From New York Times, I'm Michael Pobaro. This is a daily.

Two decades later, there are many legacies of September 11th. Thousands of lives lost.

Two forever wars, the birth of a surveillance state, but also a new era of conspiratorial thinking.

Today, my colleague, Kevin Rus, on the film that ushered in that era.

It's Friday, September 10th.

For years now, I've been spending a lot of time inside these bizarre internet subcultures.

These places filled with extremists and conspiracy theorists who have all kinds of ideas about how

COVID-19 is a hoax or how the 2020 election was stolen or why Hillary Clinton is a shape-shifting

lizard person. And the more time I've spent in these places, the more I've realized that what

unites these groups is their way of finding and processing information. This belief that the way

to figure out what's true isn't to listen to the experts or to the mainstream media,

but to go figure it out for yourself on the internet, to do your own research, as they say.

And I've been thinking about where that attitude, which is so pervasive now, actually originated.

And I think a lot of it can be traced back to this one particular 9-11 documentary,

the first real internet blockbuster. But before I tell you about this movie,

let's actually go back to the morning of September 11th, 2001.

Where were you? What did you see? What did you think at the time?

I want to tell you about one of its biggest fans.

I was actually out in O'Neill, New York, where I had gone to college. I'd recently dropped out,

but I was living with a couple of my fraternity brothers who were still in college.

A guy named Jason Burmese.

And I was working at a piece of place late night. I didn't get to home till like four in the morning

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