It's got all the modern digital-editing schticks that can now be accomplished on a low budget. But there are differences, especially in what each tape's curators choose to include. Trade Off, while made by professionals who might have been expected to dwell on the story's exciting visuals, spends more time discussing the issues behind world trade and the centralization of political and economic power by big business and international financiers. Democracy, despite coming from an activist organization with a political agenda to sell, prefers to dwell more on the spectacle of the protests themselves. But as I've been saying these past 15 months, the protests will have ultimately failed if their only legacy is as a future nostalgia topic for the middle-aged of tomorrow.
Gestures are cheap.
They feel good, they blow off some rage. But revolutions, violent or otherwise, are made by people who have learned how to count very slowly to ten. That integral aspect of the Seattle zeitgeist, complaining. Previewing a whole empire of MISCmedia products. An amateur experiment in age-regression therapy.