The phenomenon of internet spectatorship should be familiar to you if you have ever come in contact with communities dedicated to lolcows. Lolcow is the name that has been given to the deranged user who is the object of entertainment for the detached user. It has always been the case that certain vulnerable people are taken up as objects of fascination and mockery by the general population but, as with all aspects of human sociability, this phenomenon is given new life and transformed by the internet. The “rules” that SA users created can be seen as one of the first articulations of how the spectators within this social phenomenon seek to justify their actions to themselves in light of the existence of the internet. The rules offer a way of seeing the entire internet that inherently justifies the role of the spectator and vilifies the deranged. Through the action of spectating, the spectator comes to see himself as the sole possessor of rationality, as the subject who has managed to hold on to his wits despite “staring into the void” while those who were weaker than him, the poor but contemptible deranged subjects, have fallen prey to madness. The madness of the deranged subject is induced by the way in which the deranged subject allows himself to be consumed by the internet, he allows it to answer his prayers and satisfy his wants. Jolly’s example of the furry convention incident is again worth noting, as the real lesson one is supposed to take from it is that both the terrorist who intended to murder attendees with chlorine gas AND the atendees are equally as pitiable, for they have both allowed themselves to be consumed (albeit in different ways) and have both become deranged. The greatest fear, for the spectator, is that he should let his critical faculties slip, and become a lolcow himself.
It is vital for this way of seeing that the spectating subject remains, as Jolly says, “detached”. Detachment from not only both the deranged subject and the internet, but also oneself is necessary to cover up a contradiction at the core of spectatorship. The contradiction, as you might have guessed, is that there is never any clear difference between the way in which the deranged subject is deranged and the way in which the spectator is also deranged. In reality, to find oneself on either side of this interaction one must have already let themselves become consumed by the internet. The observation has been made many times that those who are most active within lolcow discussion boards have a tendency to transform themselves into lolcows. Essentially, everyone who spends a really long time on the internet is made into a freak in some way. Similar to the concept of the narcissism of small differences, the creation of lolcow spectatorship is an act of denial, of separation where no meaningful distinction should exist.
The most widely known lolcow is also the most definitive example of the contradiction between detached and deranged subject. Christine Weston Chandler has been raised to the status of celebrity through the lolcow spectator community, and the recent events surrounding her arrest demonstrate a complete breakdown of the spectator distinction. In 2021, CWC was arrested for abusing her elderly mother. It was later found out that the primary reason this had happened was because of a prolonged manipulation tactic by a long-time spectator of CWC. Once this aspect of the story was brought to light, lolcow communities wasted no time in canonizing the manipulator as just one more deranged object of fascination, but few actually picked up on the implications of what had occurred. This event reveals the detached/deranged distinction to be a complete lie. The path of the spectator, far from being the sole path to rationality, instead leads to derangement far worse than any of the supposedly deranged subjects to which they stand in opposition. The CWC incident demonstrates the complete failure of what the SA users had intended with the creation of their rules. Despite maintaining a cool detachment through humor, the internet still made the spectators “stupid”. In fact, the spectators reached a new level of blind cruel stupidity that transcended most of the supposedly deranged subjects they mocked.
