The Tyranny of the Optimized Gaze: Deconstructing the Colonial Violence of Andrew Huberman's 'Optimal Blinking Protocol'

Before we commence this critical intervention, I wish to acknowledge that I am writing from the unceded ancestral lands of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. This acknowledgment is a necessary, albeit insufficient, step towards interrogating the ongoing logics of settler colonialism, which manifest not only in the dispossession of land but also in the dispossession of our own embodied knowledges and autonomic bodily processes.

It has come to the attention of this department that a new modality of biopolitical control, cloaked in the benevolent language of 'wellness' and 'optimization,' has insidiously penetrated the social sphere. I am referring to the so-called 'Optimal Blinking Protocol' (OBP) recently canonized and disseminated by Stanford neuroscientist and podcast host Andrew Huberman. This protocol, which prescribes a specific frequency, duration, and force for blinking to 'enhance focus' and 'reduce eye strain,' is not a neutral scientific advisory. Rather, it is a violent imposition of a neuronormative, patriarchal framework upon the fluid, deeply personal ecosystem of our ocular function. It is a new frontier of colonial extraction, mining our very synapses for capitalist productivity.

The OBP functions as a tool of Foucauldian biopower, demanding that the subject internalize a disciplinary gaze and perform constant self-surveillance. The 'correct' way to blink, as defined by Huberman’s masculinist metrics, privileges a steady, unwavering gaze—a gaze historically associated with the Western male observer, the conqueror, the cataloger of the 'other.' What of those whose blinking patterns are non-normative? The rapid blinker, the eye-flutterer, the long-stare holder—these are not suboptimal subjects in need of correction. They are expressions of neurodivergent resistance, somatic dialects articulating a refusal to conform to the relentless cadence of late-stage capitalism. To pathologize these variations is to engage in a profound act of ocular ableism.

This isn't merely theoretical. We are already seeing the material consequences of this oppressive paradigm. Anecdotal reports from allied collectives indicate the emergence of 'Blink Rate Assessment Microaggressions' (BRAMs) in professional and academic spaces. Individuals are being subtly shamed for 'erratic' or 'unfocused' blinking during Zoom meetings, their somatic autonomy policed through the cold lens of corporate surveillance technology. The OBP provides a pseudoscientific justification for this new axis of discrimination, creating a hierarchy of bodies based on their adherence to a manufactured ocular ideal. It is a quiet violence, a micro-aggression that compounds the epistemic harms already faced by marginalized bodies.

Therefore, we must demand immediate institutional action. It is no longer sufficient to simply 'be aware.' We call for the immediate establishment of a university-wide 'Committee for Ocular Justice and Somatic Liberation' (COJSL) to audit all wellness recommendations for embedded kyriarchal biases. We further demand the creation of 'Blink-Inclusive Zones' (BIZs)—safe spaces where individuals can engage in un-protocolized, spontaneous blinking without fear of judgment or neuronormative correction. Our bodies, and the beautifully diverse ways they move, see, and exist, are not protocols to be optimized. They are sites of liberation. We will not allow the wellness-industrial complex to colonize our corneas.