Michael Moynihan: Even this column won't stoop to 'Corkmaxxing' — it's beneath us

A city trying to establish itself as a home for cutting-edge industry needs to move past the knee-jerk nickname or slogan

Thu, 26 Mar, 2026 - 01:00

Michael Moynihan

In the long history of unlikely column openings, I think a description of Clavicular probably ranks pretty highly in the ranking of least-expected introductions, but here we are. That’s 2026 for you.

For readers who are unstained by familiarity with this ‘online personality’, Clavicular (real name Braden Peters) is an American chap who is one of the best-known practitioners of looksmaxxing, if you’ll pardon the spelling.

And if you’ll forgive the idea, looksmaxxing is the name given to... maximising your physical appearance, even if that means using steroids and methamphetamines to that end, which Clavicular does.

Or even rearranging your facial bones by hitting yourself in the face with a hammer — or, in “hardmaxxing” mode, your fist.

“Bone smashing is legit,” said Mr Clavicular recently, though it is unclear if he had to grind those words out through a wired-up jaw.

Anyway, I mention this latest way station on the road to the apocalypse not to dwell on the activity itself, which is clearly a money scam marketed at the inadequate, nor the ideas behind it, which are deeply rooted in misogyny and racism. I refer more to the terminology, which runs along very defined lines.

Looksmaxxing, hardmaxxing, jestermaxxing: you see where this is going.

Is it any wonder, then, that a couple of weeks ago another noun collected the same suffix and enjoyed a brief vogue?

By this I mean Londonmaxxing.

If this phenomenon passed you by, don’t worry. It passed most people by.

It didn’t pass the good people of London Centric by, of course, because nothing in the English capital seems to escape the notice of this terrific publication. I subscribe to their newsletter and was recently enlightened by the great Jim Waterson’s notes on the topic.

“‘Londonmaxxing’, a nebulous term that began to be used 10 days ago by a group of young tech workers who were seemingly motivated by a) genuine enthusiasm about the capital’s economic prospects especially around investment in artificial intelligence, b) their enjoyment of living in a big city that, unlike Dubai, isn’t arresting Londoners for posting about drone attacks, c) both.

“‘Londonmaxxing’ briefly went viral on Elon Musk’s social media platform, prompting [London mayor] Sadiq Khan to change his X bio to include the term, as part of his pitch to convince AI companies such as Anthropic to move more staff to the capital."

Waterson points out the "briefly" part of his description duly fulfilled itself, and Londonmaxxing vanished as quickly as it had appeared, but he added: “. . . the moment reveals a strange story: X and many other platforms have become overwhelmed with videos portraying London as being in a state of complete collapse. As a result, anyone trying to be remotely positive about the city has to come up with a whole new term if they want to cut through the negativity and express a mildly positive opinion about the capital on the platform.”

If any reader thinks this is a pre-emptive strike from yours truly on the prospect of Corkmaxxing being foisted upon us, take a bow: you know me too well. I like a brief online flurry as much as the next man, but anything along these lines would just be unacceptable.

And not just because the suffix grew out of a movement whose supporters believe hitting themselves in the face with a hammer is a good idea.

Are there a few lessons for us to learn from the Londonmaxxing phenomenon, brief though it flared?

One obvious point is, as Waterson put it, the fondness of those using social media platforms such as X and others for uploading videos portraying their city as being in a state of complete collapse.

Leesiders can identify. There is no shortage of video clips and footage which purport to prove that Patrick’s St has now become slightly more perilous than the Gem Saloon in Deadwood, circa 1855, and circa closing time on a Saturday night.

Tapping a few apps on your phone will reveal all of this pretty quickly.

There is a conversation to be had about who is uploading and spreading such footage, of course: people are entitled to be doubtful about the true motivations of such posters, not to mention their ports of origin, which in some cases are bot farms being run thousands of miles away. The reason such enterprises focus on such false narratives I leave to readers to puzzle out.

The classic trap many of us fall into here is some variation of ‘I never saw anything like this when I was out on the town at 18’, which is beside the point. Taking the bait and discussing how dangerous the city supposedly has become based on social media clips is a profound error, and one to be avoided at all costs.

Another one of Waterson’s observations also hit home — the story of the mayor of London desperately latching onto this briefly-fashionable term.

Part of my motivation in writing about Londonmaxxing was to squeeze some lessons out of it for Cork. It certainly shows what happens when a desperation to seem relevant, particularly on social media, collides with the fleeting attention span of the modern age, particularly online. Picture: Chani Anderson

This is particularly illuminating because at first glance it looks like a classic Thick-of-It credibility grab, a bid to look down with the kid(z), but there’s a little more to it than that.

It was, as Waterson pointed out, part of Mr Khan’s pitch to convince artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic to locate more of their staff in London.

AI companies are the organisations which must now be wooed, and cities must present themselves as AI-compliant, AI-ready, AI-welcoming if they’re to snag those jobs — on the leading edge, nimble and accommodating, aware of what’s needed and happy to provide that..

Of course, the irony is that the AI companies know every city’s precise level of preparedness already, given the amount of information they’re harvesting.

Last year, Anthropic, the object of Mr Khan’s affections, agreed to pay over €1.2bn to settle a class action lawsuit filed by authors who said the company stole their work to train its AI models. Those models surely had a few volumes on the pros and cons of doing business in London fed into them along the way.

It’s instructive that the Londonmaxxing catchphrase was aimed at enticing businesses which project omniscience. The fact that omniscience is based on the work of others, taken without consent or permission, clearly wasn’t a factor in these calculations. Perhaps it should have been.

Part of my motivation in writing about Londonmaxxing was to squeeze some lessons out of it for Cork. It certainly shows what happens when a desperation to seem relevant, particularly on social media, collides with the fleeting attention span of the modern age, particularly online.

A city trying to establish itself as a home for cutting-edge industry needs to move past the knee-jerk nickname or slogan. Doing so is an admission of inadequacy: a city should present itself as both sufficient and various, not reducible to a word.

If we can take that much out of Londonmaxxing we’ll be doing well. If we never see a version of Corkmaxxing, even better.