The Age of Body Futurism | Ruby Justice Thelot

Once we've reached the limits of innovation in Silicon, we turn the microscope towards ourself and try to optimize and innovate on the body.

11% of US adults are on GLPs. 90% of Americans have heard of GLPs.

You wanna believe that you can be Amelie Marico-

Yeah

... and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day. Then you DoorDash food and you call it a day. [laughs] We live in a time of cultural confusion. We are submerged by para content, which is content about content. There was recently a study that did blind tests on people with Oura Rings and gave them the wrong number. They reported having a worse day in spite of the actual true number being correct.

It's not like we're going to be surrounded by, like, super conventionally hot people. Everyone is not going to look like Clavicular. People are just going to do increasingly, like, strange biohack-y things.

I've made my mission to cut through the nonsense and answer the question of what actually is happening in the culture.

Are peptides, protein maxing, wearables, and longevity clinics actually taking over, or does the internet just make it feel that way? In this episode, Elena Berger sits down with academic and cyber ethnographer Ruby Justice-Lullo to unpack the gap between what's happening online and what people are actually doing in the real world. They explore Ruby's idea of para content, where the conversation around a trend can become bigger than the trend itself, using today's wellness and optimization culture as a case study. From GLP-1s and peptides to Oura Rings, microplastics, and protein, they trace how niche behaviors become cultural conversations and sometimes eventually become mainstream behavior. They also look at the history behind our obsession with optimizing the body and what might come next. As technology gives us more ways to measure and modify ourselves, Ruby argues we may be entering an era of body futurism, where optimization becomes increasingly personal, fragmented, and extreme.

I'm here with Ruby Justice-Lullo, an academic and cyber ethnographer, and we're here to kind of continue a conversation that we've been having, I think, for a little bit on how to actually kind of understand what's going on in the world, and especially on the internet, when there is increasingly no real delineation between the internet and the real world. And Ruby, I think actually a good place to start is a piece you wrote last year on para content. And from there, I think we can kind of take a step back and get into a couple topics and things that we've both been paying attention to recently.

Yeah. We live in a time of cultural confusion.

I'm in a state, state, of confusion. Whoa.

Um, so many things are happening. It's so hard to, as you said, disentangle what is real to what is merely amplified by social media or the internet, or merely our small little algorithmic bubbles. I wrote a piece-- well, two pieces are germane to this topic. The first one is called The Age of Para Content, and the other one's called The Post Is The Product. In The Age of Para Content, I sort of present or reduce this idea of para content, which is content about content. And what I noticed taking a look at video game