Legends tell of a place beyond the feed. They say if you scroll far enough, you’ll reach that Elysian land. Your thumb will drag across the glass and hit the top. Nothing new will appear. The timeline will end. You will have reached the terminus of the algorithm. Free. At this peak, ascension awaits.
Clavicular, real name Braden Peters, is a 20-year-old looksmaxxer. Don’t get caught up in jargon. Don’t bother with “foid.” Ignore that “cortisol” is involved. A looksmaxxer, any maxxer, is an individual who’s dedicated their life to the pursuit of a single extreme. In Clavicular’s case, it’s physical attractiveness. He’s quite handsome in a boy-bandish “good-looking guy at the mall” sort of way. You could say his methods are nothing new. People have whitened their faces with lead and ingested tapeworms in pursuit of beauty. But forget beauty. Beauty is the medium, not the message. Clavicular is after something else.
Masculinity has always sought itself at the extremes. Old-world masculinity told men to venture forth into uncharted lands, to conquer the world. First came the frontier. Then came the markets. What remains to young men today? The digital image. Unlike stationary streamers with setups and rigs, Clavicular is known to film outside, where he “mogs” people. In other words, he looks better than the person in the frame with him. The poor mogged individual, once pulled into the borders of Clavicular’s rectangular universe, is reduced to an inferior collection of pixels. This is Clavicular’s project: to flatten his world into the 2D of “screen” and to physically transmute his flesh into “internet.” It’s humming along. Don’t believe me? Put down your phone. Notice how Clavicular ceases to exist?
Clavicular, though he claims to know the precise measurements of several of his bones and his height and weight down to the decimals, has nothing but contempt for the human body; its wild urges and genetic stubbornness. While the country was in the throes of a panic over transgender people, Clavicular was, according to him, smashing his face with hammers so his bones would grow back sharper and doing meth to suppress his appetite. He claims he is infertile from testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) starting when he was 14. He’s not one of those muscular gym rats preaching healthy habits. That’s not Clavicular’s gospel. Self-harm is on the table. It’s not about longevity, or strength. It’s not even about looking appealing to women. “It’s a big time saver,” he told The New York Times, about not having sex.
It would be cleaner, easier to situate Clavicular in the context of male internet radicalization, as “Elliot Rodgers if he had access to gender-affirming care.” This framework only gets us so far. True, the looksmaxxer has roots in the manosphere. The lingo can be traced to incel forums. Clavicular has appeared beside the far-right, white nationalist livestreamer, Nick Fuentes. This makes people assume they know what Clavicular’s political views will be. Yet, on transgender people: Totally fine. Just another person to mog. On deciding between Gavin Newsom or JD Vance: Newsom. Vance has a recessed side profile. “Subhuman.” The maxxer is an unhinged monotheist. There is one, count it, one god.
So too might it be satisfying to place Clavicular in a tradition of homoerotic narcissism. He’s after all performing for a decidedly male gaze. Inasmuch as caring about your appearance is kind of gay, so, too, is Clavicular kind of gay. But it’s homosocial intensity without the prospect of fucking. It’s the aesthetic of the possibility of fucking. The image of its potential. Clavicular is only interested in the image of men, in the image of himself beside an image of a man, in the image of himself triumphing over another image. An image is, after all, a democratic thing, available to anyone with eyes.
On the surface, he appears as but the latest in a long line of ephemeral internet curios. Briefly mined for commentary, destined to disappear when the feed refreshes. He appears this way because that is what he is. That is all he is. Clavicular is an appearance. There’s no him under the surface. Knights had their maidens. Voyageurs, their king. Clavicular, the algorithm. It tells him what to do, what to be. His bones. His fat. His breakfast, lunch, and dinner. His profession. His thoughts. All organized by metrics. Data. You can’t say it isn’t a structured life. In a way, it’s monastic. Simple. Brutal. A flat world. Flat as the glass on your phone. Clavicular doesn’t go upstairs. He “second-floormaxxes.”
“It’s a radically submissive movement. Or perhaps that’s how it’s always been. Masculinity has always had a liege.”
Anyone who’s spent a significant amount of time online is likely familiar with the nihilism it inspires. We’re hooked on it. It’s frying our attention spans. It makes us feel worse about ourselves, about the world. It tempts us: Look at this. Be jealous. Buy this. Now look at this. Turned on? Follow. Subscribe. One side tells us to fight the devil. Go offline, touch grass, read books. On the other side is Clavicular. He emerges from a budding online apocalypticist movement that extolls the virtues of total, physical capitulation to the internet.
I confess I find some sympathy for him here. We’re all on the same spectrum as Clavicular. He’s simply decided to place himself at its furthest edge. He’s far from the first person to believe there are rewards on the other side of extreme behavior. Social media is a hierarchy of attention. You will always know where you stand within it. There are KPIs. Given all the attention he’s getting, he’s not totally off the mark.
To that end, every ounce of Clavicular’s body has been shaped and sculpted by the machine. His mind is much the same. You can’t say he hasn’t sacrificed, that he hasn’t left it all at the digital altar. In this sense, there’s not much distance between Clavicular and the pornmaxxing gooners, the men who’ve bodily submitted themselves to worship of the fleshless internet image: husks, gone limp in the stream. It’s a paradox of hyper-online masculinity in 2026. It’s a radically submissive movement. Or perhaps that’s how it’s always been. Masculinity has always had a liege.
“Ascend,” Clavicular says. It’s an old idea, one of our oldest, delivered in the pill capsule of fad: through extreme devotion, you can transcend this body. Clavicular sure makes it look new, what with its impenetrable internet slang and its youthful trappings. But the Dead Sea Scrolls, a social media feed is not. I’ve little doubt that soon, and within our lifetimes, we will scroll up, and the world will refresh, and Clavicular will disappear. Where will he go? Where do any of these internet characters go once the articles go up and the novelty vanishes?
Only the almighty algorithm knows.
Clavicular is a weirdo. Why doesn't he call himself Femur or Skull, as the clavicle is the most easily fractured bone in the body. I've read a bit about him since you posted an article last week and he's top notch strange.
insanely good concept for a post/article