I’ve often been fascinated by fringe social phenomenon, like the idea of ‘Lol-cows’, a primarily online form of anti-idol-worship.
I myself have kept tabs on a few of the more prominant lolcows over the years.
more often than not however my focus has primarily been on the vastly different and often increasingly toxic communities which grow around them, like a hateful mould.
And though I try to keep my two lives seperate, online vs offline, I can at least divulge that I was the user who definitively confirmed the death of the once prominant lolcow ‘KingCobraJFS’ – having sourced the Fire and EMS Dispatch Live Audio feed for the night in question; in his home town of Casper, Wyoming, and scouring hours of audio to locate the exact call which sadly, confirmed his passing to us.
Whilst in those communities I tend more toward the role of observer rather than active participant, however in that instance it seemed imperitive to intervene – and in doing so I discovered the bewildering experience of being named and quoted in dark corners all over the internet, as we all came to terms with the actuality of his demise.
However, I digress.
Though I have written a seperate piece on the phenomenon and it’s allure, this isn’t about lolcows…
Rather this is about something which has hit mainstream media these past few days, meaning that one of our strange little corners of the internet may be more widely percieved by ‘the normies’ and as such I can share my thoughts on the subject without having to justify the very notion of the phenomenon/community’s existence to those who aren’t familiar.
I speak of course of the worrying new Gen-Z trend – ‘looksmaxxing’.
There’s a sharp, and concerning parallel to be drawn between modern “looksmaxxing” culture and John Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment, especially the emergence of what he called “the beautiful ones.”
If you’re not familiar with the experiements in question – between 1968 and 1973, John B. Calhoun conducted a series of experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), his most famous experiment was known as ‘Universe 25.’
Officially, the colony was called the Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice.
Unofficially, it was called “Mouse Heaven.”
It was a large 4.5 foot cube which contained everything a mouse could ever desire:
An inexhaustible supply of food and clean water,
a perfect climate;
reams of tissue paper for nesting;
and 256 separate apartments, accessible via mesh tubes bolted to the walls.
Furthremore, every single occupant was screened to eliminate the threat of disease.
Free from the threat of predators or disease, of starvation or the harsh elements, a mouse could theoretically live to an extraordinarily old age there, with absolutely no concern.
Survival, in the traditional sense, was for them, ‘solved’.
Yet instead of flourishing, the society collapsed – and it did so dramatically, with a number of wildly disturbing observations made, which some suggest we are beginning to see play out in our own society today.
As overcrowding intensified – the social contract was seemingly broken, and normal social structures broke down entirely.
Our focus however is on one particular subset of the population…known as “The Beautiful One’s”
Many male mice stopped participating in life altogether.
They no longer fought for territory, courted females, defended nests, or competed for status.
They instead withdrew from social existence almost entirely.
As stated, Calhoun dubbed these males “the beautiful ones”, as unlike the battle-scarred dominant males, their coats were perfectly clean – smooth and untouched.
Their lives became a cycle of eating, sleeping, and -obsessively- grooming themselves.
They looked perfect – because they had abandoned all purpose.
This occurred during what Calhoun described as the “death phase” of the colony – a stage not of starvation, but of behavioral collapse.
Calhoun termed it, the “Behavioral sink”.
Reproduction ceased.
Social bonds dissolved.
The mice experienced what he described as a kind of “first death,” a psychological and social death before the physical extinction of the entire colony, which swiftly followed.
And it is this comparison which I keep coming back to lately, which I find increasingly relevant – especially when I observe the, perhaps related, but uncomfortably similar “LooksMaxxing” culture.
A growing number of young men, particularly online, have become intensely focused on self-optimization through appearance:
jawlines, skincare, gym routines, symmetry analysis, cosmetic procedures, hyper-fixation on perceived flaws, and entire dialect is being created to describe the process, the hierachy and what defines one’s status within.
Improvement itself is not the problem however, self-care is normal.
The problem begins when appearance becomes a substitute for participation in life, and furthermore when it extends to the extremes that we are seeing within the sub-culture.
Often referred to as HardMaxxing, with practices such as “Bone-Smashing” – a technique intended to restructure facial bones by creating microfractures – wherein a ‘Looksmaxxer’ will smash their facial structure with a range of impliments, from hammers or mallets to percussive therapy devices.
Or the maxxer who participates in an an acitivity he simply calls ‘fat melting’ – wherein he uses an unknown impliment to burn & ‘cook’ his cheeks, the theory being that by burning his cheecks he’s cooking/melting the fat in his face, creating a concave, or chiselled appearance.
Like Calhoun’s beautiful ones, these subjects have become trapped in endless self-observation and further developed extreme grooming practices which extend to not just the medically hazardous, but the downright harmful.
This is all compounded by the growth of a sudden global audience, similar to that which I’ve observed in the LolCow sub-culture.
As a result of their audience they develop an exponentioally increased pressure to “Ascend” (a looksmaxxing tearm meaning to move up the perceived social hierarchy by means of physical alteration)
And on the other side of this connection is the faceless audeince, an ever present sucking void, a heaving anonymous mass who develop a parasocial relationship with their looksmaxxer of choice.
They themselves becoming obsessed not only with the practice, but with the maxxer themselves, as some form of celeberity worship.
In physics, a positive feedback loop is when an output feeds back into the system in a way that amplifies the original behavior, rather than stabilizing it.
Ever put a microphone too close to a speaker?
The speaker outputs sound → the microphone picks up the sound → the amplified noise is then fed back into the speaker → which outputs the further-amplified noise into the microphone again → looping louder and louder until you get an unbearable screeching echo.
Socially, the same thing is happening here.
A looksmaxxer posts increasingly extreme self-optimization content.
The audience responds with attention, validation, envy, obsession, or even worship, and that attention reinforces the behavior, pushing the creator into more extreme routines, more invasive procedures, more dangerous ‘peptides’ and blackmarket injections, more obsessive self-surveillance – in order to maintain status before their anonymous crowd, their sucking void, their faceless audience.
The audience, in turn, consumes this escalation and internalizes it as the new standard, becoming more fixated themselves, which increases demand for even more extreme content.
Both sides feed off each other, intensify each other.
at this point it’s no longer just parasocial – it’s a mutually reinforcing positive feedback loop of aesthetic escalation, by means of what can only be described as self-harm.
Instead of building genuine relationships, developing competence, or pursuing meaning, energy is redirected inward toward this ideal of ‘ascension’ – toward aesthetic ‘perfection.’
Grooming replaces courtship.
Image replaces identity.
Presentation replaces purpose.
The deeper issue has little to do with vanity, but displacement.
In a society where traditional rites of passage, stable community roles, and clear paths to meaning have weakened, appearance becomes one of the few remaining arenas where control feels possible, where a future appears clear.
When the social contract is broken, and status, belonging, and purpose feel inaccessible, a new social hierachy is manifested – by way of ‘beautification’
The mirror becomes the tool,
Social media becomes the battlefield,
The self becomes the project.
Calhoun’s experiment suggested that abundance without responsibility produces collapse.
When creatures are stripped of meaningful roles, they don’t become liberated – they instead become passive, withdrawn, and ultimately self-consuming.
The warning of Universe 25 is not that beauty is dangerous, or that abundance alone is catastrophic, but that beauty pursued in isolation from purpose becomes a symptom of decline, a canary in the mine if you will.
The “beautiful ones” were not the winners of the experiment.
They were the desperate signalling of its final stage, the symptomatic death throws of a societal collapse.
what further exacerbates things, and which repulsed me personally, was something you may have seen in the news recently.
There was a recent 60 minutes interview with a prominant looksmaxxer (Clavicular / Braden Peters), it’s been all over social media for a few days because they mocked him enough for him to ‘storm out’ of the interview.
The focus of the piece seemed to be on Braden’s ties to incel subcultures, misogyny, andrew tate, and in many ways was just a hit-piece divised to openly mock and humiliate not just him, but his audience.
It was one of those scenes where I couldn’t help but think to myself “All of the people on this screen right now are fucking terrible in their own perverse, self-interested ways”
An institution like 60 Minutes publicly turning it’s attention toward a young man like Clavicular is revealing in and of itself.
However here is someone who appears (to me) less like a villain and more like a symptom – a young man driven into what can only be described as a form of psychological extremity by profound insecurity, societal alienation, and a deep disconnection from stable social identity…a symptom of societal decline….a “beutiful one” from universe 25…now in human form.
And rather than asking what manner of cultural environment produces this kind of obsessive self-destruction – his pathology was paraded as entertainment.
He was treated as an absurdity to be gleefully mocked, rather than as evidence of a broader social failure; and in framing it as they did the failing societal systems which helped to create him remain comfortably invisible.
The interview was a predatory transaction, deriding an unwell young man for views instead of what it should have been, an expose about the how people behave irrationally when institutions no longer reward rational participation, and how this young man, this living symptom, is a product of that broken social contract.
A society that produces these figures and then publicly ridicules them for becoming, is not diagnosing illness – it is participating in and actively driving it’s creation.
It is perpetuating harm through ridicule, for financial gain, at the expense of not just the individual but of society as a whole.
The old implicit contract was simple:
work hard, behave well, delay gratification, contribute to society — and in return you could expect stability.
A Home.
A Family.
Social respect.
Economic mobility.
A future that made sacrifice meaningful.
And what we’re seeing in not just this looksmaxxing culture, but in this ‘youth crime crisis’ is that when people believe that social contract is broken, when a meaninful future is unobtainable, behavior changes in wild, worrying and significant ways.
Why invest in discipline if ownership is impossible?
Why respect institutions that no longer protect or represent you?
Why pursue family formation if economic conditions make it structurally unstable?
Why build long-term identity when the future feels inaccessible?
This is where Calhoun once again becomes relevant.
In Universe 25, collapse didn’t come from scarcity, but from the destruction of functional social roles.
The mice still had food and shelter, but they no longer had meaningful participation in a social order.
Dominance structures broke down.
Maternal behavior collapsed, the final litters died from neglectful mothers and violence.
Courtship failed.
Violence increased in some groups, whilst total withdrawal defined others.
Some became hyper-aggressive, engaging in acts of utter depravity, whilst others withdrew completely, becoming the “beautiful ones.”
The intiial signalling of its final stages, before the total collapse of the colony, produced both antisocial violence and passive narcissistic withdrawal.
I once again cannot help but draw a terrifying comparsion between Universe-25 and the seemingly sudden emergence of these behaviours we’re seeing presently in our own society.
On one end, you have retreat into aesthetics, self-optimization, online identity, and performative moral signaling, all hierarchical status games detached from any real contribution.
and on the other, you have nihilism expressed as crime, social disorder, and rejection of civic obligation.
They may look like opposites, but they are each symptoms of the same root problem: The belief that the system offers no meaningful future.
Even moral performance seemingly fits this model.
When public virtue becomes primarily about language-policing, symbolic purity, or social signaling rather than actual sacrifice or responsibility, morality itself becomes aestheticized; less about building a fair and decent society and more about displaying personal moral cleanliness.
It becomes ethical grooming, rooted in the tribalism inherit of our species – driven not by a desire for moral cohesion, but by a tribalistic hatred of the ‘others’ – most apparent in any Left vs Right ‘discussion’ one sees online nowadays.
Not unlike Calhoun’s beautiful ones: it is but the pursuit of a pristine appearance in the midst of civilizational collapse.
when institutions fail to produce legitimacy, people stop behaving like stakeholders and start behaving like mere occupants…or worse, hostages.
This is the death phase.
Not when people become evil – but when they stop believing the future belongs to them