Clavicular isn’t interesting, really

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Someone has to say it: Clavicular isn’t that interesting.

Or, rather, he’s interesting but not for the reasons everyone is talking about. This 20-year-old influencer, born in New Jersey after 9/11 and the release of Usher’s Confessions, is famous for two things: his quest to achieve aesthetic perfection, and taking the ​‘looksmaxxing’ subculture mainstream through a series of rage-bait controversies – like dancing to Kanye West’s ​‘Heil Hitler’ at a Miami nightclub with Nick Fuentes and allegedly hitting someone with his Cybertruck while live streaming on Christmas Eve. It’s largely as a result of those controversies that has acquired the largest controlling stake in What We Talk About Online. 

Since his streaming channel kicked off last year, Clavicular has rapidly ascended the ranks of American legacy media, New York Fashion Week, and the political podcast circuit. Like Chuck Bass for the post-Charlie Kirk age, he’s conniving and hot in a way that has fallen out of cultural visibility since glossy magazines regularly used the word ​“metrosexual.” He looks like he should be paid to stand outside Hollister with his top off in 2002. In any other decade, he would have been doing speed at The Factory with Edie Sedgwick. He would have inked a lucrative deal with a major studio that would see him exclusively star in action films where he is given seven lines of dialogue and 50 cumulative minutes of karate. He would have been fist pumping to Jersey Club beats with his hair glued up and his shirt whipped off, screaming to his friends that the ​“caaaabs are here.” But, because it’s the mid-2020s, he’s not doing any of that. He’s live streaming himself on Kick, supposedly injecting his underage girlfriend with fat-dissolving compounds.

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Given the deliberately provocative nature of his stunts, some have found Clavicular’s rise ​“disturbing.” Others have met him more charitably on his own terms. On the Adam Friedland Show, for example, he advocated taking out college loans to pay for surgery. ​“Misappropriating the funds isn’t going to get you into that much trouble,” he shrugs. ​“And you’ll mog, so you’ll be able to get out of it.” Meanwhile, the US government’s Department of War is posting looksmaxxing lingo on X: ​“Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.”

Without that lingo he helped take mainstream, though, Clavicular is basically dust in the wind. A hollow agent of new age nihilism, in which the powers that be have hung concepts like dignity and justice out to dry, and so everyone is engaged in a race to the bottom of easily monetisable content production. Low effort, high reward. In a digital economy where hate is the most powerful currency, Clavicular is like Bonnie Blue for men: an object of desire utterly divorced from carnality, a caricature of capitalist pursuit exaggerated to the point of performance art. 

In the end, both figures are a consequence of cultural shifts that have already taken place. They are sentient billboards for the wounds festering beneath the performance of social media – most of them to do with money, sexual power dynamics, and the growing obsession with physical optimisation. In Clavicular’s case, it’s all three. He’s a powerful hydra: Andrew Tate, Sean O’Pry, and Kim Kardashian rolled into one. Having interviewed him for The New York Times earlier this month, journalist Joe Bernstein came away with the following take: ​“He may come from an extreme subculture, but the combination of beauty and biohacking is one way our culture is headed, and he may just be ahead of the curve.” 

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Beyond that, the main thing he represents about our culture is how quickly things accelerate. The turnover is so relentless we now find ourselves feeling nostalgic for things that happened years – or months – rather than decades ago. At the same time the word ​“jestermaxxing” hit the zeitgeist like a second plane crashing into the tower of sanity, people were also celebrating the two year anniversary of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Experience – a fever dream viral moment from 2024 that feels like it happened half a century ago. The phrase ​“brutally frame mogged” is almost enough to make you feel misty-eyed for the good old days of neckbeards tipping their fedoras to m’lady, while AI has advanced so rapidly over the last 12 months that the ​‘haha ChatGPT make my crew Ghibli’ scandal of March 2025 feels quaint. 

In January, the ​“2016” prompt took over social media for weeks even though it was not, in the grand scheme of things, a particularly grand year for pop culture. ​“We had Zayn’s debut solo single Pillow Talk, Chainsmokers were really hot at that time,” Radio 1 Anthems host Lauren Redfern recalled for BBC Newsbeat. ​“Twenty One Pilots, The 1975 – it was all going on.” God, the long winter evenings must have just flown by.

Faced with little that feels ​“new” in the way of cultural innovation and nothing on the horizon but a steep cliff edge, we increasingly find ourselves donning rose tinted glasses for times in history that are barely historic. Long gone are the days where Miley Cyrus twerking on a teddy bear would instigate several book proposals, or an album cycle would last a year and a half. Now is the time of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest being pushed out of the news by a Tourettes campaigner shouting the n‑word at the Baftas while a looksmaxxer gets his wig snatched during a live stream. We inhale content with the wide-eyed paranoia of Rust Cohle smoking, and none of it seems to matter for longer than the time it takes to swipe up. 

No one gets 15 minutes of fame anymore. The best you can aim for, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, is 15 seconds of infamy. Clavicular is certainly making the most of his.

Emma Garland is a culture writer and editor based in London. Follow her on Instagram.

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