*I originally wrote this essay for POSTPOSTPOST’s second volume. The version below has been revised and edited, as I have continued to develop opinions since submitting it.
“Show me one receipt”
In early 2026, a rumour began circulating online about a twenty-year-old livestreamer and his mysterious patron. The streamer was known as Clavicular. The patron was known only as “P.” The rumour was that P was Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is the venture capitalist ideologue behind that wretched enterprise, Palantir.
The evidence that Clavicular’s generous and anonymous benefactor was Peter Thiel was highly circumstantial. The situation was this: P, the single-letter donor, had contributed an estimated $500,000 to the streamer’s broadcasts across three months. A $280,000 Maybach Sprinter van had appeared. The streamer had mentioned, in passing, that he had received an invitation to a Thiel party which he claimed to have declined. Later in an interview, a journalist had raised the question of his alleged involvement with Peter Thiel. In response to the question, the streamer had stood up and left. “Show me one receipt,” he had said.
The internet, characteristically, produced more folk theories rather than receipts. The most popular theory would be one that at once explained P’s identity and Clavicular’s newfound virality. A forensically inclined set of digital culture detectives, expert users of the internet, decided that it was another Thielbucks case. The Thielbucks accusation, persistent and hard to prove — a pattern matching endeavor that some may also call a conspiracy theory, holds that the billionaire investor and ideologue Peter Thiel regularly funds reactionary cultural figures as instruments of a transhumanist “post”-democratic political project. Clavicular, imagined as an astroturfed digital folk hero, seemed like the kind of vessel that such a project would require. The allegation also did something for Clavicular himself. A streamer whose notoriety might otherwise be explained by the familiar economies of outrage and humiliation was suddenly recast as a participant in a billionaire’s secret political experiment. To be suspected of receiving Thielbucks was to be granted a sort of importance.
His viral moments online were a grab bag of ragebait content in clipfarmed format. He had recently walked an Elena Velez runway alongside Remilia Corporation, been filmed chanting to a track titled “Heil Hitler” with Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, overdosed on a livestream, and been permanently banned from YouTube. In May of 2026, he had faced criminal charges in Florida after he and a fellow streamer who goes by Cuban Tarzan streamed themselves firing guns at a dead alligator. These moments of livestreamed hyperreality, their absurdity and violence, had made Clavicular a recognisable character on the screens of chronically online people. Still, Clavicular had always been a ‘poster.’ He had been creating content on the internet for a long time. Digital culture journalist Taylor Lorenz highlighted the fact on X recently (May 17, 2026):
“... Clav [Clavicular] was a huge person online before he even began his streaming pivot. He was an OG member of the Cookieverse! He was on Locked In and on the Hoopify internet. People were making TikToks about him constantly for half a year before he even started streaming.”
Clavicular had become entangled in the sticky web of body modding internet pretty early in his life. He had documented his experimental body project, his journey of looksmaxxing, in various forums and social media platforms across the years. Over time, he would livestream himself and talk about how he was doing crystal meth to remain slim, taking anabolic steroids to grow his muscles and smashing his face with a hammer so he could transform from his merely handsome self into a superhuman of epic proportions.
Like many of us, he too had a digital footprint. The online self-documentation he had engaged in for years on the internet would eventually help to satiate the internet’s inquisitive and info-hungry who wanted to piece together his psychoanalytical profile, his personal complexes and his objet petit a (“he wished to be a woman”, “he is autistic, his special interest is looksmaxxing”, “he was bullied in school”, “his parents are bodybuilders”, “he was groomed on the internet”, “he wants to be perfect”, “he is a Nazi”). Commentators argued that looksmaxxing had only become a ‘thing’ once men like Clavicular started doing it. Women, on the other hand, had been expected to ‘looksmaxx’ for centuries, they knew the deep melancholy of catching sight of one’s receding chin in a changing room and the momentary delight of thinning out one’s eyebrows. Some women had started to feel empathy towards Clavicular’s never-ending livestreamed odyssey for the most symmetrical face, despite his clear misogyny. It was understandable they thought, “we too are misogynists, in many ways.”
Transcending the person Braden Peters, Clavicular became less of a human being and more of a parasocial public where chronically online discussions about drugs, health, masculinity and far-right ideologies converged. These discussions bubbling on X, Reddit, TikTok and elsewhere had finally burst into the mainstream and into the pages of newspapers. A journalist by the name of Lane Brown argued that Clavicular’s livestream did not have enough viewers to warrant his new found virality. In fact, he implied, Clavicular’s popularity was probably due to an inorganic, stealth clipfarming campaign, a now popular mode of brute-force marketing that the biggest stars, companies and politicians pay for. The normies and normettes of the world had gazed upon the sombre spectacle of the looksmaxxing streamer and were now, understandably, asking “who is responsible for this monstrosity of an entertainer? Who must be punished for Clavicular’s looksmaxxing mindvirus ripping through secondary schools everywhere?” Lane Brown said it was the marketers, but the internet said it was Peter Thiel.
Maybe the streamer’s appeal was astroturfed via clipfarmed content, accelerated by the recommending power of the algorithmic web. Perhaps the appeal was all real, fully organic thanks to the pliant brains and searching souls of young people - who are often accused of being misguided and worse off than any generation who came before them. But if the livestreams didn’t attract many viewers, and Lane Brown was right in that the Clavicular content was artificially being dumped into the arteries of the algorithmic web by some clipfarming agency, then who would have paid for all of this? It could not have been Clavicular — he was a 20-year old streamer. Maybe it was “P”, the mysterious benefactor. The mysterious Peter Thiel.
Thiel’s memetic warfare
Peter Thiel’s memetic warfare had been tunnelling through the social networks of reactionary subcultures, subsuming everything in its path: from artists and curators, to writers and musicians, all the way into the 20-something online troops of the US American government. Peter Thiel, who had funded the construction of the most popular social platforms of the so-called West, all of them with behavioural capture systems that have been proven more anti-human than trans-human, wanted to use the imitative tendencies of humans to propel the earthly world into the stars, into deep space and new planets, all promised to computer nerds like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Sam Altman by a subset of science fiction writers from the 1970s who were nevertheless made impotent by the Silicon Valley conference and public lecture circuit. Thiel had studied under the literary critic René Girard at Stanford and absorbed the theory of mimesis. This theory could help him manipulate masses into desiring things they necessarily wouldn’t have thought of themselves, all through the might of imitation and the power of social networks.
What makes a person desire something? According to René Girard, seeing someone else desiring it. This theory of human desire, which Girard called mimesis, holds that we never want things for intrinsic reasons but only because a mediating figure desires them first. It is, as the literary critic Joshua Landy has argued, an exaggeration so total that the exaggeration becomes the theory itself. Once you strip away the claim that all desire is mimetic, you are left with the observation that desire is sometimes imitative. This is a truth so mundane it had already been captured by the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” a century before Girard wrote a word. The theory’s appeal, Landy suggests, lies in its grandiosity. It is a theory of everything, obtained cheaply, that makes its adherents feel they understand human behaviour in its totality while requiring them to know almost nothing about anything in particular. That Thiel, a man with a documented appetite for total explanatory systems and a venture capitalist’s preference for scalable models, should have found in Girard his master key to human desire is perhaps less surprising than it first appears. He sank millions into Imitatio, an institute for the dissemination of Girardian thought, and proceeded to apply a theory of desire, one built, as Landy demonstrates, on cherry-picked evidence, misread texts and fabricated details, to the manipulation of entire cultural milieus. I am not sure it worked as envisaged. What it has done, however, is to stoke suspicions that every annoying character of reactionary origins is a Thiel plant. An undercover receiver of Thielbucks.
The Dark Elves
Thiel’s philanthropic strategy favours funding individuals over institutions. Through the Thiel Fellowship and personal grants, Thiel invests in people, presumably, because individuals generate desire more efficiently than organisations. A person’s life becomes legible as an object of desire. The so-called dark enlightenment philosophers know this the best. Moldbug, known as Curtis Yarvin in the civilian world, is the primary source of this line of thought. In Moldbug’s blog, for example, we come across the fantastical idea of the dark elf vs. the high elf and how desire for a reactionary future can be manufactured. In Moldbug’s world, the high elves are the liberal cultural ruling class, the people who staff prestigious institutions, make culture, and set the terms of respectable discourse: the mainstream art world, the literary world and the academy. Those pesky wokeists and status quo-obsessed centrists. The people, who dark Enlightenment adjacents say, ruined art and culture with their weaponised identity politics.
The goal of the dark elf is not to convert them to the dark side but to weaken them “even if only little saplings of darkness grow, mere shrubs and bushes of nihilism, the high elf is weakened.” Moldbug writes that dark elves must “become and remain influential in narrow circles; to accumulate prestige, a secret prestige which is more tangible because it is secret; ultimately, to create cells and networks which can invisibly advance dark-elf careers.” Cynicism and apathy are the stated objectives of the dark elf’s operation, and the dark elf here is probably Moldbug himself.
“The only culture war that matters,” writes Moldbug, “is the culture war between the dark elves and the high elves. This war is not fought with bombs and bullets, or even laws and judges. This war is fought with books and films and plays and poems.” The dark elf’s job is seduction of desire “to seduce the ruling high elves into losing faith in their own prestigious institutions by showing them something that attracts them more — by painting a picture of an amazing and totally different future as a work of art.” To make dissident ideas fashionable, he continues, it is necessary not to water them down but to make them “more daring, more frightening and beautiful, more audacious and transgressive, more surprising and delightful.”
The question of how seriously to take all of this, whether Moldbug’s elaborate Tolkien-coded strategic framework is a genuine blueprint or an elaborate exercise in self-mythologisation, was answered, in part, by a leaked email exchange published by BuzzFeed in 2017. Writing to Milo Yiannopoulos about Thiel, Moldbug was braggadocious: “I’ve been coaching Thiel,” he wrote. “He's fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.” The phrase “fully enlightened” means, in Moldbug’s own taxonomy, someone who has arrived at the conclusion that democracy is not merely flawed but fundamentally illegitimate, that the entire postwar liberal order is a managed fiction, and that the correct response is not reform but replacement. This may sound like a good idea, but it is not because, as the journalist Corey Pein documented in The Baffler, this “enlightenment” and total revolution includes Moldbug’s pseudoscientific racism, his endorsement of corporate feudalism and lack of empathy for the middling “masses”, and his reading of the Second World War as a conflict in which Nazi Germany acted defensively. Pein also reported that it was safe to assume that Moldbug was active in Thiel’s and Trump’s circles, based on his presence at their public and private events, and that his niche fantasy fiction political philosophy had made its way into the US American state apparatus.
The Vessel
Moldbug is, of course, not Clavicular. The dark elf, a character Moldbug fashioned in his own image, is a figure who moves through prestigious institutions accumulating secret influence, whose cultural fluency is indistinguishable from that of the high elves he is working to hollow out from within. Clavicular is a mere vessel for the dark elf. The vessel, in theory, uplifts, platforms, and amplifies chaos and transgression, and serves the dark enlightenment project via his popular algorithmic virality, without requiring him to understand or even be aware of the “bigger picture.” This is the logic, at least, that a forensically inclined chronically online mind would follow: “you do not need to recruit Clavicular to the Dark Enlightenment, you need only to ensure that his content reaches the right audiences, that his body modification ideology normalises the transhumanist program, that his escalating spectacle keeps the attention of the teenage boys who are, in Moldbug’s project, exactly the kind of hobbit population whose political disillusionment and physical insecurity makes them receptive to a reactionary reorganisation of the world.” The dark elf operates within established institutions while the vessel livestreams from a Maybach Sprinter van, allegedly purchased by a mysterious benefactor whose name begins with P. But none of this can be proven, only speculated. Thiel’s funding strategies are deliberately diffuse, routed through individuals rather than institutions, through fellowships and personal grants and crypto ecosystems where money loses its origin story in transit.
The dark elf strategy requires a particular kind of vessel: someone whose transgressions read as taste and whose indifference to approval generates desire. What it got was a twenty-year-old whose livestreamed escalations have followed the logic of the algorithm with faithful, catastrophic precision. Bone-smashing and overdosing on livestream, shooting at a dead alligator, permanent platform bans and clipfarming. Recommendation algorithms on social media platforms reward attention, and attention on platforms engineered for compulsive return is generated most efficiently by escalation and spectacle. Whatever Clavicular was supposed to be, the mechanism has now fully consumed him. The human being inside the dark elf’s vessel has their own appetites and carries their own capacity for dissolution. Perhaps that’s what Moldbug and Thiel are counting on, a total disintegration of the liberal democratic status quo through extreme cultural production. With vessels such as Clavicular, the dark enlightenment can finally seed the long prophesied era of post-capitalist corpo-feudal idiocracy.
The Enhanced Games
In May 2026, while Clavicular was on trial for his crimes against dead alligators, the Enhanced Games were taking place at Resorts World Las Vegas. Forty elite athletes, competing in a Thiel-funded sporting event that openly permitted anabolic steroids and performance-enhancing drugs, were being observed by an invite-only audience of 2,500 people, with Bryan Johnson, the longevity billionaire who transfuses young blood and has recently been memeing himself into mainstream cultural acceptance, on the broadcast team.
There is a contradiction in the worship of biological hierarchy that runs through these milieus. Nature is sacred when it distributes beauty, intelligence and power unequally, but becomes an intolerable imposition when it gives a young man an insufficiently prominent jaw. The body must be accepted as destiny, except when destiny can be improved with anabolic steroids, experimental procedures and a considerable amount of money. Clavicular’s hammer and the Enhanced Games’ pharmaceutical regime both imagine the body as an engineering problem.
The Thielbucks allegations against Clavicular strengthened online as the vernacular transhumanist body ideology that Clavicular was performing for teenagers on Kick, had been now staged as a spectacle in Las Vegas. The looksmaxxing stream and the Enhanced Games were not that different, they both utilised the same ideology of using “personal science” to transcend the limitations forced down on people hoping for a different and more extreme future by the center-left liberal management of policies, rules, regulations and ethics. What the Thielbucks folk theory was pointing at, imprecisely but persistently, is that certain changes in mainstream culture were connected by the funding of the tech broligarchy, which includes Thiel, Musk, Altman and the like.
These changes and amplifications do not exactly have a traceable funding line but emerge out of a documented ecosystem of ideas, money, and desire that links a neoreactionary blogger’s Tolkien-coded strategy notes to a venture capitalist’s philanthropic infrastructure to a fashion designer’s 4chan-esque runway to an art critic’s disavowment of identity politics in a heritage magazine to a scene podcast that guests Steve Bannon to an avant garde movement predicated on nihilism to a troubled twenty-year-old’s Kick stream.
The folk theorists of Thielbucks accusations rarely have the receipts to reliably denounce the careers made by the dark elves, but what they do have is the intuition that cultural production is being organised by dark capitalistic forces, that these experimental-seeming transgressions are synthetic, that the desire for edgy aesthetics is being seeded by people with a theory of how desire works and the resources to test it at scale. Yet the suspicion is seductive in its own right. Every suddenly prominent reactionary can be assigned a secret patron; every viral clip becomes evidence of an operation. The Thielbucks theory gives a human face to what is fundamentally a structural problem. The financialisation of culture, the speculative logic of venture capital and the platform economy have created an environment in which cultural production is increasingly organised around the anticipation and manipulation of attention. Artists, influencers and intellectuals become speculative assets, their capacity to generate controversy, desire and imitation treated as an investment in future influence. The question of whether Peter Thiel personally financed any particular cultural figure becomes almost secondary. The machinery for producing and circulating these figures is already in place, and it does not require a single billionaire to operate. The real scandal is that the cultural conditions imagined by the conspiracy theory are, in many respects, perfectly ordinary features of contemporary capitalism.
Thiel does not control the totality of what is possible. Rather the broligarchy seeks out cultural strategies to create the right conditions for the replacement of the status quo without policing what comes out of it — this is irrelevant. Currently, those conditions are sufficient to amplify a chronically online nihilistic view of what art, culture, music and discourse should be. Beyond Clavicular and mainstream characters, the dark elf’s strategy has been most popular in the new post-left US American avant-garde whose dynamics are being mimetically recreated in scenes beyond its origins. Go to Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Istanbul, Tbilisi, and you will find searching and yearning young people highly influenced by the aesthetics of Dimes Square hoping for a come up. The new internet-y avant-garde organises itself around experiment for experiment’s sake and it has become a sad laboratory for jealous images. Its members arrive, independently of course, at the same forbidden opinions. They read the same books, attend the same parties, cultivate the same contempt for liberal institutions and congratulate one another on their immunity to consensus.
Their tastes and allegiances are shaped by the social hierarchies they inhabit, by the pursuit of subcultural capital and by the ordinary pressures of belonging and distinction. This is basic Bourdieu. People imitate those whose positions they aspire to occupy, compete to distinguish themselves from their peers, and struggle over the distribution of social, cultural and economic capital. Girard, meanwhile, takes us back to Cain and Abel, treating rivalry as something approaching an original condition of humanity. Through this theological lens, the competition for recognition and resources becomes a drama of human desire, detached from the material circumstances in which it takes place. One need not look so deeply into the human soul to understand why people compete in cultural scenes where opportunities are scarce and prestige can be converted into economic advantage. Capitalism provides plenty of reasons for people to imitate and outdo one another. But the theological explanation has its advantages, particularly for a venture capitalist. If competition is an eternal human predicament, there is little reason to examine the economic arrangements that produce and reward it. Capital can disappear from the picture altogether, leaving us with the tragic mysteries of human desire. Très chic.
Read with open eyes
Still, Girard’s theory of desire, Moldbug’s political fantasies, and Thielbucks allegations should not be taken at face value. They each offer an explanation of cultural influence that risks obscuring the rather ordinary social and economic relations through which culture is produced. The problem is not necessarily that a billionaire is secretly financing every reactionary cultural figure, but that the speculative logic of venture capital and the financialisation of culture have already created conditions in which such figures can flourish. What we really require is something modest and urgent, a critical literacy about the conditions under which we find ourselves making and consuming culture.
The nihilism that has become fashionable in certain circles is not inherently reactionary perhaps, but it is definitely useful to people who want to bring about a nihilistically oriented revolution — and not the kind that would benefit anyone reading this text. Detachment, irony, and performed exhaustion with “milquetoast” political commitments are indeed political positions, whether or not the people holding them intend them to be. To know this is not to become paranoid, or to treat every aesthetic choice as a loyalty test, or to demand that art be legible as resistance. We, those who do not want to remain in the permanent underclass of these twisted worlds dreamt up by the powerful and the cruel, must simply read with open eyes: to know who Moldbug is, to know what Thiel has funded and why, but also to recognise the economic structures that make their cultural ambitions possible, and to refuse, on that basis, to be a useful vessel for projects you have not chosen and would not endorse if they were named plainly in front of you.
