If the Twin Towers Fell After Twitter

It’s 2001, and my middle school lacks a cell phone policy for one simple reason: hardly anyone under the age of 25 owns such a device. 

Back then, pagers were far more common. Smartphones, as we think of them, didn’t even exist. The BlackBerry would be released the next year, alongside Verizon’s launch of the first 3G network—a technology that allowed cellphones to access the internet at painfully slow rates. 

The first phone camera was released just a year earlier, and the photos it took were so grainy that it's hard to call them photos. Yes, there were digital cameras, but they were expensive and hardly ubiquitous. Most people owned film cameras, but hardly anyone carried them on their person unless they were on vacation.

My family, like most families in 2001, only had a dial-up connection (which, at its peak, took an hour to download what my current devices can download in one second). We used AOL as our portal to the interweb. Its curators shaped far more of what we saw online than social algorithms, which didn’t exist. If I wanted to search the internet, I used Yahoo! or AskJeeves, but I rarely did so because neither worked that well. Google wasn’t a verb. If we wanted the news, we read (literal) newspapers or watched the CBS Evening News between 5:30 and 6:00 p.m. CST—usually both.

I know this is an obnoxiously long description of information technology during a small slice of history, but it really does matter for one single reason: it was a turning point in American history. 

Analogue Memories of 9/11

I still remember sitting in Mrs. Montague’s eighth-grade algebra class when our principal spoke over the intercom and explained that a deadly attack had occurred in New York City. Teachers were free to turn on their in-class televisions to learn more about what happened. 

Mrs. Montague opted out and continued a dull lecture about forms of linear equations. And here’s the wild thing: she opted out for all of us. No one could sneak a phone under their desk or covertly visit The New York Times website on their laptop. We heard about the attack and moved on to math.

It wasn’t until my next class, history with Dr. Sullivan, that I finally learned what had happened. Two planes had struck two large buildings (I’d never heard of the Twin Towers), and both were on fire. No one knew how many people died, but news anchors were already conjecturing that this was a terrorist attack and that others might occur before the day was over. After about ten minutes, Dr. Sullivan turned off the television, and I heard nothing else about the attack for the remainder of the day. 

After school, I returned home and turned on CBS and watched with my mom and sister. The news anchors were right: more attacks happened. One plane hit the Pentagon. A second crash landed in Pennsylvania. The newsman said it had likely been headed for the White House. Meanwhile, in New York, both towers had fallen, and they conjectured that the death toll would be in the thousands.

So few people caught the original attack on camera that they constantly replayed a single video on loop in slow motion of a plane colliding into a tower. There was more footage of the collapse. Of people running from multi-story clouds of concrete dust. Of ash-covered faces. Of burning wreckage. 200,000 tons of collapsed steel. I was 13, almost 14, and I didn’t know how to respond. The death and destruction were abstract—death is often inconceivable for affluent teens—but the journalists and interviewees on TV made 9/11 concrete. They showed me that this was a terrible tragedy. Something I would never forget. Something my nation would never forget. And I never did.

For a time, 9/11 brought everyone together. You saw American flags everywhere. On bumpers. In gardens. On television. I didn’t grow up in a vociferously patriotic family, but we were still caught up in a sense of solidarity with our nation. I saw a rush of patriotism that overwhelmed partisanship, and even as a teenager, I knew this was something unusual, something beautiful and even good. Sometimes, it takes enemies to make unusual friends. But this isn't always the case. Sometimes mutual enemies only entrench the mutual enmity. And I suspect that’s exactly what would happen if 9/11 happened today.

9/11 After Twitter

Now, let’s imagine 9/11 after the advent of social media and AI-curated news. As if it happened today. In one way, my experience of the attack would remain the same: it would be mediated by media. And that’s also precisely where the difference lies. In 2001, trained journalists mediated information. To print a paper or broadcast a signal, one needed tremendous resources—both technical and human. The people behind the news were far from perfect, but they were held together by a code of ethics and practices developed within their journalistic institutions. Were their ethical standards always met? No. Were their practices capable of producing unblemished truth? No.

But 2001 is a far cry from 2024. 

If the towers fell today, thousands of videos would be filmed with frightened commentary, posted online, shared, dissected, and conspiratorialized. Algorithmic systems guided by the best interest of platforms would surface not the most helpful or truthful takes but the most entertaining, controversial, and viral. Inevitably, that virality passes along tribalistic lines: conservatives getting one story, liberals a different one, moderates a third. Every digital microculture would pulse and thrum with its own version of what took place, and each version would resonate with that microculture’s vibe and narrative.

If you don’t believe me, I need only remind you that for a month in 2023, there was a massive TikTok trend of people reading Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” (in which he justified murdering thousands of people) and weeping because they realized he was right. 

Or consider the response to the assassination attempt of Donald Trump. On the right, conspiracy theories bubbled: this was an attack by Biden or the deep state. On the left, people posted their profound disappointment that the shooter missed, and shared their own conspiracy theories: that Trump’s campaign staged the attack. At one point, one in three Biden supporters believed the conspiracy!

As these stories illustrate, social media never delivered on its promise to bring people together. Instead, it’s proven itself adept at the opposite. And the online sickness isn’t quarantined: it’s infected the very journalistic institutions that once had a semblance of propriety. If you do a quick search of “Trump assassination conspiracies” on the New York Times, you’ll discover that they only challenge the conspiracies of the right. If you do the same on Fox, the opposite is true. This is precisely because they need social media platforms to drive traffic, and that means they have to play social media’s tribalistic game. They fall prey to audience capture—the point at which your audience’s interests and outlooks determine your own interests and outlooks. 

So it is almost too painful to imagine 9/11 today. There would be no solidarity. No collective mourning. There would be voices on the left telling us that this is what America deserves for its oppression of the Middle East and carnivorous capitalism. There would be voices on the right saying that the secular mecca of abortion and LGBTQ rights deserved to fall. There would be conspiracies from both sides. There would be tremendous amounts of misinformation passed on as fact (note: this already happened in 2022 when a false transcript of a Flight 93 phone call went viral), and I don’t doubt that AI image and video generators would be used by actors both foreign and domestic to spur on lies.

Perhaps the most gruesome horror would be the videos people posted from inside the airplanes and the towers themselves. Panicked videos of people in the last moments of their lives. The platforms would try to remove them, but they’d be there forever, and we’d never forget. 

I pray that God never allows a tragedy like 9/11 to happen again. But I pray more fervently today than I did five years ago, because we aren’t well. The body politic is sick. The digital rot runs from sea to shining sea. And this is precisely why it’s more important than ever to see yourself as either a missionary online (reaching a lost people) or to flee social media altogether. We need local institutions to flourish so that communities can resist the toxicity of digital technology. We also need online voices who boldly live by no lies, resist tribalism, and understand that what the algorithm feeds us is rarely real life.