On November 30, 1999, just a few weeks after turning seventeen, I witnessed another possible world taking shape in Seattle as tens of thousands of protesters took the World Trade Organization by surprise. I wasn’t near the West Coast, but I was on Indymedia. The site first went live to document the Battle in Seattle, aggregating activist-generated stories, photographs, and videos for turn-of-the-century left radicals, and received 1.5 million unique visitors that first week alone.

It was the dawn of the anti-globalization movement. Or the global justice movement. Or, perhaps, the alter-globalization movement. Whatever you called that movement, it was suddenly clear that an alliance between labor, youth radicals, environmentalists (hundreds of whom marched in sea turtle costumes), and countless others contained incredible power that we had not known we possessed.

We knew what we were against and, in broad strokes, what we were for. Most of all, we asserted that the world could be very different. This all seemed extremely radical after years of Bill Clinton’s carceral neoliberalism insisting that it was the left wing of the electorally possible.