The Body Is the Final Frontier of Capital

“(...) All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” Pascal, B. (1965). Pensées. Fragment 139.

The boys are not OK. They are whacking themselves with hammers to chisel their jawlines and injecting untested Shenzhen Steroids under a vague promise to boost anything from strength to energy to virility.

What the fuck is going on?

You may be forgiven for assuming “maxxing” comes from looksmaxxing, ergo, incel-derived. But its true foundation is gamer language - specifically, the RPG practice of min-maxing: optimising your character’s stat lines for a single output (damage, healing, survivability) even if it makes your avatar look like it fell backwards into the SNL costume wardrobe. The point here is extracting maximum performance from a single quantifiable metric, whatever collateral damage that requires.

This etymology matters because the ideology carries over exactly. To “maxx” something means to optimise for one specific outcome at the expense of everything else. This is not ordinary wellness culture with a waffly goal around balance or elegance. For looksmaxxing, how the body looks is the only variable that counts - which is why even meth consumption can be rationalised within the broader ideology, provided it accelerates the goal. It’s modern extractivist shareholder logic applied to a human face: short-term gains justified even at the destruction of long-term value.

Baudrillard argued that the body is the final frontier of capitalist logic. Once capitalism exhausts the external world of things to commodify, it turns inward. A gap opens on the stock exchange: the self as an unexplored market.

“The obsession with youth, elegance, virility/femininity, treatments and regimes, and the sacrificial practices attaching to it all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul.” (Baudrillard, J., p.129)

In 2026, we’ve now arrived somewhere he sketched the outlines of: a moment where the traditional ladders of self-improvement - education, career, class mobility - have either been sawn off or exposed as traps, leaving the body, or the image, as the last thing a person feels they have genuine sovereignty over. Capital has found its new frontier and colonised it completely.

The self-improvement industry is worth approximately $40 billion USD. Bryan Johnson is spending millions trying to reverse his biological age. His protocol has a waiting list and a merch store. The dupe - looksmaxxing courses, mewing tutorials, jawline contouring guides is available for $11.99 on any platform you care to name. There’s always a Walmart version.

Let’s be more specific about the conditions that produced this.

In contemporary society, our traditional ladders of upward mobility have been comprehensively dismantled. You know the list by now: a university degree that guarantees nothing, that young people continue to pay upwards of six figures annually for because institutions still sell the narrative that education democratises opportunity, even when deep down we know it merely reproduces it.

A housing market where, in the early 1990s, it took six years to save a 20% deposit for an average Australian home, and today takes over twelve - and that’s before we get to the glorified theme park we affectionately call ‘Sydney’.

The systematic destruction of third spaces, so that the places young people once gathered to build community have been replaced by unmoderated online chat rooms where no nosy neighbour raises an eyebrow to maintain social order. Junior jobs that AI has rendered redundant before the graduate ever gets to interview.

All of this leaves people with a particular kind of void. And for many men specifically - for whom masculinity has historically been defined through “success” in its most material sense - the collapse of the traditional model (the house, the career, the ladder) creates a specific kind of crisis. If every external avenue has been foreclosed, then naturally a five-dollar hammer promising sovereignty starts to sound appealing. Turn inward. Invest here. This one they can’t take away from you.

This is where an institutional perspective matters, and where the manosphere grifters reveal themselves to be - despite all the aggressive posturing - completely, structurally compliant.

Instead of being invited to interrogate the economic conditions producing their malaise, young men are being told to min-max their faces. Instead of collective action, individual optimisation. Instead of labour organising, jaw surgery. The discontent is real; the redirection is the product.

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It goes without saying that the manosphere is one giant misogynist ponzi scheme. The sophistication of algorithmic systems combined with grifters is so subtle that young people rarely feel they were recruited; instead, they feel they “learned” organically. r/Fitness becomes r/NoFap becomes r/MGTOW becomes r/Braincels.

But there’s a reason milquetoast liberals love to focus on figures like Andrew Tate. He’s a fetish; the face onto which systemic failure can be projected, deplatformed, and declared solved. The problem is Tate. Ban Tate. Except the conditions that made Tate possible remain entirely intact, and the next Tate is already filming his first spiritually Dubai livestream in a rented Bugatti clipped into a million pieces by a teenager in Manila.

Bread and circuses for the professional class: it allows us to locate the problem in a personality rather than a structure, which is much more comfortable for everyone involved.

A few weeks ago I was in the UK, watching Louis Theroux talk at a Snapchat event. What struck me about his manosphere doc, and the way he was talking about it, was that all these manchildren he profiled were interchangeable. The real problem is the infrastructure that supports it and the very real grievances that fuel it.

As I’ve argued before, across different contexts: the grifter is a symptom. Treating the symptom while protecting the disease is not a solution. It is a performance of one.

The deeper question all of this raises is what happens when bodily standardisation becomes the norm rather than the fringe.

Kyle Chayka has already written about airspace - the phenomenon where regardless of whether you’re in Bogotá or Hanoi, you’ll find the same café, the same flat white, the same curation of objects gesturing at the same aesthetic. Standardisation of space. We’ve had sustained discourse about the Instagram Face - the convergence of features produced by the same suite of filters, the same cosmetic procedures, the same beauty ideals algorithmically distributed globally. Standardisation of appearance.

The direction of travel is not hard to read. If the body is now an asset class, and asset classes tend toward homogenisation under market pressure, then we are watching the early stages of something else: the standardisation of the human face as a market instrument.

The amount of credit approved being inversely proportional to the whiteness of your teeth. A facial scanner as the first stage of a job interview. If we’re already sitting in the same cubicles, wearing the same clothes, we might as well look alike too.

There has been a hypernormalisation of cosmetic procedures and GLP-1 usage of late coming under the banner of self-love. But as Lena Dunham recently stated: how do we even know if we’re doing it for ourselves any more?

None of this is an argument for purity. I’ve written before about the impossibility of living outside contradiction under this system - you cannot opt out, you can only navigate with lucidity.

But it is a losing argument to try to preserve the old order when it is directly responsible for the current economic conditions and the culture that follows from them. If we cannot collectively articulate a future and organise around it, if we cannot give people something to vote for rather than merely something to vote against, then naturally there will be those who seek answers in the past.

And what do they find there? Hierarchies are natural. Violence is normalised. The strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must. Even the neolibs are unmasking - we have some very powerful total fucking losers born out of our own industry declaring masculinity means acting as if you are wearing military fatigues.

The young men being recruited into these communities are, in many cases, making what they believe to be a structurally rational calculation given the conditions they’re in. The cruelty lies in the conditions that made those choices feel like the only available ones.

So the solution is a little less ‘deplatform the symptoms’ and a little more ‘actually take the economic conditions producing them seriously’ and, I don’t know, try something else instead of reheating the leftovers of the last 50 years. Until the political class is willing to have that conversation, we will keep producing the conditions for this. Liberalism continues to be mogged.