Independent Study: Body Futurism by Toby Shorin (Essay)

0:00Toby Shorin:Welcome to a new experiment from Dialectic. I've been thinking about ways that I can add things to the world of Dialectic. And one of the commonalities across many of the people I talk to is they are incredibly thoughtful in writing. I often expose that in the conversations. I often read little excerpts and have an exegetical type of conversation where we're going through various pieces. that said, with the number of people I've talked to in the past or may talk to in the future, I would strongly encourage people to go back and actually read their writing in full. And so today I'm excited to try and experiment where I read a new essay from a past guest of the show, Toby Shorin, that he just published.

0:45Toby Shorin:It's actually a piece based on a talk he gave back at FWB Fest in 2024. And he has since added some things, concretized it and published it as Body Futurism. Obviously, you can just go read the essay or listen to Toby's talk for that matter. But I thought it would be cool to bring a piece that I really loved and that I think is both provocative and inspiring to dialectic listeners. Maybe an audio book for essays, if you will. I had a fun and multifaceted conversation with Toby all the way back on episode seven, where we briefly touched on some of these ideas and many more. And I would encourage you to go listen to that as well.

1:26Toby Shorin:With that, please sit back, relax, and enjoy Body Futurism from Toby Shoren. This was published on February 25th, 2026. And the logline for this essay is, As society turns toward the body, a new politics of the flesh is on the brink of eruption. Settle down. Settle down. Look closely and take a minute to settle in. Beginning by imagining a plane of pure light at the top of your head. Now sense as it passes its way down the tip of your scalp, down to your forehead. Notice it rolling over the bridge of your nose now, very slowly, visualizing this plane of light making its way past your throat. Are you making subtle movements there as you read or as you listen?

2:14Toby Shorin:Down to your shoulders, down to your arms, aware of the breathing as your chest fills and releases with air, noticing your diaphragm, scanning your whole body down further but slowly, slowly now, feeling the weight of your body on the chair, the points of contact between your clothes and skin, your feet, or the heft of that piece of glass and metal in your hand. Can you feel it? Can you notice the heat or cold of the air around you? And can you sense the newfound fascination with the body that permeates the airspace? The spirit of Bochoni is alive and well in America. It was, after all, American industry and American cities, American modernity, and an American century which inspired the Italian futurists to refashion the statuesque image of classical man into something dynamic, fluid, mechanical, technological.

3:11Toby Shorin:Now we Americans are at it again. Ancestral diets, crip cultures and diagnosed entities, health protocols, entrepreneurial interest in biomedicine, surrogacy, ubiquitous biometric measurement, and trauma discourse are all facets of the body's increasing role in social thought. The new body futurism takes over from the now tired futurism of software, but it is made of the same raw materials mined from the California coast. Body futurism is the result of a republic turning its mind inward, of opponents of Cartesianism seizing the day in the academy, of technologists moving their attention from virtual spaces to physical places.

3:58Toby Shorin:In other words, body futurism is overdetermined, so best get familiar. Settle in. Settle in. The Embodied Turn. Bodies are eating the world. Up from the ground comes a great swell of bodies. Running, lifting, bathing, shaking down, thinning out and waking up. Bodies have taken over popular culture. Huberman is the biggest podcaster in the nation. One in eight Americans have tried GLP-1s. Seed oil discourse has created a new physical purity drive. Wander Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score has been atop the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for seven straight years. And healing practices like trauma release and somatic experiencing have earned mainstream adoption.

4:48Toby Shorin:These are just a few indications of the physicality of contemporary thought. The concerns of everyday Americans have turned to the embodied self. Numerous factors paved the way for this embodied turn. The reactions against ensloppified, bot-infested social media is one. The bounce back from COVID-era work-from-home policies is another. Lifestyle brand burnout is a third crucial factor. In Life After Lifestyle, I wrote that conscious consumerism as a substitute for legitimate community was bound to fail. I said we're going from D2C brands to D2C practices. Well, everything now is some kind of run club, surf club, lifting club, walking club, hiking club, tea club, sauna club, among innumerable embodied associations.

5:40Toby Shorin:These micro communities leverage all of the tools of the D2C trade, but put embodied practice in the front seat. drop-shipped micro-brands hosting meditation micro-retreats and bathhouse micro-events, social media micro-influencers starting micro-academies espousing the benefits of nervous system regulation and emotional literacy. Each will sell you a hat. The embodied turn is much more than a trend in the marketplace of ideas. Body stuff is the moral source of what is fashionable, even when the fashions themselves are competing. Paleo warriors wolfing down steak and eggs, and Ray Peat heads on a carrot salad and ice cream diet are both capable of earnest moral posturing.

6:24Toby Shorin:That is the point. Anything that captures the popular imagination today, whether scientific or spiritual, unfailingly draws from the realm of embodied practice. The network ideologies that matter are the ones that promote diets, mindfulness and prayer practices, biometric monitoring systems, and health protocols. These lived activities do what products never could, fulfill the moral premise of a lifestyle through embodied practice. This body movement is being worked out across every segment of society, from policymakers to physical therapists, from the pulsating rhythms of ecstatic dancers to the Promethean efforts of tech entrepreneurs to extend life, everybody seems to have their own vision for the future of the body.

7:12Toby Shorin:Down some paths lie body-based technocratic control, astroturfed protocols of self-regimentation. Down others lie genuine liberation through true body awareness. Kinesthetic Media. The vast adoption of kinesthetic social media in TikTok and Reels makes the newfound focus on the body a permanent societal shift. Every form of media takes human faculty and extends it into the public domain. What the TikTok media format does is turn body practices into remixable, forkable content. Twitter is the marketplace of ideas where the intelligentsia debates diets. TikTok is the battlefield where body practices clash, evolve, and are tweaked to gain maximum adoption.

7:59Toby Shorin:Scroll through a dozen 30-second clips and you'll see the embodied turn in action. People are breathing, they're tapping, they're shaking, they're stretching to release trauma. Just a few decades ago, many of these body practices were the exclusive knowledge of mind-body therapists in hippie hotspots. Now, the best of them are being traded around the new sphere with plenty of money to be made by the enterprising healer, Influencer. With the wheat comes the chaff, however. For every person who discovers Yoga Nidra or trauma release exercises is another who psychs themselves into thinking they have Tourette's and then cures themselves next month.

8:38Toby Shorin:These phenomena were foreshadowed by teens doing weird dance trends and stealing cars. If a silly jingle can induce individuals to grand larceny, what are the political implications of TikTok's influence over bodily life? We have already seen what Twitter did for social discourse, proliferate 100 ,000 bizarre micro ideological strains and make them resistant to the antibiotics of institutional authority. TikTok, Reels, and YouTube are now doing the same for the social body. Watch Ballerina Farms to learn how to embody the trad wife. Subscribe to Backed from the Borderline to learn occult meditations.

9:16Toby Shorin:Bodies are online and they want your attention. The charismatic economy. Attention is all you need. The name of the white paper that inaugurated the current era of transformer models is a perfect catchphrase for the transition to a pure attention economy where bodies matter most. AI researchers in San Francisco have all started GLP-1s and weightlifting routines, having convinced each other that physique will be the final competitive edge after AI takes all the white-collar jobs. If their conclusion is excessive, the premise is correct. We have already entered an economy of charisma, which grants status to various kinds of extreme physicality or virtuosity.

10:02Toby Shorin:The combination of severely curtailed career mobility and the mainstreaming of gambling have created an economic environment characterized by grift. The biggest winners are naturally those who exude charisma and prowess. Charisma has long been the dominant mode in social media, but athleticism is now rewarded more than ever. Jake and Logan Paul pivoted into boxing. I Show Speed does exhibition races. Philosopher YouTuber Jonathan B lectures from exotic locations wearing the open linen shirts that reveal how fit he is. Less and less influencers are talking heads. More and more, it is the bodies doing the talking.

10:41Toby Shorin:Only from this perspective can the preoccupation with testosterone levels, jaw angles, and height maximizing be understood. Men are mewing and women are getting Botox at 30 instead of 50 because it is perceived as an economic necessity to appear hot online. Needless to say, the logic of body as asset is made quite explicit in OnlyFans. Even the wealthy have to play along with the charismatic economy. For some years, the high-status thing to do has been to start a company. Now, all the founders want to be longevity influencers too. The same utopian fervor once reserved for distributed systems is being used to construct ideologies of the body.

11:24Toby Shorin:The next major section, Bio-Utopianism Software Utopianism The utopian fantasies of the past three decades were shaped profoundly by software. The cypherpunk and crypto anarchist movements of the 90s laid out cryptography-based visions of the future. Digital nations without states, anonymous peer-to-peer exchange, effortless information flow. Then the 2000s saw the rise of social media, hailed as a technology that would enable the spread of open societies. In the 2010s, cryptocurrency launched a new wave of crypto idealism, pumping narratives of global coordination, private money, and a world computer poised to disintermediate legacy institutions.

12:05Toby Shorin:In all of these variations, the software utopia is one accessed through a screen. In the late part of this cycle, Silicon Valley thought leadership commingled breathless cybertopian stylistics with business models, fashioning concepts like the sharing economy, the gig economy, and the ownership economy. Geeks have always conflated operating systems and social systems, and rightly so. But in a classic media message mix-up, every technology soon became a disembodied space of utopian thought. On Twitter, where these narratives thrive, we had the crypto space, the AI space, the DTC space, the biotech space, and furthermore niche spaces.

12:46Each space encapsulated business model, people, technologies, the discourse, and most importantly, a promised social vision. The relationship of the source technology to the space is that of the machine to the

13:00Toby Shorin:futurist artwork. Bochoni's unique forms of continuity in space, or Baila's speed of a motorcycle, transform industrial machinery and automobiles into dynamic sculptural forms of amplified speed, power, and scale. Today's technologists do the same when they base social utopian imaginaries on machinic concepts. Simple concepts like digital cash transfers and business process automation become software-based parallel societies with their own economic systems and AI faiths. The Collapse of Cloud Optimism But over the last few years, these disembodied cloud utopias have slowly begun to evaporate. software has not delivered on its fantastical premises, turning formerly bright eyed millennials into techno pessimistic doomers.

13:46Toby Shorin:In the wake of the tech lash, what remain of the software futurists have consolidated around effective acceleration. Only the promise of an AI God still holds hope for software utopians. The surest sign of software exhaustion is that the tech positivism is in the process of escaping itself into a variety of other domains. You no longer need to work in tech to hold the cultural positions of tech workers. Now there are life scientists, housing lobbyists, warmongers, and energy policy advocates who all take the techno progressive stance. Climate thinking is moving away from limiting consumption towards energy abundance.

14:27Toby Shorin:An identical move is underway in biomedicine with the transition from the ethos of harm reduction to the ethos of life extension. But very few grasp the most vital point of this moment, whether in ignoring the role of violence in maintaining the state or meaning things into the discourse as a world-building strategy, the futurist tendencies of recent decades made little room for the physical person. With the fall of software comes the return of the repressed, the body itself. Embodied Ideologies Builders have become bodybuilders. Gray market peptides and gene therapies have replaced Soylent. The muscle T and chain has replaced Zuck's famous hoodie, and the office cold plunge has replaced the office beanbag couch.

15:14Grinders and quantified self, once friend subcultures of Silicon Valley enthusiasts, have now been mainstreamed and productized by whoop bands, Apple watches, and eight sleep mattresses. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of body augmentation has become far more radical.

15:29Toby Shorin:Longevity, immortality, consciousness hacking, advanced meditative states, direct gnosis, enhance Olympics, and designer babies are all the relevant super meme complexes. The human body itself is the new site of utopian technosocial visions. For the latest crop of techno-Buddhists, the future is a world of super compassionate meditators, operationalizing stream entry and scaling loving kindness practice. The gene editors start by saying you can't fix your kids' hereditary diseases in utero and end up espousing a world of kid geniuses vibe coding their first company. Brian Johnson's Don't Die movement envisions health tracking, longevity religion with an eschatology to rival the most fantastical software reveries.

16:15Humanity's rebuttal into AI is its bare survival into an ever-extending horizon. Full-body biomonitoring is far out, but you can order blueprint olive oil and stick a glucose tracker in your arm today. In comparison with the disembodied ideology of social media world building, these imaginaries are grounded in fully corporeal interventions. Swap blockchains and transformer models for Pilates and peptides. The platform is different. The style of utopian extrapolation is the same. But body imaginaries are not just believed, they are physically lived. Protocolism. If anything exemplifies the shift from software to the body, it is the word protocol, which has migrated from describing technical standards to signifying body practices.

17:02The new health protocols are the modernist architecture of kinesthetic behavior and the native social form of body futurism. Protocols for diet, breathwork, bodybuilding, and supplementation are open-source rule sets.

17:16Toby Shorin:Vitamins, coaching, apps, and classes commercialize their implementation. Apple Health and Whoop provide the substrate for various influencer-led protocol schemas. These branded body practices are becoming hyper-competitive as health tech companies scramble for data on muscle movement, cardiovascular systems, and the content of dreams. Weight Watchers, arguably the ancestor of contemporary health protocols, had already incorporated rigorous self-surveillance and social participation. Today's protocols function similarly, while automating data collection via wearables and adding competitive social media layers, e.g.

17:53Toby Shorin:sleep score. Open source communities for protocols, such as 75HARD, congregate on Reddit and sometimes on proprietary apps. Here, we see an important feature of protocols. And as much as they are tightly scripted scopes of action, they are also participatory institutions that connect bodies through regulation. Formally speaking, then, the protocol is an embodied version of the E ideology, composed of a charismatic influencer, a social media mind virus, and a fruiting body, a type of guy. While most of them seem to have an instrumental character, the moral is always embedded in the muscle fiber.

18:28Whether it's ancestral diets or Huberman's sleep schedule, there is a normative message in all of these prescriptions. You have heard of protocols, but you need to understand protocolism. It is the format of social control suited to a world enchanted by body futurism. For the social elite, the old disciplinary institutions have loosened their grip, making way for a society based on location independence, remote work, flexible romantic arrangements, easy credit, wellness services, and other apparent freedoms. But these self-chosen protocols require constant self-monitoring and self-regulation. Human Potential 2.0 With the rise of these embodied ideologies and networked faiths, one might venture that the 70s are coming back.

19:12What's really happening is the Human Potential movement out of Esalen Institute all those years ago is finally fruiting into its full form. The human potential movement applied California frontierism to the human body itself, an evolutionary mysticism, combining romantic self-expression with the tools of science and that peculiar American taste for perfectionism. It aimed to access through mystical experience whatever latent capacities are dormant in man.

19:39Toby Shorin:Human potential was obsessed with psychical research, with mind-opening drugs, with peak experiences, with the idea that we only use 10 % of the neurons in our brain. We now hear echoes of the same in today's body optimization movements, although technologies that augment our natural capacities play a bigger role. Thus, we have an ultrasound headband to induce lucid dreams and unlock unheard of qualia, ultra-rigorous diet protocols to maximize mitochondrial biogenesis, and artificially ultra-intelligent meditation instructions to create a society of sages. Both then and now, the goal of human potential is to create the superhuman.

20:17Everything happening now is downstream of Esalen in some way. Not only the superhumanism and the ayahuasca retreats in Marin County and Byron Bay, but also the flush of unconventional social healing spaces that remix Esalen's core propositions. Mixed modality social sauna spaces in Toronto, Christian churches converted for pantheistic worship in Berlin, and community acupuncture clinics in Maine. Even the exploding popularity of somatic therapies can be traced to the human potential movement. Rolfers, keygongers, tantricas, and mind-body practitioners of all stripes traveled through esalen in the 60s and 70s.

20:50New schools of body thought were born at Big Sur, and these practitioners settled west, sowing the seeds of an alternative American folk religion. Today, what they planted is taking root in Texas, sprouting vigorously through sidewalk cracks of New York, growing alien blooms in the dry California air, and blossoming across the vast plains of social media. From the superhuman bodies of dreaming technologists to the mythopoetic bodies of the new shamans, bodies across America are coming alive. Now we have thoroughly surveyed the terrain and visited the many varieties of embodiment at play in this uncertain moment.

21:26What remains is the question of what kind of body politics can emerge from this contested ground. The next major section, body politics. Social sickness. New understandings of the personal body have always led to new ideas of the social body, and vice versa. The medieval body politic was based on an anatomy of limbs, the head, the torso, and feet, symbolically justifying the social hierarchy of kings, nobles, and peasantry. Today's embodied ideologies, sciences, and protocols likewise foreshadow its politics and its political bodies. To make one example, the political dimensions of the embodied turn is blatantly visible in the current vogue for the pathological.

22:08Body politics is the politics of a society convinced of its own sickness. The techno-pessimism, gerontocracy, and senile nostalgia-mongering of the 2010s had already fostered a general sense of dis-ease. Now, that very same ressentiment has found a home in numerous embodied maladies. The loneliness epidemic, the toxic food system, the hormonal dysregulation, the microplastics, the neurotic fixation on declining sperm counts, declining sex rates, declining everything. An emaciated social body reminiscent of Egon Schiele's degenerate fond de chicla's self-portraits. Pardon my French pronunciation there, although those portraits are

22:52Toby Shorin:worth googling. All this social sickness, hypochondriac or real, contributes to the atmosphere of political decline and the prevailing sense that America, or even Western civilization itself, is ending. Disability is not merely a metaphor here. Public administration has gone defunct in reality, as the embarrassing mishandling of COVID and chaotic policies of Trump demonstrate. Despite the attempts of very online people to counter the feeling of looming crisis with utopian what-if thinking and institutional world-building, software-based political praxis, whether memeing things into the discourse or the right's predictable embrace of clicktivism and cancel culture is totally impotent.

23:34Grand narrative worldbuilding like quote-unquote progress studies no longer seems possible now that Twitter has turned into Elon's personal propaganda machine.

23:43Toby Shorin:New institutions never arose. Decomposition. Some who preach the decline of the West have found their profit in historian Oswald Spengler, a thinker who himself likens culture to biology. According to Spengler, a culture in its old age becomes a civilization like ours. Rational, rigid, megalopolitan, bureaucratized, petrified, managerial, despiritualized, refined, ornamental, wedded to the politics of quote-unquote progress. The uselessness of conventional statecraft and and digital lobbying indicates a fundamental exhaustion of civilizational vitality. If Spengler's model holds any truth, then the decay of our institutions and the protocolish virtualization of selfhood are symptoms of a greater life cycle.

24:33An aging body breaks down and decomposes. But things grow from rot. The demise of our political and social organs is a necessary prelude to societal renewal. I believe that this is what is happening now. A literal decomposition of our tired political bodies, our geriatric institutional bodies, our abstracted social media bodies, a decomposition back into firm, energetic, sensual, individual bodies. This is not Waldenponding, nor atomization, nor is it the mistake Esalen made when it abandoned 60s radical politics for a purely interior spirituality. The body is not a retreat from political, but its basic political unit, the raw material of nerve and flesh, the foundation for a new form of communion.

25:23Spinoza saw this potential when he said, we do not even know what a body can do. The Enlightenment of the Body Bodies do things when not encumbered with institutional fetters. Those bodies are immobilized, restless, desperate for movement. If institutions no longer serve us, we can only turn to local forms of self-sufficiency, that is, new bodily arrangements. Bodies are the foundation of what is real and of relationships to one another. At the core of every social form, every form of art, architecture, politics, and music, every run club and council meeting and dinner party, is simply an arrangement of bodies.

26:07Bodies moving in space, sensing each other, touching, exploring from first principles. What is actually good for this body? What social forms heal me, repair me? In 1670, Spinoza proposed an ethics derived from bodily interactions, that joy and goodness arises when bodies compound together and increase each other's power, and sadness when they decompose each other. In this, he was more farsighted than most philosophers. These very same body sensations are a key to the source of cultural vitalization. This is a different use of the body than the homogenizing protocols and futurisms of self-chosen control.