The Blackberry Walk

There are two world-changing inventions of this generation, both of which have come about relatively recently: artificial intelligence and Ozempic. To begin to talk about AI would lead this piece in a wholly different direction - discussion about the effects, dangers, and conveniences of AI have become an open wound itched frequently by bloggers and Substackers - so instead today, we'll discus Ozempic and GLP-1s more generally. For years, a dieting drug was the Holy Grail of the pharmaceutical industry. So many other illnesses, all treated with other pharmaceuticals, have obesity as the first and foremost risk factor. Diabetes, of course, is in part caused by spiking your insulin so often your cells tire; heart disease is worsened by fat-clogged arteries; and even cancer - though I'm unsure of the mechanism - is said to be more common with obesity. Mood too and the various mood-related psychological conditions like anxiety and depression are modulated by stress and the oestrogenic properties of swollen fat cells. Being fat will just make your life worse, and lead to far more complicated and expensive health conditions down the line. So why can't people just eat less? There is some truth in this sentiment. You look at the United States, and you see a race so immobile and large that they drive themselves around their Walmarts on mobility scooters, shovelling from the shelves Fruit Loops and Cheetos. This isn't seen in Britain, not really. We have obesity, but not on the same scale as the yanks; and then if you look to the continent, to a country like Greece, you would struggle to find anyone obese on the streets. It isn't as if the people are poorer and can't afford to eat, but rather there's a culture of eating the right kinds of food. Obesity is as much a cultural ailment as it is a personal failing. From the perspective of our Faustian civilisation, however, it is much easier to create a technology which eliminates obesity than to change the culture. Culture is a complex structure, much like an ecosystem; and I think there's a fear of interfering, should some other interest group rise up and break the delicate cultural homeostasis. There was such an potent dialectic within the culture on the topic of obesity even over my lifetime. I remember, even when I was a child in the noughties, seeing beanpole thin women on the telly, all with the same bikini bodies playing by the beach. When was it that changed? Early teens? Maybe Gamergate? It was some time around then when fat-positivity became the big buzzword, and all the Hollywood hetaira extolled the virtues in accepting fatness, chastising those who saw it as a demerit to beauty. To all with eyes to see, this couldn't be taken seriously. I remember seeing all the hot skinny girls being taken out of adverts and replaced with chubbier girls, sometimes attractive, but oftentimes properly overweight and intentionally unattractive, almost to evoke a disgust response to seeing a obese lady in a bikini - a kind of insult to those viewing. Where did that go? When last did you see an advert celebrating fat positivity? It was a silly movement built on foundations of sand, for the nonsense ran contrary to all intuition. But the deathblow? That was Ozempic. Somehow with the coming of Ozempic all the fat-positivity disappeared. The collective thought of our culture, the zeitgeist if you will, is hard to penetrate; but what likely happened was the cartel of rich fat ladies who did their best to convince the world that it didn't matter how obese they were, all of a sudden obtained the power to just not be obese anymore with a few magic injections. And bam, there was no need to peddle this falsehood any longer. The change GLP-1s will make to our society has only just commenced. More so in the States than here in Albion, ordinary people who are by no means obese are taking these wonder drugs to slim down a little bit, sometimes to anorexic degrees. What the GLP-1s do is not burn fat, nor increase metabolism, but rather suppress your appetite. It just makes you less hungry. A result of this, for some who aren't taking proper precautions (which many aren't) is vitamin and mineral deficiencies from lack of food. I understand this is not the intended use-case, but nevertheless suppressing the appetite leads to real dangers. I've heard some report also that this lack of appetite can metastasise into a lack of other kinds of appetite, like a lack a sexual will, or a lack of general ambition or drive. The human body is a complex web of homeostatic forces so complex we should be cautious of fiddling with the dials. These GLP-1s are powerful drugs which disrupt an individual's endocrine system, and they seems to be taken quite willy-nilly. The main drawback for many in the case of Ozempic is that it has to be injected, and for many having to take regular subcutaneous injections is rather unpleasant. Soon that will change. Many GLP-1 compounds using an oral formulation are being frantically tested, the most promising being Eli Lilly's contribution, which, once it has passed human trials, will be a single pill a day to suppress appetite. This is the state of play. What could it mean for society? The primary concern is that of the human will. Call me a reactionary, but with each technological invention I believe mankind becomes weaker. With text messages, we didn't have to plan meetups ahead of time, nor wait for a friend in faith if they were late; with washing machines, we no longer had to do washing by hand; with chainsaws, we no longer needed the strength to fell trees; with the gun, we no longer had to study the blade; with the wheel, we no longer had to haul heavy goods on our backs; and with writing we no longer had to train our memory. The list could go on, and could also become more and more absurd. But looking past the absurdity - after all, I'm here communicating by writing over the internet - you can see how with each innovation man body and his faculties tend a little more to mush. The feebleness and flabbiness of many today - and I include myself amongst their number - is in large part due to the conveniences downstream of technological innovation. We can support an economy of white-collar workers behind desks (for now) because so much toil and hard graft can now be done by machines. In spite of the innumerable ways our lives have been made easier, few technological innovations up to this point have impinged upon the will of man.¹ The will of man seemed to be sacred, a temple in the soul's garden we wouldn't be willing to touch. There's some sense that our will is a pillar of our identity which we'd be willing to die for; our most powerful stories, any shounen anime or a heartfelt war film, lionise and venerate the will of their protagonists as something far greater than ours, something aspirational to pursue. But with GLP-1s, wasn't doesn't train nor harden the will. The easy route out is taken, and the weakness in need of strength training is bypassed. Quickly, we are heading to a future where each feeling of sadness or weakness can be patched over with pills. We'll each carry a little box of pills, one to make us affable, another to concentrate, another to feel love, and another to subdue anger. Whilst medicine seems far from this image now, advances are occurring in peptide based pharmacokinetics, like GLP-1s, as opposed to the more traditional small molecule based APIs. Peptides are far more complicated and tend to affect the endocrine system as opposed to neurones like small-molecules, so the possibilities here to induce more profound changes, as opposed to the generalised nervous effects of small molecules, are endless. A blog I was reading the other day made the rather tactless yet poignant observation. That if you were a youngish girl, and you were overweight, you could by many orders of magnitude improve your dating opportunities by taking Ozempic. You'd likely attract a richer, more driven, more handsome man, and likely live out a happier and wealthier life. Ozempic very much preys upon the concerns of women. For a man to be fat, short of health complications, is rarely so much of an issue for his self-worth and perceived status from peers as it is for a woman. Eating disorders are far more common with women for this reason. But soon, I discovered in conversation with a colleague at work the other day, there'll be a male equivalent. Work has gone into drugs which act as inhibitors for myostatin, a protein which limits the growth of muscles. These myostatin inhibitors are based roughly on genetic abnormalities like those found in Belgian Blue cattle, a monstrosity bred to have a great excess of muscle to the point where sometimes they are unable to sustain their own weight. Though I suspect men won't all become ripped like a body builder - women tend not to find body builders attractive - a smaller and more regulated use of these drugs to attain a kind of well-proportioned Adonis-like male beauty. These drugs won't at all be like steroids. They'll be selective and with a fraction of the health consequences. They'll be like Ozempic, but instead of inhibiting appetite, they will be promoting muscle growth with very little exercise. Today, a large part of male culture is going to the gym, working out, and working on oneself: the gym is where men can work on themselves, as if they were chiselling themselves out of marble by their own will. What if, in the future whether it be near or far, those gains can be replicated exactly with absolutely no work whatsoever? All a man would have to do would be to take some myostatin inhibitors to get ripped with minimal effort, and then taken some GLP-1s to cut the flab, that would be it. This is what dieters today must feel when tempted with these cheat codes. Where is the human will? Where is the strife and overcoming? The question remains then, are we cooked? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. We do appear to be squeezing out every last drop of the will of man, speedrunning our way to Nietzsche's Last Men, who take no achievement in overcoming these very natural challenges we face. But on the flip-side, we may well see people who had been tied down worrying about their body image instead focus their minds on greater things. We may well see an uptick in mountain climbers, as those previously exhausting their energy on their next diet instead set their ambitions upon more noble pursuits. I am no oracle; only time will tell. Like a knife, the morality is with the wielder. Whether these chemicals will be used for good or ill will depend on the ethics, customs and attitudes which grow upon its trellis. What is for certain, however, is that Pandora's Box has once again been opened; there is no forgetting they exist. 1. Castration may well be the only other will-altering medical intervention historically performed, save for more specific conditions like hard drug addiction.