After a pang of sadness, I turn to watching other people play SimCity 3000 Unlimited on Youtube…and then of course it suggests ambient music videos of the most haunting sort, for there they are: the Twin Towers of New York City’s World Trade Center. And though I barely remember them myself — I was but seven years old when they were taken from us — so help me, the vibes work. But why?
Now, all these videos come from the same channel, which claims to represent a certain “Neon Catalog Studio”. But that would be beside the point.
The buildings were ugly as sin, the grey monolithic rectangles intruding into the sky like a tumor straight from the mind of Sauron himself, yet at night or in the twilight they have a certain irresistible charm. Because of what they were? No. Because of the time they represent. Of course that would be the case, wouldn’t it?
But it makes me wonder: I’ve been to New York City — only once in my life, but once was enough — and the current World Trade Center just isn’t the same. We collectively let the terrorists take so much from us on September 11, 2001; I can’t help but wonder why the Twin Towers were not just rebuilt in their original form as soon as was practicable — yes, practically some concessions to modernity would have to be made in the details of their reconstruction, but aesthetically a near-exact replication should have been feasible for all I know — and exactly that was proposed. I remember it well when I was a child. Yet instead we got…the current design. Which frankly isn’t very beautiful; certainly it doesn’t stand up head-to-head against, say, the Burj Khalifa, or, perhaps more to the point, the Petronas Towers.
So what gives? For those of us, even seven-year-old me, who grew up with the Twin Towers, to have them absent from our hearts forever except as half-remembered dreamscapes would just be too sad. Yet that’s exactly what we were left with: a world where their form was lost to us forever. A world where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda won.
An inflammatory statement, to be sure, but old-timer-y and nostalgia-possessed as it sounds, the current complex of buildings just isn’t the same. Perhaps people would be saying the same thing if a near-exact replica was indeed built, but looking back on it through the clarity and, yes, the healing mists as well of the 24 years of time that have passed…it’s striking how they didn’t even try. And that makes me sad, though all the more wistful for those days…for a future that was never born, except in the dreams of those who were, in the cradle, whispered what turned out to be lies.
Instead of a statement of defiance, the clearest message imaginable that “no, you won’t take what is ours away from us!”, what are we left with? A gaping hole where the Twin Towers once stood: in a sense institutionalizing the surrender of our country, our democracy, and everything it represented to Osama bin Laden, which when you think about it is the perfect architectural expression of post-9/11 America. I for one have always been resolved that no, the attacks should not have changed anything about our society or our civilization, and must not have been allowed to have changed anything.
“The world changed on September 11, 2001” is a white flag to al-Qaeda: it should not be lost on us that as of September 11, 2025 the Taliban are back in charge in Afghanistan as if nothing ever happened, and our president’s new handsome buddy in Syria is himself an al-Qaeda veteran. The Arab monarchies who, lest we forget, spawned and sponsored the likes of Osama bin Laden in the first place, continue to become wealthier and more influential. Meanwhile, the aforementioned president is busily imposing sanctions against his own country as the centerpiece of his economic policy (yes, that’s what tariffs are), and is now adopting a posture of open warfare not against any foreign boogeyman, let alone a genuine threat, but against our own cities. Including the city of New York.
Osama bin Laden and even Ayman al-Zawahiri might be deceased, the machinery of cruelty that was the Islamic terrorist movement little more than a memory, but even if the likes of the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” still had legions at their command…why would they even bother to fight? The verdict of history is clear: the terrorists won; we lost.
Instead of an architectural expression of defiance, a statement that “no, you will not be allowed to take our towers, our freedoms, our riches, our dreams, the very idea of hope away from us!”, which is what rebuilding the Twin Towers would have represented, we have been treated to the architecture of surrender. A perfect expression of the fearful security-obsessed bureaucratic hellscape that is the world after it “changed” on 9/11, a world that I’ve never liked much, even as an eight-year-old kid.
Oh, the original Twin Towers were sterile and corporate in their own way — they are, after all, modernist office buildings populated by the elites among the powers-that-be — but when I see “The Matrix” in the theater, what’s striking the most is not the struggle of man and machine, nor even the questioning of the nature of human existence in a world like ours, but how, for all their other faults, the machines had good taste: how 1999 really was the “peak of [human] civilization”. We see in that subtly green-tinted image flickering from the projector not merely an adventure, but a world that slipped away…and that perhaps, more so than any story or fantasy itself, is the ultimate dreamscape that classic cinema provides to us.
And perhaps the dreamscape of the post-vaporwave pre-security-state world is even crueler than most, because the 1990s themselves were a brighter time compared to what came before: consider that with the end of the Cold War and computer technology, at long last, coming into mass maturity, the world was getting better. There was hope in a way that there had not been in the world since perhaps before the Great War; the apocalypse of 1914 felt, for the first time since it happened, surmountable. 1999 perhaps was the peak of that feeling, in those heady days of the dot-com bubble…but even in the darkest days of the bust it was generally, almost tacitly assumed that the then-oncoming recession was a mere temporary setback.
To the point that at the time it was as often as not generally assumed that the greatest challenge lying ahead was one borne of abundance and advancement; a time where the ennui of the 9-to-5 office job being insufficient to provide meaning to a human soul was the most intractable question. But now we’ve collectively been knocked down several levels below even that. Basic freedoms my grandparents took for granted are now thought of as pie-in-the-sky dreams that could never be real…and perhaps never were
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And the 1990s themselves were a brighter time compared to what came before; consider with the end of the Cold War and computer technology at last coming into mass maturity, *the world was getting better*. 1999 perhaps was the peak of that feeling, but even in the darkest days of the dot-com bust it was assumed that the recession was a mere temporary setback. To the point that at the time it was as often as not generally *assumed* that abundance and ennui from office jobs causing existential despair was the greatest challenge lying ahead, or some such. A fair question – what comes en masse beyond the middle class 9 to 5 – but now we’ve collectively been knocked down several levels below *even that*. Basic freedoms my grandparents took for granted are thought of as pie-in-the-sky dreams that could never be real…and perhaps never were, once you get through talking to those who adhere to one of the nihilistic credos of our time.
And yes, our time is one of nihilism, in a profound and sinister way that perhaps no other civilization in human history has had to confront. We’re told that the 1990s were some brief bubble where we imagined we were “post-history”…but has History ever really returned? There was genuine belief that the generational struggle of my cohort, the Millennial Generation, was going to be the War on Terror, the Clash of Civilizations, but even in the days of late 2001 when the spellcasters’ evil powers were at their all-time height it was easy to tell that the return of History with a capital H was being manufactured, perhaps not even for nefarious reasons — though there were those — but by a ruling class desperate for meaning without some ready-made Enemy to fight and to define their identities in opposition to. Unfortunately for them, their efforts to breathe life into History was not successful: it all ended up meaning nothing.
And then what comes but perhaps the most postmodern, post-historical figure in the history of American politics: Donald Trump. Sure, Trump cuts the profile of a fascist dictator, but only as the Marxian farce that follows the tragedy. Compare today’s right-wing populism to Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists and you’ll see there’s nothing behind the curtain: it’s just an empty vessel for people who desperately want to re-enact the 1930s.
Even the original fascists were subsisting off thin intellectual gruel to say the least, but the contrast is, nevertheless, stark. Peek behind the curtain, and there’s just no actual ideological challenge to liberal democracy in there. Unlike in the 1930s. Yet liberal democracy erodes away and disappears anyway, because nobody cares to stop the cargo-cult illiberals and the paper-doll autocrats.
Perhaps we see this development in the West prefigured in how even al-Qaeda’s ideology itself was quite empty, once push came to shove, which we saw culminate in the rather more overtly nihilistic posture of an outfit like ISIS, where cruelty was pursued for its own sake.
Meanwhile, the “opposition” that seeks to “preserve liberal democracy” only care about managing the decline so the incumbents can enrich themselves…which of course explains why when a Trump or an Orban or a Putin take definitive power they all disappear into the woodwork as if freedom and democracy never meant anything to them in the first place. Because it didn’t.
It didn’t mean anything to them when the Twin Towers still stood either — or else our civilization would never have decided to surrender its soul to Osama bin Laden on September 12, 2001 in the first place — but at least then the system worked, in a sense. Society was being managed, yes, not being led into any sort of a definitive vision of a better future, but at least there was something other than some vague intractable decline to manage.
Our ruling class just have not been up to the job of righting the ship of our civilization and putting us back on course, because even if they were interested in the task it seems they simply don’t have the faculties needed to even begin to actually do it.
What do they have the faculties needed to do? It would seem, as with ISIS, performing cruelty for its own sake. Perhaps the 1990s were not so much more post-historical than what came after, but were only a bit more honest about it. It’s as if after 2001 we slipped so deep into the simulation that we can’t bear to confront the fundamental truth of the matter anymore — whence postmodern philosophical tracts, whence films like “The Matrix” — so instead we just play-act more progressively strained versions of the 1930s, like a cargo cult hoping that if only we could put on a sufficiently convincing act, some force from beyond the island would give us the gift of History.
And it gets worse: even the War on Terror, grim as it was, was slightly more inspiring than what we see today in the age of Trump, in as much as there seemed to be some level of genuine belief they were enacting History. Now? It’s pretty obvious that the highest leaders on down through the followers all know it’s fake. They merely derive pleasure from knowing you have no choice but to go through the motions while knowing it’s fake. It’s not even so much a cargo cult as a sadistic parody of one. In a way it’s crueler than what the machines were doing in “The Matrix” (but then again, the machines were not cruel by nature, were they?).
Where such a society like ours possessed by such a spirit goes, I have no idea. Certainly one has to wonder how, given 24 years and counting of such a course, what the next 24 years will look like. Nowhere good, I can assume, but where, exactly? Who can say?
What I can say is that this is a situation that, as no doubt so many of the original postmodernists would agree, is without precedent: as such, liberation, progress, perhaps even survival, would demand a completely new form of political praxis, wouldn’t it? A new way of being as the social, human animal. That’s a lot.
And perhaps one day, those who look at the ambiance of the Towers on Youtube will become the vanguard of something more, a spirit that is ready to encounter the zeitgeist that defines our current existence, but for the moment…we can listen, we can watch, and we can remember the dreams, about a point in space and time so many of us have never been…
Twin Towers view from Empire State Building 86th floor observatory, May 2001. Generously taken and donated to the public domain by Germán Ramos.
