Though barely usable or even accessible at the time, virtual reality appeared to be an answer to a provocative question posed in the Summer 1989 issue of the Whole Earth Review: “is the body obsolete?” Mid-issue, Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand “stick their heads in cyberspace”; they recount trying on helmets, getting motion sick while looking at three-dimensional wireframes and gawking at their digital digits (“Have you ever really, REALLY, looked at your own hand!!?”). In these early days of consumer VR, cyberpunks, cybernauts, and console-cowboys hoped to mass produce a machine that looked in and around our own brains, aiming to unlock a magical infinity of immersive media and second life. 

Unfortunately, the most prescient part of the section isn’t in the electrode brain implants (or “‘trodes”) or the mind-visitation vacations enabled by autocerebroscope upgrades, but rather a vision of the body merged with an office space—represented by a listing for an “office treadmill.” Three decades later, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook Horizon, a workplace dystopia not derived from Gibsonian Cyberspace, but based on the corporate mafia Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Zuckerberg may have solved VR motion sickness but thankfully has yet to make the body obsolete.