Kate Schwalls: Staff Writer
Chris Chan. WorldofTShirts. Tophiachu. Cyraxx. Amberlynn Reid. Heard of any of them? These individuals are known as “lolcows”: internet microcelebrities who can be “milked” for laughs, whose “eccentric or foolish behavior can be exploited to entertain onlookers” (Wikitionary).
Exploitation is the key word here. By and large, lolcows are conventionally unattractive, emotionally unstable, desperate for attention, and neurodivergent or intellectually disabled. They’re also usually pretty bad people: WorldofTShirts is known for public racist outbursts, Cyraxx and Tophiachu have both displayed sexual interest in teenagers, Amberlynn Reid has been alleged to abuse animals, and Chris Chan has admitted to committing incest. It’s the moral reprehensibility of these individuals that partially allows them to become fodder for bullying: if they’re bad people, it’s okay to bully them, right?
Yet most of the bullying directed toward lolcows is completely unrelated to their bad behavior. Take, for example, the CWCki, a wiki dedicated to obsessively monitoring every aspect of Chris Chan’s life. It claims to be an encyclopedia, but a little bit of reading will reveal that it certainly isn’t written like one. Here’s a quote from the page on Chris Chan’s male-to-female gender transition: “Instead of pulling off a convincing femme voice like some other trans women, he talks with a Mickey Mouse falsetto…He could have worked on feminizing his resonance… But alas, that takes effort.”
What exactly does critiquing a trans person’s gender presentation have to do with horrid acts they may have committed? Why does Chris Chan’s speaking voice matter at all? Similarly, why should it matter that so many lolcows are perceived as unattractive? It’s obvious that the immorality of these lolcows is an excuse. Lolcow “fans” like this fundamentally want to mock the disabled, the conventionally unattractive, the eccentric, the unstable. So they find bad people with these qualities and claim their cruelty is justified.
If the goal is to reduce the harm these lolcows cause, how is digging up as much information on them as possible, constantly mocking them, and encouraging them to embarrass themselves helping anyone? Viewers of lolcow content often actively encourage these lolcows to be worse. They want to see them be disgusting, crass, or embarrassing. Lolcows with psychotic symptoms are often manipulated into believing their delusions are real, because it’s “funny.” Lolcows usually do not have a stable job and depend on the internet for income. When they do outlandish or terrible things, they get more views. If a lolcow suddenly acted perfectly normal, their viewership would decrease. Their only value is in being ridiculed. More outrage and mockery leads to more views and attention, which leads to more money and relevance.
Many of these lolcows might have never done such awful things if they had better home lives and hadn’t been bullied for years. These are digital Frankenstein’s monsters: undesirable individuals outcast from society and laughed at on the internet until they become irredeemable. The internet can hate the monster, sure, and that’s justified. But don’t act like the internet didn’t create the monster.
Modern lolcow culture isn’t about calling out and addressing bad behavior. It’s about wanting to watch people suffer. It isn’t that different from Victorian-era freakshows or exploitative reality TV like Jerry Springer and Dr. Phil. People love to feel better than others, and they love to watch others fail. Schadenfreude is a powerful drug.
Next time you encounter a lolcow on the internet, ask yourself this: is any of this productive? Are we actually critiquing and properly addressing bad behavior? Or do we just want to see failure and tragedy befall those who are different from us? If we despise this “monster,” will that help? And when the Tophiachus and Chris Chans and WorldofTShirtses of the internet come to prey on teens, or shout racist slurs, or sleep with their mothers, will we all have to pretend like we had nothing to do with it?