freelansing in Seattle

On this 25th anniversary week of WTO protests, I’ll reshare this thing I wrote 5 years ago. A truly transformative time.

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As we approach the 20th anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle, I think about how there must be thousands of first-hand accounts of those historic days. So many stories from so many vantage points. Here’s my story, from my own point of view.

I’d been part of progressive/radical independent print media in Seattle for about 10 years when WTO came to town, and had been been part of an effort to bring various progressive media voices together in a way that we could support each other and our common messages. We called it Seattle Independent Media Coalition. A piece of that spun off to create the Seattle Independent Media Center, which would become the activist media hub for the WTO protests, and would later replicate into dozens of indy media centers across the country and around the world.

My specialty was print design, layout, and printing, which was already starting to feel a bit old-fashioned by 1999. My other specialty was being able to stay up all night. I was part of a print team within the IMC (Independent Media Center) that was tasked with producing a daily print newsletter during the WTO activities. It was called the Blind Spot, and was first published Monday morning, November 29, 1999. Printed at the nearest all-night copy shop.

Our planned schedule was to get all content in by 10pm each day, get it all edited by 11 or so, and then it would be handed off to me to create a 4-pg daily newsletter. My night-owl abilities would be put to good use and hypothetically I’d be done by 2-3am each night and then I’d go home to sleep.

Of course things don’t always go according to plan. Especially in situations like this. Trying to bring a bunch of people’s personal computer equipment into a space and make them all work together was not an easy thing in 1999. Felt like we were held together by baling wire and duct tape. Especially in the first few days, I think we spent more time troubleshooting technical problems than we did actually doing our work. Yet we got the work done.

Still we were overwhelmed by events. We’d had all weekend to pull together our first print edition for Monday morning, but so much happened on Monday that the 10pm deadline slipped to after midnight for the Tuesday edition. More shit happened and next thing I knew it was almost 8am when I brought the zip drive to print at the local copy shop. I left the copy shop with all our newsletters after 8am. And entered a world unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

I had not planned to be on the Seattle streets in the early hours of Tuesday November 30, 1999. I’d expected I’d be sound asleep at home, after working into the wee hours the night before. But here I was, blinking into the daylight of an historic day in Seattle. This was no time to go home and sleep. So I dropped off some of the Blind Spots at the IMC, and hit the streets to hand out the rest.

Unlike the many participants locking down the convention center that morning, I was a free agent, getting a unique perspective. I started at the south end of the blockade near the freeway and made my way north from there.

As I passed from one blockaded intersection to the next, the first thing I noticed was how every affinity group at every intersection had its own personality and tactics for shutting down their own section. Different tactics, different looks, different spirits, but they were all shutting down this beast. It was like I was watching a beautiful bouquet of flowers unfolding, each flower different than the next but equally amazing.

I paused at one intersection (6th & Union) where a bunch of my friends would be entering to bring joyful noise to those already holding it. It was the Infernal Noise Brigade. Shortly after they entered the space, the rubber bullets, pepper-spray and tear gas started flying. We were the first intersection to get gassed that day. Since I’d not planned to be there, I had not gone through any training about what to expect in that instance. When I first saw a soldier rise up out of a tank (yes, a tank, which I’d never seen on Seattle streets before) and point his rifle at the crowd, I thought people were about to die. Luckily, the bullets were made of rubber and no one died. But it felt like a war zone. I discovered that day that tear gas is no joke.

That was an epic week still etched into my brain 20 years later. 1999 was well before anyone had a phone-camera, so I couldn’t record any of these scenes for posterity. But I always believed that an epic coffee-table book could have been made showing every affinity group at every intersection in their full glory. It was such a beautiful, diverse rainbow of humanity making history.