Posted in tribute to OiT.
www.nytimes.com
The year is 2005. You open Internet Explorer, surf over to Yahoo Mail and spot an unread email from a friend.
“You have to watch this,” the email says.
The link takes you to a website where a video starts to load. It’s an hour long, and it takes a few minutes to finish buffering. Eventually, a title card fades to a shot of the Statue of Liberty, with the twin towers hovering behind it.
This, to a first approximation, is how I encountered “Loose Change,” the viral documentary film that popularized the Sept. 11 “truther” movement and became a rallying cry for Americans who believed that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an inside job, perpetrated by the U.S. government against its own citizens.
I was not a particularly persuadable “Loose Change” viewer — too young, too self-absorbed, more interested in using my computer to play video games than chase down conspiracy theories. But millions of Americans were seduced. After watching it, they disappeared down rabbit holes and emerged days or weeks later as, if not full-fledged 9/11 truthers, at least passionate skeptics. They had opinions about obscure topics like nano-thermites and controlled demolition, and they could recite the melting temperatures of various construction materials. Some believed the government was actively involved; others merely thought Bush administration officials knew about the attacks in advance and allowed them to happen.
Today, the Sept. 11 truther movement is often mocked or reduced to a sad historical footnote. It’s easy to forget how successful it was. More than 100 million people watched “Loose Change,” by its director’s estimate, making it one of the most popular independent documentaries of all time. And while conspiracy theory videos now routinely go viral, “Loose Change” was an early example of the internet’s ability to accelerate their spread.
I recently went back and watched several versions of “Loose Change.” (There are at least five English-language versions in total.) I also spoke to Korey Rowe and Jason Bermas, a producer and editor on the film, along with several experts on the 9/11 truther movement. (The film’s director, Dylan Avery, declined my interview request after concluding that I was writing a “clickbait article that blames a movie that came out 15 years ago for everything wrong with the internet today.”)
I was curious how the film holds up. But I also wanted to know whether revisiting “Loose Change” on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks could reveal anything about the trajectory of more recent conspiracy theories, or suggest how today’s popular delusions — QAnon, Covid denialism, election rigging fears — might be deflated or redirected.
What I found, in short, was that 16 years after its release, “Loose Change” is still bizarrely relevant. Its DNA is all over the internet — from TikTok videos about child sex trafficking to Facebook threads about Covid-19 miracle cures — and many of its false claims still get a surprising amount of airtime. (Just last month, the director Spike Lee drew criticism for indulging Sept. 11 conspiracy theories in a new HBO documentary series.) The film’s message that people could discover the truth about the attacks for themselves also became a core tactic for groups like QAnon and the anti-vaccine crowd, which urge their followers to ignore the experts and “do their own research” online.
The first edition of “Loose Change” — now viewable only at a few hard-to-find YouTube links — is, to my eye, the most compelling on-ramp. Unlike later cuts, which had production help from the Infowars founder Alex Jones and featured special effects and professional graphics, the first edition was made on a shoestring budget by Mr. Avery and Mr. Rowe, childhood best friends living in a small town in upstate New York. Mr. Avery, who initially set out to write a fictional screenplay about a group of friends who discover the truth about Sept. 11, ended up turning it into a documentary while Mr. Rowe, who served in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, sent him notes and suggestions.
The movie, while amateurish by Hollywood standards, is certainly watchable. Its aesthetic style is what you might call YouTube vérité — a strung-together compilation of grainy news footage set to an eerie instrumental soundtrack, with Mr. Avery narrating. And while it drags in spots — were any skeptics converted, I wondered, by knowing the precise shape of the bezels on a Boeing 757’s diffuser case? — it makes its case cleanly, and trusts that its audience will follow along.
Unlike other political documentaries of its day, like Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Loose Change” is not primarily meant as entertainment. It feels less like a conspiracist’s rant than an edgy PowerPoint presentation that calmly guides viewers through the evidence, using innuendo and leading questions to provoke their imaginations. Like: What was under the mysterious blue tarp carried out of the Pentagon? Were the phone calls from passengers aboard the hijacked planes faked using voice-morphing technology? If jet fuel didn’t bring down the World Trade Center, then what did?
Of course, most of the film’s claims are nonsense, and the mysteries it describes generally have benign explanations. (The film spawned a cottage industry of debunker blogs, one of which compiled a list of 81 factual errors and 345 unsupported allegations in the film, and no credible study has found any evidence for its central argument that the U.S. government was behind, or knew about, the attacks.)
But it’s a well-crafted piece of conspiracy agitprop, in part because of how restrained it feels by today’s standards. A QAnon video will tell you exactly who the Satan-worshiping pedophiles are, and what should be done to stop them. “Loose Change” merely asks: Well, how do you know Osama bin Laden’s confession tape wasn’t made by a body double?
(Published 2021)
Twenty years after 9/11, “Loose Change,” a landmark film for conspiracy theorists, still casts a shadow over our information landscape.
The year is 2005. You open Internet Explorer, surf over to Yahoo Mail and spot an unread email from a friend.
“You have to watch this,” the email says.
The link takes you to a website where a video starts to load. It’s an hour long, and it takes a few minutes to finish buffering. Eventually, a title card fades to a shot of the Statue of Liberty, with the twin towers hovering behind it.
This, to a first approximation, is how I encountered “Loose Change,” the viral documentary film that popularized the Sept. 11 “truther” movement and became a rallying cry for Americans who believed that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an inside job, perpetrated by the U.S. government against its own citizens.
I was not a particularly persuadable “Loose Change” viewer — too young, too self-absorbed, more interested in using my computer to play video games than chase down conspiracy theories. But millions of Americans were seduced. After watching it, they disappeared down rabbit holes and emerged days or weeks later as, if not full-fledged 9/11 truthers, at least passionate skeptics. They had opinions about obscure topics like nano-thermites and controlled demolition, and they could recite the melting temperatures of various construction materials. Some believed the government was actively involved; others merely thought Bush administration officials knew about the attacks in advance and allowed them to happen.
Today, the Sept. 11 truther movement is often mocked or reduced to a sad historical footnote. It’s easy to forget how successful it was. More than 100 million people watched “Loose Change,” by its director’s estimate, making it one of the most popular independent documentaries of all time. And while conspiracy theory videos now routinely go viral, “Loose Change” was an early example of the internet’s ability to accelerate their spread.
I recently went back and watched several versions of “Loose Change.” (There are at least five English-language versions in total.) I also spoke to Korey Rowe and Jason Bermas, a producer and editor on the film, along with several experts on the 9/11 truther movement. (The film’s director, Dylan Avery, declined my interview request after concluding that I was writing a “clickbait article that blames a movie that came out 15 years ago for everything wrong with the internet today.”)
I was curious how the film holds up. But I also wanted to know whether revisiting “Loose Change” on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks could reveal anything about the trajectory of more recent conspiracy theories, or suggest how today’s popular delusions — QAnon, Covid denialism, election rigging fears — might be deflated or redirected.
What I found, in short, was that 16 years after its release, “Loose Change” is still bizarrely relevant. Its DNA is all over the internet — from TikTok videos about child sex trafficking to Facebook threads about Covid-19 miracle cures — and many of its false claims still get a surprising amount of airtime. (Just last month, the director Spike Lee drew criticism for indulging Sept. 11 conspiracy theories in a new HBO documentary series.) The film’s message that people could discover the truth about the attacks for themselves also became a core tactic for groups like QAnon and the anti-vaccine crowd, which urge their followers to ignore the experts and “do their own research” online.
The first edition of “Loose Change” — now viewable only at a few hard-to-find YouTube links — is, to my eye, the most compelling on-ramp. Unlike later cuts, which had production help from the Infowars founder Alex Jones and featured special effects and professional graphics, the first edition was made on a shoestring budget by Mr. Avery and Mr. Rowe, childhood best friends living in a small town in upstate New York. Mr. Avery, who initially set out to write a fictional screenplay about a group of friends who discover the truth about Sept. 11, ended up turning it into a documentary while Mr. Rowe, who served in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, sent him notes and suggestions.
The movie, while amateurish by Hollywood standards, is certainly watchable. Its aesthetic style is what you might call YouTube vérité — a strung-together compilation of grainy news footage set to an eerie instrumental soundtrack, with Mr. Avery narrating. And while it drags in spots — were any skeptics converted, I wondered, by knowing the precise shape of the bezels on a Boeing 757’s diffuser case? — it makes its case cleanly, and trusts that its audience will follow along.
Unlike other political documentaries of its day, like Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Loose Change” is not primarily meant as entertainment. It feels less like a conspiracist’s rant than an edgy PowerPoint presentation that calmly guides viewers through the evidence, using innuendo and leading questions to provoke their imaginations. Like: What was under the mysterious blue tarp carried out of the Pentagon? Were the phone calls from passengers aboard the hijacked planes faked using voice-morphing technology? If jet fuel didn’t bring down the World Trade Center, then what did?
Of course, most of the film’s claims are nonsense, and the mysteries it describes generally have benign explanations. (The film spawned a cottage industry of debunker blogs, one of which compiled a list of 81 factual errors and 345 unsupported allegations in the film, and no credible study has found any evidence for its central argument that the U.S. government was behind, or knew about, the attacks.)
But it’s a well-crafted piece of conspiracy agitprop, in part because of how restrained it feels by today’s standards. A QAnon video will tell you exactly who the Satan-worshiping pedophiles are, and what should be done to stop them. “Loose Change” merely asks: Well, how do you know Osama bin Laden’s confession tape wasn’t made by a body double?
