The quick rundown here is this film is about how we live in a world of empty signifiers sold to us by an abusive system. But it has quite a bit more going on under hood as well. There’s a reason this exists within Roblox and in a lot of the writing about this that part seems to be missed. By zeroing in on the 9/11 it’s creating a forest for the trees moment.

Right now, Roblox averages 83.5 million daily users and 50% of children under 16 have an active Roblox account. By the time James Ferraro made this short film in 2017 Roblox games that were recreations of 9/11 were already a robust genre on the platform. The majority of Roblox game developers are under 18, developing games for which they fork over 70% of the revenue to Roblox Corporation. Actually getting at any of the money they’ve made is further complicated by their youth. Withdrawing to a real world bank account is going to require looping in a parent and so many of these burgeoning game developers accept their payouts in “Robux.” The Roblox Corporation stopped making games for the platform in 2008 in order to “show the power of the community”. So over a decade of 9/11 experiences in the game were created by kids, first from Generation Z and then by Generation Alpha. 

At the time of Ferraro’s film release the bulk of Roblox’s user base was born after 9/11. They have no personal memories of that day. They can’t recall how it changed their lives or hastened our collective descent to cruelty. They were born into it. We antediluvians gotta cut them some fucking slack. Our pain and perspectives are shaped differently.

For them, 9/11 has always just been an exploitable reference or crass commercial thing. Politician wants a thing? Invoke 9/11. It was a matter of months before the permanent fixture of bumper stickers, commemorative plates, tie tacks and so on had fully entrenched. For a seven year old in 2009 watching Fox News with their parents 9/11 feels like an empty signifier that triggers capitalist compliance. 

This generation is also raised by iPads as parents struggle to work more and more jobs just to keep up with where they were five to ten years ago. So a kid is handed a tablet and is told to occupy themselves and they fall into this hellscape which is the gig economy, recalibrated for children which pays them in company script and they want Robux. They want the company script. So they wrack their brains for ideas that are easy to execute and will hook some users instantly. Observing the US culture has already taught them that 9/11 is perfectly acceptable to exploit. It’s an oil well nowhere near being drained.

Ferraro’s film might offend people for whom 9/11 is not an empty signifier to be monetized. But it’s worth stepping back how this film that recreates a phenomenon amongst children is reflective of our broader cultural landscape now. Horror film audiences in theaters trend young and “grief” and “trauma” have been the breadwinners for a decade because the first generation of Roblox kids are ready to look for their empty signifiers elsewhere and only know of trauma as something to be sold.

So me, an old fuck, is not offended by the 9/11 part of this. It is what it is and I know how my life changed. It’s the Roblox component sharply reflecting how we’ve failed a generation of kids that saddens me.