Bookmarked 23 What was 9/11 by Anil Dash

Anil Dash writes his yearly post remembering the terrorist attacks on NYC in September 2001. This time he looks back at how it was, how it felt to be in the city at that time. There is much in there that I recognise from how it felt when disaster struck my home town a year earlier in 2000, and its echoes when I visited NYC shortly after 9/11.

The solidarity and drawing together of people, in contrast to the military in the streets to prevent an expected escalation that really is not how people respond to these things.

The role of ‘imaginary’ online and remote friends reaching out that over time turn into key members of your social environment, something I very much tie to that early web scene of the 00s.

Feeling compelled to go outside, into the streets. E and I simply had to go out and found ourselves walking towards the towering column of smoke in our town, despite ash and glowing snippets floating down on us in our street, and confused people coming towards us heading the other way.

In our case the shockwave of the blasts that our bodies experienced that forever drew a line between those who felt it, and those who were not in the city that day. That shockwave still lives inside of me, as I wrote 20 years after the fact.

And the smell, that smell. E and I visited NYC 3-4 weeks after the attacks, visiting a friend. Something planned earlier as a mere tourist visit had become checking up on how he was doing. Standing at ground zero, it was the smell that suddenly and overwhelmingly catapulted me back to a year earlier in our hometown, and brought all of it back in tears.

How Anil Dash describes how that was turned into something different, into war. I was at Penn station when the news broke that the bombing of Afghanistan had started. A visible and audible ripple went through the crowds in the main hall, people fell to their knees, people broke out in tears. News camera crews suddenly appeared. Only when we sought out a tv screen, in a sports bar, it became clear what just happened.

The similarities also took the shape of the exact same rumours going around in NYC and in my city the year before to try and make sense of the senseless. It taught me how rumours and conspiracy fantasies are a coping strategy. A way to square the enormous impact of something on oneself with the banality of daily life going on. I wrote a paper about it for my philosophy of technology studies at the time, using Heidegger’s hermeneutics. That was my own coping strategy, I suppose.

Anil Dash ends with “If you’ve ever been told a story about 9/11, ask that person how it smelled. Ask them the greatest kindness that they saw. Ask them how they changed.” They’re good questions, not just about then, but also in general.