Zeitgeist 2001 | Hacker News Reader

Zeitgeist 2001

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45 pointsstefankuehnel22 comments

“… Port Authority of New York/New Jersey … massive loss of life …,” interrupted radio broadcast heard in the basement of Gilman Hall, where I was hoping to hit used copies of the books for first semester senior year at Johns Hopkins. I initially thought that a ferry had capsized.

Crowding around the workstations in the CS lab, refreshing CNN and the Washington Post, trying to get anything to load… and finding out that the Pentagon had been hit, too… this wasn’t just a tragic accident.

Classes cancelled (that practically never happened), advised to leave campus over intercoms I didn’t know they had, a rather full midday service at the Episcopalian cathedral north of campus.

Gathering at the friends who had a big screen and cable, unusually quiet and free of alcohol, rewatching the unthinkable. Fark proved to be surprisingly useful for discovering the awful details that the overwhelmed news sites couldn’t serve up.

Walking near towards Union Memorial hospital with my closest guy friend, seeing if they wanted our blood donations (turned out to be far fewer critically injured survivors than feared/hoped), dreading that our country would do something impulsively stupid in response (it wasn’t impulsive, but oh boy was it stupid), wondering what this would mean for our futures (personally and generally).

It is now almost exactly half a lifetime ago for me.

The link to 9/11 searches is broken but you can find it here:

https://archive.google/press/zeitgeist/9-11-search.html

More on this topic, published shortly after 9/11:

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/890/79...

The effects of September 11 on the leading search engine (2001)

Damn this makes me feel old. I remember that on 9/11 one of my teachers broke her arm, so I would start lessons later. My Dad called me to ask to turn on the TV and check if there will be war. So I looked at WTC burning and called him back.

On next day the English teacher said to remember that day since people will be asking.

Covid and Ukraine war are "interesting" times again...

On a side note, some band has updated the "we didnt start the fire song", although in a non chronological way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=2LkVKCWL0U4

If your 9/11 story contains words like teacher, you don't have to feel that old. I remember being at work when the news broke...

Same here. No TV and the site was restricted so I was mashing refresh on Slashdot because it was the only web site that was still working on the only computer that was connected to the Internet in the entire site. Had to email updates around the internal mail system from another computer.

I knew about the event from slashdot. I was randomly browsing, read about it, thought “no way” and turned on the tv. There it was the live coverage from cnn, just in time to witness the second plane hitting. Felt so unreal and still does when I think about it.

> although in a non chronological way

The original isn't chronological either.

I was a landscaper on 9/11/2001, on a job, riding a big lawnmower at a customer's house, when the first plane hit. I remember the customer ran outside, frantically flagged everyone down, and invited us all in - she said we just had to see the news for ourselves. There were six of us standing in her spotless living room, dusty and dirty and stinking from working hard all day, watching the recorded footage of the plane fly into the first tower, when the second plane hit. We were all aghast, shocked as the gears in our brains slowly turned into the realization that this was not an accident, it was an attack. Eight months later, I joined the US Army. While in basic training, my drill sergeant told us we'd declared war on Iraq. I somehow managed to avoid being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan while in the Army, but 9/11 would affect all of our lives profoundly going forward. From the Patriot Act to TSA monitoring, that was the point where we collectively decided, as a society, that we would in fact sacrifice a little of our freedom for a little more safety.

It was unavoidable, perhaps. If Benjamin Franklin could only see us now.

I was living in NYC when that happened. On Staten Island. I think I remember waking up late and looking at the NY Times online or something and seeing a picture of the first tower with flames and smoke coming out of it. I found it a bit hard to believe, but was able to walk down the street about a block and could see the smoke and the top of the building from there.

Coincidentally, this was not long after I had a temporary word processing job at Wachtell Lipton. One of the things I worked on there was reformatting a section of a massive World Trade Center lease document.

For some reason I remember the supervisor asking me to have a smoke with her in the smoking room one day and casually asking what I thought about bin Laden or something.

At the time, none of that seemed odd, but years later I heard some interesting theories.

Another weird thing is that I had also recently gone for an interview for a SQL programming job in one of the WTC towers. Luckily they said that they could not sell my resume to their boss even though they believed I could do the job (I was referred by a technical night class where I had demonstrated a lot of pre-existing knowledge and skills).

Idk if this is what I’m thinking about but google made a timeline type exploration tool (where you could zoom in with mroe granularity) and literally no one used it :) lesson that users don’t actually like fancy user interfaces . visual representation of text data Are almost always worse I think :)

You may be thinking about [ChronoZoom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChronoZoom) ; unfortunately that is from Microsoft Research, not Google.

It's crazy that 2 of the top 4 mentioned retailers no longer exist. If I look at a list of top retailers today, I have a hard time imagining any of them not existing in 20 years.

https://fakeotube.com/video/31/september-clues-9-11-by-simon...

September clues - clips + visual analysis of the 911 footage presented on TV

nice nostalgia wave from the all your base belong to us reference - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItugh-fFgg

Damn, I'd never looked into who Tim McVeigh was.

Interesting. Reminds me of Zeitgeist from 2007.

Nostradamus?

Easily forgotten now, but after the attacks, there was a lot of online chatter that Nostradamus has predicted the attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus_in_popular_culture...

I completely forgot about Nostradamus until this reminded me of it. He was having a bit of a moment in the mid '00s for this exact reason. Looking back, I can see that time period as an incubation period for the popular conspiracy mentality we see now. These sorts of ideas were being peddled everywhere, and were benign* enough to latch on to people without much life disruption. I wonder how much of this acted as a cognitive primer for the eruption into the mainstream of much harder conspiracy theories we see today.

* At the time your wonky conspiracy brained coworker would be sitting down saying "Nostradamus said xyz, pretty weird man!". That was about it, these were just descriptive "isn't it crazy that..." conspiracies. More current ones have deeper implications to their believers, and tend to contain a prescriptive aspect as well.

I think you may be overstating the rise of conspiracy theories throughout the '00s, or rather, understating their weight in previous periods.

If you want to point to the marked rise of conspiracy theorists then you have to at least stretch back to the Kennedy assassination. This is easily the most widespread, actually believed theory, and its impact on people at the time was monumental.

The moon landing theories are obviously prevalent, though likely with fewer true believers and less implications on them.

Even in the 90s this was a rampant thing. Columbine shootings. Cobain's suicide. AIDS.

I would posit that conspiracy theories are a byproduct of mass media. However, you could easily stretch it back further and draw parallels to witch hunts as being attributable to earlier conspiracy theories on a smaller scale.

"You know, Quasimodo predicted all this..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmhVw6q-KOA

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