says "no" is with excessive policing.

When you seek to change economic and social and political realities, the people who have a lot of control over those economic, social, and political realities are going to respond in a very intense way. They're going to use policing as a tool to try and shut you down, to try to maintain a status quo. It happened in Seattle, there's no question.

[…]

Helene Cooper: I think that it was a movement that was really gaining strength and then September 11th happened, and I think September 11th killed it.

John Sellers: Lockboxes were hugely popular in the '90s. Then 9/11 came along and they started calling us terrorists. I guess they had always called us terrorists but after 9/11 people started believing them, so we stopped doing so many things like

Vandana Shiva: We are living in times where you can have a rally of one million people and the mainstream media won't cover it.

David Taylor: Twitter made organizing worse, because it broke down the interpersonal connections and the dependencies of people and the trust networks of people. With Twitter, you can put a tweet out and thousands of people would show up but those thousands of people aren't operating in this group of ten or fifteen people that are high trust, high focus, high commitment. It doesn't have the same impact. And I was a victim ofit I created the tools. I did all the tech infrastructure for the People's Climate March in 2014. We had 2,000 distributed events and sent a half million text messages around the world. Yeah, it scales better but those people just all got email messages, they never came back together in communities and then had local action groups in their community. Being able to put the things out on social media, people show up but the decision-making ability and the accountability and the infrastructure has all gone away in these mass mobilizations. In some ways, it's what made Occupy so chaotic.

WTO and Occupy were both based on decentralized, nonhierarchical organizing but the affinity group and spokescouncil model has accountability and structure and decision-making ability, while the Occupy model is whoever's there and takes the mic does it.

The people who traveled to Seattle together and did the affinity groups, they all went to their communities and kept organizing to-gether. If the same people could have come together, meeting face-to-face, and built those bonds and those peer relationships in those 2,000 cities that participated in the climate march, the impact would have been exponentially stronger.
The technology enables us to scale but it doesn't enable us to deepen and we don't invest in deepening. The deepening is hard and expensive and difficult and we get lazy about it. If I had gotten a text message to show up to the WTO, I would've showed up but I spent six months of my life-I've spent the rest of my life doing political organizing. I don't think I would've had that personal transformation unLess I had that depth. Personal transformation on the individual level is a huge part of what creates the level of political commitment for people to keep doing that work over time. Tech facilitates the process but it doesn't facilitate the connection and the commitment.

[…]

David Solnit: Occupy demonstrated some continuity with Seattle in that they had language of the ninety-nine percent and the confrontational tactics but they launched themselves with a single tactic, a bad decision-making model. They were wildly successful in terms of creating a space to demonstrate rebellion but in terms of building a long-term movement that can actually shift things, they had some bad DNA and hadn't learned lessons from Seattle.

Those of us in the Direct Action Network didn't do a great job of analyzing what we did and putting it out there.

Lisa Fithian: If you want change, go shut down a building. Use your power while you have it. It's not enough to just show up. It's like the Women's March after Trump was elected. Million people in D.C. We were just meandering all over, after going to the trouble and expense of mobilizing all those people. One thing I've learned is that no matter what your primary strategy is for organizing, whether it's electoral or regulatory or community organizing, when you're in a fight, if you can figure out how to bring direct action into your tactics your chances of winning are so much greater. It pressurizes things in a way that helps.

people need ways of deepening their connections to each other and the group. you cannot get that with online; there are definitely people who can, just like people don’t always need that deepening to get involved, but it is far from universal