The Age of Body Futurism | Ruby Justice Thelot

Ruby Justice Thelot (0:00)

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

Elena Burger (0:07)

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

Ruby Justice Thelot (0:15)

You want to believe that you can be Elmili Mariko and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day. Then you door dash food and you call it a day.

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 oar rings and gave them the wrong number. They reported having a worst day in spite of the actual true number being correct.

Elena Burger (0:41)

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.

Ruby Justice Thelot (0:56)

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

SPEAKER_3 (1:03)

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 Burger sits down with academic and cyber ethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot 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 paracontent, 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 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.

Elena Burger (2:05)

I'm here with Ruby Justice Thelot, 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.

Ruby, I think actually a good place to start is a piece you wrote last year on Paracontent. 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.

Ruby Justice Thelot (2:48)

Yeah, we live in a time of cultural confusion. I'm in a state 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, both two pieces are germane to this topic. The first one is called The Age of Para-Content and the other one is called The Post is the Product. In The Age of Para-Content, I sort of present to reduce this idea of Para-Content, which is content about content. And what I noticed taking a look at video game releases, movie trailers, that oftentimes, there's more content about content than content itself, meaning we are submerged by Para-Content, and we have very, very small pieces of thing that we can sort of glom on to, whether that be, once again, music video, or a movie, or even a trailer for a video game. I think in the essay I talk about, the GTA 6 trailer came out last year. And what's interesting about Para-Content is that it can actually take a life of its own without actually having any material impact on the real world. People can keep on talking about a thing and can grow it out of proportion, and it could be out of measure, and it could feel real in spite of it not actually being grounded in any sort of material reality. And so I've made my mission, my life's work, to kind of cut through the nonsense and kind of answer the question of what actually is happening in culture.

Elena Burger (4:17)

So the question is, how much is any given phenomenon actually happening versus how much are people talking about it on social media? How much are people making a big deal about it on social media or YouTube or whatever? And I think there's so many kind of examples that we can point to. But curious if you have any favorite examples of some kind of delta between the thing happening and the thing that people are commenting on?