Big Head Dreams

Volume 5, Issue 6, July 1998

Between driving down Baja and back, I have been battling against time the past few weeks. Thanks for bearing with me. This one is a few days late, since I had run out of source material on the road and was also too gassed to do anything but drool onto the pillows of cheap hotel rooms after each 10-hour stint behind the wheel.

This was a fun one to write, and it was equally fun (for me, at least) to unearth and read again. The idea of evolving into a floating disembodied head was inspired equally by the beautiful absurdity of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It wasn’t until a few years later (if I recall correctly) that Chipps Chippendale turned me on to the movie Zardoz, starring Sean Connery. In Zardoz, Sean jams around in a giant head (apparently about 40-feet tall, so pretty close to the dimensions of my own imagined disembodiment), disgorging guns out of the mouth and looking absolutely hunk of burning love hot in a red speedo and crossed ammo bandoliers. It is one of my favorite bad movies of all time. I might be biased, what with the affinity for giant floating heads and all.

It’s also heartwarming to know that Douglas Adams had basically laid out the framework that Corey Doctrow has identified as “Enshittification” decades before things like Meta or data centers or the current administration of the US government came to so thoroughly embody it. Anyhoo…