Dialectic Podcast — “Independent Study: Body Futurism by Toby Shorin”

Host: Jackson Dahl
Date: March 15, 2026
Episode Theme: A reading and deep dive into “Body Futurism,” Toby Shorin’s provocative essay on the rise of embodied culture and a new politics of the flesh.

Brief Overview

This episode is a unique experiment for Dialectic: instead of the usual interview, host Jackson Dahl reads and comments on “Body Futurism,” a recent essay by past guest Toby Shorin. The piece outlines a cultural shift from digital, software-driven futurism to a focus on embodied practice and physical presence, mapping societal trends across health, digital attention, politics, community, and selfhood. Dahl presents the essay as both a diagnosis of our moment and an invitation to reconceive how bodies—our own and collectively—form the basis for future politics and meaning.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction — The Embodied Turn in Culture

• [00:00-04:30]
  • Dahl sets the stage: many influential guests are powerful essayists. Today’s experiment is to make an “audiobook for essays.”
  • “As society turns toward the body, a new politics of the flesh is on the brink of eruption.” (Jackson Dahl reading Shorin)
  • Guided grounding exercise introduces the theme: direct awareness of the body and its sensations.

2. The Rise of 'Body Futurism'

• [04:30-11:00]
  • The US is reimagining the self, much like Italian Futurists in the early 20th century.
  • New obsessions: ancestral diets, health tech, trauma discourse, surrogacy, and biometric measurement.
  • Body futurism supersedes the “now tired futurism of software,” drawing pioneers from California’s technoculture.
  • “The embodied turn: Bodies are eating the world.”
    • Wellness—lifting, clubs, mindfulness—are reshaping both daily routines and identities.
    • Shorin contrasts “D2C brands” (Direct-to-Consumer) lifestyle with “D2C practices”: run clubs, sauna events, meditation micro-retreats.
  • Micro-influencers and new micro-academies compete on nervous system literacy and emotional skills.

3. Kinesthetic Media & TikTok’s Impact

• [11:00-18:00]
  • “Every form of media takes a 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 for debating ideas (e.g. diets); TikTok/Reels for enacting and remixing body practices.
  • “Bodies are online and they want your attention.”
  • Concern: social media makes body protocols viral, sometimes for better (mainstreaming trauma practices), sometimes dubious (psychosomatic trends).

4. Charisma, Status, and the Body as Asset

• [18:00-23:00]
  • “Attention is all you need.” Shorin claims this phrase (from the transformer AI paper) also defines the current age.
  • San Francisco AIs on GLP1s; creators flaunt bodies, not just thoughts.
  • Influencer culture: “More and more it is the bodies doing the talking.” (21:00)
    • Examples: Jake and Logan Paul enter boxing, Jonathan B lectures shirtless.
    • Online, “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.”
  • OnlyFans and longevity entrepreneurship as proof the body is now both object and currency.

5. From Software Utopianism to Bio-Utopianism

• [23:00-30:00]
  • Recap of software-induced utopias (crypto, peer-to-peer, digital “spaces”).
  • These “disembodied cloud utopias” are fading, leaving behind a “return of the repressed, the body itself.”
  • Shift tracked in fashion (“Muscle tee and chain has replaced Zuck’s famous hoodie”), wellness products, and quantified self gadgets (Apple Watch, WHOOP).
  • The new imaginary: superhumans, gene editing, longevity cults (e.g. Brian Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement).
  • “Body imaginaries are not just believed, they are physically lived. Protocolism exemplifies the shift from software to the body.”

6. Protocolism and Social Control

• [30:00-36:30]
  • The “protocol”—once a technical standard, now a canonized body practice—rules wellness culture.
  • “Apple Health and WHOOP provide the substrate for various influencer led protocol schemas.”
  • Health protocols create participatory institutions (e.g. 75 Hard on Reddit), automating self-monitoring and peer competition.
  • “Protocolism is the format of social control suited to a world enchanted by body futurism.”
  • The downside: self-chosen protocols demand constant vigilance and reinforce new norms.

7. The Human Potential Movement, Then and Now

• [36:30-42:00]
  • Shorin traces today’s body movements to the 1970s Esalen Institute and Human Potential movement: mystical self-expression meets scientific techniques.
  • “Everything happening now is downstream of Esalen in some way.”
  • Remix culture: “New schools of body thought were born at Big Sur... the seeds of an alternative American folk religion.”
  • Contemporary forms: mixed-modality sauna spaces, ecstatic dances, acupuncture clinics.
  • “From the superhuman bodies of dreaming technologists to the mythopoetic bodies of the new shamans, bodies across America are coming alive.”

8. Body Politics: From Social Sickness to Renewal

• [42:00-49:00]
  • Personal and social bodies shape each other.
    • Medieval “body politic” map replaced by today’s pathologized/traumatized body.
    • Social malaise: “The loneliness epidemic, the toxic food system, the hormonal dysregulation...”
    • Symbol of collapse: “An emaciated social body reminiscent of Egon Schiele’s degenerate fond de chicles self portraits.” (45:20)
  • Institutional breakdown is likened to decomposition—“back into firm, energetic, sensual individual bodies.”
  • Warning: This is not retreat or atomization, but the basic unit for a new collective.

9. Toward an Enlightenment of the Body

• [49:00-54:00]
  • “Bodies do things. When not encumbered with institutional fetters... Bodies are the foundation of what is real and of relationships to one another.”
  • Referencing Spinoza: Joy and vitality arise when “bodies compound together and increase each other's power.”
  • Advocates a wisdom rooted in “the microcosmos of felt experience” and mutual physical attunement.

10. A New Democratic and Sensual Body Politics

• [54:00-59:00]
  • “These are the democratic bodies, these are the new American bodies.”
  • Cautions against fascist body images (homogeneity, heroism), advocating instead for warmth, sensuality, plurality.
  • “Bodies of every hue and caste... at home on the range, at home on the pounding asphalt.”

11. Concluding Reflections: Becoming a Body Futurist

• [59:00-end]
  • “You and your body are the material, the resource at stake in this embodied turn.”
  • Rejecting protocolism-as-remorse; emphasizing “mutual relations of joyous nature” over abstraction.
  • “To be a body futurist, you have to become a body first and foremost.”
  • Encourages the listener to practice phenomenological self-awareness, to become “intimately aware of the most basic phenomenological sensations.”
  • A call to action: build the future not through software abstractions, but through even the “thighs you’re sitting on, the lungs you’re breathing with.”

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Guided Introduction (01:10) — “Begin by imagining a plane of pure light at the top of your head... Are you making subtle movements there as you read, or as you listen?”
• Embodied Turn (09:00) — “Bodies are eating the world... Huberman is the biggest podcaster in the nation.”
• Kinesthetic Media (13:30) — “Twitter is the marketplace of ideas where the IntelligenceSia debates diets. TikTok is the battlefield where body practices clash.”
• Charismatic Economy (21:00) — “More and more it is the bodies doing the talking.”
• Protocolism Defined (34:50) — “Protocolism is the format of social control suited to a world enchanted by body futurism.”
• Lineage from Esalen (38:40) — “Everything happening now is downstream of Esalen in some way... The superhumanism, the Ayahuasca retreats in Marin county.”
• Social Sickness Diagnosis (45:20) — “An emaciated social body reminiscent of Egon Schiele’s degenerate fond de chicles self portraits... All this social sickness, hypochondriac or real, contributes to the atmosphere of political decline.”
• On Decomposition and Renewal (48:00) — “A decomposition back into firm, energetic, sensual individual bodies. This is not walden ponding, nor atomization. The body is not a retreat from political but its basic political unit...”
• Spinoza and Joyous Bodies (52:00) — “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...”
• Democratic Bodies (57:30) — “These are the democratic bodies, these are the new American bodies.”
• Final Call (1:00:30) — “To be a body futurist, you have to become a body first and foremost... Become intimately aware of the most basic phenomenological sensations.”

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------|-------------------| | Introduction & Framing | 00:00–04:30 | | The Embodied Turn & Culture Shift | 04:30–11:00 | | Kinesthetic Media & TikTok's Role | 11:00–18:00 | | Attention Economy & The Body as Asset | 18:00–23:00 | | Bio-Utopianism vs Software Utopianism | 23:00–30:00 | | Protocolism & Health Culture | 30:00–36:30 | | Human Potential Movement Lineage | 36:30–42:00 | | Body Politics & Social Sickness | 42:00–49:00 | | Enlightenment of the Body | 49:00–54:00 | | Democratic & Sensual New Bodies | 54:00–59:00 | | Becoming a Body Futurist – Call to Action | 59:00–end |

Tone and Language

The episode retains Toby Shorin’s rich, evocative style—blending art historical references, Silicon Valley argot, and philosophical reflection—with Jackson Dahl’s calm, attentive delivery. The language fluidly shifts from cultural diagnosis to poetic invocation, always foregrounding direct experience.

Summary

Jackson Dahl’s reading of Toby Shorin’s “Body Futurism” is a compelling tour of our evolving relationship to the body amidst technological exhaustion and institutional decay. The essay asserts that our current age is defined less by digital abstraction and more by embodied practice, kinesthetic communities, and the search for new forms of social and political life rooted in sensory engagement and bodily presence. It tracks the migration of utopian energies from software to flesh, argues for the opportunities and pitfalls of this shift (protocolism, social media contagion, charisma culture), and ends by urging listeners to anchor themselves in direct, joyous bodily relationship—the real grounds for a revitalized future.

Listen if you’re interested in:

• The intersection of wellness culture, tech, and social media
• How embodied practices are reshaping politics and social forms
• Rich philosophical and cultural commentary with actionable personal insights

Find the full essay at writing.tobyshorin.com/bodyfuturism