A few days ago, I stumbled across yet another online trend with strong incel-adjacent energy: young men literally hitting themselves in the jaw with hammers in the hope of becoming more attractive.
It’s called looksmaxxing, which already sounds like a term invented on a forum populated by a mix of Patrick Bateman and crypto bros on questionable amounts of stimulants.
The premise is simple: create microfractures in your jawline to achieve a more “alpha” appearance.
Now, setting aside the obvious what on earth is wrong with people?, I can’t help but see it as the perfect metaphor for enterprise AI in 2026: a massive act of collective self-harm disguised as optimization.
Take Uber.
The company reportedly burned through an entire year’s budget for Claude Code and Cursor in just four months. And its COO, Andrew Macdonald, had the rare courage to publicly say something that, in Silicon Valley, is roughly equivalent to swearing during a venture capital meditation retreat:
“I can’t connect AI consumption to actual consumer-facing features.”
Translated from Silicon Valley into plain English:
We’re spending industrial quantities of tokens, and we have no idea why.
The most absurd part is that the phenomenon already has a perfect name: tokenmaxxing.
It perfectly captures this moment in tech.
Consumption itself becomes the KPI.
The outcome no longer matters.
What matters is being able to tell investors that 95% of developers use AI every day. That 70% of the code is AI-generated. That token usage is growing. That adoption is growing. That dashboards are exploding with reassuring metrics. And that another hundred developers can be laid off.
Meanwhile, as a user, I keep opening apps that feel like they were designed by the same people who specialize in turning simple tasks into bureaucratic scavenger hunts.
Every week brings a new feature nobody asked for.
Every month brings a redesign that somehow makes something useful slightly worse.
According to research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, roughly 95% of generative AI projects fail to deliver measurable ROI.
Ninety-five percent.
In almost any other industry, that figure would trigger parliamentary inquiries, executive resignations, and probably a few collective exorcisms.
In tech, they call it disruption.
And perhaps the best comparison isn’t looksmaxxing after all.
It’s Tafazzi.
Because while some people on the internet are hitting themselves in the jaw or collarbone hoping to become more attractive, Silicon Valley increasingly looks like a place where entire companies are repeatedly hitting themselves somewhere far more painful.
po-po-po-poropo
See you next week,
SIMONE PUORTO
