“The Strange Case of Missile Mail: A Drone Archaeology”
On June 8, 1959, the U.S. Post Office collaborated with the U.S. Navy on an experimental mail missile launch from a submarine off the coast of Florida. Missile mail represented an extension of the Post Office’s long-term strategy of adopting new transportation technologies for the movement of mail and an orchestrated attempt to domesticate missiles and encourage U.S. citizens to understand technologies of warfare in other terms, as normal parts of commerce and everyday life. In this keynote lecture, Jonathan Sterne considers missile mail as the post office’s last grab at transportation innovation, before they turned their focus to information technologies like ZIP codes and optical character recognition. He will also consider the 1959 launch as a historical allegory that can help us understand attempts to commercialize and popularize “unmanned” drones today.