This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

SHIBARI

What goes through your head when the dirty-fingernailed warehouse dwellers pull your hogtied body up from the floor with a butt load of Japanese kink rope? Obviously we’re sex positive here at VICE, but who else is going to warn you that some things just can’t be enjoyed in a vacuum? First it’s the kink rope, then it’s the property-guardian polycule, and before you know it the most important knot in your life is leashed around a maudlin three-legged staffy named Swampy. Mark our words: it’ll be your neck next.

MIND-ALTERING PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCES VIA APP

The tripsitter you found on TikTok. The ayahuasca “shaman” you can only book through Telegram. The DMT amuse-bouche on your neighborhood coke dealer’s WhatsApp menu pdf. Is it good that you can acquire a mind-altering psychedelic experience the same way you’d order Chinese take-out? It’s not an age-old question, is it? And therein lies your answer. Communing with the hidden mechanisms that create our shared reality via gas-station vape pen makes the machine elves sad and angry.

REWILDING YOURSELF

As with most things in life, there’s the question of how far you should take it. Tell your friends you’ve “gone paleo” and they’ll still be there when you admit you dropped it after three agonizing days of total bowel paralysis. They might not be, though, when you return from that meet-up with the prominent “barefooting” influencer having been brutally feral-mogged by the lad who’s spent six months full quadrupedal. He calls it “gorilla mode.” Why the fuck didn’t you think of gorilla mode?

REFERRING TO ANY ASPECT OF YOUR LIFE AS A ‘PROTOCOL’

Wiping your sweaty forehead with a beer-soaked sleeve as you feel your teeth go numb from the bump you just did in the toilets. Smoking cigarette upon cigarette, pulsating with the knowledge that you and the man you just met will go home and fuck. Turning the sand-crusted page of some shit thriller, gazing out at the Aegean, before summoning the tanned waiter for another beer. It all sounds lovely, doesn’t it? It’s called “life,” and you can forget about having one if you refer to any aspect of it as a “protocol.” Bryan Johnson might have the vascular function of a teenager, but is he happy? What does he seem more like, a credible person or a husk? Handing your soul over to “metrics” is the first step on the road to measuring your son’s erections every night. There shouldn’t be any steps on that road.

POLYAMORY

Like communism and movies starring Jacob Elordi, polyamory is a nice idea in theory. A quest to blow clean through the glass ceiling of monogamy by fucking and love-bombing a bunch of people at once with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved? ‘Awesome,’ you might think. ‘Tell me more.’ Well, the catch is that it actually takes quite a lot of admin to tend diligently to one relationship, let alone five. Whether you genuinely believe the cadre of farmers’ market enthusiasts unbuttoning their Lucy & Yak dungarees to finger each other senseless after a crazy night of tabletop board games are your soulmates, or simply see yourself as a conniving Don Draper type on the make, is irrelevant. Ultimately, you will end up in a group chat arranging “radical honesty” sessions whenever someone leaves the toilet seat up and an org chart for everyone’s alternative milk preferences.

BECOMING A MILITANT

Before parasocial relationships, ADHD hyperfixations, and autistic special interests, I had what we used to call an “obsession” with @PissPigGranddad—a Twitter leftist who left America to fight ISIS. I was working a desk job in a government office and passed the time cheering for Brace Belden (aka LeninLover69) as he advanced on Raqqa. At the time, my idea of a struggle was getting the office printer to work—and here was a punk musician from San Francisco battling Islamofascism. I followed with religious devotion as Brace, and the other international volunteers, faced down an army of jihadi chauvinists who had fled lives of comfortable humiliation in Europe and the United States to establish some kind of video-game caliphate in Syria and Iraq. These opposing militias represented two sides in an epic battle of good against evil, which felt more real than the mindless, repetitive activities that made up my days. I looked at photographs of Brace posing with stray puppies and an AK-47 and thought, ‘This is what I would do if I wasn’t too much of a coward to even quit this job I hate.’ We’ve always needed militants to provide us with a little perspective; while you’re agonizing over which electric toothbrush to buy, they’re fighting for a socialist revolution; while you’re hanging out the washing, they’re strapping themselves to C4 and getting ready to do a human-rights violation. And perspective is useful, to everyone who isn’t dead.

SYNTHOL

Synthol is one of those great ideas that appears to have emerged directly from the teenage unconscious (see also: “What if having sex could be my job?”). The dubious muscle-boosting serum is made up of oil (often sesame, walnut, or paraffin), the local anesthetic lidocaine, and benzyl alcohol—ingredients that can be found, variously, in vegan protein bars, head lice shampoo, and industrial paint. Maybe there’s some logic here: in a culture of instant gratification, where petrochemicals are used to make clothes, grow food, and produce the microplastics that have turned your balls into bean bags, it makes a certain amount of sense to simply become oil. But while synthol might be a shortcut to a bulkier appearance, it won’t make you any stronger. This modern pursuit is strictly for those who regard their body as a machine that converts vanity into permanent muscle damage. As well as the health risks that come with introducing Diddy party levels of lubrication to your own bloodstream, Synthol also gives you this weird, unnaturally swollen look. There’s a reason why bodybuilders have historically preferred to risk the shrunken testicles and rage fits that come with steroids.

ADOPTING A FLESH-TEARING WILD ANIMAL FOR SOCIAL MEDIA CLOUT

If you’re gonna learn anything from anyone in this world, learn it from someone who got their face ripped clean off by a chimpanzee. The fate of Charla Nash is not one any of us should be forced to endure, yet all over social media, wannabe Dr Dolittles are forcing creatures programmed only to shit, fuck, and kill into difficult choices. The jaguarundi does not want to sit on the couch watching Schitt’s Creek with you; it wants to be nose-deep in 5000 grams of pulsing armadillo flesh somewhere in the jungles of Surinam. The slow loris is not your friend. Pretending so might snag you followers in the short term, but no one’s sticking around for the face transplant recovery journey photos. 

COVETING A LOFT-STYLE APARTMENT

Catch you on the flip, David Mancuso. In 2026 the only people who think living in a loft is cool are spiders and Australians. 

GOOD OLD-FASHIONED ALCOHOLISM

Ketamine addiction this, can’t stop tugging it to videos of anime girls’ boobs exploding in size until they bust the windows out of an office block that—why not just hit the bottle? Like a real loser? Alcohol is the highly social, highly charismatic person’s poison of choice. Just look at what the abuse of it has given the world—Tennessee Williams, Marguerite Duras, Robert Downey Jr. in his Natural Born Killers era. Yeah, buddy. You could be the last of the big-time drunks. And the best thing about that would be that there are no other big-time drunks left for you to have to listen to and smell.

Follow Amber, Adam, Emma, and Kevin on Instagram: @amberrawlings, @yungtolstoi, @emmaggarland, @kevinleekharas

This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

The post 10 Soul-Destroying Modern Pursuits appeared first on VICE.

This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

The Yakuza is shrinking.

From approximately 180,000 members in the 1960s, an official 2024 estimate placed numbers closer to 18,000. Aggressive legislation has isolated members economically, removing their bank accounts and restricting where they can live and travel. Once inside the crime organization’s rigid structures, leaving is nearly impossible, and the traditional irezumi full-body tattoos that once symbolized endurance and status have become social shackles as owners have been banned from public spaces including baths and gyms. Today, the Yakuza exist in what some describe as a “golden cage,” bound by loyalty and trapped by regulation. All the while, Japan is changing, through technological acceleration, demographic decline, and increasing influence from outside cultures. So, how exactly does an ultra-traditional criminal brotherhood established in the 17th century survive the emerging world?

Part of the answer lies in combat sports. For the new Yakuza generation, MMA provides visibility, legitimacy, and a route to wealth, as well as an arena where gang ties help rather than hinder. Fighters’ entourages arrive openly sporting crime-family crests and cash-filled envelopes circulate before bouts. In a combat context, the elements of Yakuza culture that have fascinated observers for centuries—the mythology, the symbolism, the ceremony, the tattoos—all add to the theater.

My entry into this world of competitive Yakuza fighters came through Mario Luciano. A New York-born Italian allegedly descended from “Lucky” Luciano, one of the founding fathers of the American Mafia, Mario arrived in Japan in his early twenties. He now owns a members-only Italian restaurant in Tokyo, which is exactly as you would imagine: checkered red-and-white tablecloth, Dean Martin over the speakers, walls lined with framed photos of politicians and celebrities. But other pictures show him fraternizing with high-ranking Yakuza bosses, including figures affiliated with the Yamaguchi-gumi—Japan’s largest and most powerful Yakuza syndicate. At one point, while reaching for a glass, I noticed a Carl-Gustaf rocket launcher concealed by a row of bottles. Outside, Mario’s brand new Bentley had a bulletproof vest in the back seat.  

Through Mario, I met Miyamoto-san, a former member of the Sumiyoshi-kai, Japan’s second-largest Yakuza family. He had performed yubitsume: the ritual severing of part of a finger as penance. “He’s not a good pianist anymore,” joked an acquaintance. Today, he manages the promising MMA careers of his son Ryuko and daughter Rei, as well as a fighting organization called Kiokushikai, which is growing fast.

He invited me to his home. The walls were reinforced with steel to deflect bullets. Inside, he showed me his collection of bōsōzoku motorcycles and openly discussed his ambitions in cinema. He was affable and charismatic.

As the traditional syndicates contract, something looser is emerging. Decentralized groups—fluid, digitally coordinated, less formal—are taking shape. These networks lack the theatrical visibility of the old guard. No elaborate sake ceremonies. No public-facing headquarters with brass nameplates. No irezumi, which in the glory days of yore were created with toxic pigments and unsanitary methods to which some older Yakuza attribute their liver disease. Instead: encrypted chats, financial scams, and temporary alliances between criminals hiring through small job websites. The term used to describe this new breed is Tokuryū: anonymous, semi-organized actors operating in the gray area between gang and network. The transformation is not cinematic. It is bureaucratic, digital, and quiet.

For younger generations, it makes increasingly less sense to submit to a lifetime of surveillance and restrictions when digital anonymity offers faster profits with less risk. The mythology of the Yakuza—immortalized in film and romanticized abroad—belongs to a fading structure. The question is not whether organized crime in Japan will survive. It is whether the Yakuza can survive in a world that rewards invisibility.

The age of the tattooed patriarch may be coming to an end. The age of anonymity has already begun.

Arnaud’s new VICE documentary about the Yakuza, Tokyo Sunset, is coming late 2026.

This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

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This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

Are Western societies more barbarous than they were in decades past? As someone who’s never been on the wrong end of rat torture or a conquistador’s arquebus, it’s impossible for me to say, but abject ultra-violence has certainly become ubiquitous on our screens. Open any social media app right now, and you might see a Mumbai dog fight descend into horrifying farce as a spectator is sucked into the whirling power take-off shaft of a nearby tractor. Or a girl in a U.S. high school corridor crumpling to the floor after receiving a devastating triple blow to the face. Or a guy making minced meat of a foe who goaded him in a mall, complete with an audio edit that makes his punches land with a cartoon thwack.

In some parts of the world, the increasing algorithmic prominence of fist fights, stabbings, and gang brawls on social media has exposed some 70 percent of teens to real fighting on their timelines, often without them ever seeking out this type of content. This so-called “fight porn” bleeds into the everyday scroll, dissolving the line between entertainment, news, and snuff as it’s delivered by the same mechanisms that show you celebrity selfies and photos of brunch.

In a high rise building in Malad West, Mumbai a pet dog suddenly turned aggressive inside the elevator and tried to attack three girls

The dog's owner showed quick presence of mind and managed to control the dog, preventing a major tragedy

The entire incident was captured on… pic.twitter.com/LMghePMioz

— Ramesh Speaks (@rameshofficial0) July 18, 2026

“If you make someone sit down and watch a UFC fight or a boxing fight, they’re going to have a very different reaction behaviorally and neurochemically than if they are watching a street fight,” reasons Dr. Nafees Hamid, a cognitive scientist of political violence at King’s College London. “In both cases, you’re watching someone beat the hell out of another person. But one case is sanctioned. There are rules and a referee.” Street-fight clips are a different beast. “Are they spreading a particular vision,” Hamid wonders, “of what it means to be a man?”

When I was at school in England in the 2000s, videos of playground dust ups would occasionally be shared from phone to phone, and we’d grimace at the beatings meted out to classmates. Some of my peers would be a little more cautious the next time we were around the assailant. Others would puff out their chests, wishing to gain the prestige of putting them in their place. But crucially it was all contained, the distribution system that disseminates such content yet to be invented. Social media creates a greater incentive to “post and boast,” allowing bullies to bask in a dopamine-fueled orgy of infamy—until their victim dies and they are arrested, as has been the case in several high-profile incidents both in the UK and abroad.

Fight porn bleeds into the everyday scroll, dissolving the line between entertainment, news, and snuff

Just as violence has always been a way for men to assert their dominance, violence in entertainment has long prompted outbursts of social hysteria, from the heavy metal “Satanic Panic” in the 80s to first-person shooters like Grand Theft Auto in the 2000s. But those were all packaged forms of opt-in violence. What we’re seeing now is unpackaged, real, and floating around us constantly in a grisly ambient cloud. Who profits from turning the human experience into a never-ending fight club? Violent content on X has blossomed since the social-media platform, then called Twitter, was bought by Elon Musk in October 2022.

“I noticed [the uptick] almost immediately,” says filmmaker Luke*, who neglected to provide his surname for privacy reasons. “People fighting in the streets and dying constantly.” He assumed there’d been an algorithm tweak, intended to increase the amount of time people spend on the platform, since it’s “the kind of horrible shit that’s hard to look away from.”

The never-ending stream of gritty street brawls via popular X accounts, or on the 2.2 million-member subreddit r/fightporn, are clearly intoxicating for some. But whereas an afternoon escapade into the darkest recesses of online porn naturally concludes in a regretful discharge and at least a temporary disinterest in watching yet more filmed intercourse, the abundance of titillating bareknuckle boxing pumps adrenaline that has nowhere to go, almost leaving you craving a fight of your own. The algorithm discovered that we’ll stop scrolling when someone’s face meets concrete, and the attention economy meets the adrenal economy.

“Shocking footage registers in the brain as threat and arousal, and as a result, dopamine is released to keep you alert and engaged,” says anger management expert Mike Fisher, the founder of the British Association of Anger Management. He warns that regular viewers of this sort of content may develop worsening emotional control issues and increased baseline anxiety. “The two together, anger and watching violence, become a serious toxic concoction.”

The allure of fight porn and the ultraviolent soup careening around social media is that anyone can get into a street fight. Perhaps titillatingly, we are all just an errant barge or a misconstrued glance away from a potentially life-ending brawl. 

Road rage in Birmingham.. pic.twitter.com/KKHmK3yI5W

— London & UK Street News (@CrimeLdn) July 10, 2025

“It’s like billions of cortisol spikes frying our brains every day,” says entrepreneur Antoine, who did not want to disclose his full name for business reasons. He’s been watching street brawl content on YouTube since the very dawn of the video-sharing platform. “I’m a little addicted to these videos. I have had to protect myself and others in the past, and I feel watching fight videos helps me to be more ready if I need to defend myself again.” 

Nick admits he went through a phase of watching no-rules backyard fights on YouTube. “There’s a well-organized European brand I liked the most and found the most unnerving,” he says. “Before I knew it, I was being fed all manner of violence and actual human suffering constantly,” he adds, saying he even got served someone live-streaming their own murder.

Over the last year, Nick believes that his consumption of extreme fight content may have led him to experience intrusive thoughts, which he has found are consistent with harm OCD (a type of obsessive compulsive disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts, images, or urges about causing harm to oneself or others). “While I’m speaking to people, I have these unwelcome thoughts of twatting them in the face,” he explains. “These people could be parents, family friends, or basically anyone. It’s obviously jarring: I don’t want to hit my mom.”

It’s like his brain is saying: “What would happen if this entirely neutral situation became incredibly violent out of nowhere?” When violence becomes ambient, the mind begins simulating it. Not because we want to be violent, but because the brain is rehearsing threats.

“While I’m speaking to people, I have these unwelcome thoughts of twatting them in the face”

We are hardwired to pay attention to violence from an evolutionary perspective, says Brad Bushman, a professor of communication at Ohio State University. “Our ancient ancestors who ignored violent cues became extinct,” he says. “But when people are repeatedly exposed to street violence, they likely become desensitized and numb to it. These videos reduce empathy—and empathy is one of the best predictors for pro-social behavior.”

He learned a lesson they don't teach in schools. pic.twitter.com/Vcx1zoeSuf

— Libs Hate Us (@LibsHateUs) July 12, 2025

Even primates are drawn to violent videos, he adds, citing a recent paper he co-authored, which reports that monkeys pay more attention to videos with active and aggressive content compared to sitting and grooming videos.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether we’re more barbarous than our grandparents but what the effect of being constantly exposed to barbarism is on our brains and societies as a whole. To be clear, there is little evidence that street violence itself has exploded in the West, but what has exploded is its visibility—and the way that visibility shapes what feels socially plausible. When violence is everywhere, it stops being shocking and begins to feel normal. The danger may not be that fight porn makes us more violent, but that it makes violence feel ordinary.

*Names have been changed for privacy.

Follow Mattha on X @matthabusby

This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

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Welcome to LOST WEEKEND, VICE’s hungover news briefing.

It must be said that when it comes to female erections, I am far from an expert. So I was obviously intrigued when I received an email from Bryan Johnson‘s girlfriend late last week about lady boners. Just what are they, and what should be done about them?

Kate Tolo is probably well placed to answer that question, as she is officially in the “top 1% of all vaginas”—a bold claim made by her tech-millionaire-and-longevity-enthusiast partner, with whom she co-founded the longevity brand Blueprint.

This is her vaginal microbiome report. 100/100 score.

Top 1% of all vaginas.

Her sample is dominated by the single most protective bacterial species a vagina can host (Lactobacillus crispatus).

Only about 25-30% of reproductive age women globally are L. crispatus-dominant,… pic.twitter.com/Pt1JbKM5y0

— Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) April 30, 2026

Tolo is on a mission to be the world’s most measured woman (it’s great when a couple has a shared hobby). As part of this, she’s harvesting data on her own nighttime erections. No, not using “bean calipers,” as Bryan’s freaky online fanboys have suggested, but with a piece of $15,000 lab equipment—for context, the device Bryan uses costs just $275.

The 49-year-old, who claims to have a 22-year-old’s dick, says this price gap sums up the current status of female health, which is primed for a revolution. “If nighttime genital blood flow predicts heart disease in women the way erectile function does in men, this is one of the most important measurements we’re looking at.” I love it when he talks dirty like that.

@katetolo

welcome to my room

♬ original sound – Kate Tolo

But as much as I like to poke fun at the whole longevity movement, improving our understanding of women’s health feels like something that could genuinely benefit millions of people. So I got Kate on the phone to find out more about her “techno tampon.”

VICE: So, female erections?
Kate Tolo: The clitoral area has the same erectile tissue as in men. Women go through the same erection cycles, particularly during REM sleep. Men wake up with morning wood; women wake up with the morning bean. Men’s erectile issues can predict heart attacks by two to five years. Is this true for women too? We have the same vascular network, so theoretically, it could be. Science hasn’t looked into it yet.

What’s the difference in longevity for men versus women?
I’ve never been about optimizing or longevity for women. I’ve been about, “What the hell is going on with our bodies?” We have not characterized the female body to the same degree as the male body. It’s extremely hard to measure a female body. The infrastructure is not built for that purpose.

And this “techno tampon” is gonna change that?
It looks like a tampon and has a light and a sensor. Because light is absorbed by blood, you’re able to deduce how much blood flow there is. It’s really archaic. Bryan measures his erections with a $275 wireless device that gives him an erection score. Mine’s like $15,000, with a long wire taped to my leg and software that looks like it’s from the 1970s. It took us three months to get it running. It disrupts my sleep and is not fun to wear.

Outside of this device, what does your female health protocol look like?
I measure around 1,900 biomarkers. I have a five-hour morning routine. Everything stays the same: food, water, exercise, schedule. At 6.30AM, the alarm goes off, and the F1 race starts.

Does optimization present challenges to your romantic relationship? Not sharing a bed for sleep quality, every romantic meal is Nutty Pudding…
It’s kind of cute. We’re living parallel paths. We have this ritual where we check his resting heart rate before bed. He can’t look at his phone because of the blue light, so he closes his eyes, and I’m like, “Alright, it’s 44, it’s 43…” We have all these weird rituals that only the two of us can possibly appreciate.

That sounds strangely romantic. Are you always chill about Bryan posting about you? “The 1%” is the famous one.
Sometimes I meet people in real life, and I can just tell they’re thinking about these tweets that have gone viral. He never posts about me without checking with me first. A lot of men don’t know about endometriosis—we’ve genuinely moved the needle on that. I support trying to gather as much attention around these things as possible.

I saw these tweets: “If Bryan Johnson solves endometriosis, all of his experiments will be worth it,” and “Okay, he can be crazy in peace forever if he keeps this up”—people seem to see him differently now.
Bryan and I started the business together and only started a relationship after that. I’m a shy person, and we kept things private for the first three or four years. That let us go through the normal turmoil of a relationship and be like, “We’re locked in. We’re good.” Once I came into the picture, they were like, “Oh, right. He cares about someone, and this is his person.” We’ve been doing this together from day one. It’s been both our brains—as a love project, ultimately.

Does being in love complicate the idea of wanting to live forever?
We have an 18-year age gap—that means something when you think about life and death. The funny thing about this project is none of us will get definitive answers for, like, 80 years.

So how do you make sure these findings benefit as many women as possible?
I am trying my hardest to get the word out there. The techno tampon is interesting because I grew up Catholic, and so I know how much taboo there is around sex. This is nonsexual and could be a really important cardiac marker for women to know.

OTHER NEWS

• One of the internet’s most annoying children, Jack Doherty, is supposedly banned from posting after signing a deal with a casino without reading the fine print, a blunder which is ultimately great promotion for both parties. Now, who wants to pay me to log off?
• Why walk around the world like Karl Bushby, who is back in the UK after 28 years, when you could just “visit” all these countries using AI, never leaving the comfort of your own home, or experiencing a single real thing, and still somehow ending up with a bigger carbon footprint in the process?

PREDICTION FOR THE WEEK AHEAD

• Bored and with nothing better to do after curing cancer, scientists will start shooting smack because, unfortunately, AI is unable to solve the fundamental problem of the ultimate futility of all human existence.  

BRAND NEW SENTENCE

• “This disgusting spectacle will involve rolling him out in a wheelchair, then live-streaming his body as it’s pumped full of bullets.”

BONUS PREDICTION: A BIG NIGHT FOR ERECTION HAVERS

• Bryan Johnson and Kate Tolo will take their relationship to the next level becoming DJ partners. Their Berghain set will consist of 140 bpm techno transmitted directly to erection measuring devices. 

Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi

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This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

Now that our relationship to war is mediated by social media, it begs the question: Is conflict downstream of culture, or is culture downstream of conflict?

Photographer and researcher Federico Vespignani spends much of his time thinking about how the visuals of violence shape public perception. His book Short-Term, But Long Term archives over 300 images pulled from the dating profiles of IDF soldiers in Gaza, while his ongoing investigation Nucleo tells the story of “narco-deforestation” in Honduras (that is, drug traffickers hacking clandestine routes through the forest) with satellite images and declassified documents.

When Federico showed us his collection of conflict-inspired “tactical gear” aesthetics from Ukraine, we had to speak to him about the strange and underreported issue of graphic design in modern wartime.

VICE: What distinguishes Ukraine’s tactical shops from, say, German army surplus stores?
Federico Vespignani: Tactical shops in Europe mainly sell pants and jackets. In Ukraine, they mix in civilian clothes with a lot of graphic design—the kind of clothes combatants wear when they’re off duty. A lot of Ukrainians are starting their own brands specifically for combat. One shop I went to had its own military armor, which different caliber bullets had been shot at. There are shops selling night-vision goggles, gun parts, red dot sights, and EOTech. You can’t sell military-grade weapons in most places, but many had AK-12s as trophy weapons taken from Russian soldiers. There were also a lot of grenades and anti-tank weapons around—used, obviously. There are many tactical shops near the frontlines. They’re definitely more war-oriented. 

This is basically a war of ideology. You have paramilitary groups like Rusich and Wagner that have really strong visual identities, but they often start from a subculture, like extreme politics or black metal. How do you think that’s evolved over the last decade?
It’s becoming part of everyday life, and a part of Ukraine’s visual street culture. It’s become normalized to see a lot of branding campaigns with zombies and Russian zombies [a reference to memes that have portrayed Russian fighters, often those conscripted from prisons, as mindless undead]. It’s also reflected in the way the Ukrainian Army itself is organized. A lot of units and brigades run their own campaigns and they are branding themselves a lot. Once, I ended up in a Nazi-oriented tactical shop, which was for the Misanthropic Division.

That’s a fascinating example, because there is no Misanthropic Division… It’s like a meme, but it’s also something that people self-identify with.
Exactly.

What else is happening with graphic design in Ukraine?
There’s a lot of AI, which is something you really see with Azov [a notorious Ukrainian Special Forces Brigade]. They do a lot of anime-style video campaigns, and you can tell there’s a skilled graphic designer behind them. There’s also a lot of brand bootlegging, like “Donbasonia” patches reimagining the Patagonia logo. You see the Forward Observation brand a lot, too, which leans into special ops stuff like night-vision goggles, skulls, things like that.

Groups like Azov started off with very cheaply made flags. Now, everything looks professionally designed. It feels like a lot of talented artists are turning their skills to war.
Definitely. I met a lot of artists who, out of necessity, started working for single units like Kraken. They’re contracting a lot of freelance graphic designers and artists for branding. I met this one kid who was doing graphic design on a MacBook on one table, and on another table he had FPV chemicals for drones that he was in the middle of building.

When you think about the logistics of war, you think about food supply chains, fuel, munitions—nobody really thinks about the grassroots production of visual culture.
Yeah, what’s interesting about single-unit campaigns now is there’s no forced recruitment of people, but the units are branding themselves, saying, “You can do this, you can be a drone operator, you can be a graphic designer…” It doesn’t have to be about hardcore combat. There’s an awareness that you can be a part of the war effort in a different capacity.

This feature is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

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