If you do not remember the Berlin Wall but had an adolescence shaped by social media and cellphones, the brightest dividing lines in recent history are technological — and, with the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, are becoming more so. This is clear in the borrowed nostalgias of Gen Z, the bits of the past that 20-somethings have recently pressed into service as emblems of a lost golden era: “Friends,” John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, ’90s high-school-class home videos, music videos and concert footage from bands like Alien Ant Farm and Puddle of Mudd.
These artifacts span the pre- and post-9/11 years, and the lost innocence they represent has nothing to do with the attacks. Their interest comes from their evocation of a period when people hung out with friends in person and sweated alongside strangers at clubs and music festivals; teenagers goofed un-self-consciously for cameras rather than posing for them like jaded celebrities; and popular culture could be loud and dumb and not picked apart in the digital panopticon for its social politics. The shape that looms ominously over them isn’t the Twin Towers. It’s the iPhone.
But it is hard to disentangle 9/11 from even the societal shifts that don’t obviously relate to it. When I visited the 9/11 Memorial and Museum for the first time recently, I spent the better part of an hour in the museum’s central exhibit, a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the events of the day of the attacks. In the videos and still images, the relics preserved under glass, I found myself less drawn to the terrible but familiar story they told of the attacks than I was to the more unremarkable evidence of life in New York a quarter-century ago that the exhibit preserved — a life that I had lived myself but that suddenly seemed very far away.
I lingered in particular on a pile of floppy disks recovered from the World Trade Center rubble, caked in dust like the remnants of an ancient civilization. I tried to remember the last time I had used a floppy disk myself; it was probably not long after 9/11. It occurred to me that the world the disks represented, in which a digital life was present but not yet omnipresent, is at least as unimaginable for my children as a major terrorist attack on American soil.
I have been thinking since then about what, specifically, people my age know about the moment documented in the museum that my children will never know. It is most likely nothing particular to 9/11 itself, exhaustively chronicled as it has been. But it is visible in the record of that day, if you look closely: in the police officers not yet encased in Kevlar and equipped with drones and Palantir software, in the video footage taken by professionals and dedicated hobbyists rather than thousands of autonomous digital eyes, in the public spaces not yet studded with bollards, in the handwritten fliers of people trying to find loved ones at a time when disappearance is, for worse or for better, still a possibility.
This is a picture of a country on the brink of enormous change — some of it a direct result of 9/11, some of it not, some of it hard to sort out at this distance, the echoes of the attacks blurring with the echoes’ own echoes. But if you were there then, you see it now: a world where so much we live with today was in motion but did not yet seem so inescapable. The many narrators of 9/11 aren’t wrong to talk about the sky that morning. It really was something. The air was so clear.
Source images for illustration above: Angel Franco/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Tim Robberts/Getty Images; Nathan Posner/Anadolu, via Getty Images.