What Your Body Data is Worth to Meta

01 • 12 Minute Read

n+1	Max Callimanopulos

In the Reality Lab

Broke and scrolling Craigslist, Max Callimanopulos answered a listing to test wearable tech in Midtown and ended up in a windowless room at Meta, selling his biometrics for a gift card. Sensors tracked his thenar muscles, his heartbeat, the tiny electrical signals firing as he tapped a ring with his thumb. The study only recruited first-timers, because your body's data is valuable once. Meta has burned more than $80 billion on Reality Labs chasing this future. The Neural Band kept lagging, the testers looked entranced and cross-eyed, and Callimanopulos walked out with $150 he spent on groceries.

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02 • 20 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Ian Bogost

The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent

At a desert airpark north of Tucson, the Boeing 747s go to die. Ian Bogost walked the rows of stripped fuselages and harvested engines, mourning the jumbo jet that once carried nearly 500 passengers across oceans with cocktail lounges, hand-carved meats, and ceilings tall enough to stand under. Boeing built 1,574 of them before halting production in 2023. The plane symbolized American invention and a kind of populist glamour that deregulation, consolidation, and efficiency slowly killed. Two aging 747s still serve as Air Force One, and the delayed replacement may arrive as a $400 million gift from Qatar instead.

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03 • 40 Minute Read

Aeon	Vincent Lê

The no-human future

Accelerationism now shows up in mass-shooter manifestos and in the public declarations of Silicon Valley billionaires, and Vincent Lê argues both camps misread the man who inspired it. Nick Land began in the 1980s as a fierce critic of capitalism and apartheid before resigning his Warwick post, suffering a breakdown, and resurfacing in Shanghai as a neo-reactionary. His actual project was stranger than either the white-ethnostate fantasy or the tech-utopian dream. Land welcomed artificial superintelligence precisely because he believed it would erase humanity. Where doomers fear extinction and optimists promise paradise, Land wanted the end, and called it joyous.

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04 • 15 Minute Read

Bitter Southerner

Libby Callaway

Accidental Historian

I love local profiles of the people who make a community more vibrant. At 47, almost twenty years into promoting records in New York, Ray Di Pietro picked up a camera and started shooting the streets of Nashville. He never stopped. He has since taken millions of photos: an old man feeding pigeons, drag queens cheering in a courtroom, Bernie Sanders working a crowd, a Proud Boy meeting the eyes of a young man in a keffiyeh. He wears socks printed with red hearts because he wants some love on him. His three rules are simple: do the work, show up, be kind.

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What Your Body Data is Worth to Meta

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