I don’t normally tell personal stories on the blog, but I told this one yesterday at the panel yesterday, so I thought I’d repeat it here.

Ten years ago, I was a senior in high school, and more relevantly, preparing for my final year as a nationally competitive policy debater. The topic for the year was weapons of mass destruction, so I’d spent my summer reading journal articles about proliferation and clipping wild-eyed rhetoric from sketchy Asian newspapers in preparation for the twenty trips I’d take around the country to tournaments. On September 10, I won a practice debate round by convincing the judge that the risk of a major terrorist attack on the United States was not significant enough to be considered in a risk calculus.

On September 11, when someone told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, I told them it must have been a hoax. I didn’t believe it until my English teacher came into class, panicked because she couldn’t reach her husband, who was on a Los Angeles-bound flight out of Logan in the same window as the hijacked planes. She eventually reached him. I spent the afternoon sitting next to one of my favorite teachers, who was trying to reach his brother, who worked in the World Trade Center. He turned out to be all right, but other people who worked at my high school lost friends and family on the planes, something we wouldn’t find out until later.

Less than two weeks later, I got on a plane out of Logan to fly to one of those debate tournaments. The serviceman stationed at the check-in gate made me call my doctor to fax the prescription for my Epi-Pen to the airport to prove that I actually needed to be carrying the medicine that could save my life in case of an allergy attack—everything could have been a weapon. The Boston Globe‘s astonishing piece about the Logan workers who checked in the hijackers, who opened their luggage when it didn’t make the planes and discovered a terrible surprise, who live as little-discussed witnesses to the beginning of our national tragedy rather than its fiery conclusion, brought me to my knees as no other anniversary piece on September 11 has because this is how I experienced it, on the edge of the crisis, but not unaffected by it.

Michiko Kakutani asked, in a lead-up to this anniversary, whether our culture had changed. And thinking back to the time, I think one of the things that came as a blessed relief to me was that culture didn’t feel different, that we didn’t succumb to the notion that the end of irony would be a good thing. Has The Onion ever been better than in the weeks following September 11, 2001 when it provided a sad, irreverent commentary on the attacks? Modern Humorist’s “Kandahar Har Har” and monologues by fake Taliban stand-up Jai al-Leno were part of my rush to start thinking about Afghanistan as something other than an outline on a map—I read them along with Ahmed Rashid. On September 11, 2001 I had no notion that I would ever be a culture critic. But those reminders that culture mattered stuck with me, as did the power of being part of a mass event, no matter how terrible and involuntary, no matter how marginal my participation.

This post contains spoilers through the first two sections of Neuromancer. For next week, we’ll read section three.

When Conan O’Brien spoke at Harvard’s commencement in 2000, he joked about a number of predictions he’d made in a (presumably fake) high school graduation speech 15 years earlier:

I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: “I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority. I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule. I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography.

I start our discussion of William Gibson’s Neuromancer because it’s impossible to read this novel, published the year I was born, without thinking about what he thought the internet might look like and what it actually does—for most of us, anyway. I’m intrigued by the novel’s description of the internet as like”

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

I think for some people, that’s true. But I think for most folks, the internet just makes their world a little bigger instead of a lot larger, it makes their world easier to handle rather than turning it surreal. On the other hand, most of us aren’t actually innovators, we’re not plugged in actively testing the limits of what our enabling technologies can do and what societal rules suggest we ought to want to do. Our personal geography is not like Ninsei, where, as Case tells us, “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” Reading a novel’s a form of tourism.
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