I was just falling asleep from a long, wonderful election night, when at 2 a.m. I was stirred awake by my cell phone vibrating on the nightstand. It was a good friend from home who now goes to school in Seattle and had clearly called me from some place loud – I figured a party.
“Oh my god, this is amazing! Thousands of people marched in the streets from everywhere to Capitol Hill for this, like, massive dance party in the streets. There’s, like, music, drums, dancing … ahhh … This is what democracy looks like!” Kelsey explained, out of breath and clearly excited. She was at the corner of Broadway and East Pike Street in Seattle, where a massive, spontaneous celebration had shut down traffic in response to the Democratic victory that night. People danced and drank, sang the national anthem, and rejoiced in a moment of hope that our future might not be so screwed after all. In her story she reminded me that this moment, insane as it seemed, was not the first time Seattleites had taken over their streets. It turns out, it would not be the last.
“This is what democracy looks like!” were the words chanted by thousands on Nov. 30, 1999, when Seattle’s sons and daughters chained themselves together in the intersections around the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, shutting down traffic. Considered the first Internet-organized protest, the event blocked the entrances to the center and in so doing, shut down and ended the “Millennium Round” of the World Trade Organization’s globalized commerce talks. The confrontation that ensued, as police attempted to clear the mostly non-violent demonstrators, forever changed the city of Seattle and, arguably, changed the world. A conversation about the side-effects of unchecked globalization became louder and more widespread.
Two weeks ago, shortly after the election, Web site traffic optimizer and Seattleite Amy Balliett received a call from a friend in Cleveland, Ohio, who was struggling to organize a protest in his hometown against California voters’ decision to strip some of their citizens of their civil rights through Proposition 8. During her lunch break on the morning of Nov. 7, Balliett put up a site on the Internet called “Join the Impact” to mobilize and coordinate a nationwide demonstration to protest “Prop Hate.” Balliett, as a scholar of Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” was aware of how well-timed organization can push social phenomena past a “tipping point” that turns individual sparks of change into a mass wildfire of revolution.
By the next morning, the 26-year-old’s Web site had received over 50,000 hits, and by the day after that, her traffic was crashing servers. Seattle Internet companies HostDango and Wetpaint lent their support to Balliett, offering to handle the Web traffic for her online cause for free. In a short time, she had organized more than 1 million people to protest online, using social networking engines like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to connect with others frustrated by the California vote.
Like the WTO protest of 1999, last weekend’s turnout of millions in support of equality for gay people relied on the power of the Internet to make a statement. What began as a Friday morning lunch break in Seattle had reached 300 cities in all 50 states.
Thousands turned out in streets across the country, in solidarity with the protests in Los Angeles that had been blocking traffic every night since the election with their opposition to “Prop Hate.” It was the Internet echo of the Los Angeles outcry. In Balliett’s own Seattle, more than 5,000 poured into the streets of the city’s retail heart, Westlake Center. Mayor Greg Nickels spoke to his citizens of the importance of gay equality, following in the footsteps of his L.A. counterpart, Antonio Villaraigosa.
These three events might tell a story about how a city’s people and its streets interact in moments of political change. The challenges of the 21st century will require 21st-century solutions, and we should use new technology to progress perhaps our oldest form of democracy: mass demonstration in the public space. This city’s recent history with street protest should remind us that we should not hesitate to take over the streets when we need to and that as our society becomes more high-tech and complex, demonstrations like these have the ability to wield even more power.
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