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I occasionally see content about Clavicular (Clav, age 20) pop up in my algorithm. I used to ignore it because I felt like I had a good read on his schtick. I decided to watch a couple interviews to understand why he might be popular among others, and to better understand him from a psychological perspective.
The primary thing he is known for is being a spokesperson for looksmaxxing ideology. He believes looks are the most important factor in achieving positive social outcomes. He therefore believes in going to extreme lengths to optimize his own looks. His own looksmaxxing experiments include steroid usage at a young age, taking meth to stay lean, and altering his facial structure by hitting facial bones with a hammer/fist.
Digging deeper it appears that he has social anxiety (he suspects he has autism) and he usually uses a cocktail of drugs to overcome this anxiety when streaming his social interactions. He recently overdosed while streaming, but made a quick recovery.
He is very in tune with social media trends and algorithmic manipulation. He knows how to clip farm and turn novelty into engagement. He uses weird terms like methmaxxing and jestermaxxing to increase the probability of a clip going viral. He also knows how to livestream and turn audience engagement into content.
His interviews tend to be a combination of him wanting to sperg out about looksmaxxing and him playing the role of clip farmer. The interviewers usually start out as curious about Clav’s worldview, but then they try to bait him into talking about his past controversies or play some rhetorical gotcha game. When Clav appears to have his drugs dialed in he seems to achieve his goals in the interview (spreading looksmaxxing ideology and generating algorithmic engagement). Sometimes he just comes across as spaced out and like is he having a hard time following the logic (like he is impaired by a substance).
My personal critique of him is that he is correct that looks matter, but he fails to realize the importance of balancing other skills and traits in order to achieve social success (like Aristotle's golden mean). I also think he is on a precipice with his drug use. He has the opportunity to taper and integrate the confidence he learned into his sober personality, but if he continues using his cocktail of drugs he will cause physical and mental injury to himself.
I’m far more interested in discussing the larger pattern that Clav is symptomatic of. Young men don’t see any viable paths to success, or have good role models for how they should live their lives. They look around and see the traditional paths (like college) are uncertain at best. They notice young women’s expectations have increased and they often don’t meet them. If they see a successful person (like a retired boomer) they don’t think that path is still available to them. If everything is uncertain the best thing to do is look around for successful people and imitate them. So, they find an influencer like Clav and realize they can play the social media influencer lottery by trying to become viral like him. If society tells them to figure out everything on their own and won’t provide a clear path that is likely to succeed then becoming viral on social media, giving up, or gambling suddenly seem like much more attractive options.
It is obvious to me that incentivizing a bunch of people to figure out how to optimize viral social media content is not good for society. It steers people into echo chambers, distorts their ability to see reality, and is also a huge waste of potential – they could become productive members of society (like scientists and engineers) if only society better aligned the incentives.
How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model? Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?
A start would be to bring back men's clubs and groups. Make Boy Scouts for boys and their dads again. Bring back men's only sports and dining clubs. Give men some capacity to network among themselves, and even give candid advice about out of earshot of the breasted commissar's that dominate every other public space.
Men need their own culture again. Not in the way gonzo youtuber stars are "culture", but in the way a small towns local chapter of a men and boys club is culture. Sure, the advice and guidance young men might get from both of those might be directionally aligned. But the gonzo youtube version takes it to a place that's unhealthy, but unfortunately, it's all that is allowed to exist.
Boy scouts is for boys and their dads. There's a separate set of boy scouts troops for girls. But the BSA's current lack of appeal to boys has more to do with demand for a checkbox on the cursus honorum from parents(mostly of boys) than with separate but equal girls' boy scouts troops.
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Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction, often charachterized by such things as extreme furturistic and technological advancement, placed against societal collapse, dystopia or decay.
It was also one of the first genres that touched upon transhumanism, but such enhancement were often subhuman, degrading - willingly transforming one's self into little more than a tool made to excel in a world that's turned into a brutal machine with the endgoal to optimize all parts.
So, whenever I see such things as this;
The first thing that comes to mind is 'What did you think Transhumanism meant? Vibes? Essays?'
The second thing is 'Behold, your Cyberpunk Dystopia. It's going to involve alot of drugs.'
So the proper answer to your question is to stop making everything a cyberpunk dystopia.
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Probably not. I went from being a virgin to sleeping with 15 women in a year to getting married through reading, then attempting to implement, PUA. That's the thing though; it worked, I never post about it, and the stuff I followed were really boring and uninteresting like 'here is how to dress/present yourself' and 'here is how to lead a date to do whatever'. Most of what I did was doing, rather than consuming content. Actually succeeding at dating, be it wither maximizing in the modern atomized marketplace or joining a conservative subculture and going through the marriage process there, involves way more action than consumption. And beyond that, the consumption is not flashy/interesting/binge-able.
The way to get virality is to do wacky shit that doesn't work.
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If he is 20 now he was about 14 in 2017 when semaglutide first was approved for medical use in the US. Presumably he did not advertise taking meth for weight loss on social media at age 14.
In a world where GLP-1 agonists exist, meth might not be strictly the worst intervention for weight loss (chainsaw-powered amputations are arguably worse), but it is pretty much out there. "Take meth for weight loss" is a take so outlandish it makes me wonder why he is not employed by MAHA yet.
I get that young men feel that the game is rigged against them. By the time they have earned a master, LLMs may well substitute for PhDs in earnest, the prices of housing is all messed up and dating is mostly agreed to be terrible.
Still, I think influencers and celebrities make generally bad role models because they do not scale. 99% of the people who emulate one of the most famous actors or influencers will not get successful to a comparative degree. Nor does 'looksmaxxing wins youtube' an argument for why it would work more generally. Appearing in a skimpy outfit (for example) might well work on social media, but if you are a truck driver or middle manager it will not get you a raise.
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Why does Clav need a deeper meaning? People like watching insane celebrities act like coked up retards(because that’s what they are). He’s different in form, but not function, from Britney Spears.
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The interestin part about Clav is that his content isn't what it claims to be. At least the viral clips that I see of him marginally touch on how to be attractive. It seems to mainly be content consisting of an insecure 20 year old acting arrogantly fuelled by his deep insecurity. I can't really see the appeal of this content. It doesn't teach how to maximize appearence.
Clav is the only celebrity all my groupchats post clips from. It's highly suggestive to me that so many of my friends who would otherwise disdain celebrity culture are invested in Clavicular. Heck, it's highly suggestive that The Motte is invested in Clavicular.
There was a brief rise in "ASU Frat Leader" and Androgenic but it can't just be the looksmaxxing big muscle hot girl streamer lifestyle that's attractive or those guys would have eclipsed Clavicular.
So I think you're right, there's something about Clav specifically that the superficial description of looksmaxxing only obscures. I think at least part of it has to be his intelligence, which he has applied in a provocative way. I have some theories about the other aspects but it's not solid stuff yet.
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A counter-example to Clav would be a Youtube channel like Sickos. It's six childhood friends who try to make viral videos by doing Redbull-fueled stunts into water, snow and dirt, and a big part of their videos is just six bros ribbing each other, goading each other to bigger stunts, partying together and just hanging out.
They've been doing that for half a decade now, and their fans (mostly tween boys, from the crowed they pull at fan meetup events) got to watch them progress pretty considerably in their extreme sports skills, get rejected by girls they hit on, meet long-term girlfriends for the first time, and become financially successful on Youtube. While most are conventionally attractive men, several of them are self-admitted short kings who struggle with approaching women. While most of them are extremely athletic, their wide variety of sports almost guarantees that at least one of them sucks at the sport they're filming at any given point, which gets exploited for laughs. They show that all that is OK. And a recurring part of their videos is showing that they're afraid before big stunts, and that overcoming fear is worth it.
They speak Clav's language, but mostly make fun of it. They're very aware of status (they often approach girls in clubs by telling them they have "surfed Nazaré" - highest wave in the world in winter, they surfed it in summer, neither of which most of the girls will be aware of) and "chester-maxxing/peakcocking" (they often go outfit shopping together before partying and end up buying crazy fits), but they always show that not taking those things to seriously is important.
Certainly not without its faults (getting this good at surfing/skiing/motocross it's an expensive way of life), but a much better world view than red pill/PUA/looksmaxxing culture.
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If you're hitting yourself in the face with a hammer, it's not your looks that are the problem. It's your sanity.
To be fair, I think it's usually more like a rubber mallet and it's relatively gentle tapping, not really what one imagines if one imagines hitting something with a hammer.
It might still be a bit dangerous, but not as crazy as it sounds.
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Young men are primarily motivated by sex and superiority over peers. In the new social media age (and I mean the new new one), attractiveness spells the difference between obtaining unlimited sex + positive female attention and being relentlessly bullied by anonymous strangers online. It is believed to be extremely important because it is extremely important. Social media is now about posting videos of your face online and yapping, so the stakes of facial attractiveness are enormous. If you ask a young man, “do you want lots of intercourse with the most attractive women in your vicinity, or do you want the more expensive PC / car / apartment / vacation”, they are going to choose the former option. That’s just the reality of young male biology. So they are making a rational choice based on the prevailing social conditions. This is exacerbated by: male fitness culture causing many males to judge other males with a homoerotic standard; rap music, which glorifies nothing other than sex and influence; changes in social media that reduce “peer checking” of behavior; shows like Euphoria or whatever else which glorify bad decisions.
That’s not really a thing at their age. They will suffer longterm consequences if they don’t focus on their career, but that will only impact them later down the road. You don’t actually need any skills to acquire the kind of social success than young men are chiefly interested in, which is sex and esteem from other men.
You would have to join up with an insular social ecosystem: a very serious Mormon church, a mosque where the girls wear hijabs and niqabs, or convert to Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. Ask: does the ecosystem control sexual behavior through shame and guilt, and does it allocate esteem for prosociality?
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Ban social media.
I don't see another way to square the reaction to the recent articles about female radicalization (where most people seem to think the internet/ideology caused an unjustified reaction) with this post (where we seem to take it for granted that men are reacting to some objective fact about their circumstances). The internet is the common factor. We can't control when people feel oppressed but you theoretically could ban the internet.
Of course, a lot of us don't consider this feasible or wise in practice.
No, they all seem crazy.
Seriously, who is the best adjusted streamer? It seems to select for the most dramatic. Going down the list of streamers I know something about:
What about Cr1TiKaL?
I found one freakout (and he’s back now). For a guy who’s become inconceivably rich and famous by monologuing in front of a camera about internet drama, over a decade, I consider that heroically sane.
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Healthygamergg seems quite well adjusted (or was a few years ago, I haven't kept up much) and semi-viral. As far as I know, This is the closest thing to what Ponder is asking for.
That channel got big by appealing to spirituality, teaching emotional awareness, and most crucially the interviews. The host, Alok Kanojia, is a psychiatrist with spiritual training and a flair for storytelling. Through interviews he would help his viewers understand their feelings and situation, usually culminating in some moment of emotional catharsis. To the viewers who were not being interviewed, this provided a conversational style that they could emulate in their personal lives, and potentially a new lens through which they could view their own situations.
In addition, he does online lectures that serve as introductions to various concepts within psychiatry and Hinduism in a way that has proven very popular within his fan base.
The channel turned viral when it started doing interviews with popular streamers such as Reckful, Pokimane, and Destiny. So it still depended on the clout of others to achieve its reach.
The main controversies have been related to the ethics of a psychiatrist doing live interviews which look very similar to therapy. My understanding is that the channel is very aware of this, and does a lot of work to draw a clear line between what they are doing and actual treatment though. So overall, the content is ethically defensible and definitely a net good.
That’s a good point there are some popular influencers who provide helpful advice to young men without trying to produce maximally viral content for the algorithm. They still play to it somewhat by choosing provocative titles or captions for videos. In addition to Healthygamergg I would say André Duqum is kind of like that but more spiritual, and Chris Williamson is kind of like Healthygamergg with less therapy.
It seems much harder for someone to replicate any of those healthier podcasters though. A lot of it came from them filling a specific niche at the right time. Additionally, all of them seem to have dedicated a lot of time to building expertise over time (by going to medical school, spending a lot of time doing spiritual practices, or doing a lot of research). I know Chris talked about his beginnings as a podcaster and I think he spent a few years with much fewer views and it eventually grew organically and he already had some social media followers because he was on Love Island (a reality TV show).
Those paths seem harder to replicate for a newcomer because someone already found and popularized the niche. As a newcomer it seems like a better bet to play the virality lottery where you try to get popular from a single outrageous clip and then create new content based on what the audience liked in the viral clip. This doesn’t require any expertise at all and it will have a much faster payoff if it succeeds.
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Divisiveness sells on social media. Controversial and sensationalist content will always get a larger audience than the sensible guy telling you to get an education and not destroy your future through drug abuse and cosmetic surgery.
Past attempts to make social media take responsibility for their effects on society has mostly resulted in the attempted silencing of dissident viewpoints, while the actual issue of the algorithm boosting extreme content remains unchanged.
I think the redpill/manosphere is a good case study of this. /r/theredpill was an attempt at offering a viral competing worldview, giving young men a clear explanation of how a man succeeds in the world and how to be attractive to women. But the only aspects of the red pill that went viral were those laced with misogyny and intense sexism. The big "red pill" content creators of today are the Andrew Tate types, which are essentially grifters selling BS courses to young men. Meanwhile, the rest of the manosphere has more or less drifted into obscurity, hidden away through censorship and stigma.
I think the simple solution is to get children off of social media completely. This would limit the risk of being continuously exposed to viral memes and addictive content, while also significantly reducing the viewerbase of Clavicular and those like him. This way we are actively disincentivizing his type of business while also protecting the kids, and forcing them to socialize in person. How we go about doing this is another question though. I really dislike the idea of ID verification, but on the other hand, parents at large are also unwilling (or unable) to do their part, at most preferring to monitor the social media accounts of their kids instead of banning it outright.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
Your proposal has two flaws: the first is that it puts children at a greater risk of hermeneutical injustice at the hands of their parents. Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?
The second flaw is that many adults are also led astray by extreme content boosted by social media algorithms; many of the adherents of Queue A Knon were already adults when social media became a thing.
I believe a better method would be to adjust the incentives further upstream, by requiring social media companies to implement an Agatean Wall¹ between user-experience and revenue-generation.
¹GNU Terry Pratchett.
It seems that we have a tradeoff here: the more tightly you enforce central planning and limitations over how parents raise their kids, the more you reduce odious practices. At the same time if the central authority wishes to enforce an odious practice on all kids they have the power to enforce that in this hypothetical. At the same time, giving parents unlimited authority means you have no way to stop child abuse.
It seems to me that this is a question of marginal tradeoffs. I'm in favor of giving the state the ability to stop child abuse, defined as what the consensus of people consider child abuse, but I'm unwilling to go much further than that. I disagree a lot with how many people raise their kids, but I accept the need to let them raise their kids as they wish since I don't want them getting a vote on how I raise my kid. I'd be willing to support the state having more power if there was more of a consensus of values where I live, but since there isn't I default to general libertarianism as the local maxima.
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It’s irrelevant, my outgroup doesn’t breed well. Like pandas.
In other words, your main worry would be your outgroup converting outsiders to their worldview, which happens through the internet?
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As to your second point, I do kind of like the idea of just banning social media completely. The issue with that is I can't think of a way to do that without obvious workarounds, while also not banning the entire internet. At least with children, age serves as a clear dividing line, and adults are generally better equipped to handle the internet than kids.
I don't think I understand the Agatean wall. Would that just be a verbal agreement that the social media companies would not optimize engagement for revenue generation? If so, I don't see why these companies would ever do that.
In my proposed architecture, one side of the wall would handle content-curation algorithms and interface design, with the instruction to make it convenient for the end user to see the content they want to see, with any advertisements or sponsored content kept to designated spaces clearly labeled as such. The other side of the wall would deal with anyone seeking to purchase advertising space or aggregate data, but would have no method to adjust the experience of end-users to keep them on the site longer; advertisers could either accept however many eyeball-minutes occur without engagement-maximisation tactics, or leave the attention of social-media users to their competitors.
This gives at least some possibility of squaring the circle of having a service both free-at-the-point-of-use and prioritising the preferences of its end-users.
As for how to bring about such a state of affairs, I have discovered a truly marvelous regulatory structure accomplishing this, which this comment box is too narrow to contain.
Your link goes to a wikipedia page about a mathemathical theorem. Is that on purpose?
Link fixed; it should point to the relevant section of the article.
Pierre Fermat, circa 1637, wrote in the margin of a book "It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain." The theorem was proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles.
Congratulations! You're one of today's lucky 10,000!
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What's funny about Clav is that he (apparently, though I don't follow closely enough), misses the irony that looks are less important than status, which is often self-reenforcing, and thus undermines the very thing he's popular for. Looks is a way to bootstrap into status, yes, but 'maxxing' it, hits diminishing returns fast.
He is not sustainingly popular because of his looks, but his fame, e.g. success. At this point, further maxxing on looks, has negligible effect on his further success, while staying in the spotlight, will.
Contrast his with say, Mr. Beast, who also bootstrap himself into virality. But Mr. Beast didn't misunderstand himself as 'counting-maxxing' but rather recognized the metagame as, 'stunt-maxxing' or 'brand-maxxing' on a path to 'virality-maxxing'. From what I've seen, Mr. Beast (whom I pay little attention to) talks about his own success with this awareness, rather than giving general advice that others also try to do viral video stunts to be successful too.
Suppose instead, after first going viral, Mr. Beast had decided that "looks are the most important factor in achieving positive social outcomes" and doubled down on that, rather than his 'stunt' focused avenue. Would he have ended up with better social outcomes? No.
Looksmaxxing is a stupid ideology because, aside from getting meta-famous for looksmaxxing, as an object level strategy itself -> improving looks is very important to a point, then hits RAPID diminishing returns. This is true of almost anything, unless you are trying to win a zero-sum tournament niche, which is always a bad 'general' strategy.
On the flipside, Liver King's hard-earned clout immediately evaporated when he broke kayfabe and admitted it was all based on a contradiction and he was full of shit.
MrBeast's gimmick is basically inviting you to watch a Youtube nerd recreate Fear Factor with some additional consumerism for that fantasy element. So long as he can find some new wrinkle in that formula (or new people) he can get attention. Not sure it's the same for people like Clavicular.
sure Clav is famous for looksmaxxing, and if he stopped looksmaxxing, hed become less famous. But he's wrong in how much he advocates looksmaxxing as a generally effective strategy for status/success.
If I was famous for hopping on one foot, then continuing to hop on one foot would likely be an important part of my continued fame. But I would be wrong to espouse any general theory of hop-on-one-foot-maxxing that positioned it as a key to fame, generally.
Yes, I'm not saying he's correct. Just rational.
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Looksmaxxing ideology, PUA, redpill, and incel are kind of like "alternative media" or "intellectual dark web." That is, they satisfy a demand that original information sources couldn't meet. A lot of people do not think mainstream sources are credible on the subject of "status for men." By mainstream sources, I mean ones that follow the background Western memeplex (which is feminism). If the question is, why do people feel feminism is not credible on the subject of "status for men," I am a little biased.
For me personally, it is probably because of being on the internet in the 2010s. For kids these days, I'm not sure. It's hard for me to imagine what its like to see the cultural landscape with fresh eyes. Probably all the boys these days notice that all the help goes to girls, and never to boys. Indeed, if any help were to ever go disproportionately to boys, the culture has a ready-made, uncostly way to rectify this and give proportionate help back to the girls. The reverse is not true.
The big difference between 2010s manosphere content and 2020s manosphere content is that there was a lot more optimism in the 2010s. 2010s RedPill content, yes, believed myths like 80/20 and AF/BB (i.e. the myth that only a few men get to be sexually active with a lot of women) but they also showed men how to sleep with a lot of women, and believed any man could achieve that with hard work. This was, of course, degeneracy, but there was an optimism I don’t see these days.
My biggest frustration is how this content is designed to have the most misogynist and negative view of women possible, believe myths simply because they make women look bad and make men angry with women, e.g. If I had a nickel every time that dishonest version of the 2009 OkCupid chart was reposted, I would be very rich.
This flamebait results in engagement, so it goes viral, but it isn’t healthy because it results in men hating women unreasonably. (There’s also misandry online, but that’s another discussion for another day)
Does this really make it better? That women hold their noses and message perfectly average guys they think are ugly seems like cold comfort for the mids in question.
I don’t think those women were thinking men were mostly ugly. I think what happened is that women don’t build attraction from just looks the way men do.
In terms of replication, the results are generally not the gap we saw in that old OkCupid chart but, yes, there is a gap.
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I don't mean 2010s manosphere content was better, and so I find it more credible. I meant seeing misandry.
Misandry was normalized in the 2010s in really ugly ways:
Even here in the 2020s, a lot of these misandrists, as just one example, age gap shame, but explicitly (or implicitly) say it’s only an issue when the man is older:
Point being, people say idiotic provocative crap online for engagement.
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Virality is probably not correlated with pro-sociality.
So far as people like this are concerned, they're just overoptimizing for one aspect of social status and mining the cognitive dissonance for clicks. And what's the goal? In much the same way that bodybuilding quickly loses any connection to actual sex appeal, this "lookmaxxing" or whatever is another proxy being reified.
Young men will always be looking for ways to hack the social milieu in some way that gives them sexual access to young women. Most of them will be looking for One Simple Trick to avoid having to work too hard at it. Drugs, surgery, PUA classes, whatever. The con artists who sell them these fantasies may have a kernel of truth in their spiel, but only that.
Here's the reality: Becoming an expert at seduction, whatever we're currently calling that, is something many men are capable of but far fewer are willing to put in the work to achieve. Most men are best off building a decent life for themselves and trying to find a monogamous wife/girlfriend, not dating as a method of getting laid.
The fantasy is that you can do something easy to change that. Sexual access is competitive.
In my experience, finding an interesting single woman to marry is about two orders of magnitude harder than becoming an expert in seduction.
Getting laid is not easy, but at least doable. Finding someone I wouldn't mind inviting to my lair is... well... unsuccessful.
The whole secret of fishing is where and when.
If there are no suitable mates where you are fishing, try a different hole.
Also, perhaps think long and hard about what you mean by "interesting".
Long ago, I thought interesting women were women who were interested in the same things I was interested in. Which meant all the interesting girls were lesbians.
What do you mean now by interesting?
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