Looksmaxxing and the Economics of Self-Memeification
This past April a twenty-year-old streamer who goes by Clavicular collapsed during a livestream in Miami and woke up in a hospital bed. He had built his audience by promoting bone smashing, the practice of striking your own face with a hard object in the hope of forcing the jaw into a sharper line, and he had spoken with a certain pride about the steroids and the crystal meth he was using to get the body he wanted. Afterward he announced he was finished with drugs. When YouTube removed his channel he called the decision very sad news and described his videos as free courses created to help young men become the best versions of themselves. Around the same weeks TikTok began quietly throttling searches for bone smashing, which by the platform’s own count had been climbing toward nearly two million a day. The trend did not slow down, and the reason it did not slow down is the actual subject of this essay.
There is an easy reading of all this, which is that some young men are doing stupid and dangerous things on the internet. It happens to be true and it explains nothing, because people have always done stupid and dangerous things, usually in private and at a loss. There is also a smarter reading, the one currently filling the newspapers and the expert panels, which is that looksmaxxing is a symptom of the attention economy, of the manosphere, of a generation of men meeting precarity and loneliness with no visible exit. That reading is also true, and it is still not quite the thing. It explains why young men are anxious and why anxious young men end up online. It does not explain why this specific practice, the least defensible and most obviously absurd thing the whole subculture has produced, is the part that travels furthest. Skincare does not trend. The hammer trends. Any account of looksmaxxing that cannot say why the worst idea wins has skipped the mechanism, and the mechanism is the thing kekonomics exists to name.
The self becomes a project
On the surface looksmaxxing is the most reasonable thing in the world. The softmaxxing end of it, as the subculture itself distinguishes, is skincare and sleep and posture and a haircut that suits your face, the kind of advice your grandmother gave away for free. Most of us run a quiet version of it before a video call, tilting the lamp, raising the laptop onto a stack of books so the webcam catches us from slightly above. Hardmaxxing is where it tips: surgery, hormones, unregulated fillers, and at the far edge the hammer. Roughly half of the under-24s in one 2025 survey said they were already weighing some kind of procedure, and more than half reported real anxiety about how they looked. The notable thing is not the spread of the behavior. It is the quiet grammatical shift underneath it, the moment the face stops being a face and becomes a project.
Once the face is a project it inherits the whole vocabulary of one. The jawline becomes an asset, the cheekbones become infrastructure, the skin becomes a maintenance schedule, and the body turns into a speculative surface on which social value may or may not eventually appear, like an early-stage company waiting on a funding round the founder is no longer sure is coming. You can watch the conversion happen inside an app. Umax AI, one of the more popular face-rating tools, asks you to upload a few selfies and returns what its own marketing calls a brutal but helpful score. It rates your symmetry, your skin, your masculinity, your jawline, your cheekbones, and a figure it simply labels potential. It will detect vocal fry in your voice and prescribe exercises to lower your pitch. It has a setting called Hot or Not that the copy promises is fun to play with friends. The mirror used to reflect. The app ranks, stores, compares, and upsells, and what it is really selling is the premise that a face is a column of numbers and the numbers have a price.
This is also where the meme stops staying outside the body. The Chad face began as caricature, the cartoon of effortless masculine success that the internet drew in order to laugh near it. Inside looksmaxxing the caricature hardened into a template, a face you are meant to approach forever without arriving. A meme is an abstraction lifted out of social life, and here it loops back down and starts issuing instructions to the people who drew it. The joke files a performance review on its own audience. This is what the word self-memeification is trying to catch, and it leaves us with the economic question, which is what exactly is being produced when a joke becomes a face.
Why the hammer and not the moisturizer
Classical economics gives a thing two kinds of worth. There is use-value, whether it works, and there is exchange-value, what it trades for. Bone smashing has neither. It does not work, since doctors have said plainly and repeatedly that striking your face micro-fractures bone and invites chronic pain and nerve damage well before it invites a sharper jaw, and the streamer performing it is not selling you a jaw. And yet bone smashing generates enormous value. Kekonomics is the attempt to name that third kind of worth. Call it kek-value, the worth of an object measured purely by its capacity to keep being reacted to.
Kek-value has one strange property that makes the whole system legible. It does not require the object to be true, useful, or even sincere. It requires the object to be undecidable. The single most valuable feature a piece of content can carry is that nobody, including its maker, can quite tell whether it is a joke. The question kekonomics always opens with, is this serious, and the honest answer, yes and no, is not the mood of the culture. It is the asset itself. Undecidability is liquidity. A sincere claim can be refuted and a pure joke can be waved away, it’s just a meme, but an object that is both at once can be neither refuted nor dismissed, which means it never has to stop circulating. It sells to the sincere audience as advice and to the ironic audience as spectacle, in the same instant, indefinitely. The gap between the joke and the injury is not a defect in the product. It is the product.
This is why the hammer beats the moisturizer, and the result is genuinely counterintuitive. The system does not merely tolerate absurdity, it actively selects for it. A practice that visibly fails is funnier, more reactable, and more undecidable than one that quietly works, so bone smashing failing as orthopaedics is precisely what lets it succeed as kekonomics. In an ordinary market a product failure is a loss to be hidden. In kekonomics a failure is often the stronger product, because failure is the more liquid object. Skincare works, which is exactly its commercial weakness here. It resolves. It decides. It produces a face and then stops being content. The hammer never resolves, and so it never stops.
The mutation of an injury
Return now to Clavicular on the floor of his livestream, because his collapse is the clearest demonstration available of what virality actually is once you slow it down. Virality is not one object spreading outward unchanged. It is one object mutating, and every mutation is a fresh issue of kek-value drawn against the same underlying event.
Track it. The faint is the raw event. The hospital becomes concern content. I am finished with drugs becomes confession content, the redemption arc. YouTube removing the channel becomes persecution content. Very sad news and free courses to help young men become the best versions of themselves becomes mission content, the founder restating the vision to investors after a difficult quarter. Each step is the same forty seconds of unconsciousness re-minted as a new instrument, and each instrument pays out to a slightly different audience. The collapse did not interrupt the content cycle. It recapitalized it. A medical emergency became, inside a few hours, a quarter with unusually strong returns.
This is the part the precarity reading cannot reach on its own. Catastrophe is a liquidity event. The injury is the IPO. And the platform underneath all of it is perfectly indifferent to the jaw, because it was never pricing the jaw. It was pricing the reaction, and a hospitalization reacts beautifully.
The wound is inventory
So the loop closes, and it is worth stating in its kekonomic form rather than its sociological one. A meme sets an ideal. The ideal opens a wound. The wound is undecidable, since the looksmaxxer striking his own face genuinely cannot tell you whether he is performing a bit or pursuing a future, and that uncertainty is not his private confusion, it is his market value. The undecidable wound becomes content. The content is liquid. The liquidity converts into attention and money, and the money flows back to thicken the meme, which sets a slightly sharper ideal, and the loop tightens by one notch.
Precarity belongs in this picture, and kekonomics asks something harder of it than sympathy. Precarity is what makes a generation liquid. It converts a wide population of insecure young men into raw material, a deep and renewable supply of wounds available to be minted into content. The loneliness is entirely real, and from the system’s side it is also inventory. This is why the promise can never be allowed to close. There is always another flaw, another angle, another procedure, another influencer with a sharper jaw and a better lit room, because a self that finished optimizing would be a self that stopped producing. The optimized face never ships. It stays permanently in beta, always loading, which is exactly where it is worth the most.
Every other account of looksmaxxing treats its absurdity as the thing to be explained, the embarrassing surface under which the real causes are presumed to hide. Kekonomics treats the absurdity as the thing doing the explaining. The hammer is not a symptom of the system. It is the system’s selection criterion, the standing proof that undecidability outperforms sincerity and that a culture which prices reaction will reliably push its most ridiculous gesture to the front of the feed. The joke, in the end, is the infrastructure. And sometimes, lately, the infrastructure has a jawline, and a livestream, and a hammer it holds up to the camera so you can see it clearly, because it already understands that the moment the hammer comes down is the moment worth the most.