"I’ll be honest, I had no idea that this is what I was going to be doing,” says Piker from his Los Angeles studio. “Like, if someone were to ask me, did you ever think that you’d become a Twitch streamer? I’d be like, what is Twitch? The concept of a YouTube influencer didn’t even exist when I was growing up.” It’s the morning and he’s preparing to start his daily 11am show. He usually broadcasts live for seven or eight hours straight, talking off the cuff about current affairs, lifestyle stories, what he’s up to, playing video games, reacting to memes and media clips, and interacting with the constant stream of messages that scroll by in the top left corner of the screen.
It’s a communal experience; a good hang, you might say. It also sounds exhausting. He has estimated that in 2020 he spent 42% of the entire year livestreaming. “I’ve lowered it to seven hours a day, but sometimes I still do eight. And on top of that, I’ll take Sundays off now.” He’s already running late this morning. As we continue talking, his Twitch chatter begins to fill with “where the hell is he?” posts.
Establishing himself on Twitch, which is primarily a platform for livestreaming video games (and has been owned by Amazon since 2014), was a conscious decision, Piker says. His media career started out with The Young Turks, the progressive online news network co-founded by his maternal uncle, Cenk Uygur. Piker’s parents are Turkish immigrants, and he grew up between New Jersey and Istanbul before studying political science and communication studies at Rutgers University. He graduated to hosting his own show on The Young Turks in 2016 – earning the title “Woke Bae” in the process – but in 2018 he decided to go solo on Twitch, to counterbalance what he saw as the overwhelmingly rightwing, often racist, misogynistic and xenophobic views that infested the space. “There’s a lot of ideological diversity amongst the gamers, amongst the developers, amongst the consumers, but unfortunately, the market for political expression in this hobby is so heavily dominated by the right, and that’s the same for pretty much everything,” he says.
Hasan is doing important work.
I’m not going to down vote this because he does bring attention to topics that get sweep under the rug in the main stream but he’s had so many controversial moments that he refuses to take any fault on that is hard to be a fan of his now a days.
I’m not a fan, never liked the guy, but the whole streaming underworld is just so silly. The guy spends whole days talking about random shit live and I’m sure there’s hundredths of right wingers scrutinizing every second of it trying to find anything that could discredit him. Of course he will have “controversial moments”. If by now that’s all there is he has to be a real fucking saint. I still don’t like him thought.
I’ve been watching him more and more recently, and I wouldn’t even say he’s talking shit. He’s genuinely level-headed and makes good points. It’s the reason so many people like him.
I meant that as “he’s talking about everything without a script, deep analysis of public opinion or PR team”. If I tried that people would burn at the stake after the first hour. Both left and right wingers.
Oh, I see. To me, “talking shit” means something else entirely.
Yeah, I’m sure I used it wrong :)
Yup, that’s the point, it’s not about being a fan. Especially in the sea of well-funded right wing content online.
Like what 😂
abusing animals is important work?
I have seen dog yelping way worse for various reasons, even if they just wanted attention (getting headpats). A lot of dogs just yelp if they’re caught of wrongdoing.
The right won’t like you better if you spread their made up crap about supposedly “too far left” public figures. They want all public figures left of Mussolini gone from public life, not just the radical ones. All you’re doing is helping the right to control the narrative (wouldn’t surprise me if there were Discord servers and Facebook groups for this: allegedly the whole wizard game drama was made worse by such groups), and maybe even bury legitimate critique under bad faith arguments.
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Conversely, I think Hasan is fucking libpilled. He’s DemSoc at best.
This did not happen, get a life and stop making shit up.
Wasn’t he abusing his dog with a shock collar so it wouldn’t interrupt his streams?
No. There’s one clip of his dog probably pinching her nail on her bed and yelping and the internet took that as proof of abuse. The collar she wears vibrates, not shocks.
I’m not so sure, there are plenty of clips that point to him using a shock collar.
That’s a single clip (the only clip) and then additional clips about said clip.
If he shocks his dog to get her to obey, there wouldn’t be one clip of it, there would be dozens. The dude streams 48-56 hours a week and this is the only time? How would that be possible? It doesn’t pass the sniff test.
He’s had dozens of people come to stream with him. Someone would’ve said something by now, but it’s only crickets.
These are armchair detectives spurred on by Hasan’s rivals and nothing I’ve seen suggests otherwise.
It was a vibration collar that he didn’t even use in the infamous clip. He is friends with tons of people that would cruicify him if he used a shock collar
Yep, then denied it.