Clavicular and Fuentes

elder zoomers vs. the young ones

I’m sorry that I’m talking to you about Clavicular again. There was enough material from last post that I’ve decided to reformulate what was cut into its own thing. Most of that material was looking at Clavicular in a broader historical context, so this post is less about him and more about the world around him.

Jamie Cohen, over at New Media Homework, wrote an excellent post called we are entering the era of Show More, pointing out how “2016 was the foundation of this world,” and highlighting a piece of found poetry in a viral tweet: “We are entering the era of Show more.”

“JESTERMAXXING,” for those unaware, means being a silly little guy. “Show more” is both the essential dictum of algorithmic social media and the place where the intention of the entire exercise is clearest: it’s all about the blue text you’re supposed to click on, the engagement. Those are the two most meaningful words in the post.

Cohen correctly notes that today’s manosphere streamers are running the same plays that people like Milo Yiannopolous ran in 2016. It’s just that after two Trump administrations and a decade of enshittification, the mainstream culture that would have cancelled them, contained them, or debated them — and whose indignation they farmed for engagement — is more decayed. Boundary pushing is only interesting when the boundary is maintained, so the transgressive influencers have to attempt ever-more glaring transgressions to get the same attentional harvest.

That wasn’t true ten years ago. Back then, all you had to do was call fat women ugly on television to get a hundred thousand followers in the rightwing social media space. Now you have to throw a Sieg Heil. Perhaps in another decade, you will have to kill somebody. Or maybe we’re already there, given cherished mutual Drew Harwell’s reporting at The Washington Post about ICE’s clipfarming and content creation push.

This transgression curve is unsustainable. It will end in disaster. It will self-immolate. These guys are going to catch charges, overdose — they always talk about how the deep state will get them, but they’ll get got by themselves first.

Prior to his Jestermaxxing, Clavicular sat down with Sneako and Nick Fuentes for an hourlong stream in search of controversy. The stream to me is what you call a “rich text” for thinking about how the attention economy (and nihilistic radical politics) have evolved.

Elder Zoomers vs. the youth

For most of the time, 27-year-old Sneako sat silently, grunting now and then as 27-year-old Fuentes and 21-year-old Clav debated. Sneako, never much of a thinker, may have had nothing to say. He also had the dissociated air of somebody who’s stoned and going nonverbal. As Fuentes offered racist tirades, and Clav rambled about rugged individualism, Sneako languidly scanned the flurries of comments from various freaks on the internet blowing into the screen and looked like a lost little boy.

Both Fuentes and Sneako were born in 1998, the same year I was. They were conscious of being young men (or at least large boys) in 2016 when the derangement of public discourse really became visible. Clav was born in 2005, and was eleven when that all started. By the time he entered puberty, the looksmaxxers had been bonesmashing for years.

Age was a major part of the discussion: Fuentes jokingly called himself and Sneako “uncs” and sought to impart wisdom to Clav. Both are creatures of an earlier era of the internet — Fuentes rose to prominence with the Groyper Wars of 2019, and Sneako is a former MrBeast employee who pivoted to street interviews (of the type that spawned Hawk Tuah girl) and then sprinted down a darker path.

Fuentes, after years in the wilderness, is now at a place of new prominence, largely because everybody talked about him after Charlie Kirk’s killing. Clips from his livestream show routinely get views across X, and he’s taken to imitating the style of rightwing pundits like Tucker Carlson as he rants white nationalist talking points.

He is keenly aware of the lineage he’s trying to break into. In the livestream, he described getting offered a sponsorship deal from a gold brand and wanting to take it precisely because conservative commentator Mark Levin (a mainstream Boomer rightwing figure) once had the same sponsorship and Fuentes wishes to “mog” him. His suit-and-tie get up, along with his elevated way of speaking, also indicate that success for him means breaking into the “respectable” world: In other words, Richard Hanania walked so Nick Fuentes could run. His longterm animosity towards Charlie Kirk, who to him seems to have represented an internet forum-born political project subordinating itself to the desires of Boomer rightwing donors, might be seen in this light. Fuentes wants the Boomers to bend the knee to white nationalist shitposters.

To the extent Fuentes has a coherent project, it’s about institutionalizing a structure that advantages white men even more than it already does. His “theory of change” corresponds neatly to that of Stephen Miller or other terminally-online Trumpworld figures: transformation-through-coercion of the government, media, and markets to perpetuate racism. Fuentes’ pitch to young people frames this as a response to institutional decline, while Clavicular sees little appeal:

FUENTES: People used to say ‘oh, go touch grass.’ But what we’re starting to see is that back in the day, you could sort of ignore the decaying political situation. But as time goes on, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore in terms of the overall decline in quality of life, the rapid diversification of the country…

CLAV: I feel like I’ve sort of transcended all those issues, though.

Returning to the kind of analysis I did last post, I think this exchange corresponds to the overall idea of an algorithmic ideology replacing an institutional ideology. There used to be grass you could go and touch, a viable way of life outside the screen — but now there isn’t. Elder Zoomers vaguely remember that world, but for Clavicular’s age cohort, arrived at adulthood in the horns of a polycrisis nobody can deny, the political situation is not “decaying,” the political situation has always been fucked as a default. So the only sources of purpose or profit are the self and the social media machine.

This is nihilism-by-default rather than nihilism-by-disillusionment, and that is the salient difference between Elder Zoomers and Young Zoomers.

The LARP of it all

At this point, I risk taking these men too seriously. None of them are operating within reality or offering a sincere critique. They are each performing an ideological LARP that has become their life and they cannot turn back from it. They have burned every bridge back to the normal world and gone all in on content.

Part of the audience pleasure, to my mind, comes from this knowledge: both Clavicular and Fuentes are entirely dependent on their viewers. Much has been made about the sadomaschocistic dynamic between Fuentes and the “pay pigs” that listen to him and take his verbal abuse on stream, but the manipulation goes both ways. For each of these men, there is no meaningful relationship in their lives other than the one with their audience. They are purely devoted to a constituency of slimy, broken people in the way that nuns are married to Christ. And each of these men, at this point, could never get a normal job. So all of their actions should be assessed as the moves of a man with his back to the wall and a loaded gun pointed at his head: they are desperate, and kept in a state of desperation by an attention economy that needs them to be in that position, by a transgression curve that calls for ever-more horrendous stunts.

Each man is a kind of martyr. They inflict suffering on themselves to prove devotion to something immaterial. Like the mystic self-flagellating, or the stigmatic continually reopening the wounds on their hands so they remain gory for the faithful to see, Clavicular and Fuentes turn their lives, their bodies, into material proof of an abstract principle’s power. They strike, isolate, scar, and maim themselves to illustrate the supremacy of the simulation and its digital representations over the reality which their audience loathes.

When you think about their biographies, this dynamic is even clearer. Both Fuentes and Clav are upper-class boys who got kicked out of university because their lives on the internet got in the way of their lives in the system, and they chose the internet. College was a family-imposed attempt at normality, and each man experienced dropping out as a Rubicon-crossing, when they chose the simulated world over their real-life career prospects, community, and network — the ideology of algorithms over the ideology of institutions. As Clavicular said:

I got kicked out of college for you know, roiding, taking testosterone. I had the option to potentially get reinstated if I proved I wasn’t taking the roids, but I said, ‘No, fuck that. I’m gonna continue with with my looksmaxing, with my steroids.’ So I feel like that’s more character than anything. I’m fully willing to sacrifice my degree for looksmaxxing. It’s how much I valued it.

The appeal is almost like a LOLcow, and both men are talked about in that way. Clavicular is a performance artist. His body is a canvas and the medley of drugs and mutilations he does are the paint. The picture he’s creating is one of the modern man under algorithmic ideology: a creature surrounded by suffering on all sides, who feels so out of control of his life that he seeks to inflict suffering upon himself as a last-ditch effort to choose his own destiny.

For some audience members — like me — he is interesting because you feel like you are better than them, and most people certainly are. But he’s also like a thought experiment: what if all you cared about was content? What if you didn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone, totally disregarded the future, and just “maxxed”? How far could you go? I am, perhaps to an unproductive degree, darkly fascinated to see how far he can go because the distance he travels will be an exact measurement of how broken the old world is. Our task is not to repair that break or decelerate the transgression curve, but to find something new that can take its place. The work now is to measure and prepare.