Everyone's smart & hot & no one's impressed

ChatGPT commoditised thinking, Ozempic commoditised beauty, and we lost the monoculture that made either matter.

Something strange is happening to the human body at the precise historical moment when you can ask a machine to explain the categorical imperative while you’re on the toilet and receive a competent answer in under four seconds. At the precise moment when the entire project of human intellectual life has been fed into a statistical engine and ground into a paste that can be extruded in any shape you like, Gen Z has decided, en masse and with an intensity that borders on the devotional, that what really matters is the flesh.

They are going to the gym at rates that would embarrass every generation before them. Ozempic has achieved a cultural penetration usually reserved for religions and sexually transmitted diseases. Plastic surgery numbers are at all-time highs, and not among the rich demographics you’d expect, but the young and the ordinary and the desperately, frantically normal. On TikTok, which has replaced the public square in the same way that a tumour replaces an organ, teenage boys discuss mewing and canthal tilts and bonesmashing with the fervour and jargon-density that’s only summoned when 2 intellectuals argue their idea is 0.1% different than their opponent’s. Look ma, the boys are arguing about jawlines, and bone-smashing. My jaw, though unsmashed, has been metaphorically while my tongue holds back from stupidly asking - how the fuck did we get here?

Why now

The why now is the part that interests me. You could attribute the whole thing to vanity and be done with it. Every generation discovers the mirror, every generation finds new ways to be tedious about their own reflection and hide the mirror in their attics. Except that vanity doesn’t explain the fervour and it doesn’t explain the timing, which coincides so neatly with two other developments that the coincidence starts to feel structural rather than accidental.

RIP monoculture

The first development is the death of the monoculture, which has been diagnosed so many times by so many essayists that diagnosing it has itself become a kind of monoculture, a shared experience in an era supposedly devoid of them. The New Yorker published a piece called “The Summer of Nothing” which argued that there is no longer a cultural event that everyone participates in, no album, no show, no discourse, just an infinite micro-publics each with their own canon and their own status games and their own absolutely ironclad conviction that their particular island is the mainland. TikTok’s algorithm has shattered collective attention into ten million shards and then ground each shard into a finer powder and then blown the powder into the wind.

Every niche is large enough to be a city and too small to be a civilisation (of course, barring MAGA and Taylor Swift). The shared references that once allowed strangers to recognise each other as members of the same tribe have largely evaporated, which means that the entire apparatus of cultural signalling — the books you’ve read, the films you’ve seen, the opinions you hold — has become hopelessly, irretrievably noisy. There are too many signals and the result is that intellectual and aesthetic identity, the kind that used to be legible across a room, now only works within your particular micro-public, which defeats the entire purpose.

Free ideas

The second development, which is related to the first in ways that are either obvious or subtle depending on how much credit you want to give me, is that ideas became free. Not cheap. Free. Gratis. Libre. Available at a speed and scale that makes the Gutenberg revolution look like a minor efficiency improvement of the pamphlet industry. You used to have to read Nietzsche to have an opinion on Nietzsche, which meant reading Nietzsche, which meant sitting with prose that was deliberately, almost sadistically difficult, for months, and failing, and going back, and failing differently, until something calcified in you that you could reasonably call a worldview. The people who read Nietzsche, thus, – either in earnest or out of sunk cost fallacy – would quote Nietzsche all the time. Just the fact that you read it and engaged with it and had a critical opinion on it meant you went to the library and read its dusty pages and cursed your own stupidity and tried to decipher this text that was harder to decode that ancient hieroglyphs.

That friction was the entire point. It was the cost that made the signal valuable, in the same way that a degree used to signal not just knowledge but the willingness to endure four years of tedium in its pursuit. The friction is gone. You can ask ChatGPT to summarise the Ubermensch and it will do so in the time it takes to blink; you can ask it to explain the will to power like you’re five years old and it will do that too, without judgement, because the machine has no concept of what it means to have earned an idea, any more than a photocopier understands the book it’s reproducing.

But even the lax shameful act of typing a question into a box requires a shred of curiosity, a faint muscle-memory of intellectual initiative, and so naturally we have moved past it.

You don’t even have to remember the right thing to say.

Meta’s smart glasses will feed you context in real time at a dinner party, so you can nod along to a conversation about Foucault without ever having opened Foucault. Cluely’s founder used the app on dates, its whispered what to say, what reference to drop, which opinion to perform.

“Cluely’s mainstream breakthrough was a viral ad that showed Roy using a pair of speculative Cluely-enabled glasses on a blind date. His date asks how old he is; Cluely tells him to say he’s thirty. When the date starts going badly, Cluely pulls up her amateur painting of a tulip from the internet and tells him to compliment her art. “You’re such an unbelievably talented artist. Do you think you could just give me one chance to show you I can make this work?” The video launched alongside a manifesto, which was seemingly churned out by AI:

“We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again. It sees your screen. Hears your audio. Feeds you answers in real time. . . . Why memorize facts, write code, research _anything_—when a model can do it in seconds? The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward _leverage._

The future they seem to envisage is one in which people don’t really do anything at all, except follow the instructions given to them by machines.”

- Sam Kriss, Child’s Play

I find it genuinely difficult to decide whether this is the most dystopian thing I’ve ever heard or simply the logical endpoint of a process that began when the first human being rehearsed a compliment in front of a mirror. Roy Lee, who built the thing, called reputation “a thing of the past,” which is the kind of statement that is either idiotic or prophetic. If we learn anything from history, the two can be true at the same time.

So here we are.

Ideas are free. Culture is fragmented. Opinions are costumes you change between rooms. You know what you’re going to say on the date and you know what you’re going to say in the group chat and neither version is more or less true than the other because the concept of a true opinion has become structurally incoherent when your opinion can be replaced in thirty seconds by a better one generated by a machine that has read everything ever written and understood none of it.

The much-discussed, much-mocked figure of our culture, The performative man, emerged because the spiritual cost of performing authenticity dropped to zero, and in an economy of signals, anything that’s free is worthless.

We’ve gone post-discourse offline, which is not the same as post-opinion. Everyone still has opinions, in the same way that everyone still has a navel, but the opinions have become ornamental in the social sense of helping you navigate a party without embarrassing yourself. You don’t wanna have discourse, not an amicable one anyway. You’d either agree away or fight to make a point about who you are. Everyone assesses the ROI of an argument before engaging and almost nobody engages because the return is nil and the opinion wasn’t really yours anyway, it was suggested by a feed and reinforced by a bubble and could be swapped out by tomorrow’s feed without your noticing.

We are severed from ourselves not just at work, where performance has always been the price of entry, but at house parties and on dates and in front of our families, which is new, or at least more.

And so, the body.

The body is stupid and slow and cannot be prompted. It is sixty percent water and one hundred percent indifferent to your ambitions. It demands eight hours of unconsciousness every day – a third of your life surrendered to a process neuroscience still cannot fully explain – and if you refuse, it will hallucinate on your behalf. It requires you to consume the dead flesh of other organisms (yes even spinach is dead flesh for it grew and lived) multiple times daily, then spends four to six hours dissolving it in acid, a process so energy-intensive that your body diverts blood from your brain to do it, making you literally stupider after lunch. Your heart has beaten billions of times by the time you die and never once asked for a performance review. Your skeleton replaces itself every ten years. You are not the same body that started reading this sentence, not really, and yet you are still the same body that ate too much last Thursday. The body is said to be a temple but feels more like an inheritance you can’t liquidate. It takes months to change and years to master and will betray every lie you’ve told about your discipline within five seconds of removing your shirt.

When intellectual signals became cheap, opaque, and non-universal - the only universal connection that remains with the fellow man is that of our DNA, which has remained largely unchanged relative to civilisation.

You might be sitting with a right-winger in utter silence but your necks move at the sight of a beautiful woman just the same.

I write this as a fat man, which gives me the clarity of the excluded, the cold objectivity of someone looking through the restaurant window; when I see a person in good shape I don’t merely find them attractive, I experience something closer to awe. Their body is the visible residue of months or years of showing up to a place they did not want to be and doing something they did not want to do. In a world where every other signal of character has been counterfeited and debased, the disciplined body remains stubbornly, almost defiantly expensive. You cannot prompt your way to a six-pack. You cannot summarise your way through a marathon.

Or can you.

Ozempic does to the body exactly what ChatGPT did to ideas. It collapses the cost, it eliminates the friction, it gets you to the destination while abolishing the journey, and in doing so it destroys the signal that made the destination worth reaching. If being in shape once proved discipline, Ozempic proves only that you had a prescription, which proves only that you had insurance, which proves only that you had a job. It also proves you had the agency to get to the destination using all the resources you could when you finally gave up on trying to do it with willpower.

The injection does for your waistline what the chatbot does for your conversation: it produces the output while gutting the process that gave the output meaning. What I find most revealing about the current moment, *nobody cares*. Or rather, everyone cares in the abstract and nobody cares in practice, because our every instinct has been shaped by optimisation. If there is a hiking trail through a protected forest leading to a summit, he will happily hire gunmen and an armoured truck to bulldoze a road through the woods, because the summit is the only legible output, the summit is what gets photographed, the summit is what gets posted.

As a response, Strava screenshots and marathon finish-line photos have metastasised across every timeline; the flex has shifted, subtly but decisively, from “I am fit” to “I earned this,” which is a defensive move, a pre-emptive strike against the suspicion that you didn’t earn it, that you Ozempicked your way there, that your body, like your opinions and your taste and your dinner-party Foucault, is just another performance with the seams showing.

People are now signalling effort alongside achievement because they sense, correctly, that achievement alone has been debased. And naturally that signalling of effort will itself become a performance, will itself be counterfeited, will itself require a new and more expensive proof, and the cycle will only move forward like the hands of a clock.

Hotness is the last survivor of shared values when monoculture dies

You cannot agree with anyone on anything except for attraction to the physical body an agreement we’re only a part of because our biology refuses to change.

I don’t know where this ends. Perhaps the next scarce signal will be something even harder to counterfeit, but I suspect that whatever it is, someone will find a way to automate it, and then someone will find a way to fake having done it the hard way, and then we’ll need a new signal, and on and on, an infinite regress of authenticity and its simulation, until the question of who you actually are, underneath the optimised body and the prompted opinions and the curated taste and the performed effort, becomes not just difficult to answer but structurally meaningless.