Story thread · 2 reports / 2 sources

The 9/11 generation may be building AI’s 9/11 moment

conservativereview.com · 1d · first reportShare

Born in 1979, the year Julian Assange called “Year Zero,” I am an Xennial, a member of that most exclusive of microgenerations. These days, it's fashionable to see yourself — or your troubles — as too unique or complex for anyone else to really understand, perhaps in reaction to how digital life seems to reduce everyone to the same kind of matter: interchangeable and insignificant. ‘Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.’ But for an Xennial, it is surely a fair reaction to actual circumstances. Pure Gen Xers are trapped in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Pure Millennials are stuck in the ’00s and early ’10s. Xennials came of age in the late ’90s, a dark, captivating, dangerous, mysterious, seductive, shimmering, incalculable, and irreducible moment that quietly began sometime in 1996 and ended, with a bang, on September 11, 2001. Xennials slammed into this moment as teens who had already gotten a front-row seat to the cosmic unfolding of a shadow world with no clear name,