“Cold winds blow around me and I can’t help but think of you.”
I always tend to go into a slightly dark place during this specific week of every year. This year I’m feeling something else too, and that is anger.
I cannot tell you how much it disgusts me that so much of the archival footage from September 11 has now been age-gated and restricted as “mature” or “sensitive or adult” content, as in this example from this Reddit film archive.
It’s history. It’s archival footage of history. It’s a thing that happened.
It’s not “content”. It’s not manufactured gore, or pornography, or clickbait slop.
That day is, to paraphrase Vel in Andor, skin. It is skin. We take it with us wherever we go for the rest of our lives.
None of us who were there that day, living through it in real-time, had the choice of not seeing what we saw, not feeling what we felt, or living what we lived through.
Which is why, for what it’s worth, that archival content has been deeply therapeutic to many of us: an opportunity to rewind, live through it again with the hindsight of age and wisdom, and finally emerge from the cloud okay. Someone once called it “our stations of the cross”. I get that. I get that in my bones.
Enter the pearl-clutching brigade, who have deemed real history to be “age inappropriate” content so shocking that it requires age and identity verification to view.
You want my age and identity verification to watch that content? That verification is me. Hello. I’m the human here. I exist.
And don’t even get me started on this:
Yes, the first hour of archival news footage shows a lot of suicides. There were reasons for that. Do these people need me to sit them down and explain that morning to them or what? Do these people really think that the context of that day is going to inspire copycats?
Did I warn you all this was going to happen? Yes. Did anyone listen? No.
So congratulations, pearl-clutchers. Your push to create an “age-appropriate” web has resulted in the blocking and censorship of history. As with everything in the times we are living through, that has created a precedent for the practice to be rolled out further. You can expect more archival history to be hidden away this way.
But this particular history, as I said, is my skin. To block and censor that history as “inappropriate” is to apply the same judgement to those of us who were there: to say that our experiences are not fit for public discussion and must be hidden away and silenced.
If you silence that day, you silence the voices from that day.
You finish the job.
Header photo taken by teenage me, skiving off high school. It is framed in my house. Every time I look at it, I’m that teenager again, standing there again, with the world at my feet.
