Chud the Builder shows how fast and easy it is to become notorious

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 given Donald Trump a Cybertruck as a gift — says, “Why do you guys work 9-to-5 jobs, when you guys can make $50 per 100,000 viewers?” Ross goes on to claim his top clipper made $100,000 one month.

N3on and Ross both stream on Kick. N3on said Kick paid about 500 clippers to post for him. Clavicular, the looksmaxxer who overdosed on camera, told a podcast that Kick paid for clippers: “I think Kick has helped pushed me a lot with their clipping budget, over six figures a month.” Chud the Builder used Kick, though the site deleted his channel in April. He then moved to the crypto site Pump.fun, where he created a memecoin and gets a tiny fee every time it’s traded. (Pump.fun suspended its livestreaming feature in 2024 after people did despicable things to promote their coins, including animal cruelty. The feature came back the following year.)

Streamers are “pretty boring if you actually watch them,” Eddie Ahmed said on the phone. Ahmed said he ran a “mass short-form content distribution” business — a clipping service — but quit about 18 months ago. (His TikTok account, MonetizewithEddie, has shifted to tips on making money with AI). The point of clipping streams, he said, is to make boring people seem cool. “Maybe once in two hours, something funny happens,” he said.

Ahmed said that he would have a group of mostly “young kids” watch a streamer’s feed, ready to harvest potentially viral moments. They’d be paid based on how many views their short videos generated.

How could clipping pay a good hourly rate when you have to sit through so many hours of content? A successful clip of a popular streamer could easily get a million views. “That’s like $1,000,” Ahmed said. Clipping for someone like Clavicular could bring “like $10K a month. Obviously, that’s worth it. … Plus it’s like, kids who have like nothing else to f**king do.”

On the livestreamer’s side, the process demands an endless flow of video, spiked with increasing absurdity and extremity. A streamer ends up playing to two audiences at once: the official one, of people who tune in to the flow, and the audience of clippers looking for the viral high points.

“Clip farming” is the act of performing for that viral segment by doing something stupid or outrageous on camera. It might be intended to appear spontaneous, but it’s planned.

“When you start your stream, you have one goal: and it’s to farm at least 50 clips a stream,” JasontheWeen, a streamer, said on a podcast. The business of performance within performance generates a whole new layer of cynicism among people watching: Kai Cenat, at one point the biggest streamer on Twitch, has emotional reactions that are so over the top that many viewers suspect they are fake. Last year, a joke spread on social media that he’d hired an “emotional stylist” to help him react to things on camera. It started as a meme, but then people began to believe it was real. Text on one clip someone made of Cenat reads: “dis guy NEVER had a genuine reaction bruh.”

The scrambling for attention seems silly until people start getting punched on camera. In February, the streamer known as Deen the Great was punched in the face and knocked down by a former UFC fighter during an apparent confrontation at a party. (“I’ll make you another clip,” Deen taunted, before getting hit.) In April, the streamer Androgenic got punched in the face after pushing a woman during a skirmish. That same month, the streamer Sneako was punched (“and f**king suplexed” as one clip put it) while he walked down the street proclaiming that masturbators should be executed. Also in April, Clavicular lost consciousness during a stream after taking a prescription stomach medication and was hospitalized. (This week he was sentenced to six months’ probation in Florida for shooting an alligator carcass on cam.)

Before Eatherly was in the headlines for the shooting, which he described as self-defense, his main stunt was yelling the n-word and other racist insults at Black people and filming any confrontation that ensued. The term “chud” comes from the 1984 horror movie “C.H.U.D.,” which stood for “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.” During the first Trump administration, antifascists used it to describe white nationalists and fascists who seemed particularly dumb and violent. Eventually, some on the right began using “chud” self-deprecatingly, and others set out to reclaim it, positioning themselves as proud Chuds.

Eatherly had moderate success manipulating the attention economy to his benefit. In recent weeks, clips of his fights got modest circulation on social media, and the white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes noticed Eatherly in early May. “To me, it’s not nice,” Fuentes said of Eatherly’s use of racial slurs to provoke strangers. He added: “I don’t like that approach. That’s not my approach.”

Those who don’t watch Fuentes — or get clips of him through their algorithms — might be surprised by that response, given that Fuentes once said that Hitler was “really f**kin cool.” After the shooting, Fuentes expanded on his criticism of Eatherly. “I see a lot of people on the timeline defending this behavior, saying, ‘Yeah well we should be able to say the n-word.’ Yeah, well, I don’t know,” Fuentes said on his podcast. “I don’t actually necessarily want to be out in public confronting Black people calling them n***ers.”

Of the n-word, Fuentes said, “I don’t think it should be treated like a blasphemy, but let’s be honest, it’s not a nice thing to say.”

But Fuentes’s critique of Eatherly’s behavior lives in the world that incentivized it. One cut of this take got more than 1 million on X, another one got 25,000, another 205,000, another over 144,000. The three-hour Rumble podcast episode it came from got less: 900,000 views.

On a recent stream, Adin Ross, who has hosted Fuentes, was asked about Eatherly in his chat: “Can you pay his bail?” a viewer typed. “Imagine the clips.”

Ross replied, “Dude, f**k no. Absolutely f**kin not.”

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