Overview
The September 11, 2001 attacks and their aftermath generated one of the most intense clusters of RRE activity, and produced some of Agre's most significant political writing. Within three days of the attacks, Agre published 'Imagining the Next War: Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy' (September 14, 2001), a 4,300-word essay that brought together his entire intellectual framework to analyze the political meaning of 9/11. A week later he published the expanded 9,500-word version, 'Some Notes on War in a World Without Boundaries' (September 21, 2001).
Key RRE Posts
Agre's own writings (with his bracketed commentary):
Curated forwarded material:
Significance
This cluster demonstrates Agre at his most powerful as a public intellectual, applying his analytical framework — institutional analysis, democratic design, conservative movement analysis, selective amplification, and surveillance critique — to a real-time political crisis. The speed and depth of 'Imagining the Next War' is remarkable: written 72 hours after the attacks, it anticipated debates about permanent war, the surveillance state, and democratic erosion that would dominate political discourse for decades.