alt Hacker NewsThis article is an anecdote extrapolated to something bigger: A type of lazy writing where the writer has a single social experience with a group of weird people and then writes about it like it’s the common experience in a place.
The writer went to SF for a few days and went to one party where a group of friends were into peptides. From the article, they were also particularly terrible people. Just read this quote:
> “They change your personality, it’s literally made me less shallow knowing that we can just looksmax you.” “Ugliness is just a choice now.” “I shot up a twink with ozempic who did not need to lose any weight.”
I can’t believe I have to say this, but if someone is bragging to you about injecting weight loss drugs into another person who shouldn’t be taking weight loss drugs, your response shouldn’t be “lol how quirky”. You should recognize that they are a bad person. In my experience the drug enthusiasts who brag about getting other people started on their drugs are bad news, but the ones who brag about introducing to their drugs to people who clearly should not be taking those drugs are the worst variety.
These people always exist. Go back a few years and they might be talking about nootropics or “research chemical” drugs that are analogs of methamphetamine or MDMA. Go back further and they might be bragging about doing steroids and importing testosterone from gray market sources. Go back before that and they’d be bragging about all the Modafinil they’re taking.
The thing about drug user bubbles like this is that when you’re talking to them you’d be convinced that everyone is doing what they’re doing: Taking the latest on-trend drugs in large amounts and one-upping each other on dose, stories, or drug-fueled adventures.
What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized. The party doesn’t last forever and the mindset of being able to endlessly adjust your body and/or your mood with drugs starts to turn dark after the early years where hubris makes users feel like they’ve found the secret to better living through chemistry.
If you’ve encountered groups like this you’ve also seen how the “everyone is doing it” mentality becomes embedded in their minds. That doesn’t mean everyone is importing various Chinese peptides and injecting them for “looksmaxxing” and whatever these people were on about about the “peptide party”. These are just garden variety young drug users riding the latest trend
EDIT: I replaced one instance of the word ‘journalism’ with ‘writing’ because it was becoming a pedantic distraction in the comments.
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> What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized.
Lots of people from the 2010-ish era of "aesthetics" and steroids are having heart issues now in their 30s (or earlier). Pretty sad to see.
To me it's fairly clear where this comes from: ambitious people convinced they've figured out some secret cheat code that no-one else has. I'm yet to see that path end well for anyone.
> You should recognize that they are a bad person
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit but I don't really think they're bad people. Young, arrogant, stupid, unaware of the consequences of what they're doing sure... but I don't think it comes from a malicious place where they're intentionally trying to hurt others.
Your criticism is entirely reasonable despite the pedantry. Yes, these people are bad people, but I think that could be the point here. Not to mention, this is just another chapter in SF's long history of being the vanguard of drug experimentation.
You may enjoy Didion's 1967 Slouching towards Bethlehem[1], a similarly anecdotal (and substantially better-written) piece about the drug scene in SF's Summer of Love.
They did point out, with numbers, that the SF scene is a lot smaller than would ordinarily be expected. Additionally this is the party scene which is a subset of the general tech scene. These people have more time and money to spare than those who are busy working but they do form a bit of a nexus that channels information. The blog post seems to go to great lengths not to pretend that it is something that it isn’t.
I think it’s important to understand that AI, even at its current level, is revolutionary as are cheap Chinese peptides. This isn’t a crypto bubble, both of these will be world changing. I’ve been doing AI for decades and peptides for 5 years (treating an actual medical condition) so I was in this space before it was cool, happy SF finally caught up.
This is a blog post, not journalism as such. It's someone humorously recounting their own personal experience. They have no responsibility to contextualize anything for you.
The whole thing read to me like:
"Let me tell you about the weird people in my social circle I've chosen to write about ... aren't they weird? Now I'm going to draw massive conclusions about everyone in the Bay Area based on the extremely weird group (that I self-selected)."
Well said. This is better written and more sensible than the article itself.
>Go back a few years and they might be talking about nootropics or “research chemical” drugs that are analogs of methamphetamine or MDMA. Go back further and they might be bragging about doing steroids and importing testosterone from gray market sources. Go back before that and they’d be bragging about all the Modafinil they’re taking.
The peptides and nootropics are the mildest things on the list, and yet here being compared to illegal stimulants and steroids? Those are not the same crowds at all.
It's not journalism though is it, it's just someone's blog where they can tell any story they want, as has been the entire history of story telling. With that out of the way the rest of your post is just flanneling.
JFC, that twink thing is freaking me out. My ex, objectively hot and already too thin due to a gallbladder problem, kept bugging me to get her various GLP-1 drugs and we had screaming arguments about how her drug abuse was going to kill her (recreational ketamine, GHB, cocaine, marijuana, whatever peptide stupidity her friends just read about, probably a few I'm forgetting). Fast forward and she's not my problem anymore. I have no idea what's she's on now, but I fully expect to get a call about her having ODed.
You're claiming laziness because a writer gives explicit testimony to what he saw, heard and thought, without sufficient moralizing layered over the top about how "drugs are bad m'kaay?" I wish more writing was this lazy.
I'm inclined to agree.
But...
I'm also inclined to believe we are not the cool people being invited to these circles :)
Looking at what has happened with wegovy etc, it doesn't seem impossible.
I know you edited your post, but I'm actually taken aback by people trying to argue it's a blog, not "journalism". I see no real difference between this and some of the most celebrated pieces of gonzo journalism.
However, this cuts both ways. This format is how we get some of the most interesting pieces of reporting about culture and counterculture. It's someone who went to some parties or worked for some companies. What you refer to as laziness is what makes it valuable: it recounts specific experiences instead of trying to speak in generalities. And it's descriptive rather than moralizing.
In the same vein, some of the most powerful exposes about neo-Nazi movements are just raw accounts of what's going on inside, without the author constantly repeating "and by the way, Nazism is bad, these people are all bad, and here are some statistics".
The SF Bay Area culture is probably not a thing, but there are some pretty awful subcultures within it, and many of them revolve around performance-enhancing drugs and rationalism-as-a-justification-for-bad-things (Zizians, longtermism, etc). I think we should own it.
I don't think that's the way you're supposed to read it? I think you're supposed to read it as, the trendy extremes tell you something about a place, even if the details are silly and ephemeral. People with no filter, no shame, no interest in correctness or consequences, and no pole star except trends are like a cartoon guide to the trends and the mentality driving them.
I think the author would agree with most of what you wrote.