There will never be another 9/11. God willing, there will never be anything like those attacks again. But that’s not what I mean. I mean that spirit of America that watched, absorbed, and responded to September 11 is gone. It is never coming back. It was tied to a particular moment in our media and our politics. No matter what happens to this country in the years ahead, we will not see it, think about it, feel it, or remember it the way we did 25 years ago. We don’t have the same eyes, minds, hearts, or memories we did back then.
September 11 happened at the intersection of digital and mass media. That’s why we still have framed issues of newspapers and the reason we can watch an unsetting number of home videos capturing the explosions. In the hours after American Airlines 11 hit the north tower, classrooms, living rooms, lunch rooms, and just about everywhere else were tuned in to the same handful of broadcasts. There was no serious alternative to the broadcast networks unless you had cable, and no serious alternative to CNN if you did. This isn’t just an interesting detail of that day. It’s a social and psychological fact. The reason we remember 9/11 as something that happened to us, collectively, in a single moment, is that we were all shepherded into the same handful of spaces to witness it. We remember it as something we shared because we did.
Our conversations about the attacks were rooted in the shared experience of it. The conspiracy theories would come, of course, but they would come later, not instantly. The vast majority of the country was bound together in the same finite amount of thoughts and words—the thoughts and words we inherited from places like nightly news, or from talk shows, from newspaper columnists, or from the president himself.
This moment lingered. When President Bush threw the first pitch at Game 3 of the Yankees-Diamondbacks World Series, barely a month after the attacks, America tuned in. That baseball was not America’s favorite sport didn’t matter. That the President had been controversially elected didn’t matter. This moment was happening. We watched not only because we wanted to, but because it felt like we needed to.
The collapse of the towers, the “Falling Man,” “Let’s roll,”—all of these pieces of time found us because we were all standing in the same places.
I’m not suggesting that Americans didn’t have strong disagreements. Nor am I trying to whitewash the real politicizations that would come later and accelerate the processes that would lead our country into many of the pits it has fallen into since. And of course, whether we’re talking about Jon Stewart or Rush Limbaugh, Americans were not completely unified in whom we trusted to talk us through the moment.
The point is that the halls of memory around 9/11 are built out of materials that we all recognize. There were no personally curated feeds, no algorithmic islands, no influencer economies to magnetize attention away from the moment. In just a little while, high speed Internet would claim a majority of American homes, and only seven years later, Apple’s iPhone would radically transform what it means for a people to experience any moment. The attacks of 9/11 were among the last truly formative events for American culture. Soon enough, technology would permanently change what it means to be “formed” at all.
Charlie Kirk was murdered on September 10, 2025. Before you ask, no, I am not comparing nearly 3,000 murders on 9/11 to Kirk’s death. I am contrasting the way a certain generation of Americans experienced that moment with the way we experienced 9/11. Kirk’s murder was almost camouflaged into whatever media source you were consuming when it happened. If you experienced it via X, you saw horrifying, unforgettable footage, and an articulate rage toward the forces that had made it plausible. If TikTok was your choice, you saw something different: Emotionally performative faces, reacting in real time, often with fear but a sense of satisfaction. YouTube? Grief, punctuated by immediate conspiracies (who was that old man?) and accusations. Facebook? More of the same, flanked by advertisements and staged reactions.
And we haven’t even mentioned the AI content.
Kirk was a culture war figure, and it makes sense that his murder would play along culture war lines. But a major part of how his death will forever be embedded into our memory is the sprawl of attention that accompanied it. There is no “moment” of Kirk’s death. There can be no collective memory of it. There can and will only ever be different feeds. Kirk’s death could never be “unifying.” That has less to do with the kind of person Kirk was, and more to do with the kind of people we are.
If the Kirk example is too polarizing for you, we could name Sandy Hook. Rage at gun control opponents is understandable, but why would it replace grief, rather than follow it? Because in the digital age it is impossible to feel a moment without experiencing the commentary around it. Our feeds do not transmit shared experience. They produce curated content. The very concept of a “moment” is quaint. There is only output, only content, only takes. Life on the internet means our eyes can never look straight ahead. We are always turned somewhere else.
Tragedy exposes the limits of online life like nothing else does. The more traumatic the event, the more something in us wants shelter from the content storm. Saying something “just to say something” feels hollow. What we really want in those moments is not noise, but shared silence. We want people to just stand with and bear witness. It’s as old as Job’s friends, who, when seeing his suffering, suppressed their moralism long enough to just sit in the ashes. There’s something very Christian about that. Perhaps that is why, in the months after 9/11, many churches were unusually full. Sitting silently while human mortality and the impossibility of control hit us in the soul is a spiritual event. It is better to go to the house of mourning than the house of feasting.
Perhaps our digital experience of life has become a way to trying to turn all mourning into feasting (when we scroll our way through dark days, don’t we say we’re “consuming” content?). Perhaps all of this just serves the desire to escape God and grief through an algorithm that reassures us that, no matter what, we and the people we like are Right.
Maybe one of the things we can carry forward from our cultural memory of 9/11 is the need to encounter suffering like people instead of like computers. Maybe we just need to sit in one place, with others, and watch in the same direction, accepting that all the info and all the validation is less important than accepting our need to helplessly pray. And then, when we look back at our lives 25 years from now, perhaps we will remember the presence of God and the ones we love more vividly than our feeds.
Thank you for such a concise summary of many things that I have been unable to articulate.
This is such an important perspective! Thank you for helping us to consider remembering well.