letter from the editor: oligarchs, algorithms, and freewillmaxxxing

this is the letter from the editor for issue 7 of the diving horse, our summer issue, themed freewillmaxxxing. it's about touching grass and turning off the phone, sure, but it's also about media literacy, mortality, morality, who's profiting off your insecurity, and what it actually costs to make your own choices in a world built to make them for you. we're sharing it here for free so you can get a feel for the issue before you grab one.

we also talk to colin murphy, big body kito, em weight, enzo ronchi, and celia porter, and get the scoop on what the youth of ac are actually thinking. newsflash: everyone brought up third spaces and i didn't even prompt them to. plus learn about some new additions to the hottest show on the boards, the hook, and a boatload more.

issue 7 is available now. preorder online for pickup at tony's baltimore grill or angeloni's club madrid, or we'll mail it to you. pick up at tony's and your first beer or wine is on the house.

issue 7: freewillmaxxxing

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freewillmaxxxing is a reflection on our digital, post-covid age, a world where the budding adults went to prom online and celebrities spend as much as a house on a facelift. it's hard to know what's real, hard to trust much of anything, and somehow we're more connected than ever and just using this power to isolate even louder.

poverty, war, famine, fatigue, none of that is actually new. like, oligarchs have always weaponized religion to keep the poor obedient, weaponized love and sex to sell you something, manipulated art and music to flatten the population into whatever shape served them that decade. people have been writing about these patterns for as long as people have been writing. what is new is the medium: we are the first people who have lived under constant surveillance, constant connectivity, constant access to anything you can think to look up, constant visibility to anyone who feels like looking, and people livestream their lives now, their breakups, their meals, their actual deaths sometimes. you can show yourself to millions of strangers every second of every day if you want to, and a lot of people do, because the economy now rewards that more than it rewards most actual jobs, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, some of the people getting paid are people who never would have been paid for anything by the old gatekeepers. but the patterns running through all of this are the same patterns that have always run, it's just the volume and the speed and the proximity that are unprecedented, and that changes what it feels like to be a person.

there is a whole genre of tiktoks now of people who went into prison before smartphones and came out into this, and they walk into a gas station and watch everyone in line scrolling, and they don't know how to use the self-checkout, and they describe the change in the air, the lack of eye contact, the way nobody looks up. my dad has talked about it too. he went in the slammer before smartphones really existed and came out when they were at their peak, and he says the biggest difference wasn't the tech itself, it was watching how people changed around the tech. when somebody who skipped a decade of it tells you the world feels different, you should believe them.

what's also new is the proximity. we can see firsthand what's happening in sudan and gaza, in real time, from the people it's happening to, and then we can watch the algorithm try to bury those firsthand sources under confusion, hostility, ragebait, and ten thousand competing little fires designed to wear you out before you can think about any of it. it's not that the information isn't there, it's that you're being kept too tired to hold it. but this is just one example.

and you can feel it on the street, too, where the third places are gone or going, the diners closed, the lobbies got privatized, and once essential establishments are now closed or closing. in atlantic city it's worse than most cities, because the institutions that used to be third places, the boardwalk amusements, the casinos themselves, are (for the most part) no longer trying to be. the casinos aren't trying to entertain, they're not trying to be a place, they're trying to extract the maximum dollar per square foot from a body in a chair and then move that body along. the carpet patterns are designed to push you toward the slot floor, the chairs at the slot floor are designed so you stay just long enough to lose the next hundred, and nothing in there is built for leisure anymore. you can feel it. it isn't even fun to lose at the slots anymore, the lights aren't lighting, the ambient noise is gone, and you can tell they just want everyone to go home and gamble on the app instead, where the margins are better and they don't have to pay anyone to walk the floor.

around it, the rest of the city keeps thinning out, the mom-and-pops keep getting bought or they don't get bought and they just close, and the same handful of conglomerates absorb whatever was local, and the food gets a little cheaper and the prices go a little higher and the staff gets paid a little less and the menu gets a little shorter and one day you realize there's nowhere left in town that's actually run by someone who lives in town and, more importantly, cares about this town, aside from a few establishments. (let's take a moment of silence and manifest that the irish pub makes it out of all this unscathed and unmodernized, its charm and its prices preserved, its history intact, its sprinklers, fine, sure, update those, we'll allow it.) all of it adds up to a city that feels like it's being run by people who have never been here, and it forces the people who actually love it here out, including me. if this city starts looking like fishtown, corporate and ugly with nothing local left in it, i'm taking my magazine and getting the fuck out, respectfully.

freewillmaxxxing is about finding a little balance, harmony, and bliss anyway, about taking a walk and leaving your phone at home, or using your phone for something productive instead of doomscrolling, about being really bad at something for a while before you're kind of good at it, finding a new favorite food and a new least favorite, owning up to your mistakes, booking the flight if you can squeeze it, sticking up for yourself or for a stranger, loving someone you've been taught to hate, going easy on yourself and on other people, and building meaning into your life that isn't just the grind everyone's handed you as the default. being open minded, being yourself, saying "you know what, i don't like that, but it's none of my business." it's the art of knowing when to mind your business and when not to.

but it's also about facing the tough stuff, about adapting, persevering, knowing when to cut ties, knowing when to put yourself last and when to put yourself first, paying attention to who's profiting from your insecurity and to how many of your "personal failings" are actually products being sold back to you. you can't fix all of it, but you can notice it, and noticing is most of the work.

it's about redirecting misplaced anger, turning the volume back down, understanding that you give what you get and that the way you react to a thing is often more of the thing than the thing itself. some of the worst stuff that ever happened to me ended up being the things that taught me the most, and i'm not saying that's a rule, i'm just saying it's worth sitting with before you decide what something means. yin and yang, cause and effect, a little time on the beach, coming together instead of coming apart.

obvi, this issue came together because of clavicular. if you don't know who that is, i envy you, briefly. braden, twenty years old, born in 2005, the year before youtube went mainstream, the face of the looksmaxxing scene, which is a whole online universe of mostly young men trying to optimize their faces and bodies into a very specific image of male attractiveness through gym work, skincare, jaw training, cosmetic procedures, and on the deep end of it, "bone smashing," which means hitting your own face with a hammer. they have their own slang, too: mogging is out-attracting someone in proximity, mewing is a tongue posture thing supposedly meant to reshape your jawline, and looksmaxxing itself just means maxxing out your looks. ascending is getting better, descending is getting worse or doing something embarrassing.

honestly, in my head it isn't all that different from our own beauty standards as women, chiseling down their cheekbones, getting buccal fat removed, taking ozempic, starving yourself, whatever this week's procedure is. going to extremes for beauty isn't new, it's just usually been women doing it, and we got so used to it that we stopped seeing it. some of the things clav says that people are most outraged by, i read and i'm like, that's just kind of the beauty standard for women, said out loud, by a guy, and that's part of why it's making everyone so mad. it's the same machine pointed at a different gender and people don't have a script for it yet.

i, like most twenty-eight year olds, first learned about clav through insane headlines and short clips on tiktok, and like most twenty-eight year olds, i wrote him off as an annoying dummy and moved on. but like most things, it isn't that simple. the headlines are almost all wrong, or at least flattened, and the more i actually watched and read past the headlines, the less the easy take held up. clav is not a stupid kid. he is a scared kid, an articulate one, and one who has thought a lot about what he's doing and why.

the 60 minutes australia interview made me want to throw a chair, not because of him but because of the interviewer, who kept making the whole thing about himself, hanging onto buzzwords like they were going to do the work of an actual question, not trying to understand where clav was coming from at all, just judging him. and then he pulled this move where he claimed that if he, the interviewer, was super ugly, he'd still have the same job, which, first of all, is not a man who got that job because of his personality, and second of all, the way he talked about women in that same interview was its own little master class in the exact thing he was supposedly there to investigate. by the end of it i was siding with clav, which was frustrating, because i didn't want to be, but when a grown adult journalist interviews a twenty year old as if the twenty year old is the freak in a sideshow and the twenty year old turns out to be the more composed person in the room, that's its own kind of telling.

the deeper thing, and the thing that gave me the idea for this issue, is what watching clav and his audience and his critics actually shows you, which is that the looksmaxxing economy runs on dissatisfaction, it sells you the cure for an anxiety it manufactured, and the people most furious about it, including the people most furious about clav personally, are often running a slightly less extreme version of the same operation in their own lives, like the filter on instagram, the post-breakup haircut, the squinting in the mirror, the small daily looksmaxxing nobody calls looksmaxxing because we did it before there was a word for it.

so you can write him off as a freak, a lot of people do, but the loudest dismissals of clav often reveal more about the dismisser than about clav, because when you write someone off, you don't have to think about why they exist. and clav didn't appear out of nowhere, he's a kid who grew up in a world that told him his face was a problem to solve, in a country where loneliness is a public health crisis, in an economy that pays him to keep solving it. the people selling him the hammer are richer than him, the people laughing at him on tv are paid more than him, and the people my age sneering at his haircut are, in a lot of cases, just an instagram filter away from being on the other side of the equation.

so why is it like this, why are we all walking around holding ourselves and each other to standards nobody can actually hit? part of it is the machine, because the same economy that produced clav also pays celebrities to sell ozempic and fillers to teenage girls, and we call one of them a freak and the other one a wellness brand. part of it is loneliness. part of it is that staring at your phone for nine hours a day will produce a person who hates their own face, eventually, almost regardless of what that face actually looks like. and part of it is that we got so used to women bending themselves into impossible shapes that we stopped seeing it as anything but normal, and now a man is doing the same kind of bending out loud and it looks shocking because it's the same operation pointed at a different target.

and part of it, i think, is that we were raised in a system that doesn't actually teach you how to think, it teaches you categories, multiple choice, standardized tests, one correct answer per question, fill in the bubble, move on. you don't get rewarded for asking why the question is shaped the way it is, you get rewarded for picking from the list, so when someone shows up who refuses to fit in the list, your brain doesn't know where to put them. clav says, over and over, in interview after interview, that he's a jester. he says he's not telling anyone else what to do. he says people have to figure out what they want for themselves, which is almost the entire point of this issue, but he says it with a haircut and a face and a vocabulary that most people have already filed under "influencer who is bad," and the file is already closed, so what he actually says doesn't make it in. we got mad at him for what we slotted him into rather than what he is, and we do this constantly, to each other, all day, every day, because it's the thing the school system taught us to do and we never unlearned it.

clav has the freewill to do whatever he wants to his face and his body, which is the same freewill this whole issue is named after. you can disagree with what he does, you can think the whole looksmaxxing project is grim and sad (i do, too, in a way), and all of that is fair. but the rage at him specifically, the dunking, the headlines, the writing him off as a freak, that's the symptom of the same disease that made him, it's the categorizing brain refusing to deal with a thing it doesn't have a category for, and it's no less suffocating when we do it than when the system did it to us.

freewill doesn't mean no consequences, though, it means you get to make the choice and then you also have to live in whatever the choice produces. clav can bone smash his face all he wants, he can also end up looking like pretty squidward in ten years, and the meth (if the rumors are true, and they often are with looksmaxxers, the routine is brutal) will write its own bill, and that's his to carry. and the same applies to the rest of us. you can choose how you react to him, to a stranger on the internet, to your neighbor, to your in-laws, to anybody, but you also have to live in the result of that reaction, because every choice you make creates the next conditions you have to deal with. you might be right, they might be right, nobody might be right, doesn't matter, you still have to own it, you still have to apologize when you screw up, you still have to move on. that's what freewill actually costs.

so how do we breathe a little. i don't fully know, i'm figuring it out too, but i think it starts with noticing, noticing what you've been sold and what you've been sold to want, noticing when the rage you feel at a stranger on the internet is doing something to you that doesn't actually help anybody including you, noticing when you're filing somebody into a bubble before you've actually listened to what they're saying. taking the walk, leaving the phone, eating the meal slowly, talking to the person at the counter, sitting on a bench somewhere if you can still find one. going easy on yourself, going easier on each other, realizing that the kid you're mad at on the internet is somebody's kid, and that he's scared, and that you've been scared too, and that yelling at a scared person has never once made them less scared. at the very least, we can start by having these conversations.