9/11
Was it my fault? In part?
The morning of 9/11, I was running late to marriage counseling with my then-wife. A harbinger of more than one failing.
As we settled in, our counselor told us that she had just heard that a jet had been hijacked and crashed into the Two Towers.
Immediately I knew something fundamental had changed, a seismic shift.
I have no other memory of that session. I think at least half of it was our mutual reaction to events so horrific that it was impossible to fully process them in the moment.
I was a frequent, frequent traveler at that time. The events of that day really hit home. It could so very easily have been me on one of those planes.
I went on into work on autopilot. I remember sitting in my office, not really sure what to do. Various members of my team came by to talk and were similarly untethered.
Belatedly I realized everyone should just go home. I went home myself not much later.
I remember sitting there watching CNN and trying to get my head around everything that had happened. There was a scroll along the bottom of breaking news related to the main story wrestled over by the usual cast of talking heads.
One item scrolled by that caught my eye.
“Microsoft Flight Simulator used to train terrorists"
That was mine. My fucking game had been used to train terrorists in the most horrific attack on American soil ever.
I knew that I would have to go in early the next morning. PR was going to be jumping on me to help craft a response.
My boss was out of town in San Francisco, scrambling to find a way home. His boss was in Manhattan! He also was trying to figure out how to get home and ultimately rented a car and drove across the US to make it home (with 3 colleagues in a similar bind).
It was on me to work with Corporate PR to respond. Which ultimately wasn’t much of an answer. We had no way of knowing if the terrorists had trained on Flight Sim. Nor any way of knowing if they could have, would have been successful without it.
I got a call from my boss later that day.
“Why would you bring Flight Simulator into this? What the fuck? Are you brain-damaged?”
This was the tipping point in my career at Microsoft. I would never recover.
Being accused by the media on one side of aiding and abetting this attack was bad enough. Having my own boss accuse me of dragging this into the spotlight was the final straw.
The thing is, I am, despite appearances, quite an emotional and sensitive person. The events of 9/11 tore my heart out. I was feeling every death personally. Hearing that in some weird, tangential way it might have been my fault was overwhelming. Impossible to process. Devastating.
The FBI investigated and probably other agencies I don’t know about. The truth is that Flight Sim was present in at least one of the flight schools the terrorists trained at. They almost certainly used it as part of their preparation. Would they have done what they did without it? Probably. The government investigators ultimately let it drop.
That should be enough for me. But 25 years later I still can’t let it go.
You have to find a way to let your feelings of guilt go. If it wasn’t for MS Flight Sim, it would’ve been some other thing. YOU did not train them.
It was a devastating time, and something we’ll never forget, but your personal guilt? Not justified.
Love you, Stuart.
Oh, man. I may know, better than most, how this feels.
Late in the evening on the night that Norwegian mass shooter Anders Brevik killed 69 people, most of them teenagers, I was in a hotel room in Vancouver when my phone rang. It was a reporter in Montreal who was, apparently, part of a group of reporters that were going through Brevik's deranged 1500-page manifesto with a fine-tooth comb, trying to find the sources of his insipiration.
This reporter asked me if I was aware that three pages of this screen (somewhere in the 650-page region of it) had been lifted directly from a series of blog posts I had written the year before.
No, of course, I was not aware of this.
I was a senior fellow at the big K Street labor think tank at the time. My boss was horrified to learn of that things he'd published on their blog -- thing he's paid me to write -- had been misdirected this way. I loved that job, which I'd been in for four years by that point. I was out within six months -- somehow, the funding for my position had "just dried up." But I knew: that association, though no fault of mine, was a fatal liability. (On the upside, I guess: New York Magazine asked me to write up a reflection about what this felt like at the time.)
Those of us who create things and shove them out into the world have zero control over who discovers them, or what they choose to do with them. It's not fair to blame us when someone we never met makes choices we would never have imagined anyone making; but there's something about the corporate mindset (even in the non-profit world) that just wants to cover its ass.
Sucks. But I guess it's just a risk of the work we do.