9/11 was the last event of the twentieth century and the first event of the twenty-first. We experience it now on X or TikTok or YouTube. We see news footage and camcorder footage, and though many of us were already alive when it happened (I was in seventh grade), we may as well have not been. We understand the world of 2001 about as well as the people of 1935 understood the world of 1913. September 2001 belongs to the before times that are not so long ago, yet nevertheless impossible to reach back to, that exist behind a phenomenological firewall, whose modes of experience, even if they were once ours, are now unimaginable.
We understand the world of 2001 about as well as the people of 1935 understood the world of 1913.
9/11 was perhaps the last moment of objectivity, the last time history could be experienced objectively and collectively, when everyone could turn on the TV and see and feel things the same way, the last time when America was basically unified and innocent. From the late 90s to the early 2000s, we got many such last of the lasts: Michael Jordan’s last championship, Tiger Woods’s peak, McGwire, Sosa and Bonds in baseball, Woodstock ’99, Titanic, Harry Potter, Infinite Jest, Seinfeld, the dot-com bubble …
By our 2026 standards, those phenomena were under-debated, under-utilized, under-subjectified. Celebrities and stars and works of art and mass culture, new technologies, TV shows were not endlessly, obsessively picked apart by shrieking vultures (Time and Newsweek might have had different interpretations, but that was about it).
Things were simply great. Or if you didn’t think they were great, you could find an alternative culture, an indie culture that adequately replaced the transcendent objects of American mass culture.
Before 2001, things were simply great. Or if you didn’t think they were great, you could find an alternative culture.
The internet, meanwhile, still took a long time to load. Very few had cell phones. Desktops were popular, but hardly universal. Music still arrived in the form of CDs.
The stock market was high, home prices were going up, club scenes were growing, the garage band movement was underway. Glossy magazines and newspapers were solvent. Most of us would go back to September 10th, 2001, either because we were there and it was better, or because we weren’t there and it seems better. September 10th, 2001, was the last good day.
9/11 was a symbolic and metaphysical demolition of the neo-liberal culture that preceded it, a mass extinction event. The small and nimble survived. The behemoths died out.
America and American culture were never as brash, big, ridiculous as before 9/11. Everything that followed became, in an almost linear decline, more fractured, more uncertain, more anxious. Two wars, housing and stock market crashes, the rise of alienating new technologies. Covid. AI.
After 9/11, the small and nimble survived. The behemoths died out.
The disturbing thing is that it’s hard to imagine Americans rallying behind a similar disaster at scale today. One imagines that a new 9/11 would, from the very beginning, be mocked, memed, placed at a distance, refracted through a hundred million TikToks, a hundred billion comments.
A 9/11 today, God forbid, would not really happen, because no one would really experience it except for those at ground zero. But what made 9/11 so world-historical, so world-, nation- and globe-changing was that hundreds of millions of people emotionally, psychologically and spiritually participated in the tragedy. They understood that the people in those towers or on those planes were like them. They could empathize. They knew the dead had families. There was a basic standard that said everyone is basically the same underneath, an American is an American is an American. That could not happen today because there’s no longer agreement that an American is an American, or that being an American is essentially a good thing, or that America is made up of people who are all similar in some way.
The twenty-five years since 9/11 map the transformation of America from a culturally self-consistent nation to an incoherent, schizoid, and paranoid surveillance state. This is why 9/11 is so pivotal: nothing that followed it was imaginable before it, and yet it is very much itself a document of what it ended: the determination, the courage, the sense of collective purpose in which the whole country participated. The nearest equivalent is almost certainly 1914, when the bravest sons of Europe signed up to die in the first months of the war.
9/11 is very much itself a document of what it ended: the determination, the courage, the sense of collective purpose in which the whole country participated.
The world has not entirely gotten worse since 2001. Certain kinds of material affluence are more accessible. The environment is cleaner. HIV has been largely mitigated. Surgery and sports medicine are highly advanced. Food has gotten better.
But on the whole, it might be said that we participate in the internet more than the country, and that we live on the internet, not in America, that we live in America only secondarily.
On 9/11, when you turned on the TV, you did so as a grieving and morally affected citizen. You could see the TVs on in the houses in your neighborhood; you could see the lights on in the kitchens and people conversing; you could hear your neighbors talking in hushed tones. It was not yet possible to crouch in a corner of the house, absorbed in a small screen, with earbuds in. It was not yet possible to join an entirely subjective experience of hyperreality. 9/11 was hyperreal—it was on TV—but it was a collective hyperreal.
If 9/11 now is something of a meme, an Alex Jones riff, a joke, it’s because we have lost the solemnity and moral capacity to commemorate tragedies. As a whole, 9/11 is just a thing that happened to some people at a certain time, people who aren’t on social media and aren’t influential or clouted, who are in fact dead: again, we can’t really commemorate or experience grief over 9/11 on its twenty-fifth anniversary because we now live on the internet, not in America. We’re not really Americans, but internet people, and we have trouble thinking about anyone other than ourselves.
