Grist #1
It’s pierced nipple prosthetics all the way down.
Also: AI and the attachment economy; bootlicking techno-oligarchs; replaceable bodies; Alex Honnold, geopolitics and Chinese peptides; and ben ming nian
I am not a weekly writing girlie, as you probably have ascertained by now. But while I continue to work on something juicier, please enjoy issue #1 of Grist, my listicle (gristicle) concept doc of what’s rattling around in my brain. It may signal some of what’s to come. Certainly it’s keeping the gears lubed.
“The Discourse”
The Red Carpet’s Body Mods by Emily Kirkpatrick for i-D
I was thrilled, nay, titillated, to see Chappelle Roan’s red carpet dress at <checks notes> the Grammy’s. While there was a brief 3-month stint in my undergrad years when I thought I wanted to “go into fashion,” I am by no means a fashion writer and always appreciate Emily’s hilarious and trenchant takes.
I still am not able to discern whether Chappelle Roan has actual pierced nipples beneath the flesh prosthetics her stylist pushed the jewelry through, but that would add another layer of intrigue for me. The ongoing celebrity obsession with the artificial body is such an uncanny pleasure. It makes me feel pretty certain that even they are feeling unmoored from the most intimate reality of their own bodies. Celebrities, they’re just like us!
The lines have been drawn. Silicon Valley must decide which side it’s on by Brian Merchant
The deafening silence of the biggest tech companies in the face of Minneapolis is a harrowing reminder that Google’s infamous “don’t be evil” mandate was always the most insulting and bullshit fantasy. But maybe you should just ask Claude about it. Can we also please talk about how fucking good the pub name “Blood in the Machine” is???
The Attachment Economy Is Here. We’re Not Ready by Center for Humane Technology
Using the term “AI” as a catchall is kind of like criticizing electricity—we need to be more specific in our critiques. This is a great place to start teasing some of those ideas out. I suspect we will experience much less a clear shift from the “attention economy” to the “attachment economy” than a layering of the two to form something truly inescapable, but that’s only if the assholes mentioned above have a say. Dr. Zak Stein’s guiding principle is also much better than “don’t be evil”:
“If a technology interfaces with your attachment system, it should improve the quality of your attachments rather than degrade the quality of your attachments with humans.”
Who Gets To Be Chinese Now? by Faith Xue
It’s not that this is the most affecting piece of writing about the “You’ve met me at a very Chinese time of my life” trend, but it clearly maps the territory of one side of the argument. “Chinese culture” is apparently beginning to get its time in the Western sun.
As a half-Chinese, half-Euro mutt American I have many mixed (har) feelings about this. The idea that someone might look at me in my Adidas tang jacket and read me as just another white person hopping on the nouveau-Chinoiserie bandwagon instead of another Asian person alienated from their culture is physically painful. But on the whole it is exciting for me to suddenly have much easier access to a tiny part of my heritage that I’ve struggled to connect with for years.1
It’s hard not to see all this and think of Japan and America’s voracious and selective appetite for bite-sized and decontextualized pieces of Japanese culture from the ‘80s to now. (I took Japanese from 6th to 12th grade as a sick “close enough” proxy to Cantonese, and also because I’m a fucking weeb, so take it from me.)
My personal headcanon is that this whole trend is just a setpiece in a broader geopolitical battle between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China for Western affinity. Why else would Taiwan be open to Netflix orchestrating Alex Honnold’s Taipei 101 buildering livestream?2
Related to all of the above, Jasmine Sun’s excellent reporting on Chinese peptides, both on the NYTimes and her Substack.
I was born and raised in the Bay Area, and ever since moving to the fertility-cult-for-white-people that is Ojai, I have ached to go back home. This cringey line about San Francisco from Jasmine’s NYT article evokes twin, love-hate feelings of disgust and longing for me, like the sisters Laura and Susannah in The Book of Love:
Gray-market peptides have flooded some corners of the tech scene recently, showing up in hacker houses, start-up offices and even “peptide raves” sponsored by suppliers. One recent event at Frontier Tower in San Francisco featured a mix-your-own peptides workshop, a D.J. playing techno with chemistry structures projected in the background and a dress code calling for “crazy futuristic cyberpunk attire.”
I have a friend in biomaterials who got an “exclusive tour” of Frontier Tower not too long ago and said it was more like a poorly run frat house than a biolab, so this tracks. SF is so fucking embarrassing and I miss it all the time.
Books
Late to the literary game as always, but Kelly Link’s The Book of Love was the haunting delight I needed after slogging through pop-sci nonfiction.
This is kind of perfect for people who love Stephen King but are also extremely tired of Stephen King. Can’t recommend enough, even though it left me very hungry for more after. (Apt, it turns out.)
I couldn’t understand why it took me weeks to get through a chapter of Mary Roach’s book Replaceable You: Adventures In Human Anatomy before I realized how absolutely boring it was.
This was basically a lot of “gee whiz” reporting on shit that ranges from pretty fascinating to downright abhorrent, and to get very little back from Roach beyond “well isn’t that neat” was sort of impossible to bear. But I’m glad she had a good time looking up that Georgian plastic surgeon who replaced a man’s penis with his middle finger.
TV
More Ahh! Real Housewives! for me.
After my first-time viewing of Vanderpump Rules last year and whirlwind entry into the Bravo universe, I zipped through The Valley and my first Real Housewives franchise, Salt Lake City within a couple months. I felt I was done after that. But per cajoling from friends, and despite beginning to get headaches from the constant yelling, I’ve just started Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
This has me hungry for a Baron Harkonnen instead of a Peter Thiel. Give me a villain who really looks like they’re living well off their blood money.
It’s rough airdropping into the 2010 of it all, but I appreciate how honest the women were at the time about their Faustian bargains: You will be wealthy and well-connected enough to eat the finest foods in existence but you will ask only for 2 shrimps so you can look skinny in Vegas. This has me hungry for a Baron Harkonnen instead of a Peter Thiel. Give me a villain who really looks like they’re living well off their blood money.
Internet K-Holes
It’s all related: Bryan Johnson and his PE-backed quest for immortality.
The boys be biohackin’! This is the subject of a future piece, and in my cursory research I found myself tickled by this Wikipedia sentence: “Johnson follows an entirely plant-based diet aside from consuming collagen peptides.” When clicking through to the source, I learned that, according to his own company’s statistics, he is also ranked “Top 1% Nighttime Erections.” More to come, don’t you worry.
It’s my ben ming nian 本命年, bitches, and I am not stoked!
Unfortunately the last unfinished zone of my house is directly south, but hopefully General Wen Zhe will forgive me for decorating. I don’t feel great about bringing the veneration of military leaders into my cultural healing journey, but maybe he’ll appreciate a conversation/reading nook instead of the junk pile it currently is.
How about you all? What’s been on your minds? Did I miss anything major these past few weeks? And if you see any biohacking or Bryan Johnson-related content that I simply must see, please drop me a line!
This is all still distinct from my own family’s culture and heritage, though. They immigrated to Hong Kong from the mainland in 1944, which has its own distinct set of politics, styles, languages and dialects. Hearing people refer to Mandarin as “Chinese” fucking kills me. Still sorta wish I’d gone to Chinese school with my friends though, even if it wasn’t Cantonese.
Buildering is term of art for climbing buildings, derived somewhat derogatorily from “bouldering.” I don’t personally consider it a form of “rock” climbing for obvious reasons. I also find it quite boring. But Honnold is a friend of a friend and he is very nice and cool, I just wish he would’ve negotiated rather more than $500,000 for the stunt, which incidentally is equivalent to the amount Netflix’s execs found in their pockets after their pants went through the laundry.
Love this format!!! So fun to get a sneak peek at what’s percolating behind the scenes ❤️
I really love reading your writing. Feels like having a couch convo with a friend. This listicle style was fun! Also I want a behind the scenes of the nipple prosthetic because I am FASCINATED. Also could go on a deep dive rabbit hole of this peptide shenanigans myself. Thanks for keeping us entertained!