The Mudsill Theory Revisted

or, the Commodification of the Neo-lumpenproletariat Lolcow

During the Antebellum period of Southern History, theorists of slavery generally gathered around two poles of understanding the institution. There were a thoughtful (probable) majority who would admit slavery was bad while also holding that trying to get rid of it on anything but a glacial timeline would be disastrous. Thus your Thomas Jeffersons and Robert E. Lees. But there was also a clever minority who asserted that, far from being any kind of evil, necessary or otherwise, slavery was actually a good thing. The most famous spokesman for this view was Senator and Vice-President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who delivered an extended apologia for that idea called Slavery a Positive Good.

Less well-known as a theorist is James Hammond, also from South Carolina (the Palmetto State produced a lot of those guys). Hammond’s contribution to understanding slavery was what later came to be known as the Mudsill Theory. The term refers to the foundation level of a typical house of the period, the part that actually sat in the dirt that supported everything else. In short, borrowing a bit from Aristotle, Hammond argued that every society depends on exploited labor from exploitable people to facilitate the creation of higher civilization, and unlike the North, which trapped fellow white people in a system of indifferent wage labor, the chattel slavery in the South reflected actual human racial inequality and was thus not only far more just, but to everyone’s benefit. The rich white people got leisure time to do highbrow things like write Declarations of Independence and shoot each other over gossip, the slaves got to not be in Africa anymore, and the poor white people got to feel better than some other group. What’s to hate?

Well, a lot has changed since those benighted times. We no longer have slavery, and by that I mean we have a ton of it but no one talks about it. Rich white people in the South have channeled all of their resources and militancy into college football. Poor whites aren’t doing so great, the occasional vice-president notwithstanding. And our notion of the mudsill, of that class upon which society rests, has evolved as well.

Africans still don’t want to live in Africa, though. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Interestingly, Abraham Lincoln dismissed Hammond’s arguments by pointing out that in the North men were far more likely to be freeholders and small businessmen than wage laborers, essentially conceding that the latter prospect was not much better than involuntary servitude but denying that it was much of a phenomenon. How things have changed. Capitalism under liberalism 1.0 birthed enormous social inequality and instability, which in turn led to the growth of the welfare state, the strictures of which inspired a rebellion called neoliberalism among the capitalists, which led to more social decay, and the advent of what we have today, the managerial state, which is in essence also the therapeutic state.

In our present arrangement, manufacturing efficiencies by way of globalist arbitrage and automation have mitigated the need for a large and somewhat educated working class and demand instead a dull mass of consumers with disposable income, cultivated to embrace vice, addictions, and fads without considered thought. At the lowest level these people cease to be self-sustaining or even functional and thus come under the direct custodianship of the state. Marx had some notion of this in describing the lumpenproletariat, that class of decayed vagrants, junkies, petty criminals, and losers from higher strata who were even worse off than the proles who at least had their labor to sell.

But Marx wrote in an age when the state had yet to take much interest in such people. The poor are a gold mine for the bureaucracy. Every fentanyl fiend currently bobbing his head in waking death on the sidewalk necessitates an army of police, counsellors, lawyers, welfare clerks, therapists, accountants, each of whom comes with a whole team of paperwork-filers, not to mention the associated phenomenon of non-profit organizations paying out taxpayer-funded salaries to scores of people on the theory that people will work hard to solve a problem that will result in their no longer being paid if it is in fact solved. They’re less of a mudsill than a sinkhole, but much like developers in Florida, it hasn’t stopped us from building an expensive house on their foundation.

This is the non-metaphorical version of what Daniel Penny prevented metaphorically.

This concept is quite personal to me, as I happen to be related to one of these human sinkholes. I’ve mentioned him before in different contexts, but always describing the relationship differently for privacy’s sake. For the purpose of discussion I’ll say he’s a cousin, and that I’m close with his sister and her family. Among people I know in real life I generally refer to him as Gollum. This isn’t exactly fair, as Gollum was able to live on his own, feed himself, and avoid substance abuse. The same cannot be said of his namesake.

“Gollum doesn’t smoke filthy pipe-weed, precious. Gollum is straight-edge.”

Gollum (the cousin, not the Stoor Hobbit) is a vile creature, born in a dark period known as the early 80s, sired by a violent criminal, a degenerate lowlife, and Quaaludes in equal measure. He, along with his sister, was raised by his grandparents, who gave him all the love and opportunity a child could ask for (his siblings, brought up similarly, are all doing well in life). He repaid their kindness- and perhaps indulgence- with a life of depravity. Gollum has never had a real job, at most working under the table at various landscaping gigs, but whatever money he did come across was spent on intoxicants. The physical effects of the One Ring on Tolkien’s Gollum are largely approximated in my cousin by Natural Light, and I don’t mean sunshine. Needless to say, he developed a lifelong marijuana addiction as well, and the combination of all that, plus his profound stupidity, immaturity, and mental and emotional instability, have led him to repeatedly abuse those around him. He is long known throughout the neighborhood for getting violently drunk and screaming at his very elderly grandparents, whom, needless to say, he lived with continuously until their deaths when he was in his forties.

When they both passed away, within a year of each other, his sister inherited the house. But because Gollum lived there, despite paying no rent or bills and having no prospect of ever being able to do so, she had to go through the formal, time consuming, and expensive process of evicting him. This meant taking time off of work, driving an hour away to file paperwork at numerous county offices (the area has been enriched by diversity, with all the attendant benefits to government efficiency) and arranging to have him physically removed, all while trying to get her grandparents’ personal property out of the house before he could pawn it (she was not always successful). The worst part was, she has had to keep paying the mortgage the whole time, or else they would have foreclosed and she would have lost the family home. She was supposed to have him out on the 9th of this month, but she literally checked one box wrong on one of the forms, and the Sheriff’s Department told her, in something of a huff, that they did not like their time wasted.

I’ve had many encounters with Gollum over the years, which generally result in the police being called. While he is quite eager to scream at senior citizens and his little sister, he is for some reason unwilling to get in my face with his complaints, relying on law enforcement to respond on his behalf. I generally address him with words that start with F and P, and in a voice that brings the neighbors to their front porches with camera phones rolling. It goes without saying that the police and courts as a whole are inclined to take his side (he’s the reason they exist in their current form, after all) no matter how stupid the whole situation must look to any sane observer. I recall him once calling the cops while we were cleaning out the house, telling the lady officer who arrived that we didn’t have his permission to be there. I shoved my arm past the police-lady to point in his face and offer my opinion on the legal question at hand in a way that immediately prompted her to bark a code-number into her radio, whereupon other cops quickly arrived. They decided that since he was physically squatting there, while his sister merely had legal ownership of the house, that we did need to notify him when we arrived in the future. At another point, he accused me of breaking into the house in front of a team of officers, which prompted me to offer some philosophical speculations regarding his manhood and basic humanity in a tone that in turn led the officers to a whispered discussion about where I’d be spending the night. As it happened, I had just been DMing

Adrian Vermeule

about a recent article I’d written, and I could only marvel at the dichotomy of my life- discussing the legacy of Metternich with a Harvard professor while waiting to discover if I’d be heading to the county lockup for white trash domestic nonsense (I wasn’t arrested, and my rap career ended before it ever had a chance).

But that’s the thing about sinkholes; if you’re close enough to observe them firsthand, you’re close enough to fall in. Such people are the absolute bane of working class life, dreaded by every family, talked about in hushed and sad tones whenever neighborhood business is discussed. “Did you here about John and Beth’s youngest kid- back on meth.” “NO! I thought they just paid for rehab?!” “Yeah, they had to take out a second mortgage and everything.” That kind of stuff. Working people once had faith to sustain them, a sense of pride of place and occupation. My dad is a boomer prole, and the ethos he taught me was that a man who doesn’t work is a bum, plain and simple, to be utterly despised by all decent people. Not having a job and providing for your family was the one violation of social norms that was unforgivable, a complete disgrace, even if it was in some way involuntary. The precarity of working class life today has hollowed out that code, to the point where welfare, idleness, and self-indulgent pursuit of constant intoxication is perfectly acceptable. The system will make sure you don’t starve, that you have all the chemical and virtual approximations of happiness needed to stave off boredom one day at a time, and if you ever wake up and fight back against it, well, they’re ready to fight you in return. Shut up and game. What are you, some kind of weirdo?

But is there a way to fight back against such people, to strike a blow against normalizing state-sponsored degeneracy? Surprisingly, the internet offers one such model, though, being the internet, it’s not especially kind. The phenomenal popularity of live-streaming, particularly videogame play, has naturally led a number of lazy idiots to conclude that fame and fortune await with the mere creation of a YouTube account. While these projects generally flame out due to the inherent sloth and dullness of the people involved- as most people can’t imagine the hard work that actually goes into looking like you’re having fun online- occasionally one of these accounts becomes famous for all the wrong reasons. These people become lolcows, the centers of their own mythos and economy.

Consider Cyraxx, the internet persona of Chance Wilkins of Akron, Ohio, a place the late and very missed Mike Carroll once called the Anus of America. Cyraxx started at the bottom and has spent his life digging; you can read his wiki (yes, it’s for all his lore) for the full background on his horrific family history. Raised by his grandmother (it’s a recurring pattern), he dreamed of fame as a musician and artist from a young age, apparently reasoning that if he dreamed hard enough, he wouldn’t need to go through the trouble of learning to perform or putting in even minimal effort to be successful. By the time he came to wider notice, he was already infamous for plagiarizing beats and lyrics from better artists, going so far as to record a song using the words of a poem written by a child sex abuse survivor.

The hills have eyes, each of which looks in a different direction.

Cyraxx lives in utter squalor in a rented home with his grandmother and her boyfriend, the former of whom he infamously attempted to strangle when she refused to let him hitchhike to visit a girl he met on the internet who was probably catfishing him anyway. He is infested with parasites, his bald scalp covered in bedbug bites that have been scratched into a scabrous patchwork of lesions. He is filthy to the point that one can almost smell him through the screen. He tried being a Juggalo for a while, though that community has since rejected him. He seldom leaves his attic, has never had a job, and cannot drive, which is ironic since he considers himself one of the world’s top street racers. This accolade, like all of his others, exist entirely in his head canon.

The main thing he has going for him is his willingness to fly into insane rages at a moment’s notice whenever someone questions his musical talent or status as a “drift king”- or really for anything. A self-image based entirely on delusion and a predilection for unhinged screaming rants make for an entertaining spectacle in certain corners of the online world, and thus, Cyraxx originally came to the attention of his mortal enemy and chief troll, MusicBizMarty. Marty initially trolled Cyraxx by creating two different and entirely fake music labels, each bidding for him to sign with them. Marty was in charge of the evil Ram Ranch Records, while good guys The Bender Boys helped Cyraxx thwart their machinations (Cyraxx is a fan of professional wrestling and understands the world in terms of the basic narrative structure of that medium). Unfortunately, at his moment of triumph, The Bender Boys betrayed Cyraxx (heel turn!) and sold his contract to Marty. All of this happened without Cyraxx bothering to google either non-existent company. His screeching wrath at being betrayed inspired others to begin harassing him on the internet, a phenomenon that has continued to this day.

If you’re inclined to be sympathetic to Cyraxx, know that he’s an utter degenerate, a pathological liar and serial abuser of women. Despite being just a hair over five feet tall and an utter physical coward, he constantly issues streams of death threats at anyone he dislikes, including copious racial, ethnic, and religious slurs largely unconnected to any actual characteristics of the people he’s insulting (he routinely calls the white Marty both “n***** boy” and “hook-nosed Jew,” often in the same sentence). But worst of all, numerous trolls have catfished him posing as underaged girls, and Cyraxx has responded to pretty much all of them with pictures and videos of himself… well… you know. It’s very, very bad.

Loli + Jew-naming . . . Groyper arc imminent?

This revelation prompted an intensification of troll attacks, with many of them visiting his home to yell abuse, throw things, or in the case of one, stage a protest. This prompted a rare outdoor sighting of what his ‘community’ has labeled “the Goblin,” wherein he attacked the sign-wielding troll with a baseball bat. This led to his hilarious arrest, where he screamed like a girl as his grandmother tried to comfort him (he is in his early thirties) before he was packed off for the night.

Marty visited the Cyraxx lair on several occasions, each after numerous threats on the part of Cyraxx to kill him. Each time, Cyraxx declined to leave his attic to back up his words. Marty then devised a new plan, proclaiming to the internet that he intended to move to Akron just down the street from the Wilkins family (in reality he merely rented an Air B-and-B and livestreamed from the porch). Cyraxx emerged from the dark, misty streets to fight him at last, and it went about as well for him as you’d expect.

The screaming starts around a minute in.

The aftermath involved Cyraxx joining Marty’s panel while wearing some kind of weird Naruto anime outfit and issuing more threats. He’s also known to wield an aluminum katana around his room while letting the trolls know their days are numbered.

Marty sends Grindr dates to Cyraxx’s family’s house, posts Facebook Marketplace ads listing items on their porch available for free, and at one point scrappers arrived under the impression they could remove the backyard fence. Another arc involved him tricking Cyraxx into thinking he was communicating with a YouTube executive who had the potential to shut Marty down, only for Cyraxx to lose his temper and hurl horrific abuse at the woman on a livestream without ever realizing she was in on the troll. But Marty is hardly alone. Other trolls buzz the home with drones, stop by on RV tours, and have had dozens of bags of cement delivered, which threatened to collapse the porch. A pair of accomplices once buddy-trolled him into uploading a virus into his Xbox, which rendered it ‘bricked,’ as the kids say. Needless to say, Cyraxx’s reaction to this is to “fight back” against the trolls by screaming at them by name online, which has the effect anyone with a three-digit IQ could predict.

If you can hear over Cyraxx’s attempts to blow out his own mic, he’s demanding that Marty explain what happened to his friend’s hot tub, then immediately commanding Marty to “shut the f*** up” when he attempts to answer, in between inexplicable racial slurs.

In short, Cyraxx is the hub of an enormous amount of online activity. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of content creators await the latest news from the Raxxverse, which they then package into narrative form and post on their channels. People mock his music, his gameplay, his overall lifestyle, or devise complex ways to prompt him into sputtering fury. Many of these videos have high-effort production values and a good bit of them are monetized, often very successfully. You can watch Marty calmly thanking his viewers for their superchat donations as Cyraxx rages in the background on several videos. Bigger accounts have taken notice as well, with Turkey Tom- whose content is excellent- posting a full-length documentary on Cyraxx. People have produced action figures, cartoons, and parodies of him. Scores of people are making money off Cyraxx, none of whom are Cyraxx. This has not escaped the notice of the Goblin, who claims to be owed millions by the trolls, and remains certain that once the FBI gets involved, he’ll be rich. Interestingly, Gollum nurses a similar delusion, believing that when his other grandfather passes away, he’ll inherit tens of millions of dollars.

Trolling violates the Constitution of Independence.

There have also been crossovers, attempts to create novel forms of entertainment by putting multiple lolcows in the same space to see what happens. Some of the smarter lolcows themselves have gotten into the game, inviting Cyraxx onto the somewhat popular podcast Lolcow Live, an opportunity Cyraxx used to rage out and flee the panel. On a smaller scale, Marty has brought Cyraxx on to debate Tony the Black Dragon, the issue at stake being who was the more demented, creepy pedophile. Cyraxx lost by default, but only because Tony placed a curse on him using “arrow-mayick, an ancient form of demon.” This became a video series, at least one of which involved Tony arguing with a soundboard of Cyraxx clips for around 15 minutes, and another where Marty convinced Tony that he was arguing with a soundboard that was in fact the real Cyraxx, to the latter’s angry dismay.

Cyraxx is but one of an entire caste of lolcows, and not even the most famous. That infamous distinction probably belongs to Chris Chan, whose over-a-decade long career of public self-humiliation culminated in a horror arguably worse than murder (hence the neo-subcategory of ‘horrorcow’). The whole story has been the subject of innumerable videos and text posts, some involving enormous effort and attracting millions of views, generating income that, again, flows entirely to those secondary parties. Turkey Tom once again has the best documentary on that subject. It’s an international phenomenon, really- Count Dankula has a three part series on the German lauteslachenkuh, Dragon Lord.

So is this right? The short answer is no. It would be a better world if people like this just left the internet, found real jobs, and turned their lives around. Those who’ve shown the proclivities Cyraxx has should be imprisoned. Unfortunately, despite the hopes inculcated in us by our liberal society, the prospect of that is slim-to-none. In another age, Cyraxx might have been gainfully employed as a rat-catcher or night-soil man and avoided pornbrain-inspired pedopoasting, just as Gollum might have found use as a ragpicker or galley slave. But the modern world has no productive use for such ‘men,’ and their role can really only be as recipients of state intervention, necessitating ever-increasing expenditure and energy on the part of the system to keep them. Trolling is not a good thing as a whole, but its one tentative claim to value is that it turns that process on its head, taking the clients of managerialism and sub-rosa commodifying them, turning them into instruments of gain on the part of enterprising self-starters. It’s not a coincidence that trolls and their targets are generally from the same basic demographics, that lolcows and trolls alike are commonly underemployed working class white men, or else downscale middle class interlopers who will never know the security and stability of their forebears or those government agents who spend their tax dollars on their lazy and feckless peers. Every bright public school kid nurses memories of those hapless idiots who wasted endless amounts of class time on their personal drama and nonsense, turning what might have been an uplifting environment into a stage for their dysfunction. Cyraxx was in high school until he was 23; imagine sitting there and being told you belong in the same place as him, that when you both graduate (theoretically) he’ll take his place beside you as a citizen in a republic. The hollow lie at the heart of that system is repulsive, and it’s certainly understandable that such experiences could lead one to seek out such lowlifes in adulthood and mock them, especially with the prospect of getting paid involved.

Of course, Cyraxx, like Gollum, is simply too stupid to realize how stupid he is. The smarter people, the ones who benefit from a system that allows him to sit idle, collect SSDI, and vote for more, are the actual source of the problem. Ideally, after enough trolling, it will hopefully dawn on the people ridiculing Cyraxx that the real issue is the managerial class that empowers him and the people like him, upon whom their power rests. The people that guard their claims to other people’s homes and livelihoods are the ones who will ultimately need to be held accountable. Hopefully, the great sea change so many sense in the days to come will help sweep away such oppression.

While the consensus has centered on ‘goblin,’ I would hold that Cyraxx would be better categorized as a species of Gully Dwarf. The official description, noted above, lines up neatly with many of his personal characteristics, save that Gully Dwarves have no tradition of soliciting nudes from teenage girls.