The Internet that Made Clavicular

"a crazy thing is happening", sponsored by Stake

The other night, on the dance floor of a warehouse in East Williamsburg, I spotted the comedian William Banks a few feet away from where my group was standing. He’s probably best known for staging a prison stint, escape, coming home party at Mi Sabor Cafe with a performance by 454, and eventual actual reincarceration that unfolded over several months via social media posts meant to be seen as real. More recently, one might have come across this familiar face for a video he filmed of Kick Streamer of the Moment Clavicular getting attacked at a nightclub in the middle of a Frost Children set put on by Los Angeles Apparel for New York Fashion Week. The clip and caption are presented as serendipitous footage from a random bystander, just some guy who happened to be at the right place at the right time. This is the setup for the second half’s punchline, when the beat drops and Banks shifts the camera away from Clavicular and onto himself bopping around, bursting with excitement. It’s the kind of video uncannily optimized for the passive scroll – “you gotta watch until the second half ☠️☠️”-- and therefore I was immediately skeptical of its apparent spontaneity. Why was a twenty-year-old streamer who openly uses the N word and calls transgender people “trannies” at a performance helmed by trans artists? What were the odds that a comedian whose specialty is social media performance art happened to be there to capture a scene so timely, and so emblematic of his artistic prerogative? Who actually wears the clothes of Elena Velez? Why are there so many New York Fashion Weeks?

Clavicular isn’t the first right-wing streamer to gain notoriety, but he seems to be the one who has captured the hearts and minds of the New York Magazine Chatter Class™. Corporate workers are joking about “slopmaxxing” and “bowlmogging” their peers, and they’re packing Zyns because their #2 CHAD (their boss) or their PSL-9 STACY (their girlfriend) are spiking their cortisol. Blue checkmark accounts are saying this new vernacular resembles a kind of Joycean linguistic innovation, failing to understand that Joyce was inspired to push the written word to its limit because he was madly in love with his wife Nora. The 4chan/incel-adjacent language of today, on the other hand, is borne out of a nihilism in which one believes the only way they can get ahead in this world is to smash their cheekbones with a hammer so it can grow back stronger. Every new thinkpiece inspires accusations of normalization and platforming, stirring us to collectively keep on talking about it. The end result of this kind of phenomenon are profiles in prestige publications, symbolizing an affirmation of Clavicular’s relevance for geezers overly concerned with the crisis of young white men.

There’s an easy answer to why the twenty-year-old looksmaxxing white boy from New Jersey is the one that broke through and is beheld like some cute zoo animal instead of his Nazi-adjacent Miami compatriots Andrew Tate, Sneako, Myron Gaines, Adin Ross, or Nick Fuentes. He’s a young impressionable boy who says outlandish things matter-of-factly and constantly finds himself in sitcom situations run through a brainrot filter. His popularity also coincides with the biohacking trends of the moment, where more people are knowledgeable about the peptides Clav is injecting himself with than ever before. While these things are important to consider, I’m more interested in the mechanisms that allowed someone like Clavicular to infiltrate everybody’s feed over the past month.

iS cLaViCuLar rEally rIgHT wing MAGA if he dOeSn’t embrace MAGA actress syDnEy Sw33nEY? My latest for the Atlantic.

For any digital creator, streamer, founder, what have you, the path to virality these days runs through the clipper economy. Companies pay aggregator accounts with large followings to clip pieces of longform content like podcasts or livestreams to post on their own accounts a la paid placement. When the average social media user encounters these clips on their timeline, they appear to be organic posts instead of user-generated content. If you’re a tech CEO like Roy Lee of Cluely, the model is straightforward: go on some podcasts, pay a few hundred accounts to clip incendiary moments to push out, and now it seems like a thousand unrelated people are talking about you, meaning you must be someone. This new propaganda machine is a testament to the passive scroll and how we engage with the glut of short-form video online. Before an inkling of skepticism can cross your mind, you’re on to the next one.

More pertinently, gambling brands are also in the mix, sidestepping rules about advertising by targeting online audiences through clip accounts that slap their watermark on videos of streamers doing stupid viral shit. Kick, the streaming platform of choice for right-wing figures like Adin Ross, Sneako, Nick Fuentes, and gremlin basement dwellers like DJ Akademiks, was launched in 2022 by the founders of the online casino Stake as an alternative to Twitch with a focus on looser content moderation equitable splits for its creators. Twitch has strict rules about streaming online gambling content, so it’s easy to see why the founders would start their own platform where they can freely advertise the joys of playing slots on your phone. Stake’s marketing tactic in the past has been to pay streamers with large youth audiences, like Adin Ross, to go on live and gamble away fake money for hours on end. Their biggest brand ambassador, Drake, reportedly gets paid a hundred million dollars a year to endorse Stake; he went on a Kick stream with Ross last year to lose fake millions on roulette to promote the app. If you dig around Clavicular’s Kick, beneath the stunts, the framemogs, the jestermaxxing and the runways, you’ll find much of the same: He’s said that Kick pays him a $133,000 dollars a month, which is ultimately Stake’s money, which is ultimately your money.

in the words of #2 CHAD ANDROGENIC when he accosted a normal woman who called him an ugly idiot, “play stupid games win stupid prizes”

The popular conspiracy that all right-wing media is funded by Peter Thiel belies the far more banal reality of market capitalism at work. What troubles me isn’t the bonesmashing, or that the Orlando Asian mogger inflicted a Lil B type curse on Clavicular, or what the (even ironic) embrace of looksmaxxing vernacular says about Gen Z nihilism or whatever; it’s the way in which a suddenly ubiquitous cultural conversation has been so deliberately and yet so slyly manufactured via advertising dollars. The wise Ock Sportello opined about the Clavicular PR push and the notion of discovery in “culture” media. For some time now, so much writing in this space has tried to make sense of the stuff that happens on your phone. For many people, Red Scare is just a thing that happens on your phone. The Reactionary Right and those literary readings that inspire more thinkpieces than there are attendees? Mostly just another thing that happens on your phone. Clav is another drop in the slop bucket, though at least his shtick lays bare the socially engineered path to virality, fame, and relevance. Culture journalism used to be about contemplating the roots and consequences of noteworthy human activity—our mysteriously emergent ideologies, collectives, modes of expression— but now I fear it’s all just dictated by algorithms. It’s all making sense of tweets and Tiktoks and mistakenly invoking them as evidence that something organically peculiar is afoot. Through the money-pumped manipulation of the algorithm, Stake has disguised an artificial phenomenon as a real one, and now it’s too late– now you’re asking the Chipotle worker to proteinmaxx that slopbowl, you’re telling your girlfriend she absolutely mogs the coworker she caught you flirting with at your holiday party, and the worst part? The beleaguered bowl artist and the insecure girlfriend, rightfully disturbed as they are, understand exactly what you mean.

***

Back at the club, after seeing William Banks, I asked my friends if they thought Clavicular was going to show up and cause a scene. Shiiii, I hope so. Though he didn’t, I looked around and felt the shockwaves of his New York speedrun in the crowd. There many groups of young men huddled together giggling, those jestermaxxing chuds. I got framemogged and heightmogged; my cortisol spiked because strangers were flailing their sweaty arms in tight quarters; no baddies verified me, and I’m still hearing a light ringing sound, tinnitus perhaps. It was so loud in there, all that noise, and it didn’t occur to me to earplugmaxx. I wonder if Clavicular knows of a peptide for that.