Yesterday, I wrote about the afterlives / memory turn in September 11 studies.
I wrote about Al Qaeda’s coordinated terrorist attacks on the United States on 11th September 2001 on their 20th anniversary. Things feel different on their 25th anniversary.
On 11th September 2001, I was working for The Disinformation Company Ltd (later TDC Interactive) as an offshore contractor based in Melbourne, Australia. The rest of the team was based in New York City. Our contact was largely via email - with me sitting in on Friday afternoon team meetings at ungodly hours using international calling cards. On that afternoon, then founder / creative director Richard Metzger asked me to post an article on US marijuana politics. I did so and logged off. What Metzger, founder / publisher Gary Baddeley and the rest of the then classic era / core team did not know was that I had been homeless for almost 18 months. I was editing the (now former) Disinformation website from the Borchardt Library and Computer Labs at La Trobe University’s Bundoora campus during the day. At night, I would sleep in the stairwell basement of the then Thomas Cherry Building - renamed in 2025 as the Jenny Graves Building. Earlier this year on a short-term contract, my team and I would go to the Jenny Graves Building for a coffee. I would pass the stairwells where I had slept (apart from when they flooded during winter) with the rest of the team being none the wiser.
Being homeless meant that I missed the wall-to-wall TV coverage of that evening.
The next morning, I attempted to log on to Disinformation’s content publishing system. The server was down. I figured that Lee Hoffman was maybe doing some unscheduled site maintenance updates. This meant I had the day off. I logged off the computer terminal in the ground floor of the Borchardt Library and left the campus. Only later that day in Melbourne’s CBD did I by chance see a Herald Sun newspaper headline and photo. I still didn’t grasp what others did about the terorrist attacks.
I wrote a series of heavily improvised articles on the September 11 terrorist attacks. Their headlines all began with the phrase US Terrorist Attacks on an older version of the now former Disinformation website. Here they are (the listed dates now differ from the original publication dates - due to updated content on an old content publishing system):
US Terrorist Attacks: Nevermind bin Laden, Here’s The Arms Trade (Link).
US Terrorist Attacks: Smashing The Control Images (Link).
US Terrorist Attacks: News Frames and Filters (Link).
US Terrorist Attacks: Due To Circumstances Beyond Our Control (Link).
US Terrorist Attacks: Global Terrorism Resources (Link).
US Terrorist Attacks: Profiling Osama (Link).
Rollins Band: Find The Real Patriots (Link).
Everything You Know Is Wrong: A Canticle for Osama bin Laden (Link).
If this had been my September 11 experience it still would have differed from most.
However, real life brings unexpected twists. Several months before, I had pooled money together to purchase a student ticket to fly to New York City for author Howard Bloom’s wedding in Brooklyn. I was in NYC from 20th to 25th September 2001. US President George W. Bush announced the grand strategy that became the Global War on Terror on 20th September 2001 - my 27th birthday. Baddeley picked me up from the airport playing Macy Gray - who by coincidence is playing a live date tonight in Melbourne. Metzger took me on a tour of New York City - including Electric Ladyland Studios, CBGBs, and Christopher St - where we huddled in his apartment browsing his Aleister Crowley books and talking about how things were already getting out of control.
I stayed with Bloom - and on 21st September 2001 stood on the top of his Brooklyn brownstone seeing for the first time the dust cloud in the distance still over the World Trade Center debris now called Ground Zero. It was a sunlit, quiet afternoon - and in the cognitive dissonance of the silence I remember wishing that my college girlfriend was with me. When I wrote my PhD dissertation The Development of Strategic Culture in Terrorist Organisations (2020) my then Monash University PhD Supervisor Dr Luke Howie told me that I had to tell this story - which I did briefly on pages 22-23. But there was a lot more still untold. For example, Bloom and I on a video call for the Howard Bloom Institute had a laugh that I had been in the room of his wedding with Richard Brodie (Virus of the Mind) and Douglas Rushkoff (Coercion: Why We Listen To What “They” Say) - two people who went out of their way (along with Bloom) to give me access and interviews during 1997-99 - but we actually didn’t meet in the room face-to-face (I saw Rushkoff walk out after the wedding ceremony with Metzger—and wasn’t quick enough to grab him).
For most people, September 11 is a collection of images - American Airlines Flight 11 at 8:46am EDT, United Airlines Flight 175 at 9:03am EDT, American Airlines Flight 77 and the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93 which crashed in a field near Shanksville. Metzger, Baddeley, myself, and others were running what at the time was a very well known website that had survived its Razorfish funded period during the peak of the 1995-2000 Dotcom speculative bubble. The FBI had “gone to ground” and had interviewed everyone - including our talented designer Leen Al-Bassam, as Metzger told me in his Christopher St apartment. “Things are going to rapidly get out of control,” he reflected. It was the end of an era that we had already sensed unfolding via events like the 2000 US highly contested election outcome, and the high-profile collapses of Enron Corporation and Worldcom. Metzger and I both made a contrarian decision (which Baddeley later reversed as publisher / current owner) to not pursue the already circulating memes and conspiracy theories that would later become known as the 9/11 Truth Movement.
In not seeing the actual terrorist attacks in real-time - and thus in not fully grasping both their kinetic shock and strategic surprise - I improvised with topics. That’s why for example above there was an article on the global arms trade. What I did turn to was Susan D. Moeller’s book Compassion Fatigue: How The Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death (New York: Routledge, 2002) to map out the group and mass psychology of what was unfolding. Going with Disinformation author Preston Peet to see the Mother Superior era Rollins Band play the Irving Plaza on 24th September 2001 was also a pivotal experience (I missed several larger concerts held later). I had gone to the US with $USD60 in total - and I spent most of it on this gig - brushing Peet off afterwards in embarrassment at being broke.
A few weeks later on 10th October 2001, the Rollins Band played La Trobe University - same line-up, probably the same setlist, and Henry Rollins spoke of the earlier gig - to what I felt was a largely disinterested student audience. I had tried to interview Rollins in 1994 for the then La Trobe University student newspaper Rabelais - and when the cross-border interview negotiations failed - the failure became in Gonzo / New Journalism reportage style the real story. What was so important in retrospect about the Irving Plaza gig was when Rollins came out and spoke to the audience - thanking them for being brave enough to see him play. At that moment, Peet and I both felt that we were witnessing a poignant moment in history. Hardcore punk rock attitude means you turn up and play your gig - even if terrorists attack your city.
So, our influences in the immediate aftermath were not conspiracy theories.
When I returned to Australia, I very soon went to Newcastle for the annual This Is Not Art youth festival to speak. One panel was on technology and mental health. As TINA in 2001 unfolded, the anthrax scare happened and the psychopolitical shock influenced the youth festival cohort in visibly emotional and fear-aware ways. I had written as a BA at risk student about the US military. In the very final essay for my BA which I wrote for peace studies scholar Dr Thomas Weber (now an Adjunct Associate Professor), I tried to also reflect on my period in the John Godolphin Bennett line of transmission in the Gurdjieff Work. Dr Weber did not see the submitted essay as being really part of peace studies - no doubt as The Work is now even more obscure than it was in the late 1990s and the early 2000s - and that it better reflects dealing with political revolutions like the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 and then the tumultuous civil war period of 1917-1922.
In 2003, whilst in the now former Strategic Foresight program at Swinburne University of Technology, I wrote an over-long, unfinished submitted essay called Confronting The Unthinkable. This attempted to deal with the emerging national security and strategic intelligence environment. The essay suffered from not having any scope or selection / inclusion conditions, whatsoever. The same year, now Professor Axel Bruns of Queensland University of Technology invited me to write a Media/Culture journal paper on how September 11 was affecting journalists and the media. Barry Saunders (later of McKinsey & Co) and I would revisit this research question with a closer focus on editorial practices and investigative journalists in a 2009 conference paper (for which Monash University’s Dr Ben Eltham and I co-wrote our now well-known conference paper Twitter Free Iran - which a blind peer reviewer decided to reject from the conference peer review stream as it mentioned psychological operations - despite the fact that Dr Eltham and I critiqued both the United States Department of State and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - which then led to my blog being hacked). This led me in 2010 to reflect during medical condition related illness on offensive cyberwarfare.
Don Webb has frequently observed to his students that “the Secret of Magic is to change the Magician.” The same holds for witnessing catalyst events like terrorism, geopolitics, and other volatility shocks. It gives you a different framing. Most people think of September 11 as involving two planes and the World Trade Center towers (the Pentagon incident is often forgotten and Flight 93 is summed up in the defiant, rallying cry: “Let’s Roll!”). There is a large (yet now fading) industry of core terrorism studies books, films, documentaries, streaming series, and now other memorials. But what Webb points to is that transformative moments of deep liminality (explored by the anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner) can occur in many, varied life contexts.
In 2004-05 when then Professor Trevor Barr (of Swinburne University of Technology) and I fought over my initial draft of the Disruptive Internet school of thought (for the 2005 contract report Smart Internet 2010 released by the Smart Internet Technology CRC and co-written with now Dr Darren Sharp and with contributions by now Dr Mandy Salomon), it was in part over our respective different subjective experiences of disruption as volatility. Mine were clearly more ‘edge case’ or '‘tail risk’ oriented than most people—reflecting a personal trauma history that included Autism and Complex PTSD. September 11 for me was not just the WTC. Rather, it was the psychological aftermath—and how this then led the US to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Military historians and war studies scholars today call these the Forever Wars - with a nod to Joe Haldeman, Steve Coll, Dexter Filkins, Peter Bergen, and Lawrence Wright, amongst others.
In 2011, I wrote another Media/Culture paper for its ‘Doubt’ special issue on September 11 counterfactuals. What occurred on September 11 now 25 years ago was only one possibility of several contingencies that did not in fact occur. In 2014, I saw Professor Richard Ned Lebow (Kings College London, Cambridge University, and Dartmouth University) and Professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (New York University, Hoover Institution) do a tag-team style joint presentation on their respective approaches to counterfactuals and to game theory at the International Studies Association’s annual convention in Toronto, Canada. Wooster College’s Jeffrey S. Lantis and I talked about the paper over coffee, and I later also discussed it briefly with University of Birmingham’s Professor Patrick Porter.
Two years earlier, Professor Jeremi Suri (University of Austin at Texas) kindly had coffee with me at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, where we talked about daily writing schedules, trade press publishers, and he recommended to me Michael Kenney’s book From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Drafts in progress facilitate mentor-like discussions with far more experienced Professoriate.
I moved from Futures Studies and Strategic Foresight into core Counter-Terrorism Studies and Political Science. One way in retrospect to understand this is that the phenomenological experience of being actually in New York City just after the September 11 attacks meant that I collapsed the optionality of branching future pathways into one onrushing future. Don Webb might remind us that the ancient Egyptians called this onrushing future the Neheh: it creates even more uncertainty.
In 2014, Dr Eltham and I co-wrote a Contemporary Security Policy paper on Australia’s defence and national security oriented strategic culture that Professor Jeffrey S. Lantis had shepherded through an International Studies Association annual convention panel (and subsequent Routledge book). The CSP editorial team turned up to the panel and we discussed blind peer review feedback that I had just received. “Can you handle these suggested edits?” I was asked. “Yes,” I replied. “Good—we need them by the end of the week.” We looked at each-other. “OK, I can deliver that to you,” I replied.
So, I spent the ISA annual convention evenings in my Hilton Hotel room, working through the edits—with a larger budget this time of $USD75 for the week, as Hilton staff had taken my credit card as a security. Luckily, in having previously been homeless, I was able to find cheap coffee and bagels, and to find free meals in the evenings at the ISA conference. That lobster meal glimpsed at in a Toronto restaurant would just have to wait. Instead, I went to the Royal Ontario Museum after seeing a bus stop poster to commune with China’s Forbidden City courtly treasures, in a 2014 exhibition of political, cultural, and social elites.
In early 2024, Dr Megan McElhone of Monash University’s prestigious Criminology Department invited me to sit in for a few weeks to help facilitate a class. In one session we discussed the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Siev X Tampa crisis that occurred in October 2001. Dr McElhone remembered both incidents from her childhood. I was the only one in the room with more mature memories - and mine were divergent than most as I was still a BA at risk student at La Trobe University - and also still homeless during both incidents. It made me feel old as a Generation Xer. Students were receptive to a good discussion and Dr McElhone kindly gave me some space as a facilitator to share some “lived experience” based insights.
25 years later, September 11 is now a hinge / sliding doors moment. The United States psyche changed that morning at 9:03am EDT. As per the Professor Richard Ned Lebow approach to counterfactuals noted above - what occurred was one of only a potential range of plausible and probable events. When you get into the quantum physics involved this is multiverse, simulation, and many worlds theory-oriented ontology, epistemology, and possibly even metaphysics. It made sense to my autistic / neurodiverse mind (having been late-in-life diagnosed in October 2022). It’s also just my own, very subjective experience that reflected the confluence of some very unusual life circumstances. If you were alive when the September 11 terrorist attacks happened then your own equally subjective experience will likely differ from mine. We don’t need to collapse it down into an absolutistic (Milton Rokeach) or totalistic (Robert Jay Lifton) single-point outcome: asperspectival and multiperspectival differences (Herbert J. Gans) can be respectfully honoured, with a dose of antifragility (Nassim Nicholas Taleb).
Traumatic experiences in a longitudinal rear-view mirror become a resource. You cannot escape the strategic surprise or the volatility shock of what you experienced on 11th September 2001 - or have since learned about - as social learning, cultural transmission, and folklore from others. It’s instead a resource that you can use. Osama bin Laden, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and the Hamburg Cell reinforced Walter Laqueur’s then just espoused theory: a paradigmatic shift from Old to New apocalyptic, mass casualty terrorism.
I (along with many other people) took the bait—and got ourselves hooked on what has subsequently evolved into surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff) or technofeudalism (Yanis Varoufakis). As the noted military innovation historian and current La Trobe University Vice-Chancellor Theo Farrell has wisely observed, British counterinsurgency experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq were unwinnable. This is also why Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for the cognitive-emotional processing of traumatic experiences can be helpful. You have to accept your limits. Then, you build a far larger life around the traumatic core.
When I go back mentally to the 15-20 minutes on the Bloom brownstone roof in Brooklyn on 21st September 2001, I can still vividly remember it. A clear blue afternoon sky with very warm sunshine. A mild breeze. A very quiet city in which New Yorkers were actually being very nice to each-other. But - that dust cloud hovering in the distance over the World Trade Center site - it’s so large, it’s still there, it really feels out-of-place (a signal of Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance), and - how would other people feel if similar destruction ever occurs elsewhere? I was alone in that moment - I held that thought for a few seconds - and then I went back into Howard Bloom’s apartment where we continued our face-to-face discussions.
At the time, the experience felt very weird - and I didn’t expect it to change me as much as it did. You can learn to have these kinds of dislocative subjective experiences in far more mundane life circumstances - and even to summon them at mental-emotional-physical will - in a far more limited way. In doing so, you take what Carl Jung might call the Shadow of September 11 - with all of the still unfolding and real-world horror that it has wrought (and will continue to do so - including the now observable via negativa existentialist absences of much younger generations).
You begin to transform in a more alchemical and energetic way - into the willed, focused intent of what you wish to bring into the world in a far more positive, constructive way. That for me is the real and enduring lesson of 25 years after the September 11 terrorist attacks.