The Audience Was the Alibi

On looksmaxxing, livestreams, and the strange business of watching everything and seeing nothing

Out here, the news arrives late and slightly out of breath. The signal on the hill comes and goes like a moody teenager, and by the time a story has fought its way up the valley to my phone, the rest of the world has usually had its outrage, posted about it, and moved on to lunch. I’ve made my peace with that. Living in a cave in rural Spain teaches you that most things which feel urgent at the time turn out to be weather, and weather passes. But every so often something lands that doesn’t pass, that sits with you through the evening and the washing up and the long dark afterwards, and this week it was a word I’d only half understood until I read it next to the word “rape”.

The word was looksmaxxing. If you’re over forty and you’ve managed to avoid it, congratulations, and I’m sorry to be the one who ruins that for you.

A self-improvement movement, allegedly

On paper, looksmaxxing sounds almost wholesome, in the way a gym membership sounds wholesome. Young men wanting to look better. Eat well, sleep properly, sort your skin out, stand up straight. My mother would have approved of most of it. The trouble is that the online version never stops at “stand up straight”. It’s a concept that entails seeking out extreme and sometimes dangerous methods to increase attractiveness, and it comes wrapped in a whole grammar of its own… men ranked like cattle at auction, faces measured and found wanting, the constant low hum of the message that you, specifically you, are not enough and never will be unless you suffer for it.

It lives on TikTok, on Telegram, and above all on Kick, the streaming platform that has built its reputation on being the place you go when the other platforms have had enough of you. And like every subculture that grows in the dark, it needed a face. It found one in a young man called Braden Peters, known to his followers as Clavicular.

The man at the centre

I want to be careful here, and not because I’m nervous of lawyers. I spent a good chunk of my working life in the RAF Police, and if that career taught me anything, it’s that an accusation is the beginning of a process, not the end of one. The process exists for a reason. It protects the accused, yes, but it also protects the accuser, because a verdict reached properly is worth something and a verdict reached by the internet is worth roughly what the internet is worth. So everything that follows is an allegation, and Peters denies it.

Here’s where things stand. Peters, 20, has been charged in Massachusetts with raping a 17-year-old girl who told police she became heavily intoxicated after he gave her alcohol at his family’s Cape Cod home. A clerk-magistrate found probable cause for the charges on 4 September, and a criminal complaint was issued on 8 September. He’s due for arraignment on 14 October. In a related civil case in Florida, his attorneys have said the encounter was consensual and described the lawsuit as a publicity grab. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

It’s not, I’m afraid, an isolated blot on an otherwise spotless year. Back in March, he was arrested in Florida, accused of instigating a fight between his girlfriend and another 19-year-old woman at a short-term rental in Kissimmee. He was also charged over shooting at an alligator, pleaded no contest, and was sentenced to six months’ probation and 20 hours of community service. He was hospitalised in April after a suspected overdose. And he’s not the only name in the frame. Another looksmaxxing influencer, Mason Hull, was arrested in May on child abuse imagery charges.

That’s a lot of police activity for a movement that claims to be about moisturiser.

Vodka, water, and the watching crowd

Of all the details in the reporting, one has stayed with me more than the rest, and I think it’s the key to the whole sorry business. According to the complaint, the girl told police he knew she was 17, gave her vodka, and told her to say to his livestream viewers that she was 18 and drinking water.

Read that again, slowly, because if it’s true, it tells you everything.

The camera was on. People were watching, possibly thousands of them. And the stream wasn’t a record of what was happening; it was a performance designed to disguise what was happening. The audience wasn’t a safeguard. It was a prop. It was, to borrow a phrase I used to hear a lot in a previous life, the alibi being built in real time.

We’ve spent the best part of twenty years telling ourselves that visibility is protection. Put a camera on it and bad things can’t happen, or at least they can’t happen unseen. Body cams, doorbell cams, dashcams, livestreams… the whole modern faith in transparency rests on the idea that watching and witnessing are the same thing. They’re not. A witness is someone who sees and then does something with what they’ve seen. A viewer is someone who sees and then scrolls. The livestream has turned millions of potential witnesses into an audience, and an audience, whatever else it is, has paid for the show and would quite like it to continue.

We didn’t miss him. We booked him.

Here’s where I part company with the comfortable version of this story. The comfortable version goes something like this: these insular online subcultures fester out of sight, the mainstream media doesn’t understand them, and nobody takes any notice until the police finally step in. It’s a flattering story, because it casts the rest of us as innocent bystanders who simply didn’t know.

It’s also, as far as I can tell, not true.

We knew. We knew in enormous detail. Peters walked the runway for the Elena Velez show at New York Fashion Week in February. His pursuit of traditional attractiveness by any means necessary became the subject of intense interest and discourse early this year. The Guardian covered him. The LA Times covered him. He was written up, photographed, analysed, profiled, and joked about. The press didn’t overlook him. It booked him.

He was treated as a curiosity, a slightly grotesque novelty act, the sort of thing you read about with one eyebrow raised and then forward to a friend with the caption “the state of this”. And the moment the charge sheet arrived, the same outlets that had been happily gawping discovered, with a great clearing of throats, that he’d been a danger all along. That’s not neglect. That’s spectatorship with a guilty conscience.

I don’t say this to let the platforms off the hook, because they’re very much on it. I say it because the “nobody knew” story lets all of us off the hook, and I’m not sure we deserve it. We covered the circus beautifully. We just forgot there were people in the cage.

Follow the money, as ever

It’s worth asking why anyone would build a career on this, and the answer is the same boring answer it always is. Somebody is paying. Peters has over 400,000 followers on Kick, and he livestreams his activities on close to a daily basis, often streaming his time at parties and clubs or talking with women. Daily. Think about what that demands. Every day you have to be more interesting than yesterday, and on a platform that rewards shock, “more interesting” only ever travels in one direction.

This is the part that people who don’t spend time online tend to misunderstand. They imagine these streamers as unhinged individuals who happen to have cameras. Some may be, but the structure doesn’t require it. Escalation isn’t a character flaw in the system; it’s the pay structure. The algorithm doesn’t care whether you’re shooting at an alligator or crying about your jawline; it only cares whether people stayed to watch. Build a machine that pays out for attention, and then act surprised when the people feeding it keep reaching for the thing that gets the most attention, which is always, always, the thing that shouldn’t be happening.

I wrote a while back about synthetic economies manufacturing demand without any real human need behind it. This is the human version of the same disease. Nobody needed Clavicular. The market made him because the market could.

Who’s the sergeant now?

Let me be clear about who I’m not angry at, because the easy version of this essay is a sixty-six-year-old man in a cave shaking his fist at teenage boys, and that essay is both lazy and wrong.

I spent years around young men. The RAF took them at seventeen and eighteen, still half-built, full of bravado and insecurity in roughly equal measure, and threw them together in barracks where hierarchy formed within about an afternoon. I watched those pecking orders take shape: who was strongest, who was best-looking, who was the joker, who was the target. None of it is new. Young men have been ranking each other since the first cave, and I say that as someone who currently lives in one.

What was different, and what I didn’t fully appreciate at the time, was that there was always somebody older in the room. A decent corporal, a sergeant who’d seen it all before, someone whose job, formal or not, was to notice when the ranking tipped over into cruelty and to put a stop to it. Not every one of them was a saint. Some of them were part of the problem. But the structure assumed that young men left entirely to their own hierarchies would eventually hurt someone, and it placed grown-ups in the way.

So the question I keep coming back to isn’t “what’s wrong with boys today?” It’s “who’s the sergeant now?” And the uncomfortable answer is that, for a great many lonely lads sitting in bedrooms at two in the morning, the sergeant is an algorithm, and the senior man in the room is a twenty-year-old with a ring light and a legal team.

The boys drawn into this aren’t the story. They’re the product. They’re being told that they’re ugly, measured against a standard designed to be unreachable, and then sold the cure by the same people selling the disease. Some of them will grow out of it. Some of them will hurt themselves chasing it. And a few of them, having learned that other people are there to be ranked, used, and filmed, will go on to hurt somebody else.

There is no exit from the joke

When Peters was arrested in Florida back in March, the internet did what the internet does. One commenter joked that he’d gone from looksmaxxing to jailmaxxing in a single day. It’s a good line. I laughed, and then I felt faintly sick about laughing, which is becoming my default response to most of modern life.

Because that’s the trap, isn’t it. Even the arrest became content. The mugshot became a meme, the charges became a punchline, the police became another guest star in the ongoing series. In a culture where everything is streamed, there’s no outside anymore, no place you can stand where the show stops, and real life begins. The courtroom, when it comes, will be clipped and captioned and ranked by the same audience that watched everything else, and some of them will be watching to see whether he still looks good in the dock.

I don’t know how this case ends. Nobody does, and nobody should pretend to until it’s been through the process it’s owed. But I know how this kind of story tends to end in the wider sense, because I’ve watched it before. The subject goes quiet, the outrage moves on, the platform issues a statement about community standards, and six months later there’s another young man with a ring light, a following, and a slightly more extreme idea of what it takes to keep people watching.

The signal on the hill has gone again as I write this. For once I’m grateful. Out here, when the screen goes dark, the only audience left is the valley, and the valley has never once asked me to perform. I’m not sure what we do about the boys who don’t have a valley. I’m not sure anyone does. But I suspect the first step is to stop watching as if we were somewhere else, and to start witnessing as if we were in the room.

Because we were, we always were.