Maxx-ed out

"Lethalitymaxxing", Clavicular, and the adolescent self-loathing of the -maxxing movement.

Donutmaxxing.

“Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.” No, not a 15-year-old narrating their Call of Duty stream, but a recent tweet by the US government’s Department of War, sent a couple of weeks before it joined Israel in launching this week’s massive bombardment of Iran, which has reportedly killed hundreds of civilians.

In case you’re late, chat, we’re all maxxing now. If you’re not frictionmaxxing, you’re low-key jestermaxxing. Maybe you’re fibremaxxing, or moneymaxxing; not enough of us are booksmaxxing. The slaymaxxing chads are Guccimaxxing; the betas are nutmaxxing. (NSFW warning and an apology for that last one.) You get the point. The internet’s favourite suffix is everywhere, to the point that the world’s largest superpower — the one indiscriminately targeting boats with drone strikes, and dropping cruise missiles on kids at primary school — is now using it to joke about killing people more efficiently.

Maxxing, if you’ve been too busy touching grass to notice (OK, enough buzzwords), just means “maximising”. The phrase originates in gaming — specifically, the practice of obsessively focusing on one stat or strategy to gain a competitive advantage — but has exploded on Tiktok and X in the last few years through the mainstreaming of incel culture. Specifically, the phrase has broken through via looksmaxxing, an extreme cult of insecure men who claim that life is a Darwinian dystopia in which everything from sexual success to social status is dictated by physical attractiveness, as defined by a dysmorphic obsession with jaw-line widths and “PSL ratios”.¹ On Looksmaxxing forums, young guys rate each other, while discussing everything from skincare to leg-lengthening, jaw surgery, mewing, and even so-called “bone-smashing”, the act of intentionally reshaping one’s facial structure through brute force.² The self-proclaimed king of the looksmaxxers is Braden Peters, aka Clavicular, a 20-year-old American recently subject to splashy profiles by the New York Times and GQ.

If the zeitgeist of the 2010s was defined by optimisation culture — nudge theory and Strava and tracking one’s sleep as a means of coping with recession — maxximalism is surely the defining philosophy of this, the MAGA-AI decade. If optimisation was about the best, maxxing is about the most: owning the most, doing the most, being the most. Elon Musk is wealthmaxxing; Bryan Johnson is longevitymaxxing; Bonnie Blue is bodycountmaxxing. In a culture where everyone and everything is already optimised, only those willing to go to absurdly extreme lengths stand out.

In that sense, -maxxing is the ultimate product of streaming economics, in which attention is currency and network effects apply not just to tech companies but to the digital serfs (or “influencers”) manning their platforms. The largest platforms, the largest podcasts, the largest Youtube channels, the largest newsletters — in every case, being the biggest attracts a increasingly large concentration of audience, and thus revenue. In a world where relevance is dictated by FYP , breaking through requires you to make as much noise as possible — whether you’re a right-wing politician, or a teenager posting about strangers’ jawlines.

The result is maxxing culture, a kind of surreal performance art which requires a truly unhinged level of dedication to the work. For Johnson that means an utterly exhausting daily regimen of blood infusions and treatments. In Clavicular’s case, that includes being openly misogynist, dancing to “Heil Hitler” with far-right figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, taking so much exogenous testosterone he is supposedly infertile at 20, and allegedly smoking meth to stay thin. And it means hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to own the libs.

In the old days, we would have called this behaviour “courting controversy”, ragebait, or trolling; you might recognise similar antics from Ye, or Milo Yiannopoulos, or any number of 90s and 00’s tabloid mainstays. Streamers call this “clipfarming”, but the MO is largely the same: do something shocking; fan the flames of that reaction by actively confronting critics; claim you’re being “cancelled” or “censored” in order to move to the most profitable extraction methods, and then monetise that attention ad nauseam, until you need to juice the algo again. No matter the prefix, all -maxxing is fundamentally attentionmaxxing, and it’s multiplying because in our FYP era, it’s the only strategy that works every time.

If that also sounds like the actions of certain political figures and global superpowers lately, that’s not a coincidence. What I’m describing is, in the most literal sense, extremism: the pursuit of behaviours far beyond the bounds of normal conduct, taste, or logic, and towards extremes. There’s a reason that far-right and far-left parties are doing so well in this attention culture; there’s also reason that a lot of the -maxxing influencers exhibit behaviours and command followings that are a bit like cults. (Bryan Johnson has flirted with starting a religion; bonesmashing looks an awful lot like self-flagellation.)

But while millennials and MAGA incels running government X accounts love to adopt young people’s internet slang (remember “kamala is brat”?) , something important is being lost in the -maxxing discourse, and it’s this: maxxing is for losers. It’s a movement founded on insecurity. Looksmaxxing is a practice rooted in the most isolated and troubled communities of young men: people who fundamentally hate themselves, and through that self-hatred have reduced the world to a nihilistic series of transactions or calculations. Gaming the system requires that the system itself be a game; or at the very least, an algorithm. I’m alone, but if I inject this, and operate on that, somebody will date me. It’s about performing something that you’re not.

It also, let’s be clear, sounds absolutely miserable. In the GQ piece, Clavicular describes his childhood: “I rot[ted] in my room… posting on Looksmax,” he said. (The whole vibe of the -maxxing crowd is less “lock in” than “shut in”.) Despite being invited to walk at fashion week and party with the manosphere bros, Clavicular told GQ that, “All the IRL streaming is performative, I don’t even like going out to the club anymore.” Both the GQ and New York Times profiles note his obsessions with Matt Bomer and David Gandy, two men whom he deems better looking than him.

Clavicular is beta, chat.

His ultimate goal, we’re told, is to get a bimaxillary osteotomy, or double jaw surgery, in order to “ascend.” In the looksmaxxing community, to “ascend” is to become desirable, to become an “alpha”³, someone who will get the girl, make the friend, get the bag. Of course, the terminology is a tacit admission of deficiency: to ascend, you must first start at the bottom.

That’s the paradox at the heart of maxxing culture. It is try-hard, an ideology of striving for something you at the most essential level don’t have. It is the admission of a hollow core, a cult of self-loathing. (To use other buzzword of the moment, ‘maxxing’ is in this sense the opposite of ‘aura’.)

Which is why I think the US Department of War tweet was revealing. When the US government says it’s “lethalitymaxxing”, that isn’t the behaviour of the most powerful armed force in the world. It is posturing of the most basic degree. It’s not the language of combat veterans but of incels running their social media channels; people who have only experienced conflict through a screen. And it’s the language of an administration with the competence to call a campaign ‘Epic Fury’ and then have three of their own fighter jets shot down by friendly fire.

You might say that -maxxing is just a meaningless suffix now, “the -gate of the brainrot era”. It’s a joke, even if the behaviour it describes isn’t. But language is revealing. In this case, it serves as another bleak reminder that the real world and social media are now functionally inseparable. And that perhaps we would all benefit from a bit more moderation — in every sense of the word.

BELOW THE FOLD

1. “Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people — a lot of other people — will become useless. they will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. ” I had a few issues with this essay from Harper’s Sam Kriss at Harper’s, but it’s certainly full of great lines.
   

2. “One Anthropic researcher told me that he often wonders whether ‘maybe we should just stop.’” Also on the subject of AI, this New Yorker essay by the always-excellent Gideon Lewis-Krauss is one of the best explanations of how we think agentic LLMs like Claude actually work.

3. I enjoyed interviewing Aidan Zamiri, the director of the new Charli XCX mockumentary The Moment, for The Observer. I thought the film itself was smart and funny, and perfectly encapsulates the luxury nihilism of the brat era.

1. As one TikTok user put it, ““Looksmaxxing tik tok is a large majority of men arguing on which male supermodel they think is the hottest”

2. From what I can tell, “bone-smashing” originally started out mostly as a joke. Despite the coverage, it’s unclear how many men are actually doing it; perhaps fewer than have written articles about it.

3. One of my favourite facts about the incel community is that its worldview of “alphas” is based on discredited science about wolves, and that the founder of that idea now travels the world warning that it’s bullshit.