On December 24, 2024, an eighteen-year-old using the X handle GrishaPutin—a moniker roughly equivalent to “Greg Putin”—posted an image of a shell poised for launch into Ukraine (see Fig. 1). On its dark metal casing, he had painted a whimsical image of Santa Claus seated in a sleigh drawn by two reindeer, accompanied by the message: “Merry Christmas to Ukraine from USA.”
“Merry Christmas to Ukraine from USA.” US inscription on munition from Russia to Ukraine (https://x.com/ZShakerCentral/status/1871650102437446042).
Figure 1 Long description
A shell is placed on a wooden surface, featuring a painted image of Santa Claus in a sleigh with two reindeer. Next to the illustration, the message 'Merry Christmas to Ukraine from USA' is written. The shell is positioned horizontally and is surrounded by wooden supports. The image is part of a social media post with the caption 'Merry Christmas to ukraine! From USA' and includes a flag icon. The post timestamp is December 24, 2024, with a view count visible.
GrishaPutin, who describes himself as a “Russian streamer and humanitarian aid volunteer,” is part of a cohort of Russian entrepreneurs offering clients in the United States, China, Qatar, and beyond the opportunity to personalize munitions with inscriptions of their choosing. Other posts in his feed reveal close collaboration with military infantry units and indicate that the proceeds from his enterprise fund both armaments and what he terms “humanitarian aid” for Russians affected by the ongoing war over Ukrainian sovereignty.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote that violence is “mute”; it “begins where speech ends” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 308) and “acts without argument” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Arendt1969, 161). But if Arendt was right that violence tends to arise when the rational capacity for dialogue has failed, humans have still managed to braid violence and speech together for millennia by adorning deadly weapons with written words. The ancient Greeks and Romans forged lead sling bullets with inscriptions in the mold, including the names of commanders, invocations to the goddess of victory Nike for good luck (as if to anoint or bless the weapon), and sardonic words directed at the enemy, such as “take it” or “catch.”Footnote 1 In World War I (WWI) and World War II (WWII), adversaries painted images and slogans onto fighter aircraft and sometimes posed for photographs next to missiles and bombs. Often these were chalked with the name of their nation or military unit, a cheeky nickname for their enemy—“Willie” for Kaiser Wilhelm, for instance—or a darkly witty phrase, as when members of a Canadian unit in WWI wrote the words “IRON RATIONS” on bombs to be dropped during the Battle of the Somme (Basbouss Moukarzel Reference Basbouss Moukarzel2023/2024, R22).
In this paper, I deem this long-standing military practice “bomb mail”—a play on the term “mail bomb,” a weapon that also arrives remotely from an unseen sender.Footnote 2 Bomb mail has gained new life as the internet and social media have amplified its reach and resonance. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, for instance, images of munitions bearing messages penned by Israelis or the Palestinian resistance proliferated across platforms such as X and Telegram. Both Russian and Ukrainian military units have also been scrawling on their armaments since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. American politicians have occasionally gotten involved in bomb mail, as when both the former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and Vice President Mike Pence wrote messages on Israeli shells destined for Gaza. Such instances tend to create a high-profile media spectacle and invite much polarized commentary, suggesting that participating in bomb mail is compelling to the general public—appalling to some but charismatic to others.
In recent years, social media has enabled countless individuals to purchase artillery shells and commission bespoke inscriptions. Ukrainian groups have leveraged this civilian-funded support to raise substantial sums for the war against Russia—over two million dollars in the case of the self-styled group “Sign My Rocket.” (Though the practice lacks official sanction, military leadership often turns a blind eye, as the proceeds may directly fund the munitions themselves [Bubola Reference Bubola2022].) The primary patrons of Ukraine’s shell-signing enterprises have hailed from the United States, Finland, and other European nations. Similar opportunities on Russian social media platforms attract Chinese, American, and other clientele, as noted. For a time, Israeli entrepreneurs—such as the now-defunct “Message in a Bottle” group—also capitalized on this model, raising funds by selling custom inscriptions to overseas supporters (Hajdenberg Reference Hajdenberg2023).
While bomb mail clearly has alluring properties, its material effects are all too real. Most of the recent inscriptions in Israel and Ukraine, for instance, have been written onto US-manufactured 155-mm artillery shells, the NATO all-purpose standard size (Li Reference Li2024). These weapons are fired by a howitzer or field gun on the ground and loaded with TNT explosive that bursts into thousands of metal fragments upon impact, with a kill radius of about 160 feet and a casualty radius that can extend up to 1000 feet. Bomb mail thus binds personalized messages to weapons with devastating impact. In its contemporary incarnation as social media-stoked warfare, it also blurs the lines between state conflict and civilian participation, encouraging what I call cosmopolitan militarism. If militarism is, as Nicole Wegner defines it, “the normative valuing of … the use of military force for political purpose” (Reference Wegner2021, 2), cosmopolitan militarism leans into this ideology while extending civilian options to endorse and even participate in other nations’ wars. In the twenty-first century, cosmopolitan militarism is probably most often achieved in the digital sphere, which includes the option to pay for other nations’ armaments by commissioning inscriptions on them. Bomb mail allows individuals from across the world to engage in a kind of semiotic perpetration, simultaneously “speaking to” another nation’s enemies while killing them at the very same time.
The form and significance of bomb mail have taken varied shapes across historical, geopolitical, and sociocultural contexts. Much could be said about these contingencies, including the sometimes religious inflections of bomb mail (evident, for example, in allusions to Quranic prayers inscribed on Hezbollah missiles targeting Israel); the way language choice implies a particular readership (as in Iran’s English-language inscriptions mocking Donald Trump on missiles launched during the 2026 war instigated by Trump and Netanyahu); the role of revenge, even over the longue durée (as in Finnish inscriptions invoking the Soviet Union’s 1939 invasion of Finland, on Ukranian shells commissioned to be fired at Russia in 2022); and the connection between bomb mail, mourning, and a one-to-many necropolitics (as in the genre of Israeli inscriptions, on missiles destined for Gaza, dedicated to individuals killed in the October 7, 2023, attacks). This article, however, opts not to focus on such specificities but rather offers a broader analysis of bomb mail’s charisma and the lure it seems to exert on those who participate in it.
This lure is evident in the ways that some people think and talk about bomb mail and its violent long-distance speech acts. To be sure, the phenomenon inspires a range of supercharged evaluations. In September 2024, for instance, the American political advisor and media personality Jason Jay Smart deemed the act of signing bombs “cool,” and posted an image on X of a Ukrainian shell reading “Without love from Jason Jay Smart. Rest in Pieces.”Footnote 3 His detractors called him “disgusting,” “mentally ill,” and “sick” for “getting pleasure out of murder.” But Jason Jay Smart is far from alone in his enthusiasm; many associate bomb mail with a frisson of excitement or awe—not just because one can pay money to inflict death from afar, but because one can use words to put one’s personal stamp on it. One Reddit group that jokingly calls itself “Non Credible Defense” (in contrast to the self-serious group of military experts in the “Credible Defense” group) has pooled money to commission bomb mail from Sign My Rocket. Its members have remarked liberally on its appeal. They fantasize about what witticisms they might inscribe on a shell and make comments such as “It’s mind-blowing to see [our reddit group] have a tangible, real world impact on the war.”Footnote 4 In another thread, a Non Credible Defense member writes, “It’s just so surreal that [bomb mail] is possible.” A further commentator describes bomb mail as “blursed,”Footnote 5 an internet neologism meaning both “blessed” and “cursed.”
Terms like “surreal” and “blursed” capture some of bomb mail’s alluring strangeness. This article uses linguistic and anthropological tools to approach the question of why bomb mail has been so compelling. As an entry point, I cast my mind to a recent conversation I had with a US military veteran I call Steven. When I told Steven I was exploring the dynamics of bomb mail, he replied, “Oh sure. My unit in Afghanistan used to write all kinds of bullshit. It’s kind of like magic, like casting a spell.” My anthropological feelers sprang to attention. He continued, “It’s kind of like the shell gets personified.” Steven’s invocations of “magic” and the personified munition offer important clues to the experience of at least some participants. Bomb mail is more than just a matter of scrawling graffiti on weaponry. Sending it can feel like a charged and ontologically mysterious deed—even among otherwise disenchanted moderns.
To better understand bomb mail’s enigmatic appeal to service members and civilians alike, I focus on some of its uncanny and quasi-magical affordances. If magic is the extension of human capabilities through mysterious means, bomb mail enthralls by fusing the performative power of human voice and semiotic creation with faraway kinetic destruction. And if the sense of expanded, quasi-magical agency entices, so too do bomb mail’s uncanny qualities. While the concept of “the uncanny” has been variously defined (see, for instance, Freud Reference Freud2003), I draw here on the early-twentieth-century psychologist Ernst Jentsch (Reference Jentsch1997[1906]), who described the uncanny as arising from objects or experiences that are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, producing a sense of unease and strangeness.Footnote 6 Classic examples include disorienting encounters in which one cannot determine whether an apparently animate object is truly alive, or whether a lifeless object might be animate. Arguably, bomb mail carries a similar power, conjuring a sense of involvement with enigmatic forces for at least some (even if not all) participants.
I focus my analysis on three dimensions of bomb mail. First, through the medium of writing, bomb mail appears to intertwine persons and munitions, a fusion that surely augments the bomb mail commissioner’s sense of agency. Second, bomb mail enacts a peculiar relationship between language and violence, as violence becomes a vehicle to augment verbal meaning while the words’ meanings are inseparable from the violence. This intertwining may further contribute to the impression that bomb mail holds a kind of spell-casting power. Third, bomb mail gives rise to an uncanny enemy other, a target framed by an uneasy simultaneity of humanizing and dehumanizing stances. Working in tandem, these three qualities make bomb mail particularly compelling.
My discussion extends the scholarly conversation on the affective affordances and ontological peculiarities of weapon–human relationships. In their broad musings about weaponry, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987, 400) claim that “weapons are affects and affects weapons,” both being a kind of “projectile” carried on a vector. Bruno Latour (Reference Latour1994, 33) suggested that humans and weapons are mutually transformative: “You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it.” The ethnographer Chelsey Kivland (Reference Kivland2017) demonstrates that some urban Haitians tend to agree; in their accounts, even touching a gun can magically transfer new capabilities for violence to people. Meiches (Reference Meiches2017, 15), in a related vein, adopts a Latourian approach to weapons to impute them with agency and to argue that the relationships between weapons and persons have the power to “enchant.” Bomb mail enhances relationships such as these by inserting writing and other semiotic forms into the mutual enlivening of weapons and people.
Bomb mail also gives special meaning to the munitions involved, for although weapons have intrinsic qualities and affordances, they are also semiotic artifacts; in the words of Hugh Gusterson (Reference Gusterson1996, 2), there are “many ways to see a missile.” In the 1980s, for instance, nuclear warheads represented a national nightmare to some, but an image of peace and security to others who imagined nuclear arms build-up as a reasonable means to deter violence. Carol Cohn’s (Reference Cohn1987) telling exploration of nuclear “defense intellectuals” in the same era suggested that their microculture repeatedly linked nuclear bombs to aggressively masculine and heterosexual agency. When it comes to bomb mail, particularly that solicited over the internet in recent years, shells are often inflected by a kind of snarky, “fun” energy through their inscriptions. As a result, the act of paying for and inscribing a shell is simultaneously unsettling and entertaining.
When bomb mail proliferates, it encourages the exertion of global violence. Civilian participants do not merely commission inscriptions; they are affectively commissioned by their own inscriptions, being seduced by bomb mail’s charisma into a cosmopolitan militarism that exults in silencing the enemy. Arguably, bomb mail encourages what Simmons (Reference Simmons2019, 133) calls “joyful perpetration,” or a “continuum of taking pleasure in the suffering of another that starts with everyday examples of schadenfreude and bullying [and extends] to the joy of killing in warfare.” With its sinister delights, bomb mail beguiles participants, animates their violent fantasies, and, in some cases, manages to make killing seem fun.
Blurring persons and munitions
To have one’s ideas and sentiments delivered by blast offers a heady identification with violence, prompting a closer look at how people and munitions seem to blur in bomb mail’s long-distance speech acts. As a starting point, I consider what Erving Goffman (Reference Goffman1981) would term the “participant roles” in bomb mail communication, some of which are ambiguously suspended between persons and munitions. In his illuminating, if rudimentary, breakdown, of participant roles in communicative scenarios, Goffman differentiated what we would ordinarily call “the speaker” into several more finely grained roles: the “author” (the people or persons who craft the form of a message), the “animator” (the entity that animates it), and the “principal” (the party or parties who subscribe to or stand behind the message). Subsequent scholars, most notably Judith Irvine (Reference Irvine, Silverstein and Urban1996), have encouraged us to tinker more subtly with participant role characterizations according to the contingencies of speech acts, and to consider the intertextual reach of utterances as well across time and space.
While authorship is not the most compelling aspect of bomb mail, it is worth noting that many bomb mail messages have intertextual echoes. Some recycle commercialized stock phrases familiar from t-shirts, bumper stickers, and so forth (e.g. “Keep calm and carry on,” an ironic use of the slogan from UK propaganda posters designed to keep morale up during WWII), or phrases deployed in violent multiplayer video games (e.g. “The dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed”). Other bomb mail messages use slogans familiar from militaristic contexts, such as “Hooah!,” a rallying cry in the US Army that one American commissioned to be written on a Ukrainian shell destined for Russia. Still others mimic stylistic patterns on bomb mail from previous eras, such as the formulaic “A present from [sender’s location],” an inscription used on bombs in WWII (and possibly before). Bomb mail authorship may be so thoroughly dispersed across prior voices and conventions that the individual who picks the slogan may function less as an original creator than as an “initiator” who reanimates familiar tropes within a specific moment of a conflict, slipping themselves into an ongoing stream of militaristic discourse. In some instances, this means that civilian bomb mail initiators partake of the reflected power or self-aggrandizement conferred by the militaristic bravado of previous instances of bomb mail.
More pertinent to the question of magic is the fusion of person and weapon in the animation of bomb mail’s words. In spoken discourse, a Goffmanian framework defines the “animator” as the individual who physically voices the message—the one who gives it audible form. The act of inscribing words on a munition using chalk, marker, or paint can also be seen as an act of animation. Yet the full realization of bomb mail depends not only on inscription but on its movement through the air and its explosive impact. The weapon on its airborne arc acquires a kind of animating agency: by propelling the message toward its intended audience, it helps bring it to life. Additionally, if the detonation is understood as an integral part of the message, then the munition functions as a kinetic animator in this respect as well, completing the speech act through destruction.
In fact, perhaps when Steven invoked the “personification of the shell,” he was alluding to the blurring of the line between human intent and mechanical force, which also suspends what Goffman called “principalship” ambiguously between humans and weapons. When writing is applied to the surface of a bomb, or when the aggressive inscription “Fuck you!” explodes on impact like an exclamation point, does not the bomb itself appear to speak, both enhancing and “standing behind” the message’s meaning? Bombs already seem alive in their own way—moving, targeting, detonating with violent purpose, even if “mere” physics is doing the work. But the inscription eerily fuses the machine with the person, giving the bomb a voice, an attitude, a stance toward its target. Surely this is part of the appeal: the sense that in writing or commissioning bomb mail, one is sending a piece of oneself along for the ride, collapsing the distance between launch and impact, mere signification and material effect. The dynamic resonates with Alfred Gell’s (Reference Gell1998) argument that a person’s capacity to act or effect change can extend beyond their physical body, being distributed across various material traces and objects in the world that bear witness to their existence and intentions. In bomb mail, the person isn’t conveying mere words, while the bomb isn’t just an object anymore—it’s a messenger, carrying the person’s stance.
Handwriting is a component of this personification of the shell and distribution of the writer’s personhood into munitions. Consider, for example, Nikki Haley’s bomb mail, inscribed on her visit to Israel in May 2024. During a highly publicized moment, she wrote on a shell: “Finish them! America [heart symbol] Israel/Nikki Haley” (see Fig. 2). Certainly, a key achievement of this writing concerned what Haley was trying to index about herself in her capacity as a politician. With press photographers and bystanders capturing the spectacle on camera, her handwritten note with her signed name indexed her endorsement of the Israeli state’s violence. Her ruthless-sounding order—“Finish them!”—is ambiguously addressed to the Israeli Defense Forces, or the shell itself, or both; either way, it calls for dramatic, total obliteration of those targeted—a display of aggressive enthusiasm for military violence that some constituents will approve of for its political “strength.” As a female politician, Haley also faced expectations that she retain some modicum of personal “femininity”—which she achieved by counterbalancing her hypermasculine utterance with a heart symbol.Footnote 7
Nikki Haley writes “Finish Them …” US inscription on munition from Israel to Gaza (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/05/29/nikki-haley-signs-shell-israel-visit-gaza-hama/; photo credit Howard Beckett).
Figure 2 Long description
The image A shows a woman writing on a shell. The image B shows the text on the shell that reads, 04795, Finish Them exclamation point, America heart symbol Israel slash, Always, Nikki Haley.
At issue for my purpose, though, is the way Haley’s handwriting on the shell entwines her with the munition. As James Frazer noted (see Taussig Reference Taussig1992, 52–58), objects or entities once in contact sometimes are thought to retain a mystical connection, which he called the “law of contact” (sometimes called the “law of contagion”). In this line of thinking, humans who meaningfully touch a missile—particularly as they inscribe their intentions onto it in writing—may continue to act upon the munition, such that the shell carries the person along with it, effecting a kind of distributed personhood. The individuality of handwriting, so personal that it can sometimes be identified like a fingerprint, intensifies the effect. Meanwhile, through the moment of contact, the munition may have left a trace on the person in turn, instilling them with violent power.
In the dynamic of inscription-by-commission, wherein slogans or images are ordered online or via social media, then the orders are fulfilled by a soldier in the field who writes or paints the customer’s chosen message onto a munition, handwritten animation plays a slightly different role. Nevertheless, even when the message originates remotely, the personal mark of the soldier’s handwriting adds a visceral layer of authenticity and immediacy. Take the shell in Figure 3, commissioned by Republican Senator Randy Fine of Florida, who paid for several inscriptions on Israeli munitions. His selected message and his name, jotted by someone on the Israeli side, appear alongside the factory’s standardized, stenciled fonts and technical codes. This contrast between mechanical regularity and the intimacy of human touch underscores the artisanal aspect of the inscription. However artless his words (“Regards from Randy Fine”), the fact that they emerged from Fine’s will makes a difference. In fact, given that, in western language ideologies, words are often thought to carry their authors’ intentions with them (cf. Duranti Reference Duranti2015), perhaps the law of contact still helps supercharge the munition with Fine’s mind and affective investment—his spirit, to put it more metaphysically.
“Regards from Randy Fine.” US inscription on munition from Israel to Gaza (https://jewishcurrents.org/the-book-of-randy).
Figure 3 Long description
Four artillery shells are standing upright on a dirt surface. One shell has a handwritten inscription reading 'Regards from Randy Fine.' The other shells have various stenciled markings and codes. The shells are positioned closely together, with the inscriptions and markings clearly visible.
As the person and munition merge through the act of writing, the brief arc of the shell once fired collapses space and time, telescoping the connection between the author and the target on the battlefield. Rather than signifying mute destruction, then, these adorned munitions become embodiments of a person’s anger, memory or, in some cases, a frustrated longing to participate in one of the many geopolitical dramas unfolding elsewhere. Bombs and persons are thus blended, with bombs taking on seemingly agentic and intentional communicative qualities, and the persons who write upon them being perhaps supercharged with destructive powers.
Entwining language and violence
Bomb mail complicates the tidy division between language and violence—and seems to get some of its compelling qualities from the way it entwines the ephemerality of linguistic meaning with the material shock of kinetic force. I suggest it binds language to violence in at least three provocative ways.
First, and perhaps most obviously, the inscriptions on munitions confer meaning on the violence by deputizing the words to speak on behalf of the blast. Put another way, bomb mail’s written messages delimit the intended significance of the explosion. That meaning is most fully articulated in the mind of the semiotic perpetrator, but it may also be conveyed to others—especially when the inscription is disseminated publicly, typically through images shared on social media. In such cases, at least a portion of the targeted population may grasp the message if they happen to see bomb mail postings by their adversaries. If a Russian sees an image of bomb mail commissioned by a Finn, for instance, reading “For the freedom of Finland,” they will understand that at least some of the shells hurtling toward their soldiers from Ukraine are earmarked in the name of Finland’s freedom from Russia.
Second, in many instances of bomb mail, the speech act is structured such that the language requires the munition’s violence for the message to be fully realized. Consider, for example, certain bomb mail “jokes.” Humor often relies on juxtaposition or inversion, and in military settings, some jokes take a more specific form I term “frame perversion”—a communicative structure that pairs a benign or overtly positive frame with a menacing one (McIntosh Reference McIntosh2025). Examples from the Global War on Terrorism abound in memes that read, for instance, “Hearts and Minds Campaign … Giving two to the heart and one to the mind,” or “I enlisted to make a difference … and I can make 30 differences per magazine.” Many examples of bomb mail employ frame perversion, which is unsurprising given that bomb mail tends to originate with military personnel or with civilians drawing intertextually on militaristic humor. In certain cases, however, the frame perversion is not complete in the inscription alone. The tension between positivity and menace—and thus the force of the joke—relies on the munition’s latent or impending violence to deliver its punch line. A common example is when the shell’s inscription frames it as a “gift,” “valentine,” or “present [for the enemy],” or includes phrases such as “sent with love” or “warm regards.”Footnote 8 Such affectionate words, when etched onto instruments of destruction, suggest a perverse intimacy with the intended target (a theme I return to below).
Crucially, these inscriptions render the munition’s violence more meaningful and vice versa. Such inscriptions are not merely ironic texts, for expressions like “sent with love” become ironic only in the context of the explosion the munition heralds. The words alone, in other words, cannot complete the speech act; only the blast supplies their full pragmatic force and renders the words themselves sadistic. Consider, for instance, the role of violence in completing the inscription’s meaning in Figures 4 and 5. These phrases on their own—“Have a peaceful Christmas!” and “Live Laugh Love”—would not constitute frame perversion, but with the munition’s promise of violence, positive sentiments are jarringly juxtaposed with menace.
“Have a peaceful Christmas!” Finnish inscription on Ukrainian munition to Russian forces (https://www.proukraina.fi/index.php/signmyrocket-gallery/).
Figure 4 Long description
A 155 millimeter shell is placed horizontally on a wooden holder with six circular slots. The shell has Finnish text 'Rauhallista joulua! T.Sutiset' written on its side. The background is a rough surface, possibly concrete.
“Live Laugh Love.” Inscription of unknown origin on Ukrainian munition to Russian forces (https://signmyrocket.com).
Figure 5 Long description
A munition is placed horizontally on a wooden holder with circular indentations. The munition has the inscription 'Live Laugh Love' written on its side. The background is a rough, textured surface. The munition is cylindrical with a pointed tip and a band near the base.
Other munition inscriptions rely still more creatively on the promise of kinetic violence as the “punch line” to a joke. One Sign My Rocket shell, for instance, reads “If you can read this you’re too …”—a play on the familiar bumper sticker, “If you can read this you’re too close.” Here, the truncated phrase trails off in ellipsis, inviting the reader to infer that the reader is so close that the blast has rendered them incapable of finishing the sentence. Another shell, seen in Figure 6, reads “Fuck you. St[r]ong letter to follow.” The joke lands when one realizes that the “strong letter” is the explosion itself—an ironic understatement that transforms the blast into the follow-up message. In both cases, linguistic expression and kinetic violence are deeply entangled, with each element granting the other its full meaning: the words animate the blast, and the blast retroactively completes the joke.Footnote 9
“Fuck you. St[r]ong letter to follow.” Inscription of unknown origin on Ukrainian munition to Russian forces (https://signmyrocket.com).
Figure 6 Long description
A munition with the text, Fuck you comma Strong letter to follow period, is in the center. Other munitions are on the ground. One munition has the text, The Blade dot sh slash, on it.
The third primary way that bomb mail mingles language with violence brings us directly to the matter of magic. Bomb mail has a family resemblance with other forms of action at a distance, some of it violent (e.g. detonating a bomb with remote control), and some of it effective through magically efficacious symbolism (e.g. voodoo dolls). Bomb mail seems to combine elements of both. Given the distance traveled by a shell or missile and given the force of an explosion, bomb mail appears to be the ultimate extension of “doing” things with words, of language as social action (cf. Austin Reference Austin1962). Returning to the words of the veteran Stephen, furthermore, bomb mail can, for at least some participants, shimmer with the charged significance of “spell-casting” or issuing “curses”—acts that assume magical performative efficacy. As extensively documented in countless ritual and religious contexts, spells and incantations are thought to exert force in the physical world through a mysterious causal logic (Tambiah Reference Tambiah1968). Initiating bomb mail, some may be indulging (however vaguely) in the fantasy that their inscription on the bomb in flight functions as a curse that delivers a form of metaphysical justice. Along similar lines, part of bomb mail’s enchantment may be its oracular quality, as it appears to predict who will die, why, or in what spirit—imbuing the munition with a knowing agency, as if it understands the rationale for its own detonation.
This semiotic-material conjunction of bomb mail—what we might call a form of weaponized performativity—blurs the boundary between symbolic and physical action. Such logic may help explain a telling phrase from Anton Sokolenko, the Ukrainian entrepreneur behind the “Sign My Rocket” campaign launched in 2022. Initially operating without a dedicated website, Sokolenko promoted the initiative on social media platforms like Telegram, where he wrote: “You have a chance to kill orcs [a slur for Russians] with your text,” and offered inscription suggestions such as, “wish someone a happy birthday/death in pain” (Hauptman Reference Hauptman2022). His phrasing—“you have a chance to kill with your text,” and the spell-casting impulse of “wishing someone death in pain”—depends on the seamless cognitive leap to the idea that words themselves can kill. In a similar vein, a Ukrainian entrepreneur who goes by the handle “@GloOouD” writes, “you will have a chance to eliminate Russian terrorists with your text on a 155 mm artillery shell that will be fired on the heads of Russian soldiers and their military equipment.”Footnote 10 The grammar subtly implies that the “text” itself might do as much or more of the killing than the shell itself. In bomb mail, violence is not mute, and words are not inert abstractions.
The consumerist aspect of bomb mail, it should be added, may merge the quasi-magical qualities of bomb mail that I have described with the quasi-magical element of commodity fetishism, in which objects are experienced as though they intrinsically contain desirable value or power—even, sometimes, a kind of “life.” In commodity fetishism, the social coordination that lies behind the process of making a commodity tends to disappear, and the object becomes a materialization of affect and value. When participants use pay-to-play bomb mail services, they engage with the modern enchantment of objects, encountering a munition not primarily as death-producing machinery, but as a purchasable, personalized symbolic object—a collectible of sorts, which the purchaser can “own” and display like a war trophy, in the form of a photograph posted on social media. The social coordination required to inscribe the munition from afar, and the violent social relations embedded in warfare, may disappear from view, being displaced and reconfigured into a symbolically condensed, emotionally charged commodity. Bomb mail thus reveals how modern capitalist mediation, digital participation, warfare, and performative signs can converge in a single commodity form that behaves uncannily like an enchanted object.
The uncanniness of the target
I have discussed the dynamics surrounding the munitions and their inscriptions, but what of their targets? The matter returns me to the uncanny, that strange or compelling quality that surrounds an entity of uncertain status. Uncanniness tends to be evoked by objects of ambiguous status, which are (for instance) simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, or objects whose animacy is uncertain. Arguably, bomb mail has a way of framing its targets in a paradoxical fashion, rendering them both adversaries and intimates while simultaneously humanizing and dehumanizing them. In fact, composing bomb mail could be said to create an uncanny relationship—giving the participant an additional sense that they are engaging in something extraordinary and compelling.
Scholars have already recognized that some element of ambiguity is not unusual in the way enemies are framed in times of war, as is evident in the peculiarities of wartime dehumanization. The term “dehumanization” alludes to a spectrum of stances toward living others, and at its most extreme, it involves a total failure to recognize animacy or feeling in the other. However, in philosopher David Livingstone Smith’s (Reference Livingstone Smith2011) formulation, dehumanization can involve a paradoxical perception that recognizes the other’s agency and capacity for emotions—human-like qualities, in other words, that include interior life—while still perceiving them as subhuman, or not quite equivalent to a fully honored human being (see also Levinas Reference Levinas1969).
Much bomb mail seems to evoke this version of dehumanization, one that is humanizing in one regard while still stripping the other of worthy humanity. What some bomb mail inscriptions achieve, furthermore, is an amplification of the paradox, and thus of the target’s uncanniness. For instance, by writing an inscription as if to an addressee (e.g. “Merry Christmas!” or “A gift for you!”), bomb mail personalizes the otherwise faceless enemy, implying they are social intimates. If domination is not merely about physical or material power but also about psychological satisfaction, bomb mail stokes the notion that the enemy has a mind and might feel dominated by the inscription. The fantasy that the faceless enemy’s mind might be affected can be as important as brute seizure of the upper hand. The enemy is thus paradoxically anonymous and distant yet individually addressed in an intimate fashion.
Indeed, bomb mail operates through a perverse form of phaticity, in which the communicative function of language that is normally used to establish or sustain social contact is rendered radically ambiguous. The channel of and for communication is simultaneously opened by the missile in flight, bearing its message, and closed or foreclosed by the impending detonation, which is, of course, an entirely antisocial communicative act. The bomb is violently imposed upon its addressee, who, presumed dead, has no possibility of response. The message affixed to the bomb thus becomes literally the last word, admitting no rejoinder. In this way, the sender wins the exchange not only by killing the enemy but by silencing them and extinguishing their participation in semiotic interchange altogether. This communicative structure has strong resonance with certain fractious modes of political discourse in the contemporary West, perhaps especially the United States. Even as calm voices have exhorted citizens to engage in civil dialogue and empathic conversation, many on both the political right and left have emphatically rejected this call, instead refusing utterly to listen to their adversaries—a dynamic I have explored among Trump supporters who deratify the participation of the liberals and progressives they insult (McIntosh Reference McIntosh, McIntosh and Mendoza-Denton2020). In a related vein, bomb mail “speaks,” yet considers its targets unworthy of deliberative verbal exchange, terminating them and hope of conversation in the process.
Another bomb mail paradox plays on the peculiarity of addressing a note or letter to someone who, it is anticipated, will die in a blast that precludes the possibility that they will read the inscription. Indeed, the question of who these inscriptions are “for” is rather complicated. When it comes to ordinary mail, formulations such as “Dear John,” or “From Brad to John” render the semantic addressee the ratified reader of the mail. Even when these readers are not named, as in the case of a note that reads, simply, “I love you,” the implied addressee is normally a ratified reader of the message. When it comes to epistolary inscriptions on munitions, however, the initiators are fully aware that the medium of their message will self-destruct on arrival—obliterating both the inscription and, ideally, its intended recipient. In this way, semantic addressees are not ratified addressees/readers in any conventional sense; rather, they are the literal targets of the munition’s kinetic violence. In rare historical instances, such as the Athenians’ sling bullets, munitions did not explode on impact, allowing the enemy to plausibly read their inscribed message, and thus aligning the target—or, at least, those in the general vicinity of the target—with the intended addressee. But contemporary bomb mail is paradoxically designed to annihilate both the message and the person to whom it is addressed.Footnote 11
Even if the targets of taunts, slurs, and quips scrawled on munitions may never read them, the messages still find readers, of course, and this secondary audience can play a crucial role in fostering communal bonds (cf. Cameron Reference Cameron, McIntosh and Mendoza-Denton2020). In Ukraine, bomb mail commissioned by civilians is penned by service members in the field; in doing so, they register the symbolic weight of international support, perhaps drawing a morale boost from the gesture. The digital realm amplifies this effect, offering a broader emotional canvas for shared experience. As one Ukrainian soldier told a journalist in 2023, “The probability that the enemy will read [the inscribed missiles] is low. That’s why they are photographed and posted on social networks. This is more of a message for Ukrainian society than for the enemy” (Chapple Reference Chapple2023). Once a photo of an inscribed munition appears on social media, the circle of ratified readers expands dramatically. Ukrainian websites such as signmyrocket.com showcase images of personalized Ukrainian munitions to supporters closely following the war effort. Supporters of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza frequently reposted images of inscribed munitions with affirming and heartfelt commentary, while critics did the same with reactions of horror or condemnation. In this way, bomb mail becomes a powerful affective medium—a site of solidarity and of protest, capable of mobilizing emotions across the gamut.
Some bomb mail is ostensibly addressed to the second person, “you,” and in such instances, the uncanniness of bomb mail’s target reaches its apex. Consider the addressee in the inscription on Figure 7, which features a shell adorned by the Ukrainian entrepreneur who goes by the handles “GloOouD” or “Cloooud” (possibly referring to the suite of cloud computing services in Google Cloud). In July 2023, they announced they were starting a project called “REVENGE” that, like SignMyRocket, would allow people to pay for the inscription of their choice on a 155 mm shell in Ukraine destined to be used against Russian military units. They accompanied the announcement with an image of a shell reading, “You was killed by GloOouD.” The recipient of a message like this could be considered a “spectral addressee,” in several senses. They are anonymous, unknowable, and faceless to the message author/initiator. They will never actually read the message, because the message explodes before they can. And they are expected to die—becoming ghosts or specters—as the bomb mail lands.
“You was killed by GloOouD.” Ukrainian inscription on munition from Ukraine to Russian forces (https://x.com/GloOouD/status/1676654728178966542). In online remarks to a respondent, GloOouD confirms the stenciled red signs are intended to be “Khorne symbols,” a stylized skull rune used in the popular tabletop and video game Warhammer to represent the Chaos God of rage and bloodshed- note the intermingling of fantasized war play, here, with actual kinetic violence. (I have rotated this image 90 degrees for legibility, and the Khorne symbols are now on their side).
Figure 7 Long description
Two cylindrical artillery shells are positioned side by side. The surface of one shell displays a handwritten inscription that reads You was killed by GloOouD. Stenciled symbols are visible on both shells. The shells appear metallic and cylindrical in form, with markings applied directly onto the outer surface.
Another invocation of a spectral addressee can be seen in Figure 8, an image of another shell commissioned from Sign My Rocket. The Japanese phrase “Omae wa mou shindeiru” (お前はもう死んでいる) translates roughly to “You are already dead,” with “omae” being an aggressive, rude version of the second person pronoun. Typically, a Japanese speaker would direct that term to a man, especially a male interlocutor whose name the speaker does not know. The sentence is a widely memed catchphrase used by Kenshiro, protagonist of the anime and manga titled “Fist of the North Star” (Hokuto no Ken), who says it to his enemies just before he kills them using his martial arts techniques.Footnote 12
“You are already dead.” Transliterated Japanese inscription on munition from Ukraine to Russian forces (https://www.signmyrocket.com).
Figure 8 Long description
A munition shell is lying on the ground with transliterated Japanese text inscribed on its side. The shell is cylindrical and metallic, with a pointed tip. The text is written in a clear, bold style along the side of the shell.
Even though the enemy-addressees here are paradoxically slated to die before they can read the message, they are simultaneously—and equally paradoxically—interpellated as hapless spectral readers who have no choice but to take in the message on the bomb. The compulsion to imagine the enemy reading the inscription is evident on several threads on the Non Credible Defense Reddit. One participant, fantasizing about what they might write on a shell from Ukraine to Russia, writes, “Imagine getting shelled and seeing your commander getting blow [sic] up by a shell that says owo or uwu.” (“Owo” and “uwu” are emoticons that originated in anime fandom and gaming cultures; they both represent cute and positive facial expressions, with “owo” representing a face with wide-open, playful eyes and “uwu” representing closed, happy eyes. The fantasy of their use in this violent context is another instance of frame perversion.) Another thread participant adds, “Imagine if somebody paid for a ‘God I wish I could fuck an F14’ [a supersonic aircraft developed for the United States Navy] paragraph and that was the shell that landed in the middle of a half dozen Russian generals during a conference stream with Putin.” A further fantasy reads, “Would be hilarious if the shell was a dud so Russian state media shows a footage of the landed shell that was meant to wipe out the generals, and the writing on it.” It is as if these bomb mail initiators would love to grant the enemy a flicker of a comprehending mind, and just enough consciousness to take in their message, but not enough humanness to trigger their empathy.
Evidently, bomb mail engages in a “shadow conversation” (Irvine Reference Irvine, Silverstein and Urban1996) carried out with “shadow subjects,” defined by Maisa Taha (Reference Taha2017, 191) as absent, imagined discursive figures or “stance partners.” An adversarial intimacy is set up, hostile and deadly, but one that still engages a fantasy of a vaguely construed mind on the other end. The inscribers know at some level that their inscriptions are primarily affirmations of sadistic or cavalier stances that will be seen only by themselves and their allies; bomb mail inscriptions, put another way, are self-defining and bonding mechanisms that indulge in a fantasy of power and control. But meanwhile, bomb mail is all the more compelling for its uncanny capacity to invoke the impossible interlocutor. Evidently, killing is more satisfying or perhaps just cooler when one can envision the enemy’s mind, in a hazy sort of way—just enough to enjoy their suffering, but not enough to regret it.
Blursed: a conclusion
The magical and uncanny qualities I have discussed arguably help to give bomb mail some of its sinister appeal by activating a sense that participants are engaged in a “surreal” and “blursed” activity. Through bomb mail, humans and bombs become composite entities, while humans can use the bomb to extend and amplify their opinions, intentions, wit, and anger across vast distance. Violence becomes verbally enchanted, personal intentions merge with the brute force of a bomb’s detonation, munitions seem to speak, while enemies are limned as if present and absent, human and not. The result is thrilling and deadly.
Beyond these magical and uncanny qualities that may appeal to some, I further suggest that when people commission bomb mail from afar, the perverse intimacy they conjure with their inscriptions reflects, in part, their frustrated agency and alienation. Digital purchases of bomb mail are part of a widespread trend of participating in the world through digital means. As the material structures that held together communities’ economies and their sense of identity have been outsourced and generally atomized by late capitalism, the internet furnishes countless ways to satisfy the human hunger for connection, identity, and agency—even when the contact they achieve with others is purely digital.
Agency may be a key factor for some bomb mail participants who hold a kind of nostalgia or longing for participation in a more embodied, “old-fashioned” form of masculinizing warfare where one directly grapples with an adversary. Like trolls the world over, these keyboard warriors may also be impatient as they witness global political developments from afar, and seek the power to taunt, provoke, and influence. The appeal of commissioning bomb mail may additionally echo the dynamics identified by Lilia Chouliaraki (Reference Chouliaraki2006). Writing about the “spectators” of distant suffering, Chouliaraki explores the loss of agency experienced by millions who witness the pain of faraway others through television and computer screens. Her focus is humanitarianism, and the frustration felt by those who, bombarded with images, videos, and narratives of suffering, are left unable to act meaningfully. Given “the narrow repertoire of participatory positions” that “Western public life” affords its citizens (Chouliaraki Reference Chouliaraki2006, 15–16), some respond by adopting a “cosmopolitan” sensibility—one that seeks to be a citizen of the world by “act[ing] on [faraway] suffering without controlling the outcomes or experiencing the effects of such action.”
This, perhaps, is how we arrive at bomb mail’s cosmopolitan militarism, in which once-passive spectators of faraway geopolitical drama can affect the world from a distance, transforming their fantasies about the enemy into real-world violence through the touch of a button. These digital munitioneers become “petty sovereigns” (Butler Reference Butler2009), acting in the interest of a state that may not even be their own while living out a fantasy of almost magical power and agency exerted against an abstract and uncanny other.
In so doing, of course, these actors engage in the oppressive foreclosure of two-way communication, embodying what Paolo Freire Reference Freire2000[1970] would call “antidialogical” action. Their harmful speech acts ultimately render their targets not interlocutors so much as nonentities. Bomb mail’s discursive terms of engagement resonate with the increasingly widespread tendency to obstruct mutual listening and dehumanize out-group members, a stance that afflicts all too many political contexts in the troubled twenty-first century.
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