On September 11, 2001, I became an anarchist.

Well, not exactly.

These things are never that clean. I didn’t wake up that morning believing one thing and go to bed clutching a black flag and a copy of Bakunin. There was a long process that led me there, probably longer than I understood at the time.

But if I had to put a date on it, September 11th would be the date.

My buddy Shawn called me that morning.

“Frank, we’re under attack!”

I don’t remember what I said back. I remember trying to figure out what the fuck he was talking about.

You have to remember that this was 2001. There was an internet, obviously, but it wasn’t the thing permanently attached to our nervous systems that it is today. What passed for broadband was still pretty fucking slow. There was no Twitter to refresh, no livestream from somebody standing six blocks away, no little glowing rectangle in your hand buzzing every twelve seconds to tell you the world had ended again.

And I barely watched broadcast television.

If I wanted to watch something, I went to the video store. Like a civilized person.

So now I suddenly needed television, except I didn’t have a proper antenna.

I remember scrambling around looking for metal coat hangers. I started bending the fucking things, trying to fashion them into an antenna, trying different positions, holding them at stupid angles, attempting to pull a recognizable image out of the static.

Eventually something appeared.

Barely.

The picture would come in and out through the snow, but there it was: New York City and those fucking buildings.

That is how I watched September 11th happen: through a shitty television signal being pulled out of the air by coat hangers.

There are certain moments when history is happening at the scale of millions of people, but your memory of it gets trapped inside these completely mundane little objects.

A telephone.

A coat hanger.

A television.

A pack of cigarettes.

I was living in Atlanta at the time. And if you wanted immediate analysis of what was happening, there was always radio.

This was Georgia, so the AM dial was dominated by right-wing talk radio. Angry white men already had all the answers to questions nobody had even had time to formulate yet. There was one NPR station I could pick up, also Radio Free Georgia, a lefty community radio station, but otherwise turning on news radio meant entering a universe where somebody was permanently furious about liberals, taxes, immigrants, feminists, hippies or whatever fresh menace was destroying America that particular morning. Sean Hannity was part of that insanity, just to give you and idea, and I was even on his show once, but that's a story for another day.

And now America really had been attacked.

I was terrified of what those voices were going to turn this into.

But I also had somewhere I was supposed to be.

This is another bizarre thing about enormous historical events: your calendar doesn’t know that history is happening.

I was working on video projections for a play, and there was a meeting that morning. So at some point, somehow, I got into the car.

I remember Radiohead playing on the CD player..."Women and children first..."

I remember pulling into a gas station.

And I remember buying my first pack of cigarettes in nine months and eleven days.

Nine months and eleven days.

Yes, I knew exactly.

I had quit smoking as a New Year’s resolution. I had made it all the way from January 1st to September 11th without buying a pack of cigarettes.

Then two planes flew into the World Trade Center and I thought, fuck it.

The world had suddenly become incomprehensible, but smoking was something my body understood.

And while all of this was happening, another thought had already begun gnawing at me.

What the fuck is the government going to do now?

Because September 11th didn’t happen in a political vacuum for me either.

I had already spent the better part of the previous year trying to get Ralph Nader elected president.

I wasn’t some hardened anarchist revolutionary at the time. I still had one foot planted pretty firmly inside progressive electoral politics. I thought maybe if we could get somebody like Nader into the conversation—somebody talking seriously about corporate power, the environment, labor, militarism—we could move politics somewhere useful.

Instead, I got an education in how American electoral politics actually worked.

I watched the struggle to get Nader onto ballots. I watched him get locked out of the presidential debates. I watched a political system that endlessly congratulated itself for offering people choices become extremely fucking uncomfortable when somebody tried to offer people another one.

By the end of the 2000 election, I wasn’t exactly ready to throw elections into a dumpster and light the dumpster on fire.

But I was dumpster-adjacent.

I had started thinking that maybe the anarchists had a point.

Maybe the electoral system wasn’t going to solve our problems.

I just didn’t know I was an anarchist yet.

And there were plenty of other things pushing me in that direction.

My activism in Atlanta was mostly around independent art and film spaces and marijuana legalization. I was also working with a lefty, lesbian-run independent record label. I was surrounded by artists and weirdos and queer folks and activists and people who were already deeply suspicious of the official explanations for how the world was supposed to work.

That was my Atlanta.

So I didn’t come to radical politics alone, and I certainly didn’t arrive there because I read one magic book.

There was a whole ecosystem around me.

And then, just before September 11th, I read Gore Vidal writing about Timothy McVeigh.

McVeigh, for people who only vaguely remember the name now, was responsible for the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. He saw his attack as retaliation against a federal government he believed had declared war on its own citizens, particularly through events like the siege at Waco, Texas.

None of that justified murdering 168 people.

But Vidal was interested in the dangerous question of why.

Why did this happen?

What did McVeigh believe he was doing?

What did government violence have to do with the political violence that followed it?

Vidal had actually corresponded with McVeigh, and he wrote about him in an essay, “The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” published in the September 2001 issue of Vanity Fair.

The timing of that still fucks with me.

September 2001.

That was rattling around in my head because there was another part of the Oklahoma City story that had stayed with me.

Immediately after the bombing, before anybody knew who had done it, suspicion fell on Arabs and Middle Eastern terrorists.

Then the bomber turned out to be Timothy fucking McVeigh: a white American veteran from upstate New York.

And yet Oklahoma City still helped produce a major expansion of federal anti-terrorism powers under Bill Clinton.

I had been reading about this stuff and becoming increasingly freaked out by what governments could grant themselves permission to do during moments of collective fear.

And then came September 11th.

Almost immediately, the conversation turned toward Arab terrorists.

Afghanistan.

War.

Retaliation.

Somebody was going to pay.

And sitting there in Atlanta, pulling images of the World Trade Center out of the static with my goddamn coat-hanger antenna, I had a very simple thought:

If this is what the United States government did after some white American dudes bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, what the fuck are they going to do when foreigners attack the symbolic center of global capitalism?

I was freaking the fuck out.

I didn’t know what to do.

Then I saw a flyer.

There was going to be an anti-war protest opposing the growing calls to attack Afghanistan.

So I went.

That was my entrance into the anti-war movement.

And because I was a filmmaker, my next thought was pretty obvious.

I have a camera.

I know how to edit.

Maybe I can do something with that.

That was how I found Indymedia.

For those of you who weren’t around for it, Indymedia—the Independent Media Center network—was this strange and beautiful worldwide collaboration between media activists, filmmakers, photographers, journalists, hackers and assorted tech geeks.

It really took off during the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, when activists built their own media infrastructure to cover what was happening in the streets rather than relying on corporate news to explain the movement back to itself.

And then the idea spread.

Indymedia centers started popping up all over the world. Whenever there was a big anti-globalization convergence—and convergence was the word everybody used back then—some temporary ecosystem of laptops, cameras, cables, exhausted activists, bad coffee and questionable internet connections would materialize nearby.

People would come in from the streets with photographs and video. Reports would get written. Audio would get uploaded. Somebody would invariably be screaming about a missing battery, a busted cable or a computer that had decided to shit itself at exactly the wrong moment.

It was chaotic as fuck.

But it worked.

And one of the important things about Indymedia was that you didn’t necessarily need to convince some editor that your story was worthy of being published.

You could publish it yourself.

That sounds completely fucking ordinary now.

At the time, it wasn’t.

One of the central ideas behind Indymedia was something called open publishing. The basic premise was almost stupidly simple: the people formerly known as the audience could become the media.

Anybody could report what they had seen and post it directly to the newswire.

Text.

Photographs.

Audio.

Video.

A lot of what Indymedia was doing feels invisible in retrospect precisely because the internet eventually swallowed the idea whole.

Today we take it for granted that if something happens in front of you, you can pull a device out of your pocket, write about it, photograph it, record it, shoot video of it and make it available to potentially millions of people without ever asking permission from a television station or newspaper.

That basic relationship to media is now the bread and butter of social media.

Except now it belongs to fucking corporations.

The architecture of participation that once felt genuinely liberating—you don’t have to be a passive consumer; you can publish—became the raw material for some of the largest capitalist enterprises on Earth.

There’s a historical irony in that which I don’t think gets talked about enough.

Long before “user-generated content” became a hideous phrase uttered in Silicon Valley boardrooms, anarchists, hackers and media activists were already experimenting with networks where ordinary people could document their own struggles, publish their own accounts and communicate horizontally without waiting for some corporate gatekeeper to tell them their experience counted as news.

Indymedia didn’t invent every technical piece of that culture from scratch. But it was one of the places where those pieces were being assembled into something politically meaningful very early on.

And the politics mattered.

The point wasn’t:

Look! Everybody can become a content creator!

Jesus Christ.

The point was that people involved in struggles could tell their own stories.

Workers could report from a picket line.

Someone getting tear-gassed at a demonstration could publish what they had just witnessed.

A photographer could upload pictures the networks weren’t showing.

A radio activist could send audio from the streets.

A filmmaker could shoot a protest, edit the footage and put it back into circulation while the struggle was still happening.

Media wasn’t supposed to be something produced over here by professionals and consumed over there by everybody else.

It could be part of the struggle itself.

And for a filmmaker like me, that idea was fucking intoxicating.

Atlanta had its own Independent Media Center, and one of the things it became particularly known for was helping set up temporary media infrastructure around the annual protests at Fort Benning against the School of the Americas.

The School of the Americas Watch protests had been happening for years by that point, drawing thousands of people to Georgia to protest the U.S. military school and its long association with Latin American military officers implicated in torture, massacres and other human rights abuses.

Every year, people descended on Fort Benning.

And there would be Indymedia.

That was the world I stumbled into.

I showed up to an Indymedia meeting when I was already 30 years old, and I remember walking into that room feeling like I had just landed from another fucking planet.

I was older than a lot of the people there. I didn’t come out of the same activist subculture. I didn’t necessarily dress like them or talk like them or know all the political vocabulary.

People looked at me.

I looked at them.

I’m pretty sure at least half the room was trying to determine whether I was a cop.

Fair enough.

But then I started working.

And the work spoke for itself.

I went to everything.

Every protest I could get to, I brought a camera. I filmed. I went home. I edited. Then I brought something back.

Fast.

That was the thing I had that a lot of people there hadn’t encountered before.

By then, I had already been editing video for more than fifteen years.

I could fucking cut.

I had speed on my side.

A protest would happen, and instead of footage disappearing into somebody’s closet for six months while they contemplated making a documentary about it, I could turn it into something people could actually watch while the event still mattered.

And people responded to that.

Indymedia became my portal.

It was where the various pieces of my life—filmmaking, politics, independent media, my growing suspicion of authority—finally started colliding with each other.

And it was through that world that I met my first anarchists.

Not anarchists as an abstraction.

Not anarchists as the cartoon in my head.

Actual anarchists.

At one point I got onto a bus headed for Washington, D.C., for an anti-war demonstration.

On that bus were two people who would become two of my best friends from that period of my life.

It’s a long fucking ride to Washington from the ATL.

Which means you have a lot of time to talk.

And we talked.

About war.

About the state.

About violence.

About nonviolence.

About capitalism.

About organizing.

About what liberation might actually mean if you stopped assuming that the institutions running the world were eventually going to develop a conscience.

At the time, I considered myself a pacifist.

Over those conversations—and many, many, many conversations and late nights that followed—my friends slowly disabused me of my pacifism.

And I want to emphasize the way they did that.

They weren’t swaggering tough guys telling me that violence was cool.

They didn’t hand me a brick and tell me to go smash something.

They were gentle.

They were patient.

They asked questions.

They took my arguments seriously.

They made distinctions I hadn’t made before—between violence and resistance, between peace and submission, between refusing to dominate someone and refusing to defend yourself or somebody else.

Slowly, some of the things I had believed to be absolute moral principles started looking more like assumptions I had never really interrogated.

That process took time.

Lots of conversations.

Lots of late nights.

Lots of arguing.

Lots of listening.

Somewhere in that period I went through another rite of passage familiar to many baby anarchists of my generation:

Somebody handed me a copy of CrimethInc.’s Days of War, Nights of Love.

And that book hit me almost as much as the ideas inside it did.

Because the thing was fucking beautiful.

Here was anarchist propaganda that didn’t look disposable.

It was designed.

It had photographs.

It had typography.

Somebody had clearly obsessed over how the thing felt in your hands.

I loved punk zines. I still love punk zines. I love that photocopied, cut-and-paste aesthetic.

But I also remember thinking:

This isn’t going to reach everybody.

Days of War, Nights of Love seemed to be trying to do something different.

It was trying to reach beyond what we used to call the anarchist ghetto.

It was still uncompromisingly anarchist, but it wasn’t satisfied only speaking to people who already knew all the passwords.

And I thought:

I want to do this with video.

That was the revelation.

If they could make anarchist print propaganda that looked this fucking good, that could escape the subculture and land in the hands of somebody who didn’t already identify as an anarchist, why couldn’t I do the same thing with moving images?

So I started turning chapters from Days of War, Nights of Love into short films.

And somewhere inside all of that—September 11th, the anti-war movement, Indymedia, the bus rides, the conversations, the friendships, CrimethInc., the endless hours sitting in front of an editing machine—I made a decision.

This was what I wanted to do with my life.

I wanted to make media that promoted anarchist ideas.

I wanted to fight for liberation.

And twenty-five years later, I keep thinking about that trajectory because there is a story we are constantly told about moments of rupture.

Something terrible happens.

The ground moves.

People get scared.

Everything that seemed permanent suddenly looks fragile.

And supposedly the inevitable response is that everybody runs toward nationalism and authoritarianism and vengeance.

People become reactionary right-wing assholes.

They look for somebody weaker to blame.

They demand a strongman.

They want borders and cops and bombs.

And yes, that happens.

I watched it happen after September 11th.

I watched fear get converted into war.

I watched grief get converted into nationalism.

I watched uncertainty get converted into certainty.

I watched people who had no fucking idea where Afghanistan was become extremely confident that we needed to bomb it.

But it isn’t the only thing that can happen.

I am living proof of that.

A rupture can also cause somebody to start asking questions they weren’t asking the day before.

It can expose the things that were already rotten but had been successfully disguised as normal.

It can make the official explanations stop making sense.

It can force somebody to look around and realize that the institutions supposedly protecting them might actually be producing some of the conditions making the world so fucking dangerous in the first place.

And in those moments, what matters enormously is what people encounter when they start looking for another explanation.

Reactionaries understand this.

They are always waiting at the rupture with a flag, an enemy and a story about who you should hate.

We need to be there too.

Not just after the rupture.

Before it.

We have to build the relationships, the projects, the media, the movements and the cultures that people can stumble across while the world still feels relatively stable.

We have to give people opportunities to brush up against anarchist ideas, to dabble in them, argue with them, make friends with anarchists, discover that we’re not the fucking cartoon they’ve been taught we are.

Because then the ground moves.

And suddenly those conversations from six months ago or five years ago make sense differently.

Maybe somebody remembers the strange anarchist they talked to all night on a bus.

Maybe they remember that book somebody handed them.

Maybe they remember a video they watched.

Maybe they remember somebody patiently taking their ideas seriously instead of trying to beat them over the head with the correct politics.

Maybe instead of running toward the people demanding more cops, more borders, more prisons and more bombs, they run toward the people trying to build something else.

That’s more or less what happened to me.

So yes:

On 9/11, I became an anarchist.

Not because two planes hit the World Trade Center.

Not because catastrophe magically produces good politics.

And certainly not because I figured everything out that morning.

I became an anarchist because a whole series of people and projects had already been building the path before I knew I was walking on it.

Artists.

Queers.

Anti-war organizers.

Media activists.

Tech geeks.

Anarchists.

Friends who were patient enough to argue with me until two in the morning.

People who built websites.

People who printed books.

People who made flyers.

People who organized buses.

People who set up temporary media centers full of shitty computers and cables.

People who believed that ordinary people could produce their own media, organize their own lives and fight for a world that didn’t require rulers.

When the world cracked open and I went looking for an answer, they had already built places where I could find them.

And once I did, I never really left.