Food-hacks. Supplements. Fad diets. Nootropics. In the expansive landscape of online marketing campaigns, social media, and algorithms, it feels like half of all that you read or hear online boasts some form of posthuman biological optimization. These products promise a gambit of health benefits and biological improvements to the human body. Some claim to help your brain function at a faster speed or capacity. Some claim to regulate your gut—to make your input and output as efficient as a hybrid automobile.

In all of this, there is a common appeal to self-betterment—a tug at the universal belief that we could be smarter, stronger, less anxious, with just a little help from technological innovation.

But, these products, and their claims, have dipped into the realm of the uncanny. In the promises they offer, there is a darkness lying below the surface—a sense of existential dread and mortal panic.

Dr. Jeremy Tirrel has been examining this phenomenon. In his upcoming book, which is tentatively titled: Strange Consumptions: the Gothic Rhetorics of Nutrition, he and Dr. Kate Maddalena look at the relationship between humanity’s nutritional discourse and the weird, eerie rhetoric that surrounds it.

By utilizing a Gothic lens, they hope to illustrate how these adverts prey on our discomforts and anxieties, working to make us desperate for scientific intervention.