Last year, a 21-year-old college student went viral on X for asserting that “being terminally online is wild [because] someone mentioned 9/11 in my class today and I genuinely forgot that not everyone thinks it’s funny now.” The post — which she deleted a few days later — shed light on the popularity of memes making light of the 9/11 attacks among Gen Z, and sparked a debate about the relationship between humour and tragedy. While 9/11 humour certainly risks trivialising people’s suffering, the moral debate surrounding it masks deeper questions about its longer-term effect on our collective consciousness.
I began noticing an uptick in 9/11 memes around mid-2024, inciting numerous censures on the occasion of the 23rd anniversary last year. This September, I have continued to stumble upon new iterations of these memes. While most of the zoomers I know readily admit that they laugh at and often share 9/11 memes, many have made clear that they don’t find the suffering inflicted by the events to be humorous. As one friend put it, “when people talk about it I take it seriously. I grew up close to the city and knew people affected and always have a heavy heart on 9/11, but I consider laughter a part of grief.”
My older friends who lived through 9/11 — especially those who lost loved ones in it — tend to have little tolerance for any form of 9/11 humour. One friend, in addition to finding such memes grossly insensitive, said that they are a sign of Gen Z’s “apathy toward other people’s suffering” and general “nihilistic worldview.”
As someone who lived through 9/11 and saw the Twin Towers burning with my own eyes — and knew people who lost loved ones in it — I am under no illusion that there was anything remotely funny about the deaths and horror the attacks brought about. Still, I can’t help but chuckle — as much as my conscience prods me not to — whenever I see the infamous “never forgetti” (two bales of spaghetti in place of the towers with tomato sauce pouring out of the sides) or the airplane mode-full battery-9:11 memes.
But we’d do well to remember that the moral conundrum regarding sensitivity to the suffering inflicted by the attacks began well before the emergence of 9/11 memes. (Older readers might remember Norm Macdonald’s deep love of 9/11 jokes.) Just six days after 9/11, indeed, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen remarked on a German radio station that the attacks were “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” The sight of the towers burning accomplished “something in one act” that “we couldn’t even dream of in music.” Needless to say, making such a statement less than a week after the attacks was disturbingly insensitive and in poor taste. Yet as time has gone on, Stockhausen’s outrageous statement has stayed with me. In all honesty, it has helped me to make sense of a vice I developed that is perhaps more grave than giggling at 9/11 memes.
It was nearly impossible to escape the image of the towers burning as it was constantly replayed on news channels for months on end. But it was the dawn of YouTube that really cemented my fixation with rewatching the horrors of that day. Since being founded 20 years ago, a plethora of footage of the towers collapsing from various perspectives — news broadcasts, security cameras, civilians with camcorders — have been uploaded, amassing billions of views.
I’ve always been reticent about confessing my morbid fascination with rewatching the horrors of the day. It wasn’t until the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh (who features 9/11 in the plot of her 2018 bestseller My Year of Rest and Relaxation) admitted to having “watched tons of [9/11] footage” that I realised I wasn’t alone. “This sounds really un-American,” she continues, “but talk about performance art. Completely disturbing, mind-blowing imagery on our televisions. It totally obsessed people and left them vulnerable.” Moshfegh, who was a mere 120 blocks away at her Columbia University dorm on that fateful morning, noticed how “sh*t changed” after 9/11. The New York she knew — where it had once been possible to do and be anything — had died. Something about the sight of that horror “pulled the fabric of bullsh*t” from our eyes and “unplugged [us] from the matrix.”
Moshfegh is not the only person to have asserted that 9/11 shattered our naive trust in progress at the turn of the millennium. Jean Baudrillard, the late French theorist on whose work The Matrix was based, insisted that globalist expansion, neoliberal economic policy, and American exceptionalism developed alongside the West’s fascination with “hyperreal” spectacles. The spectacular allure of Hollywood thrillers, celebrity culture, and reality TV — which are predicated on the “denial of reality,” and which has no issue sacrificing people’s dignity for the sake of increasing ratings and profits — is “terroristic in itself.” On 9/11, “the spectacle of terrorism force[d] the terrorism of spectacle upon us.”
And this is perhaps what kept me watching those clips of the catastrophe. A mass unmasking of our rosy aspirations and unplugging from the matrix, it incarnated the constant stream of virtual spectacles flooding our attention into reality itself: a fantasy film made real. There is nothing remotely artistic about nearly 3,000 innocent people dying. Yet in a society with forms of entertainment so reliant on human exploitation and the mass uprooting from the real, labelling an act of mass terror “performance art” is not exactly far from the mark.
Ross Barkan, whose recent novel Glass Century revolves largely around 9/11 and its impact on New York City, was only 11-years-old when he watched the smoke fill the sky that September morning from his native Bay Ridge. Echoing Baudrillard’s sentiments, Mona, the main character of the novel, couldn’t help but feel that the sight of the towers burning “it cinema, bad fiction, a plot point dreamt up as too ridiculous for art and discarded somewhere else.” The possibility that her loved ones working at the World Trade Center — who had symbolically “made it” to the summit of the American Dream — might be trapped in “the holy hell of it” seemed “beyond the realm of belief altogether.”
The spectacle of 9/11 … cannot fully comprehended, even by those who lived to see it happen
Despite describing it as “the scariest day in [his] life” and having lost loved ones, Barkan recently told me that he “isn’t really offended” by the emergence of 9/11 memes and rather that he is “somewhat fascinated” by the phenomenon. “I think at heart you can’t comprehend it if you weren’t there or you weren’t experiencing it even from afar.”
The spectacle of 9/11 — “unmatched” and “unanticipated by … any apocalyptic film” — cannot fully comprehended, even by those who lived to see it happen. The mystery of the events is even more elusive for zoomers who only know about it second-hand via stories and news clips. “Putting aside the cynicism or the irony” of the memes, Barkan sees them as an “attempt to understand,” to compensate for having “missed out a major event” that played a role in “a lot of major and surreal turns in the 21st century from the election of Trump to to COVID.”
Certainly, 9/11 memes risk cruelly downplaying the unspeakable suffering that the attacks brought about, and perhaps to a certain nihilistically detached, “irony-pilled” sense of humor that has become characteristic of Gen Z. Yet there is also something to be said about how the memes serve as a legitimate, albeit severely limited, attempt to grapple with the “hyperreal” events of 9/11.
As commentators like Adam Curtis and Slavoj Zizek have warned, overly simplistic platitudes about how on 9/11 the uncivilised “bad guys” attacked us freedom-loving “good guys” paper over the deeper complexities at hand. Similarly, bluntly moralistic condemnation of 9/11 humour risks sentimentalising the event and thus masks the massive paradigm — or “vibe” — shift that came about in its wake. While we can continue to question whether memeifying 9/11 is a grave offence or justifiable coping mechanism, let’s not ignore the fact that it marks an elusively intricate shift not only in the trajectory of geopolitics, but in our very perception of reality itself.
