The targets of the attack were not so much people or strategic targets, but symbols—The World Trade Center being one of the largest and most visible symbols of the Modern's reach over our ever-shrinking globe, the control center for billions of globe-spanning dollars, constantly visible in American-exported movies. One theme constantly stressed by pantheon of the philosophers of the postmodern, is the importance of symbols. September 11 was not an attack upon an individual or a nation state, but upon an idea: the meme of global capitalism.

Likewise, the terrorists—we're not afraid to call a spade a spade here, so you'll forgive us from refraining from calling them "alleged hijackers" —were ideologically motivated. They did what they did because they believed. They conformed to their own subculture, and their belief—and the reinforcement they received from their fellow-believers—was enough for them to destroy themselves while committing mass murder. They were not dissimilar to fundamentalist Islamic punk rockers-except instead of wearing safety pins through their nose, their particular subculture asked them to fly airplanes into buildings.

The terrorist cells themselves follow a postmodern model. The importance of the individual, the basic pixel of society, is an inseparable part of the attacks, and the democratization of technology is what made them possible. In this case, it is not the Internet, that great Defense-Department project-turned-geek-dream that became the terrorists' means of foul self-expression, but a jumbo jet. As anyone who's read Michael Crichton's Airframe knows, a jet is a terrifically complicated piece of machinery. Yet, with minimal training, every Tom, Dick, or Muhammad can learn to operate one well enough to fly it into a building.

The terrorists are, like it or not, hackers of a sort: initiates in the own world, skilled at the technologies and techniques that enable them to subvert the system, unnoticed until they strike. Fighting them with guns and satellites and other war material designed to go head-to-head with the Soviet Union is like trying to destroy Jell-O with a sledgehammer: You don't hurt the Jell-O, you just scatter it, until it's everywhere. The only thing that can defeat a hacker is another hacker.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing, though, is the sheer randomness of it: The abolition of meaning. The victims were doing nothing different from that what we all do every day, drinking their coffee in the comfortingly ordered cubicle-world when chaos struck. The impact of the hijacked airliners made one thing startlingly clear: we live in a world made medieval once again, where sudden, meaningless death can seemingly overtake us at any moment—and, unlike the medieval people, we don't have realists to comfort us in the face of the nominalists. Uncertainty is the order ot the day. Postmodernism is the province of anomie, meaninglessness, and angst.

We are the ones who have to give it meaning.