How did CAT get involved with the Seattle WTO protests in 1999 and with Indymedia?
What happened is that I’m doing a PhD in physics and I was in Colorado as part of that, doing research at the university and I thought I’d check out the local media activist scene. So one night I dropped in on Free Speech TV (a progressive satellite television station and internet streaming media provider) and I ran into Manse. Actually, through email from another Australian I found out that Manse was involved in the Seattle thing, so I got onto him and said “look, look, look, have you got any software to do the webcast for this?” because I’d started hearing how big this event was gonna be and the huge media center that they had planned and that it was gonna be multimedia and all that sort of stuff. I was worried that they’d try and do the web page manually because I’d seen a lot of people try to do that and it’s just a disaster generally because there’s too much going on. So I talked to Manse and they did actually have something but it was under [Microsoft] Windows and it was still ve
