Twenty years today. I keep typing that sentence in my head and it still doesn't feel like a real number. Twenty.
I wasn't going to write about this. Techpad is not exactly the place for 9/11 retrospectives, and I've got half a draft sitting in my drafts folder about USB-C ports that I should probably finish instead. But I spent last night flipping between three different anniversary specials and this morning scrolling a timeline that couldn't decide whether to be solemn or business as usual, and something about that whiplash felt worth writing down.
Here's the thing nobody prepares you for with a 20-year mark: the internet doesn't pause for it. I opened Twitter around 7am (yes, I still call it Twitter, not "the app," sue me) and the first three tweets in my feed were, in order, a "never forget" post from an airline's corporate account, someone complaining about their internet provider, and a guy live-tweeting his Peloton ride. Then a photo of the second plane. Then back to normal. That's just what feeds do now. They don't know it's a solemn day unless you tell them, and even then they only sort of know.
I was seven. Third grade, Mrs. Delacroix's class, and I remember the specific detail that the TV cart got wheeled in and nobody would explain what we were watching, just that we were watching it quietly. I didn't understand the scale of anything until years later. What I remember clearest, honestly, isn't the towers, it's my mom being unable to get through on the phone lines for like four hours because everyone in the tri-state area was trying to call everyone else at once and the network just couldn't take it. No cell towers built for that kind of simultaneous load. That's such a specific, boring, infrastructure kind of memory to have from a day like that, but it's mine, and it's probably part of why I ended up caring about how systems fail under load in the first place.
It's strange to think about how differently that day would look now. Everyone in lower Manhattan would have a phone with a camera in their pocket instead of disposable Kodaks. There'd be a livestream. There'd be a hashtag within minutes and a wave of misinformation right behind it, faster than any newsroom could correct. I'm not saying that's better or worse, just different, and it's the kind of different you only notice when you sit and actually think about it instead of just accepting "technology changed everything" as a vague truism.
Small complaint, since apparently I can't write a post without one: I really don't love the genre of anniversary programming where every network airs some slickly produced retrospective with swelling strings and slow-motion footage, like it's a movie trailer instead of, you know, actual grief that actual families are still carrying around. One of the specials I watched last night cut to a commercial for a mattress company thirty seconds after a 911 call recording. That's not a tech complaint exactly, but it's the same instinct that makes engagement-bait headlines feel gross to me — packaging something heavy into content that has to hit a runtime and a break schedule.
Meanwhile the rest of the tech world just kept doing tech world things this week, which is its own kind of strange to sit next to. Apple sent out invites a few days back for an event on the 14th, and the rumor mill is already fully spun up about what's coming — new phones, probably a new Watch, the usual September choreography. And El Salvador's bitcoin law took effect Tuesday, which by every account was a rocky rollout, glitchy app and all, but it happened, a country made a cryptocurrency legal tender for the first time ever, and it barely registered against everything else in the news this week. Under normal circumstances that alone would've been the biggest tech story of the month. This week it was a footnote.
I don't have a tidy way to land this one. I think that's fine. Not every post needs a bow on it. I'm going to go finish my coffee, and probably that USB-C draft later, and let today just be what it is.