one of the more reliable rules of the internet is that if a sufficiently committed group of people in silicon valley decides something is good/bad/going to change the world/kill us all, you will inevitably learn all about it (and then form an opinion about it yourself). this has been a law that governs everything from ai discourse to health/biohacking to what you eat to how to track your body’s functions. i think people are only just beginning to appreciate just how culturally influential the bay area is. a funny byproduct of this phenomenon is that sf people will sometimes take credit/co-opt cultural trends they aren’t even directly responsible for. so i talked with @being_on_line about how to disentangle a true bay area export from a hijacked narrative, and more generally how to figure out what is actually happening in the world. an unsurprisingly tall task. sf sometimes encounters a subculture years after it’s been incubated, and immediately claims and mainstreams it. chinese peptides are a particularly good example: earlier this year, a lot of writng/blogging about peptides attempted to paint it as a sf-exported phenomenon, but it was really a trend that started in the south and midwest, among the bodybuilding community. a 2013 DOJ case even documents an illinois distributor importing them in 2010–11 for the bodybuilding market. sf is ofc capable of homegrown culture (and productive neuroses). last year, nat friedman's plasticlist project spent about $500k over six months testing 296 food products for 18 plastic-associated chemicals. (specifically chemicals like phthalates and bisphenols). i personally believe this kind of citizen science / gonzo testing is only going to become more in-demand as people increasingly care about food provenance/toxins. i think this is why these trends are worth paying attention to even when parts of them look ridiculous. a small group can change what gets tested, funded, packaged, and eventually made easy for everyone else to do. i also don't think the endpoint of the current body-optimization boom is that everyone gets conventionally hotter and starts to look like clavicular. i think people are going to do increasingly specific, strange things to themselves, depending on what they personally think is worth optimizing (an example of this is that people are now working on wearables to achieve the equivalent of a full night’s sleep in four hours). full convo below!