By Elle Reeve, CNN
(CNN) — When the livestreamer who calls himself “Chud the Builder” was arrested and charged with shooting a man in Tennessee last week, it sounded as if everyone was supposed to already be aware of him. Reports described Chud, whose real name is Dalton Eatherly, as a “popular livestreamer” and “notorious,” and as someone “known for posting racist content.”
But many people who follow current events on the boundary between online and offline outrage hadn’t really heard of Eatherly. Before the shooting, he didn’t even have a page on Know Your Meme, a site that was once just a funny website about documenting internet culture, but unfortunately now is a vital reference source about figures who make news while bringing internet activity into the real world.
Instead of conventional notoriety, what Eatherly had was a sort of potential notoriety, or notoriety in waiting. Where his provocations had caught on was mostly within the community of “clippers.”
Clippers are the middlemen between all the people looking for attention today and the billions of people who are looking for something to pay attention to. They sift through longform material — hourslong podcasts and livestreams that are mostly very boring — and pick out a few seconds of conflict or misadventure or some other drama, then package it into short, shareable video clips.
Then they hose down social media sites with these clips. The algorithms of Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and especially TikTok are designed so you don’t need to have a big account to make a post go viral. A stimulating enough clip, pushed out by enough minor and passably non-robotic-seeming accounts, can catch on and be amplified into ubiquity on the platforms.
The story of Chud the Builder can be interpreted as a political one, made for sparking discourse about free speech and right-wing extremism and the normalization of racism. But at the core it’s a story about money, and the incentives for antisocial behavior created by the social media companies that make money off it.
Some clippers clip because they’re fans of the person they’re clipping, and they want everyone else to share the experience. But most are either paid per post or per 10,000 views. In retrospect, clippers are a predictable development in the online attention economy, heirs to the people who cut movies down to trailers or political events down to sound bites.
There are many Reddit threads about how to become a good clipper. On one such thread, a comment offered a prime directive of clipping: “stay symbiotic.” Meaning, make sure the relationship is beneficial to both the creator and the clipper. There are pages of YouTube videos about the clipper economy, many with the uncanny urgency of a multilevel marketer.
“They post the videos, we pay them a certain rate per 100K. That keeps them motivated to keep posting, keep posting, keep posting, and without them, I’d be nothing. Because all that matters is the clips,” the streamer N3on says in a video posted by KlipDumpOfficial. “There’s people who make 20K like every two weeks.” In a video posted by ClippingDynasty, the ubiquitous streamer Adin Ross —who is monetized enough to have giv