The bees are dying. That’s an objective fact, for which we can blame commercial pesticides, climate change, and, more recently, a content creator who goes by the handle @green_king365. In February, he took to Instagram with a video of him grabbing a bee and pressing it against his temple. When it stings and injects its “bee venom” it acts as a “natural hairline steroid,” he explains. He then eats the bee. That part isn’t necessary for results, though it is perhaps the logical next step in what can only be described as anti-slaphead slapstick. There’ll be no trip to Istanbul for this lad. For what it’s worth, @green_king365 already has decent hair. He may style it a bit like Sid from Toy Story, but it has good volume and luster. Things certainly aren’t dire enough for him to be committing small-scale bee genocide. That’s not the point, though. Because @green_king365 is a looksmaxxer, and like most other broadcasts from that world, his thing with the bees forces us to broach the eternal question: Is this for real, or some kind of performance art? View this post on Instagram The other day, it occurred to me. Looksmaxxing bros are Jackass for the algorithm. Green King (let’s ditch the @) combines self-inflicted pain and internet virality with a third element: nature. Browse his videos and you’ll see him gnawing unidentified wild mushrooms straight off the branch and jumping barefoot onto sharp-looking rocks from a great height. He’s already got other lads rubbing their arses against tree trunks to score a few stings.Add some funny circus music and a dwarf being fired out of a cannon and you’d basically be right back there in the summer of 2001, watching Johnny Knoxville and friends light up late-night MTV at your friend’s house.Not all looksmaxxing is stunt based. The culture itself runs along a spectrum, from “softmaxxing” (there isn’t anything particularly spectacular about moisturizer tutorials) to “hardmaxxing” (surgery, steroids, unorthodox bee-based innovations) and long ago started making its way from the online shadows into mainstream cultural consciousness. Ever since the 2019 New York cover story about the uptick in young men getting “incel plastic surgery” to achieve chiseled “Chad”-like features, there’s been a steady stream of reports on how male beauty standards are evolving in a strange dance with the internet. For humungous fitness influencers that look like mountains with veins and death-mogging biohackers like Bryan Johnson, the relationship between content creation and real-world behavior seems to be getting ever-more symbiotic, though some are more subtle and geeky about it than others. It’s easy to understand why most coverage has skewed hyperbolic. (“How many bones would you break to get laid?” read the digital headline for the New York piece.) There’s no shortage of articles warning that your child might take a hammer to his face after you’ve tucked him into bed or mew to the point of lockjaw. That concern isn’t entirely unfounded—last summer, one guy in Germany smashed up his legs to gain an extra 20.5cm in height, and is now on crutches re-learning to walk.Then there is Clavicular, the scene’s absurd but logical (or at least plausible) conclusion.Clavicular—a 21-year-old from New Jersey whose real name is Braden Peters—first started picking up column inches last autumn. In 2026, his fame has exploded. On a livestreamed visit to Arizona State University (ASU), Clavicular ran into a massive, croissant-looking frat leader who “brutally frame mogged” him. Instantly, a new lexicon was born. The terms “frame mogging” and “jestermaxxing” were suddenly everywhere, slapped onto anything. Old pictures of John and Yoko. Anti-capitalist sentiment. The Joker monologue from The Dark Knight. Watching it unfold, you can’t help but wonder if memes were always the point.“He’s already got other lads rubbing their arses against tree trunks”And yet there’s something decidedly pre-meme about it all. Regardless of the internet’s fingerprints, it’s chaos for the sake of chaos. Watching the video of Clav getting involved in a brawl at an NYC nightclub, you half expect Spike Jonze dressed as an old woman to materialise in the background. You’re waiting for a pair of prosthetic testicles to enter the frame. It’s the kind of footage that used to require a bumper edition of the DVD—the one with all the deleted scenes.It’s 8AM in London when 20-year-old Alex Aaron dials into our call. The self-proclaimed “biohacker” and full-time “#chad” is currently holidaying in Australia, doing the same shit he does in Colorado (gym), but in the Southern Hemisphere (gym but hot). His camera doesn’t work, which is a shame because Aaron is absolutely massive—he went viral with a TikTok of him parading his ripped physique around Colorado University. Sitting across from him on-screen would probably feel like Zoom calling a Street Fighter character. (Aaron knows the ASU frat boy, by the way—cagey on the details, but he’s apparently “an interesting guy.”)“I wouldn’t even call what I do looksmaxxing,” complains Aaron. “They take meth and smash their bones. That’s not me.” What Aaron does instead is inject himself with peptides: experimental compounds designed to optimize everything from muscle growth to skin quality. He’s elusive about his current stack, but does recommend injecting 500mg of glutathione if you ever happen to be hungover, and using Dihexa to help prevent Alzheimer’s. Medical professionals have strong reservations about peptides and the risks associated with taking them. To the watching audience, users like Aaron are a human experiment with a very long fuse. Jackass had the decency to hurt its cast immediately—a skateboard to the groin, a taser to the neck, results delivered in real time. Whatever Aaron is doing to himself, the bill might not arrive for years. Which, in a way, makes it harder to look away.In non-medical senses too, the peptides have been a problem for Aaron. Instagram suspended his account for promoting them, so he can’t do that anymore, though he still drops subtle mentions aimed at circumventing the censors here and there (“Tequila, rEt@trutide, and Shabbat dinner”). He now primarily operates on X, where he sells 30-minute “peptide/optimization” consultations. “When my platform blew up, I was like, why wouldn’t I be profiting off of this?” he says. View this post on Instagram Despite declining to smoke meth or smash his face with tools, Aaron’s fully aboard the content-to-commerce express, stopping at xenophobic rage bait, mentions of Clav, and “homelessmaxxing” (in essence, enjoying the benefits of living frugally). You can’t look away, even if you’re not one of the few that’ll actually get to the point where they’re injecting themselves with Thymosin Alpha-1. (That one’s good when you’re traveling, apparently.)Escalation is baked into the model. “The people that are successful are successful because what they say is crazy,” says Aaron. “They keep finding crazier things to say.” And increasingly crazier things to sell. The looksmaxxing ecosystem has merged with the broader hustle economy, where going viral and flogging something are essentially the same move. It’s a long way from the late-2010s “incel plastic surgery” panic, when the story was more straightforward: pathetic losers mutilating themselves to get girls. The guys dominating the space now aren’t desperate for sex—they’re entrepreneurs. The stunts, of course, have kept pace. There’s @andrewmaxxer, who looks like he just tried to inhale an iPhone. Thanks to his fuck-off jawline, he’s shilling “jaw training” gum (it’s just gum). When he’s not, it’s just visceral jaw-based content—gnawing on a massive saucisson, for instance. Leon Otremba (the German leg-smasher) offers €149 consultations to help others do the same. Even ex-bare knuckle boxer LinxLondon has become a regular fixture in the UK Kick streamer circuit, appearing alongside Ed Matthews purely for having a preposterous jawline—social currency made flesh.Again, all of this stuff feels like it could be the work of Bam Margera or Maria Abramović. “The guys dominating the space now aren’t desperate for sex—they’re entrepreneurs”In the same way that Jackass inspired thousands of teenage boys to form suburban “bush jumping” crews, the looksmaxxer dream is trickling down, having an impact on the things men are doing to alter their appearances, whether it’s getting “brotox” or deliberately getting bees to sting their foreheads. Rory*, a former looksmaxxer, had booked himself in for teeth whitening and a blepharoplasty (an eyelid lift) before canceling both. “I realized it was allowing other people too much influence on my life,” he tells me. Before that, he’d stuck to the basics—a haircut that better suited his face, some blusher to define his jaw. Small enough, in other words, not to feel like the beginning of something. But as another former looksmaxxer put it, the basics often pave the way for something more extreme. “At first it sounds ridiculous,” he explains. “Then it becomes optimized. Then it becomes responsible self-improvement.” View this post on Instagram Green King didn’t turn up for our scheduled call, but he did send voice notes afterwards. It would have been 9AM in Oregon, and you can hear he’s already out and about. The birds are singing and the bees buzzing, blissfully unaware of their fate. He tells me that “the vast majority of bee stings have been off camera.” Apparently, he’s “gotten hundreds upon hundreds.” “If my videos got zero views, I would absolutely still be doing it,” he says—something that’s a little hard to believe given he’s also “definitely looking to monetize it, whether that’s selling consultations and courses or what.”As for why he eats the bees, Green King explains: “Just to leave zero waste. Plus, they’re loaded with minerals and B vitamins. It’s a win-win.”One member of Green King’s crew is @floridamanbarrett. Though he’s a different breed entirely, he’s somehow a natural product of the same ecosystem, and even more Jackass-coded. Strip back the looksmaxxing lingo and the competitive lat flexing, and what you’re left with is a bloke angle-grinding a coconut for a laugh. Or juggling with a knife. Or shoplifting (he manages to shove six cans of tuna in his Nike fleece). It’s not looksmaxxing, exactly. But the impulse—to perform, to push it, to see what’s wild enough to land—is the same. Content first, consequences later. Spectacle designed to go viral, extreme enough to cut through an endless scroll. And behind it all, a business model. Jackass for the algorithm, with a merch table full of proteins, pills, and ball-pein hammers. Only, where Jackass did it to make people laugh, looksmaxxers do it to make people jealous. Watching it all, you’re struck by both the futility of existence and the sense that you can do, well, fucking anything. When homeownership feels like a punchline and graduate jobs are increasingly a lottery, optimizing your jawline (or at least performing the optimization of your jawline) starts to make a strange kind of sense. Status has to come from somewhere. And who knows, maybe it could come from moisturizer tutorials after all. While writing this piece, I came across the intrepid and important work of another of Green King’s crew: Tim Jantosz. His skincare regime? Caking his face in his own shit. Ryan Dunn actually did something similar for CKY2K—the rawer, weirder prototype that predated the Jackass franchise. Hey, close enough.Follow Amber on Instagram: @amberawlings*Names have been changed for privacy.The post Is Looksmaxxing Just ‘Jackass’ for the Algorithm? appeared first on VICE.