How 9/11 became a meme

Sean Ramos from Today Explained from Vox, like many of you, I lived through 9-11. My memories of that day are of horror and shock and devastation, which is why I think 25 years later, it's so surprising that my feeds are filled with 9-11 memes that are ironic, irreverent, and surely insensitive. Think pasta stacked up to look like the Twin Towers with Eminem in the background and a caption that reads, never forgetty, mom's spaghetti. Some of you surely know what I'm talking about, and some of you surely don't. So on the show, we're going to try and get everyone on the same page. Please consider this a trigger warning. Bear with us as we try to understand how jokes about the worst attacks in our country's history have helped a lot of young people deal with it and avoid it. How 9-11 Became. How 9-11 Became a meme. Maybe the most popular meme online. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. 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The University of Oregon. And let's be honest, Whitney, have you ever laughed at a 9-11 meme? Um, I mean, I have been, so let me, I have been engaging with 9-11 memes since 2008. And some of them are so shockingly silly. It's just, the juxtaposition is so unbelievable that that will elicit a giggle often, even when you're like, I feel very uncomfortable. It's just, I feel very uncomfortable about this laughter. When you're talking about tragedy, seeing something absolutely absurdist in this really serious context, it doesn't mean you're necessarily laughing at the tragedy itself, but there's just something that happens to your body when you see two things that should not go together. And that is where a lot of this laughter tends to come from. So having said that, yes, I will admit to having laughed at some of these memes because they just are set up to be, you know, a little bit of a joke. So the kind of essential experience of humor. But for some people, those two things pushed together, they do elicit a visceral embodied response, but it's one of disgust. You mentioned that you've been tracking these memes since 2008. When did people start trafficking in them? Because it's not like everyone agreed that there's some humor to be had or found here on like September 12th, 2008. There are folklorists who were tracking the humor in response to the attacks from the day of the attacks. Okay, so I'm wrong. There were people on day one? Oh, yeah. Yeah, there definitely were. I mean, and there are archives of examples of it from all the way back then. Raid Center posted September 11th, 2001. And it was wordplay like that. And some of these jokes would be just text, like, how do you make a big apple crumble? And then maybe there would be an image of the towers themselves. Osama bin Laden announced today that he will give up terrorism to become a TV chef. For his first program, he'll be showing us how to make a big apple crumble. Posted September 30th, 2001. I remember one from the. Early days of like, this is how they're going to rebuild the Twin Towers. And it was five towers, like fingers. And the, you know, the tallest one was flipping the bird to the world, essentially. Rebuilding New York's skyline. New Trade Center design incorporates a gesture and spirit familiar to all New Yorkers. Posted September 13th, 2001. Yeah, yeah. You would have kind of visual gags like that. And so then as you move into 4chan and something awful, there were gifts. Gifts were possible, like Hulk Hogan's smashing the towers, the Kool-Aid man bursting through the towers. And then, you know, flash forward even further, and you get to platforms that allow for short form video and audio in particular. Coming to stores soon, the 9-11 playset. It's center on the juxtaposition of the, either the towers themselves or whatever it might be. And then you have, you know, the overlay of audio that, you know, creates this incongruous kind of experience where suddenly, you know, it's techno music or whatever it is that you're putting over it. With each of these iterations of the humor, what really shifts is what people are able to do with the platforms. And the jokes are always reflections of what people are able to do with these media. Even if, like, you have no idea what we're talking about right now with these memes, I feel like everyone has probably, probably seen the literally, I have to say, iconic image of George W. Bush in the children's classroom with his assistant whispering in his ear. And it's like blank, blank, blank. Another Drake diss has been dropped by Kendrick or whatever. Like that version, is that the most widely trafficked 9-11 meme? Well, it depends on what community you're talking about. I mean, the trolls on 4chan that I was studying back in the day, the most dominant form of joking was people jumping out of the windows. Like, that's what the humor was based on, that it was about the body horror of the day. But if you're talking about more, the kind of more mainstream articulation of the memes, well, then maybe that that image of somebody whispering something into George Bush's ear, you could maybe think of it as rather than framing it as the most popular meme, but the most kind of gateway druggie of all of the memes, because you're not having to think about what 9-11 actually was. And so that happens to be very exploitable because it's nonspecific, right? And you can apply it to any situation and never once have to think about the reality of what happened on that day. And I think the latest iteration that I've seen, which is essentially this AI 9-11 sort of recap starring Super Mario from like his Mario Galaxy era, standing there watching the towers get hit. It is bananas. Mamma mia. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against military installations of the Taliban regime. Have you seen this? Does it just imply that these memes are going to continue to evolve forever along with our technology? With AI humor, it lowers the bar. It lowers the bar of participation to basically nothing. It is so easy for anybody to just create really intricate kind of joke visual and audio jokes around 9-11. And so that also helps explain why is there so much more now than there was before? Well, because these tools of creation have been democratized in ways that allow literally anybody to jump into the fray and start participating. Is there a political map for how this thing has been memed? Or to the best of your knowledge, are the left and right, you know, sharing memes in an equal number? The memes themselves? I mean, that's a it's an interesting question because 9-11 joking as I see it with my students in my classroom probably are similar to what I saw with my students in my classroom and the jokes that they would share and engage with about Charlie Kirk's assassination. Even the conservative students in the room were acknowledging that yes, they shared them. Yes, they laughed at them that there didn't it didn't seem to be politics didn't seem to be predictive of whether or not a young person in my class was doing this kind of joking. So I would say that's probably true for 9-11 seems to be on the bipartisan side of things. OK, I'm glad you brought up Charlie Kirk because now these two events feel weirdly tied together because it was September. 10th of last year and what I remember from Charlie Kirk's death was there wasn't a grace period. It was like the jokes were happening as the news was breaking. Have we become numb to the comedy equals tragedy plus time equation? It feels like there's no more time anymore. Social media and especially platforms like TikTok, they demand an instant response. That if you're not instantly responding to something, you're not going to be able to harness the engagement that you might be able to get otherwise. And the more you have a platform that's pushing you towards a short, fast response, the more likely you're going to start to see this decontextualizing, which then lends itself to appropriately incongruous joking behaviors. So as long as we've had platforms that push people to respond quickly and to respond pithily and to respond in ways that engage in sort of remix behaviors, then you see very fast joking. Do you think this is the most memed event in human history? It probably is because it is one of those rare events that probably close to everyone in this country and in many parts of the world know something about 9-11. It's a piece of intellectual furniture that most people have inside of their minds that then can become a kind of touchstone for different kinds of joking. Or. Just reflection. 9-11 wasn't just the event that happened on that day. It wasn't just what happened to the friends and family of people who lost someone. It didn't wasn't confined to the first responders or to Afghanistan or to Iraq. 9-11 reverberated and continues to reverberate politically. It is an enormous event that happened in American history. When you are just distilling it down to a single pixelated image, you're not getting that. And so that's why I think it's. It's really important for us to think reflectively about this idea that comedy is tragedy plus time, that for that configuration to work, the people engaging in the comedy have to accept that something is a tragedy. And you can only accept that something is a tragedy, really understand what that means if you know what it is. That is not what often happens with 9-11 humor, that instead it isn't tragedy. It's a tragedy plus time. It's somebody's engagement with a single pixel. That's content. And for many people, they're not able or they're not willing to reduce something so big to something so small. And that's where you see a lot of the disconnect between people who think the joking is fine and the people who think that the joking is not. When Today Explained returns, we're going to hear from a young person. A young person who didn't really live through 9-11 take the opposite approach. He's not reducing the attacks to a meme or pixels. He's doing everything in his power to relive every tragic moment. Support for Today Explained comes from Quince. The seasons are changing, I'm told. And that may make it a good time to assess and refresh. That doesn't mean you need to fill your closets with a bunch of junk. Take it from Quince. It's all about cultivating a wardrobe that has fewer but better items. 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Manny Morota's personal Twitter account isn't terribly exceptional, but he's got four other ones that are. Manny runs 250 years ago live, 100 years ago live, 50 years ago live, and most relevant to Today Explained, 25 years ago live. On all of these accounts, he pretends he's a reporter from history reliving the day's events as they unfold. And we spoke to him yesterday. Ask him what 25 years ago live would look like today. A little before 8.46 a.m., I'm going to start reporting the news from the day that occurred besides the September 11th attacks. And then at 8.46 will come the pivotal, there's been a crash at the World Trade Center. There's been a plane crash. This is just coming in. There appears to be a major fire on the upper floors of one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. We have a breaking news. We have a breaking news story to tell you about. Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City. It happened just a few moments ago. From there, it's going to be a little over 400 posts throughout the day, detailing in the most thorough possible manner the timeline of the attacks. And I've made an effort to cover everything that is factually known about the day from the moment of the first plane impact until. midnight on September 12th. So it's going to be as complete as possible of a timeline of a record, but it's going to be posted in a way that makes it seem like I'm someone learning about this for the first time. A second plane has hit the second tower. America is under attack. The reason I'm doing this is because I want people to understand how it must have felt on that day to live through that terror and that uncertainty. So I'm going to be covering the September 11th lie. If there was Twitter on September 11th, 2001. Which there was not. Right. How old were you on September 11th, 2001? I was two. I was actually three. I was a toddler. So you're kind of reliving the experience yourself and maybe even in a way living through it for the first time by doing this? I think that there's a big rift between people who remember the September 11th attacks and people who don't. The people who remember it, it's like this big. communal event that occurred. It's a water cooler conversation. Everybody remembers where they were and what happened afterward and what the world was like beforehand. For people who don't remember it, we only know what the world was like afterward and we don't have an emotional connection to it. I mean, when I was growing up and learning about it in school, it was as distant and academic to me as something like Pearl Harbor is. It was a date in a textbook. That's all it was. But for somebody a little bit older, even 40. five years older, it was a huge emotional event and they remember the world before and after it and my goal in running this and in doing this live tweeting and pretending as if i'm there and invoking the feelings of emotion and even terror will be to reconcile those two generations the people who remember the attacks and the people who don't has anyone gotten into your dms or in your replies to say like hey nobody wants to relive this what are you doing tons of people in fact uh just yesterday there was a person who was asking me kindly don't do this at all please just end the account right now wow and a lot of people leading up to it have been asking in a polite way uh not in a mean way this is graphic this is emotional please don't do this for for the good of humanity don't do this so the compromise that i reached as a result um is that i'm not going to show especially violent imagery i'm not going to show uh jumpers for example uh nor am i going to show um any you know i'm not going to show any violent imagery i'm not going to show any violent imagery or i'm not going to describe anything of that regard uh because i i think that that's a good compromise where i can show the event and have it be something that people remember but not go into really gruesome detail that alienates people that's interesting because like i don't want to see the jumpers on my feed although i sometimes do but i think the jumpers was part of the horror of that day so how do you handle this responsibility you have to capture the totality of the most horrific day in american history well i should correct what i said about the jumpers i'm not going to show any impacts or any jumpers faces but i will be showing photographs like the falling man yes okay so i i find that to be representative of the day but how do i handle the responsibility of showing this um it really is a compromise and i'm not some hollywood executive in a boardroom with a with a focus group trying to figure this out i'm you're a 27 year old in your living room with a twitter account and a computer yes uh exactly that uh and i'm posting all this manually as well so i i've declined to use automation i'm going to be typing out everything huh manually as it's happening why uh because i've always done it this way um if i'm posing as a reporter who's live in history i might as well act like one which means that i'm going to post immediately i've seen people online anticipating your your accounts posts on september 11th like they're excited about it what do you think that's about so we talked earlier about this generational rift between people who remember the event and people who don't um and i think that people who don't generally speaking treat it both as an academic subject and as a meme of sorts uh they're very prone to make jokes about it uh and you may have seen in all the comment threads people saying crazy stuff like oh i have a business five in the north tower or i have a flight from boston to los angeles people think it's funny um and i i see the analytics of my account i know that the demographics who follow it are mainly uh 15 to 24 year olds and they are recounting it as as sort of a meme as something that's funny there's nothing i can do about them and i'm very glad that they'll be over with on september 12th your 2001 live account has 570 000 followers do you have any idea how many of those people are just following you to see what you do on september 11th i can't say for sure but i can say affirmatively that it's nine times the number of followers that i had at the beginning of this calendar year this gets to the point of my question which is like it's weird to think that you know you benefit financially or you know commercially from this thing that you're doing this project that you've come up with but you do how do you think about that intersection of of you know it sounds in a way like you're trying to provide a historical service to people a public service to people but it's also benefiting you is that uncomfortable at all i want to make clear from the beginning that i am not financially benefiting from my coverage of the september 11th attacks uh this year um if there is any monetization because i do have sponsors if any monetization comes from these attacks um it's i'm not going to do anything about it um i'm not going to do anything about it i'm not going to do anything about it i'm not going to do anything about it i'm not going to do anything about it to charity because i've grappled with this question for about two years knowing that the attacks were coming um and i decided at the beginning of this year um that any revenue that came from the attacks would go immediately to charity i see it as blood money i see it as wrong to collect it for myself i see it as profiting off the victims and the event uh and so i'm not going to profit off it this is going to be an emotional experience have you like prepared yourself emotionally for what you're about to do it's been very emotionally difficult to research uh i watched 240 hours of footage 9-11 footage in preparation for this i watched about 40 documentaries i read four books um i've become bathed in 9-11 content i guess in the past year and it has not been a fun experience um yeah at all so i i think that it's negatively affected my mental health quite a bit i've gotten emotionally invested in it and now i'm going to be showing it to everybody and i have mixed feelings about that morally um and it's going to be tough on me do you think the emotional response might help you process further what happened on september 11 2001 so some people in the comments have been sharing the stories of their relatives on 9-11 and i really appreciate that i think that helps um people process the attacks and how it affected their families in particular uh and so i'm hoping that people are going to come out and respectfully say thank you for doing this my brother was in the towers he escaped but uh like here's the story um and so i'm really hoping that people are going to come out and share their stories because i feel like then i'm going to be able to share my story with them and i'm going to be able to share my and it would become a giant uh therapy circle versus a meme fest uh which i'm hoping it doesn't become younger people gen z in particular see the event as either academic or as a meme fodder and so my hope in doing this is that they're going to see it as a little bit more that they're going to see it as a collection of stories and events that were horrific in scale and so it's my goal to show gen z people what happened on the september 11th manny marotta once again is at 25 years ago live you also heard from professor whitney phillips from the university of oregon and we also want to thank professor joshua rovner from american university for his help with today's show which peter ballin on rosen produced joely myers 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