Today, Explained - How 9/11 became a meme

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

On the 25th anniversary of the deadliest attack on America, 9/11 has quite possibly become the most memed event in human history. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. President George W. Bush was reading to an elementary school classroom in Sarasota, Florida on September 11, 2001 when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informed him about the second plane hitting the World Trade Center towers. Photo by Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast⁠.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sean Ramosferm from today explained from Vox, like many of you, I lived through 9-11. My memories of that day are of horror and shock and devastation, which is why I think 25 years later, it's so surprising that my feeds are filled with 9-11 memes that are ironic, irreverent, and surely insensitive. Think pasta stacked up to look like the Twin Towers with Eminem in the background and a caption that reads, Never Frigetti mom's spaghetti. Some of you surely know what I'm talking about and some of you surely don't. So on the show, we're going to try and get everyone on the same page. Please consider this a trigger warning.

Bear with us as we try to understand how jokes about the worst attacks in our country's history have helped a lot of young people deal with it and avoid it. how 9-11 became a meme, maybe the most popular meme online. You're listening to Today Explained. So I'm Whitney Phillips. I am an associate professor of information politics and media ethics in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. And let's be honest, Whitney, have you ever laughed at a 9-11 meme? I mean, I have been, so, let me, I have been engaging with 9-11 memes since, 2008 and some of them are so shockingly silly. It's just the juxtaposition is so

unbelievable that that will elicit a giggle often even when you're like, I feel very uncomfortable about this laughter. When you're talking about tragedy, seeing something absolutely absurdist in this really serious context, it doesn't mean you're necessarily laughing at the tragedy itself, but there's just something that happens. to your body when you see two things that should not go together. And that is where a lot of this laughter tends to come from. So having said that, yes, I will admit to having laughed at some of these memes because they just are set up to be, you know, the kind of essential experience of humor. But for some people, those two things pushed together, they do elicit a visceral embodied response,

but it's one of disgust. You mentioned that you've been tracking, these memes since 2008. When did people start trafficking in them? Because it's not like everyone agreed that there's some humor to be had or found here on, like, September 12th, 2001. There are folklorists who were tracking the humor in response to the attacks from the day of the attacks. Okay, so I'm wrong. There were people on day one? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, there are dead. definitely were, I mean, and there's, there are archives of examples of it from all the way back then. What does World Trade Center stand for? Welcome to Canada. World Terrorist Convention. What, Trade Center? Posted September 11th, 2001. And it was wordplay like that.

And some of these jokes would be just text, like, how do you make a big apple crumble? And then maybe there would be an image of, of, of, you know, the towers themselves. Osama bin Laden announced today that he will give up terrorism to become a TV chef. For his first program, he'll be showing us how to make a big apple crumble. Posted September 30th, 2001. I remember one from the early days of like this is how they're going to rebuild the twin towers. And it was five towers like fingers.

And the, you know, the tallest one was slipping the bird to the world, essentially. Rebuilding New York's Skyline. New Trade Center Design incorporates a jester and spirit familiar to all New Yorkers. Posted September 13, 2001. Yeah, yeah, you would have kind of visual gags like that. And so then as you move into 4chan and something awful, there were gifts. Gifts were possible, like Hulk Hogan's, smashing the towers, the Kool-Aid man bursting

through the towers. And then, you know, flash forward even further and you get to platforms that allow for short-form video and audio in particular. Coming to stores soon, the 9-11 playset. It's center on the juxtaposition of either the towers themselves or whatever it might be. And then you have, you know, the overlay of audio that creates this incongruous kind of experience where suddenly, you know, it's techno music or whatever it is that you're putting over it.

With each of these iterations of the humor, what really shifts is what really shifts is what people are able to do with the platforms. And the jokes are always reflections of what people are able to do with these media. Even if, like, you have no idea what we're talking about right now with these memes, I feel like everyone has probably seen the literally, I have to say, iconic image of George W. Bush in the children's classroom with his assistant whispering in his ear. And it's like blank, blank, blank. another Drake diss has been dropped by Kendrick or whatever.

Like that version, is that the most widely trafficked 9-11 meme? Well, it depends on what community you're talking about. The trolls on 4chan that I was studying back in the day, the most dominant form of joking was people jumping out of the windows. Like, that's what the humor was based on, that it was about the body horror of the day. But if you're talking about the kind of more mainstream articulation of the memes, well, then maybe that that image of somebody whispering something into George Bush's ear,

you could maybe think of it as rather than framing it as the most popular meme, but the most kind of gateway druggie of all of the memes, because you're not having to think about what 9-11 actually was. And so that happens to be very exploitable because it's nonspecific, right? And you can apply it to any situation and never once have to think about the reality of what happened on that day. And I think the latest iteration that I've seen, which is essentially this AI 9-11 sort of recap starring Super Mario from like his Mario Galaxy era standing there watching the towers get hit. It is bananas. Mamma me. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against military installations of the Taliban regime.

Have you seen this? Does it just imply that these memes are going to continue to evolve forever along with our technology? With AI humor, it lowers the bar of participation to basically nothing. It is so easy for anybody to just create really intricate kind of joke, visual and audio jokes around 9000. And so that also helps explain why is there so much more now than there was before? Well, because these tools of creation have been democratized in ways that allow literally anybody to jump into the fray and start participating. Is there a political map for how this thing has been memed or to the best of your knowledge are the left and right, you know, sharing memes in an equal number? The memes themselves, I mean, that's a, it's an interesting question because 9-11 joking as I see it with my students in my classroom probably are similar to what I saw with my students in my classroom and the jokes that they would share and engage with about Charlie Kirk's assassination. And when we were talking about Charlie Kirk's assassination, even the conservative students in the room were acknowledging that, yes, they shared them, yes, they laughed.

at them that it didn't seem to be, politics didn't seem to be predictive of whether or not a young person in my class was doing this kind of joking. So I would say that's probably true for 9-11 seems to be on the bipartisan side of things. Okay, I'm glad you brought up Charlie Kirk because now these two events feel weirdly tied together because it was September 10th of last year. And what I remember from Charlie Kirk's death was there wasn't a grace period. It was like the jokes were happening as the news was breaking. Have we become numb to the comedy equals tragedy plus time equation? It feels like there's no more time anymore. Social media and especially platforms like TikTok, they demand an instant response. That if you're not instantly responding to

something, you're not going to be able to harness the engagement that you might be able to get otherwise. And the more you have a platform that's pushing you towards a short, fast response, the more likely you're going to start to see this decontextualizing, which then lends itself to appropriately incongruous joking behaviors. So as long as we've had platforms that push people to respond quickly and to respond pithily and to respond in ways that engage in sort of remix behaviors, then you see very fast joking. Do you think this is the most memed event in human history? It probably is because it is one of those rare events that probably close to everyone in this country

and in many parts of the world know something about 9-11. It's a piece of intellectual furniture that most people have inside of their minds that then can become a kind of touchstone for different kinds of joking or. or just reflection. 9-11 wasn't just the event that happened on that day. It wasn't just what happened to the friends and family of people who lost someone. It wasn't confined to the first responders or to Afghanistan or to Iraq. 9-11 reverberated and continues to reverberate politically.

It is an enormous event that happened in American history. When you are just distilling it down to a single pixelated image, you're not getting that. And so that's why I think it's really important for us to think reflectively about this idea that comedy is tragedy plus time. That for that configuration to work, the people engaging in the comedy have to accept that something is a tragedy. And you can only accept that something is a tragedy really understand what that means if you know what it is. That is not what often happens with 9-11 humor. that instead it isn't tragedy plus time. It's somebody's engagement with a single pixel.

That's content. And for many people, they're not able or they're not willing to reduce something so big to something so small. And that's where you see a lot of the disconnect between people who think the joking is fine and the people who think that the joking is not. When today Explain Returns, we're going to hear from a young person

who didn't really live through 9-11, take the opposite approach. He's not reducing the attacks to a meme or pixels. He's doing everything in his power to relive every tragic moment. Support for today's plane comes from Quince. The seasons are changing, I'm told, and that may make it a good time to assess and refresh. That doesn't mean you need to fill your closets with a bunch of junk.

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You can go to bambus.com slash explained and use the code explained for 20% off your first purchase. That's BOMBAS.com slash explained. Code Explained at checkout. You're listening to Today Explained. Mani Marota's personal Twitter account isn't terribly exceptional, but he's got four other ones that are. Mani runs 250 years ago live, 100 years ago live, 50 years ago live,

and most relevant to today explained, 25 years ago live. On all of these accounts, he pretends he's a report. from history reliving the day's events as they unfold. And we spoke to him yesterday to ask him what 25 years ago live would look like today. A little before 846 a.m., I'm going to start reporting the news from the day that occurred besides the September 11th attacks. And then at 846 will come the pivotal, there's been a crash at the World Trade Center. It's been a plane crash. This is just coming in.

There appears to be a major fire on the upper floors of one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. We have a breaking news story to tell you about. Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City. It happened just a few moments ago. From there, it's going to be a little over 400 posts throughout the day, detailing in the most thorough possible manner the timeline of the attacks. and I've made an effort to cover everything that is factfully known about the day from the moment of the first plane impact until midnight on September 12th.

So it's going to be as complete as possible of a timeline of a record, but it's going to be posted in a way that makes it seem like I'm someone learning about this for the first time. A second plane has hit the second tower. America is under attack. The reason I'm doing this is because I want people to, understand how it must have felt on that day to live through that terror and that uncertainty. So I'm going to be covering the September 11th Live if there was Twitter on September 11, 2001.

Which there was not. Right. How old were you on September 11th, 2001? I was two. I was actually three. I was a toddler. So you're kind of reliving the experience yourself and maybe even in a way living through it for the first time by doing this? I think that there's a big rift between people who remember the September 11th attacks and people who don't. The people who remember it, it's like this big communal event that occurred. It's a water cooler conversation. Everybody remembers where they were and what happened afterward and what the world was like beforehand. For people who don't remember it, we only know what the world was like afterward and we don't have an emotional connection.

to it. I mean, when I was growing up and learning about it in school, it was as distant and academic to me as something like Pearl Harbor is. It was a date in a textbook. That's all it was. But for somebody a little bit older, even five years older, it was a huge emotional event, and they remember the world before and after it. And my goal in running this and in doing this live tweeting and pretending as if I'm there and invoking the feelings of emotion and even terror will be to reconcile those two generations, the people who remember the attacks and the people who don't. Has anyone gotten into your DMs or in your replies to say like, hey, nobody wants to relive this? What are you doing? Tons of people. In fact, just yesterday there was a person who

was asking me kindly, don't do this at all. Please just end the account right now. Wow. And a lot of people leading up to it have been asking in a polite way, not in a mean way. This is graphic. This is emotional, please don't do this. For the good of humanity, don't do this. So the compromise that I reached as a result is that I'm not going to show especially violent imagery.

I'm not going to show jumpers, for example, nor am I going to show any gore. I'm not going to describe anything of that regard. Because I think that that's a good compromise where I can show the event and have it be something

that people remember, but not go to really gruesome detail that alienates people. That's interesting because I don't want to see the jumpers on my feed, although I sometimes do, but I think the jumpers was part of the horror of that day. So how do you handle this responsibility you have to capture the totality of the most horrific day in American history? Well, I should correct what I said about the jumpers.

I'm not going to show any impacts or any jumpers' faces, but I will be showing photographs like the falling man, yes. Okay. So I find that to be representative of the day. But how do I handle the responsibility of showing this? It really is a compromise. And I'm not some Hollywood executive in a boardroom with a focus group trying to figure this out.

I'm one person. You're a 27-year-old in your living room with a Twitter account and a computer. Yes, exactly that. And I'm posting all this manually as well. So I've declined to use automation. I'm going to be typing out everything manually as it's happening. Why?

Because I've always done it this way. If I'm posing as a reporter who's live in history, I might as well act like one. Okay. Which means that I'm going to post immediately. I've seen people online anticipating your accounts posts on September 11th. Like they're excited about it. What do you think that's about? So we talked earlier about this generational rift between people who remember the event and people who don't.

And I think that people who don't, generally speaking, treat it both as an academic subject and as a meme of sorts. They're very prone to make jokes about it. And you may have seen in all the comment threads people saying crazy stuff like, Oh, I have a business meeting at 845 in the North Tower. I have a flight from Boston and Los Angeles. People think it's funny. And I see the analytics of my account. I know that the demographics who follow it are mainly 15 to 24-year-olds,

and they are recounting it as sort of a meme, as something that's funny. There's nothing I can do about them, and I'm very glad that they'll be over with on September 12th. Your 2001 Live account has 570,000 followers. Do you have any idea how many of those people are just following you to see what you do on September 11th? I can't say for sure, but I can say affirmatively that it's nine times the number of followers that I had at the beginning of this calendar year.

This gets to the point in my question, which is like, it's weird to think that, you know, you benefit financially or, you know, commercially from this thing that you're doing, this project that you've come up with. But you do? How do you think about that intersection of, you know, it sounds in a way like you're trying to, you're trying to, provide a historical service to people, a public service to people, but it's also benefiting you. Is that uncomfortable at all? I want to make clear from the beginning that I am not financially benefiting from my coverage of the September 11th attacks this year. If there is any monetization, because I do have sponsors, if any monetization comes from these attacks, it's getting donated straightaway to charity because I've grappled with this question for about two.

years knowing that the attacks were coming. And I decided at the beginning of this year that any revenue that came from the attacks would go immediately to charity. I see it as blood money. I see it as wrong to collect it for myself. I see it as profiting off the victims and the event. And so I'm not going to profit off it. This is going to be an emotional experience. Have you like prepared yourself emotionally for what you're about to do? It's been very emotionally done. It's been very emotionally difficult to research. I watched 240 hours of footage, 9-11 footage in preparation for this. I watched about 40 documentaries. I read four books. I've become bathed in 9-11 content, I guess, in the past year, and it has not been a fun experience at all. So I think that it's negatively

affected my mental health quite a bit. I've gotten emotionally invested in it, and now I'm going to be showing it to everybody. And I have mixed feelings about that morally. And it's going to be tough on me. Do you think the emotional response might help you process further? What happened on September 11, 2001? So some people in the comments have been sharing the stories of their relatives on 9-11, and I really appreciate that.

I think that it helps people process the attacks and how it affected their families in particular. And so I'm hoping that people are going to come out and respectfully say, thank you for doing this. My brother was in the towers he escaped, but like here's the story. And so I'm really hoping that people are going to come out and share their stories because I feel like then it would become a giant therapy circle versus a meme fest, which I'm hoping it doesn't become. people, Gen Z in particular, see the event as either academic or as meme fodder.

And so my hope in doing this is that they're going to see it as a little bit more, that they're going to see it as a collection of stories and events that were horrific in scale. And so it's my goal to show Gen Z people what happened on the September 11th attacks. Mani Marota once again is that 25 years ago live. You also heard from Professor Whitney Phillips from the University of Oregon, and we We also want to thank Professor Joshua Rovner from American University for his help with today's show, which Peter Ballin-on-Rosen produced, Jolie Myers edited, Gabriel Dunatav fact-checked, and Bridger Dunnigan, and David Tattashore mixed.

This is today explained.