Clavicular: the digital Dorian Gray He is an ugly cipher for our time

Every man has some picture that is the image of his secret life — his dream. People are often damned by theirs. Clavicular (née Braden Eric Peters, 17 December 2005) was haunted by an image of his own perfected face. It would take years to construct it, to finish his “ascension”, but by the time it was finished — when his biacromial width, his chin-to-philtrum ratio, the distance between his pupils were perfectly harmonious — his face was no less perishable. But for now, at least, it was beautiful. But “behind every exquisite thing that existed,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “there was something tragic”. This, then, is the Tragedy of Clavicular.

Back when Covid hit, Clavicular — still a spotty, autistic Braden — was locked-down at his parents’ home in Hoboken, New Jersey, where there was little to do but prowl Los Santos on Grand Theft Auto and dwell in the shadow realm of 4Chan. There, “blackpilled” by the incels, he discovered an awful truth: that women only desire attractive men. But there was a solution: “looksmaxxing”. This neophilosophy posited that beauty was much like a sport or a musical instrument — if Peters put in the requisite effort, the 10,000 hours, he could make himself beautiful too (like his hero, the actor Matt Bomer). If Clavicular could be beautiful, then he could be desired. If he could be desired, then he wouldn’t die alone. He set to work on his face with a singular devotion.

He mail-ordered testosterone to inflate his muscles, until his parents discovered and confiscated his stash. He set up his own PO box to which he would order hormones and peptides and, it seems, crystal meth. He persisted with methods increasingly grotesque as he steadied the tiller of his errant puberty toward his beautiful majority. TikTok depicts his painful “ascension”: for some time, his face — pockmarked with fat jabs and carpeted with pubescent beards — initially resisted attempts at contortion until he started bonesmashing, as traumatic as it sounds. No longer a looksmaxxer, Clavicular was a hardmaxxer — famous less for his beauty than for his willingness to suffer anything in pursuit of perfection. His destiny, after all, was to become beautiful.

His first big break came in November last year, when he appeared on a Kick Channel belonging to Cheesur — a “chaos streamer” known as much for racist trolling and high-stakes gambling as for his much-publicized claim that he helped the US military track down cartel lord “El Mencho”. Cheesur and Clav met to chat about hair-loss treatments, but instead assessed the merits of meth. “I do meth,” said Clavicular, “to — you know, basically — suppress my appetite and try to get leaner.” He methmaxxed to gauntmaxx.

But was it worth it? Upon ascension, he became less interested in obsessively documenting his beauty and his practices, and more interested in banally provocative livestreams — shouting the n-word on a street, crying over a “raw” steak, or being “brutally framemogged” by the ASU Frat Leader. There were girls, too, of course, but few ever seemed to linger. Back in November, he injected one with a fat-dissolving drug. “Now that we’re doing Aqualyx,” she says, as she presses her face with varnished fingers, “these fat cheeks will go away.” He is unexpectedly delicate, as he dabs her face with alcohol and gently slides in the needle.

But “slaymaxing” with a succession of obsessive “foids” can be tiresome. And he entertains his gormless retinue with tales of Grandma. How he was sent off to her house in Connecticut when he pissed off his parents, and how lived with her while serving as a “wagecuck” — a waiter, that is — after being kicked out university when his drugs stash was uncovered. “I like to see peoples’ faces when I wake up in the morning,” he tells a cluster of scantily clad groupies during one livestream. “That’s why I liked living with my grandma,” he tells her, before lamenting the fact that she won’t come to Florida. “She’s too old to go on flights.” He was beautiful but damned to loneliness.

Of course, he never helped himself — not when he emptied a pistol into a dying alligator, nor when he ran over a fan. But for that, he might have been forgiven, had he not sung “Heil Hitler” in a Florida club (he was always in Florida clubs; last night, he launched his own Florida club) while flanked by the Tate brothers and Nick Fuentes, or intimated a sort-of primitive eugenics when he called JD Vance “subhuman” on account of his “recessed side profile”. (That’s why he’d vote Democrat in 2028: because “Newsom mogs”.) In his empty quest for beauty, Clavicular had damned himself to become a cipher for the issues of the day. The more interviewers attempted to label him (a Nazi, an Incel, a Lost Boy) the more he’d insist that he wasn’t interested in “political jestering”. He was just “a looksmax guy”.

None of this made him a massive streamer — only 295,000 followers on Kick, 890,000 on TikTok — but that hasn’t stopped his content from becoming some of the most influential ever made. Overnight, it seemed, everyone was speaking Clavicular. The Mayor of London was “Londonmaxxing” and the Office of the Under Secretary for War for Research and Engineering captions a tweet: “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethality maxxing.” As much as Clavicular insists that all politics is “jester” he has become political.

For under the mask, there is an ugliness. In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia this week, after fielding questions about his friendship with Andrew Tate, he responded with petulant childishness and informed his interviewer that he “didn’t have time to look into who your wife cheated with” before ending the call (the interviewer smiled; saying he is unmarried). Last month, when The Atlantic journalist Will Gottsegen requested an interview with Clavicular for an article, he responded via email with a photograph of the magazine’s boss, Laurene Powell Jobs, on a beach with Ghislaine Maxwell. But when Clavicular shared Gottsegen’s contact information online, The Atlantic writer said he “had never experienced so many direct violent threats, and so much virulent anti-Semitic hatred” as those he received from Clavicular’s fans.

And the closer the boy came to that perfect face, the more monstrous he was. “I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful,” Oscar Wilde wrote. Clavicular, by now impotent, meth-addicted, and specter-thin, passed endless nights in endless joints, heckled and clawed at and plied with free drinks, his life live-streamed into such formlessness that, by the time he overdosed this week in a Florida club on a “pentastack” — the cocktail of Adderall, DXM, Ketamine, BDO, and Pregabalin which sustain his livestreams — his life had relinquished almost all pretense of meaning. Like Dorian Gray, he would emerge from each scrape (with drugs, the feds, or women) unblemished. His face was calcified in its youth. “The worst part of tonight,” he joked the morning after his overdose, “was my face descending from the life-support mask.” But, by the time he was streaming again, it looked like nothing had happened. Somewhere, surely, inside or upstairs, there must be a trace of his self-destruction.

“Whatever bad happens,” Andrew Tate once told him, “I hope you sit there and go: ‘At least I was real. I was me. I said what I meant.’” And yet the tragedy of Clavicular is that he could never be real. Following this week’s unfortunate events, he announced that things would need to change — that he can’t do what he does without drugs, and that he can’t risk another overdose. Had he chosen life-over-fame, age-over meth? Towards the end of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian ponders “a new life” until guilt forces him to slash his portrait and so kill himself. “Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in the heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.” Dorian’s story is a tragedy because he has the capacity for self-reflection.

But Clavicular? From his soulless mansion, haunted by hangers-on, he broadcast to his fans that he must learn “either to practice mogging sober, or just find a new form of content”. But then, only hours later, there he was at the launch of his “Bacara Club”, looking as spectral as ever, as if doomed to party into his twilight. It seems this wasn’t the end of Clavicular’s tragedy — just a scene-change after the first act.

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