How To Ruin Your Life With Three Posts

Three Years of Accidental Critique And Why My Haters Were Right

Winter ‘22

On a Midtown ice rink slicked with low-wattage Christmas lights, their reflections pooling on the ice like bad makeup, someone asked what I did. I blanked—forgot the name of my own podcast, which sounded fake anyway, like a brand for something that didn’t exist yet. Nate Kuo, who I barely knew, answered for me: “Matthew’s a writer.” Flat, automatic, like a waiter tossing the check onto a table mid-shift without breaking stride.

I hadn’t said that out loud yet, not in that city, not to people who I didn’t already know. But Nate had that dry, DMV-employee tone, administrative, uninterested in performance. I think it’s also why I liked him and why we later became friends. It made it harder to object.

That night lodged somewhere I couldn’t place until much later. I met Dean Kissick, whose work I knew well enough to feel nervous around. I probably said something over the top, hoping to camouflage the adrenaline with hand gestures. He didn’t blink. “No, please. I’m enjoying this,” he said, like he was indulging a child performing a magic trick at the wrong time. It wasn’t permission, but it worked like it.

There wasn’t a strategy. I just started posting more. Things that didn’t belong anywhere: captions from Instagram parties, bad flyers, clout economics, internet-famous people who behave like NPCs. Subjects that registered as unserious, which is why I liked them. The unserious stuff always tells on the serious stuff.

It felt, in hindsight, like drifting into what Kierkegaard called the present age—a time marked not by decisive commitments, but by abstract commentary, irony, and reflection without risk¹. The moment critique became the default mode of engagement. Not to build, not to resist, but to observe and post. To turn life into content hallowed of consequence.

It started crowding out the academic work I was supposed to be doing—submitting proposals no one read, fine-tuning arguments for parties and groupchats instead of conferences. I called it a “side project,” but it was the only thing I finished. Probably because I’d spent so long as a chronically underplayed musician from a small scene, convinced that being ignored was the same thing as being real. Obscurity as ethics. If something felt embarrassing, it meant I was getting closer.

The posts didn’t perform. They weren’t designed to. But they started becoming… clear. Not a beat, not quite a style, just a way of watching things happen. Of treating things that weren’t meant to be taken seriously as if they had stakes.

People still laugh when I tell them what I write about like clout dynamics. They say it’s middlebrow, which I’ve learned is a word people use when they want to sound elite without sounding mean. Like Virginia Woolf writing about Radclyffe Hall: too accessible, too eager to be understood. That’s fine. Being legible is underrated. I think it’s more dangerous than it looks. Maybe one day I’ll teach at a community college.

When they ask, which isn’t often, I say it wasn’t the book or the byline or the panel. Those things came later, by accident or by necessity. What happened first was three posts. Just three, each more deliberate than I admitted at the time, each carrying the kind of tone that looks like carelessness if you don’t know how long it takes to make it look that way. They were seen by exactly the wrong people, in exactly the right way. And after that, the rest was inevitable: I’d written myself out of any possibility of being considered a respectable thinker, with three posts that were so much themselve

Three years in New York and I’ve become a bad writer, a lolcow, and a reference point for a very small, extremely online group of people. This is about that. Or maybe it’s just what happened while I was trying to vanish into the crowd, hoping no one would ask me what I do.

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Winter ‘23

A year after recording a podcast on cultural capital dynamics, I found myself circling back to the same pattern—this time under a new name. Back then, on the Neoliberalhell episode, I sketched out what I called 'cloutmaxxing': the compulsive inflation of names on party flyers, group shows, campaigns. Each name a placeholder for legitimacy. Each inclusion a bid for attention through borrowed weight. Cloutmaxxing has always been a kind of phantom limb of cultural production—moving, gesturing, pointing at value without ever making contact. It operates through adjacency, parasitism, the illusion of authorship-by-proximity.

When Brad Troemel later coined 'cloutbombing' in a viral post dissecting the Heaven by Marc Jacobs couch, it felt like watching my own theory rerouted through someone else’s amplifier. He coined the term a month after I did but virally. But the logic was unmistakable—identical, even. I remembered working the door at Lulo’s H3aven parties during that electric period when SOPHIE's presence still felt pulsing and new. Kim Petras's entourage would drift through like a confirmation of the scene's legitimacy.

The original H3aven—spelled with a 3, hosted in illegally rented warehouses with sweating walls—was a trans and POC-built nightlife space. Not a creative directors mind map. Not a casting funnel. It didn’t brand itself, it didn’t promise cultural dividends or safety, it just insisted on the ephemeral space it created. There were no sponsorship decks or planned photo ops. There were chasers, people in moods, mode choc and people trying not to be seen, exactly because they belonged. It was unphotogenic because it was less image and more vibe.

Then came HEAVEN, the Marc Jacobs version: a mall-goth diorama designed for retail, sprinkled with musicians, downtown kids, and PR-stars, and lots of random types of successful art adjacent people. A couch made to look like it belonged to the scene it was draining. A Xerox passed off as an heirloom. The theft wasn’t aesthetic, it was gravitational. Pull the name, the spelling, the residue of legitimacy, and repackage it for Tumblr revivalists without an 3. The look of subculture without the cost of belonging to one.

If we’re going to diagnose the cultural sickness of surrounding every campaign, panel, or couch-drop with micro and macro clouted figures—an ensemble of borrowed status arranged like a moodboard for relevance—then we have to name what underwrites it: clout grabbing. Not the academic kind, but the ambient, socially-accepted version where attribution becomes optional the more famous you are. In this schema, theft isn’t risky—it’s efficient. There’s no meaningful opportunity cost to lifting an idea when you occupy the upper strata of visibility. You can deny, deflect, or simply ignore the origin point. Especially if the originator is someone with less clout, less reach, fewer mutuals. The assumption is baked in: ideas come from losers, execution comes from winners. It’s not just that Marc Jacobs could plagiarize Heaven—it’s that there was no compelling reason not to.

Troemel’s post about the couch didn’t challenge that. It participated as an ensemble of influential people sharing his term in unison on the screen. Cloutbombing isn’t commentary—it’s an angle. It's ensemble-casting your critique so you get to be the smartest one in the room and still invited back. Like all good social capital moves, it struck the pose of distance while embedding itself deeper. The couch post wasn't subversion. It was an RSVP.

That’s the trick of cloutmaxxing: to confuse adjacency with authorship, noise with recognition. You don’t need to make something new—you just need to be photographed near it. Better yet, name it. Coin a term. Watch it catch. It’s why platforms reward memes over essays, formats over forms, velocity over depth. No one cares who planted the seed. Only who monetized the bloom.

It’s tempting to obsess over Marc Jacobs, but the larger mechanism is everywhere: podcasts built like Ponzi schemes of guest equity, panels as mutual clout laundering, group shows where the collective is branding and the work is secondary. Scenes don’t form around values anymore—they form around visibility economies. Around who tags who. Who comments first. Who gets the recap carousel.

Even critique becomes part of the loop. To call it out is to participate. To name it is to traffic in it. There is no outside. Just smaller and smaller margins of plausible deniability. That’s why cloutmaxxing works—it isn’t a failure of originality. It’s the system working exactly as designed. Circulation isn’t a symptom. It’s the product.

And this is where Troemel’s post folds in on itself, again. Not implosion—just rehearsal. The kind of loop that flatters itself as critique but functions more like an application. Another anti-clout gesture optimized for clout. Familiar moves, perfect timing. Which, of course, is the only thing the feed rewards. I recognized it immediately—not because I’m above it, but because I’m basically a clout demon with imposter syndrome. A symptom spotting symptoms.

The couch wasn’t a prop. It was a thesis. About how easy it is to reroute credit. About how documentation replaces experience. About how we no longer need to build scenes, just carry on the same thoughts, aesthetics, and references with mutuals. The couch said: You don't need to be there. You just need to be tagged.

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Winter ’24

In the winter of this year, I wrote on Instagram about Elena Velez's latest fashion show—what you might half-joke was a neoeugenic pageant backed by Passage Press and the Sovereign Fund. Passage, the publisher of race realist Steve Sailer, and Sovereign, orbiting Peter Thiel and behind the right-wing social space Sovereign House, seemed like the perfect sponsors for Velez’s stumble into the aesthetic cul-de-sac of a considerable cultural experiment.

Velez preemptively declared she’d either go bankrupt or be canceled; neither happened². Compact ran a limp little take calling it “weird” in the title The Weird Racial Right Plays Dress-Up.³ Everyone else moved on. The “contrarian” angle is oversaturated—too easy to spot now, too desperate. The taboo layering felt algorithmic: antebellum nostalgia, slavery chic, some light raceplay undertones. It was anti-woke drag, stripped of any of the seduction that made earlier versions of this trick work. The affect was off. No mystique, no menace, just mood lighting and bad faith.

The show looked like a Civil War reenactment for trust fund kids, or a high-production-value lookbook dragged out on a runway for hate clicks. Think hoop skirts, faux patina, plantation-core lighting. It was Gone With the Wind as a showroom sample, packaged in a way that made you wonder if the references were supposed to be ironic, or if irony was just being used as plausible deniability again. People called it a tired Southern nostalgia play, but it didn’t even seem nostalgic—just flat. Like opening an old history textbook and realizing the racist caricatures haven’t been edited out, just re-captioned.

Elena Velez has always had range—she can style like a savant—but this time it felt like she was running a simulation. A/B testing how far a designer can lean into the iconography of trauma before someone with a checkbook gets uncomfortable. It wasn’t subversion. It was the kind of theatrical provocation that signals you’ve read the discourse, even if you have nothing new to add to it. Like Dimes Square cosplay for people with investors. The whole thing felt less like a fashion show and more like a press release for a future that doesn’t exist yet.

But Velez is smart. Her shift away from this direction didn’t feel like surrender, it felt like strategy. She pivoted. Started aligning with safer icons—OnlyFans partnerships, Dorian Electra cameos. The sponsorships started to look more like survival tactics than statements. It was giving Midwest daughter with a post-contrarian hangover, trying to monetize her way out of a niche she accidentally type casted herself into. I liked these newer shows more. They were quieter. Less thesis-driven. Like she was finally designing again, instead of baiting headlines.

Critics called them boring, which is another way of saying they weren’t scandalized enough to write about them. But boring might be the point. Strategic ambiguity is the only viable rebellion now. No sides, no stakes, just a kind of curated exhaustion⁴..

Dean Kissick would say it’s a return to beauty or to depoliticize art. Gideon Jacobs’s reflections on Trump’s image, where the political isn’t erased so much as sublimated⁵. Either way, it's the same gesture: polish the surface, ghost the context. Velez’s defenders say she’s returning to aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics, like that’s ever been possible. As if hoop skirts can exist without antebellum baggage. As if prettiness is ever apolitical.

What’s happening is simpler than that. It’s ambient politics—post-everything performance, where nothing is disavowed, just softly forgotten. It lingers like a bad smell in a good room. You get used to it. You call it atmosphere.

Jameson would probably say we’ve reached peak aesthetic detachment: form without urgency, politics hollowed out and taxidermied. The show was a beautiful corpse—dressed up, mood-lit, and staged for documentation. It didn’t critique liberalism. It didn’t side with the right. It just stood there, disavowing everything it resembled while wearing it anyway. A runway show as plausible deniability. A ghost of a take.

That’s what made it so now. Because in 2024, the most political thing you can do is perform like you're not being political. To dress up in history’s worst moments and call it design. To float just above meaning, weightless, brand-safe, and ready to sell.

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Fall 24’

In the fall of that year, I kept circling a line from Catherine Breillat, whom I’d seen speak at Lincoln Center: “I consume like a carnivore, consuming the actors with my camera.” Her framing of art as predation lingered with me. Filming, she said, isn’t preservation; it’s devouring. Creation is hunger—an insatiable drive that transforms both the creator and the created into objects of consumption. During my previous years in NYC, parties were my primary social engine, a kind of live cinema where performance bled into intimacy. And as their digital afterlife began circulating—clipped, filtered, made ghostly—I found myself wanting to explain to the distant onlookers, those watching with envy or ache, that what they were seeing was only the residue, not the thing itself.

The party was already happening before Charli walked in. You could tell from the photos—wide lens, hard flash, bodies caught mid-pose, like they were about to move but didn’t. The kind of blur that signals motion and planning at once.

People were already sweating, already filming, already halfway through their narratives. No one was really watching the door. Everyone was already performing for their own lens, their own edit. She arrived eventually, but the night didn’t change. Just paused. Like buffering.

The venue was generic in a chic way. Could’ve been LA or New York or somewhere meant to look like both. Trees, lights, mirrors. The crowd did the heavy lifting. Aesthetic references recycled fast: early Tumblr, late Y2K, post-COVID. Sheer mesh on top of more mesh, denim that looked like it was supposed to be ironic, everyone in sunglasses, indoors, at night. The look was “don’t look at me” in a very self-aware way.

This was Charli’s birthday, technically. But it didn’t feel owned. It felt shared, or maybe outsourced. There wasn’t a main character. Or if there was, it was whoever posted first.

I kept thinking: this is what people mean when they say “scene,” but they don’t mean community. They mean mutual surveillance. They mean synchronized feeds. The vibe was good, but also… practiced. Everyone had the same body language. Drunk, but not too drunk. Casual, but posing. Every gesture had a timestamp.

When Rachel Sennott fell to the floor, it felt like a callback. Like she knew it would photograph well. The reaction was immediate, exaggerated, and already stale. It’s hard to fake surprise when you’re already filming.

I’ve seen this party before. Not exactly, but close. In Bushwick. In Silver Lake. Kind of the same places. In stories that disappear in 24 hours. The same people, or people who know the same people. The same hashtags. No one really talks. They just hover. Bodies touching, minds elsewhere. Waiting for their moment. Hoping it’s being captured.

I watched one woman glide through it all. Sequined, photogenic, comfortable. She laughed at the right times, posed with the right people. I saw her everywhere the next day. But later, in the elevator, she looked… smaller. Phone in hand. Face turned away. Maybe she was tired. Maybe she was just off-camera.

I thought about posting something. A line about performance. Or presence. But it felt obvious. Too on the nose. So I didn’t.

This is what parties are now. Not to connect, but to circulate. The goal isn’t to be seen—it’s to be seen later. And only in the right light.

If you want advice on getting invited to parties like this—like I sometimes do (though less often these days)—don’t write about the party. Just post photos. Just buy the $20 drink. That’s enough.

Thank you for the responses from Nate Kuo, Haskell Flender, Caia Hagel, and Shumon Basar.

1. Kierkegaard, Soren, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age a Literary Review. Princeton University Press, 2009.

2. Testa, Jessica. “Should Making It in Fashion Be This Hard? (Published 2023).” New York Times, 23 Sept. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/style/elena-velez-fashion.html.

3. Sohrab Ahmari. 2024. “The Weird Racial Right Plays Dress-Up.” Substack.com. Compact’s Substack. February 14, 2024. https://compactmag.substack.com/p/the-weird-racial-right-plays-dress. Note: I reached out to the author of this piece, Sohrab Ahmari, and he graciously made it accessible to the public by removing the paywall.‌

4. Horyn, Cathy. 2024. “Cathy Horyn Fashion Review: Elena Velez, Kors.” The Cut. September 11, 2024. https://www.thecut.com/article/cathy-horyn-fashion-review-elena-velez-kors.html.

5. Kissick, Dean. 2024. “The Painted Protest, by Dean Kissick.” Harper’s Magazine. November 15, 2024. https://harpers.org/archive/2024/12/the-painted-protest-dean-kissick-contemporary-art/.