The Age of Body Futurism | Ruby Justice Thelot

Once we've reached the limits of innovation in silicone, we turn the microscope towards ourselves and try to optimize and innovate on the body. Eleven percent of US adults are on GLPs. Ninety percent of Americans have heard of GLPs. You wanna believe that you can be Amelie Morico and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day. Then you DoorDash food, you call it day. We live in a time of cultural confusion. We are submerged by terra content, which is content about content. There was recently a study that did blind tests on people with O 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 biohacky 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 conics 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 The Low 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 parrot 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 oral rings, microplastics, 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 below, 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 space of confusion. 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 …