body, head, no legs

67 years ago today the united states navy launched a regulus cruise missile from a submarine off the coast of florida. inside the missile: 3,000 pieces of mail that successfully crash landed at a naval base in mayport. postmaster general arthur summerfield called it “the beginning of the most important event in the history of postal services.” he predicted that within years, mail would travel by guided missile from new york to california, to britain, india, etc.

haha

cool idea in an eight year old kinda way. the missile worked fine. it hit its target and the mail was recovered in its wreckage from its armored capsule. the idea died anyway, probably bc ppl didn’t want to risk property or death in order to receive grandma’s letter. it was a solution that sought a contradiction that didn’t exist at the time. the post office already had workers, routes, systems—a whole material infrastructure built over centuries out of actual human need. the missile didn’t emerge from that need. it emerged from a military industrialist cocktail hour.

every era produces its version of missile-mail: the grand technological vision that fails not because the technology doesn’t work, but because it was never in conversation with the conditions it claimed to solve. it was imposed on those conditions from above, by weirdos with the capital to impose things, who then expressed genuine surprise when the world didn’t reorganize itself accordingly.

damp vader himself, mark zuckerberg, spent somewhere between $40 and $50 billion building the metaverse (estimates vary because after a certain number of zeros the accountants started to hallucinate and stress eat whatever fucking nutrition blocks that were available in breakroooms). the metaverse was going to be where we lived, worked, attended concerts, got married, experienced presence. he changed the name of his company, hired thousands of people, and eventually unveiled a legless avatar of himself and put it on the internet as proof of concept. this was zuck’s actual mic-drop pic:

legless avatars. here is a dweeb with turtle eyes so removed from the material experience of being a human body in a physical world that he genuinely did not clock, in any of the meetings, across all the months of development, that people might be icked out by their digital selves having no legs. that embodiment is not a feature you can deprioritize for the v1 launch. that presence—actual, felt, physical presence—is not a problem technology can replace. because it is not a problem, it is the condition.

by 2023 the metaverse division had lost more money than most countries have. by 2024 everyone had quietly agreed to never bring it up again, like that one freind who tried to get everyone to invest in a shitcoin in 2021.

for kicks, lets look at the other side of the pattern, the part that doesn’t get talked about as much.

in 1975 a man named gary dahl was sitting in a bar listening to his friends complain about their pets — the feeding, the training, the vet bills, the mess. and he said: “what if the pet was a rock?” he was joking. then he wasn’t. he sourced smooth stones from a beach in mexico, put them in cardboard boxes with breathing holes, wrote a care manual with instructions like “your pet rock will sit, stay, and play dead — consistently and without complaint,” and sold them for $4 each.

he sold 1.2 million of them in six months and made nearly $6 million, then retired.

the pet rock did not emerge from capital looking for a problem to solve. it emerged from a real, felt, material absurdity—the exhausting performance of care that consumer culture had turned pet ownership into, and it held a mirror up to that absurdity and charged $4 for the mirror. it was a joke that understood its moment completely. within a year it had done its job and went peacefully in the night (though not completely—50+ were sold just last month on amazon).

this is what it looks like when the idea comes from the ground up rather than the top down. it metabolizes the actual contradictions of its time in a way that can be somewhat palatable.

the through-line here is not technology. it’s not even money, exactly. it’s the relationship between an idea and the material conditions that produced it, or didn’t. missile-mail was an aggro military project; the metaverse was a billionaire fever dream, an idea that actively feared its conditions—the messy, embodied, unmonetizable reality of human connection—and tried to replace them with something cleaner and more extractable. classic zuck. yuck. instead of starting from a place of human need, broken humans like mark thought to themselves “we have capital. what should we do with it?”.

marx called this use-value versus exchange-value. marx-ist vs mark-sus.

the pet rock, on the other hand, was an idea that loved its conditions, that sat inside the contradiction and laughed. unfortunately, learning from history is hard for us as a species, let alone adopting the dialectical perspective. history is not a lesson for most. it’s a cycle with better special effects each time. the metaverse will most certainly be back, in some shape or another. it’ll have legs next time. It will be exorbitantly funded too. after all, capital will keep capital-ing. the missiles will keep flying. gary dahl will keep getting his checks, happily retired with his rocks. as for headbodylegs, and the rest of us for that matter—we will meander and struggle onward, trying to make things that understand their moment.

smugly,
hbl

ps: oh and in case u didn’t know, we also make music in addition to complaining about capitalism on the internet. the EP “ur welcome im sorry” is still out, still. full album is in the works, more to come, luv u