How the Internet Turned Biohacking Into a Cultural Obsession

Summary

• A recurring pattern Elena highlights in internet wellness is a roughly 1:10 gap between awareness and actual use — 90% of Americans have heard of GLP-1s but only 11% are on them, per a Gallup poll she cites. She notes a similar pattern for crypto (95% aware, 14% own), plus VR and meal kits: “tech culture is so influential that you can have lower incidences of the thing and then a much larger percentage of people who are like, ‘I definitely have an opinion about this.’” For investors, perceived penetration of wellness trends is systematically inflated by discourse.
• Ruby Thelot’s core concept, “paracontent” — “content about content” — explains the inflation: a trend “can take a life of its own without actually having any material impact on the real world.” Her heteropessimism study sampled about 2,000 Reels/TikTok videos: about 40% of dating content was positive, and she also found a fairly neutral segment, part of her test of whether online talk reflects behavior.
• Silicon Valley didn’t invent the peptide trend — it professionalized it. Elena’s correction of the media narrative: peptide culture started in Midwest bodybuilding communities and places like Austin med spas dispensing “Chinese peptides,” then got “accelerated and managed” by the Valley — a recurring misattribution pattern worth remembering when San Francisco “exports” a trend.
• Thelot’s TikTok dataset (~960 peptide videos, 2024–2026) suggests content mix can help read an adoption curve. Categories include promotional, personal exploration, educational, and a skeptical/warning category at ~19% — with contestatory “it’s kind of a scam” content rising in 2025–26 and promotional and personal content converging. Backlash is one maturity signal; protein is a saturation example (“protein fatigue,” with the same product’s protein content newly prominent).
• A potential downstream of Bay Area food paranoia is consumer testing and certification. Elena cites a group majorly funded by Nat Friedman and other tech names that partnered with Light Labs in Austin to test packaged meals, boba, protein bars and other products for microplastics and open-source the results; related baby-food findings prompted further testing. Thelot predicts fee-based “aggregators” certifying products against whatever your avoidance list is — microplastics, seed oils — creating novel “green” or “organic”-style labels.
• The future isn’t uniform optimization but bifurcation: quantification and esoteric practices growing simultaneously. Ruby cites a study where Oura wearers given incorrect sleep scores “reported having a worse day” despite the actual number being correct, and sees people who previously quantified themselves adopting Reiki and acupuncture. Elena’s version of acceleration: “Everyone is not going to look like Clavicular. People are just going to do increasingly strange biohacky things” — her next-frontier call is sleep-compression devices promising what feels like a full night’s rest in 4 hours.
• The closing macro thesis: in the age of AI, the body becomes a major optimization surface. Ruby updates Toby Shorin’s “body futurism” — “once we’ve reached the limits of innovation in silicon, we turn the microscope toward ourselves” — arguing that “in an age of great abundance” and potential total automation, the only thing we may have to improve is the body.

Deep dive

1. Paracontent: there is more content about the thing than the thing

• Ruby Thelot’s framing, from her essays “The Age of Paracontent” and “The Post Is the Product”: we’re “submerged” by content about content — GTA 6 trailer discourse being the canonical case — and paracontent “can take a life of its own without actually having any material impact on the real world.” Elena’s parallel mission is to “cut through the nonsense and answer the question of what is actually happening in culture.”
• The method in action — Thelot’s heteropessimism piece, which “got [her] into a lot of trouble”: she examined the claim that straight relationships are doomed from the woman’s perspective by analyzing about 2,000 Reels/TikTok videos. About 40% of dating content was positive, and she also found a fairly neutral segment. Her constant check: “is this thing that I’m hearing just me spending too much time online, or does it actually have any true consumer behaviors behind it?”

2. The peptide origin story: SF takes credit for the Heartland’s trend

• Elena’s correction of the narrative that tech culture exported peptides: the trend “really started elsewhere” — Midwest bodybuilding subcultures and Austin med spas giving people “Chinese peptides” — and then “got professionalized… accelerated and managed” in the Valley. Thelot agrees provenance is genuinely blurred now: “the chains of distribution are so rich and multifaceted” that a women’s-wellness TikToker will repurpose a bodybuilder product; she’s watching creatine reach her non-tech friends and new longevity clinics appear in Manhattan.
• The numbers behind the awareness gulf: Gallup finds 11% of U.S. adults are on GLP-1s while 90% have heard of them. Elena asked Astra for comparable ratios and got crypto (95% aware, 14% own), VR, and meal kits — a recurring roughly 1:10 tech-category signature.
• Thelot’s mechanism for the gap: the marketing machine (“every subway has an ad”) plus celebrity visibility — “you can’t really talk about a celebrity without talking about whether or not they have ‘Ozempic face’” — yields high awareness and low conversion: “you’ve talked about it at the bar with your friends, but you might not have actually tried it.”

3. What the TikTok data says — and why aspiration, not use, drives views

• Thelot’s week of crunching ~960 peptide videos (2024–2026): the sample was mostly positive, with weight-loss, feeling-better and bodybuilding content. Contestatory “it’s kind of a scam” content rose in 2025 and, to some extent, 2026, alongside more safety questions and product comparisons. Four categories are promotional, personal exploration, educational, and skeptical/warning at ~19%; promotional and personal-experience content converge as adoption grows.
• Elena’s parallel example of “friction technology” — technology that prevents you from using technology, including Opal, Brick, Yondr pouches, dumbphones and cybercelibacy lifestyle content — shows the same proxy dynamic: “there’s more content about not using your phone than people truly not using their phones.” Ruby’s challenge is how people make those videos; Elena’s answer is “their iPhone 16s,” posted on Instagram.
• The unifying mechanic is aspiration: “You want to believe that you can eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day. Then you DoorDash food and you call it a day.” Ruby notes that the obesity rate in America is actually declining; she sees some reason to attribute that to GLP-1 use and perhaps “social media contagion,” producing at least some real behavior change.

4. Four centuries of thinness: elite signaling on a pendulum

• Elena traces the history of male thinness and weight anxiety to the 17th century, after England boosted sugar production in Barbados. Sugar moved from an upper-class luxury toward broader availability as supply increased and prices fell; gout appeared in the middle classes, and Dr. Venner used obesus in 1620 while proposing one of the first diets. Weight became associated with unhealthiness and mental dullness, including in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar line about keeping fat men around him because they were too dull to fight.
• Thelot adds the parallel history of female thinness: Renaissance ideals such as Raphael’s Venus and Castiglione’s account of female beauty give way to elite asceticism, in which controlling appetites signals virtue and intelligence. That ideal becomes encoded in fashion through garments such as the Victorian corset. The two tracks coexist: elites adopt the ideal first while sugar-consuming masses remain more portly.
• The pendulum then shifts with economic conditions. During the world wars and the Great Depression, plumpness regains cachet as an indication of health amid scarcity. In the postwar period, bodies return toward Dürer-style “good proportions.” In the 1990s, European fashion designers and the supermodel revive thinness for women, with “heroin chic” becoming the ideal. Elena connects today’s celebrity-first GLP-1 adoption to the same elite-first, trickle-down pattern.
• Elena’s corset-democratization analogy — front-lacing designs and factory production made an elite garment mass-market, just as compounding and easier-to-use GLP-1 formats could remove friction from injections — is offered with the hedge intact: “that is way too much of a stretch of an analogy, but you get the point.”

5. Body futurism: microplastics, certification aggregators, protein saturation

• The quantified self is the trend Elena identifies as one Silicon Valley genuinely exported: Fitbit launched in 2007, the year Kevin Kelly called it the year of the quantified self in Wired. Ruby describes that “rather futuristic, prescient vision” as only fully realized now through the Apple Watch (2015), DEXA scans, CGMs intended for people with diabetes, Function Health and Superpower. Her favorite frame is Toby Shorin’s body futurism: “once we’ve reached the limits of innovation in silicon, we turn the microscope toward ourselves.”
• Elena’s case study of what can follow from Bay Area conviction: a group majorly funded by Nat Friedman and other tech names partnered with Light Labs in Austin to test packaged meals, boba, protein bars and other products for microplastics and open-source the results. The discussion also describes baby-food findings that prompted one mother to test more baby food and formula, even though “the medical consensus is still out” on whether microplastics are harmful.
• Elena expects “way more advancements in consumer testing or lab technology” and microplastic-free product lines. Thelot’s build-out is a member-funded aggregator certifying goods against an individual avoidance list — microplastics, seed oils and similar concerns — through novel versions of “green” or “organic” certification.
• Protein-maxing is a mainstream-saturation tell: “certain foods have always had the same amount of protein, but that same number is now prominently featured on the yogurt.” Elena sees backlash already — “my water doesn’t need 20 grams of protein in it” — after cycles from Atkins and keto to “2× your body weight in protein.”

6. The future is bifurcated: dashboards and Reiki at once

• Thelot’s evidence that quantification has a cost: a blind study gave Oura ring wearers incorrect sleep scores, and when the number was lower or negative, they reported having a worse day despite the actual number being correct. She describes that as a deleterious effect on felt health and sees people pushing back against quantification in favor of holistic or esoteric ways of knowing the body, including Reiki and acupuncture.
• Because we are in a “pluralistic culture” with multiple frameworks, Thelot predicts growth in quantification and esoteric self-knowledge simultaneously rather than one shared pendulum swing.
• Elena agrees but recasts acceleration: “It’s not like we’re going to be surrounded by super conventionally hot people… Everyone is not going to look like Clavicular. People are just going to do increasingly strange biohacky things.” Her next-frontier call, based on conversations with hardware founders, is wearable devices that might provide what feels like the equivalent of a full night’s rest in 4 hours, or something like that — longevity pursued as more waking hours, not necessarily a longer life.
• Thelot closes by noting that Shorin wrote “Body Futurism” before the AI boom. In an age of great abundance and potential total automation, she argues, the body may be the only thing left to improve, potentially keeping it central for the next few years.