Twitch’s Hasan Piker says there’s more to leftism than ‘woke-scolding’

Games journalist Nathan Grayson, founder of Aftermath where he also currently works as a reporter, has a new book out Feb. 18 that spotlights nine different Twitch creators — their fandoms, how they got their start, and the culture of livestreaming that surrounds each of them. You can read an excerpt below of Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen focused on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Reprinted with permission of Atria Books at Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.

Despite a career focused on United States politics, Piker spent most of his childhood in Turkey. And despite popular misconceptions about the intent of his political ideology, he feels no need to mythologize himself as the main character of a rags-to-riches tale—or a rags-to-rags tale, as critics regularly posit should be his ultimate goal. Instead, he says during a December 2022 interview from his home, he grew up “relatively affluent” in Turkey after being born in the United States. A switch from private to public school in fourth grade opened his eyes to the cruel realities undergirding modern society.

“I saw the gardener’s kid going to the same school as myself, right? And I was like, ‘Holy shit, these dudes are not living the same way that I am.’ I was taking this for granted,” Piker says. “And that is where I started realizing that there was something weird about the way that we existed on this planet.”

Other bits and pieces of a childhood in Turkey further informed Piker’s nascent political views. After former Turkish Prime Minister and current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came to power, Piker found himself frustrated even by “silly” impacts of a socially conservative regime like Erdoğan’s suing his favorite political satire magazine because of imagery he found objectionable.

“I thought that it was unacceptable for someone in a position of power to do such a thing,” Piker says.

During his early years, Piker’s parents would bring him on summer trips to America, but it wasn’t until college that he moved to the United States. This proved to be an eye-opening experience on several levels.

“He was so shocked,” says his mother, Sedef Piker. “He said, ‘I can’t believe these kids, Mom. They’re bored.’ . . . They had everything that all these people around the world would dream of, and they were bored.”

The more Piker observed, however, the more he realized the problem wasn’t the people. It was that this supposed land of plenty was not providing for those with less. The American healthcare system, he says, ultimately served
as the “final” rung on his ladder to leftism.

“I grew up in a different part of the world where I saw not the immediate impacts of American imperialism, but the secondary shock waves,” Piker says. “But then seeing that this service that should be afforded to every single person unconditionally was paywalled — it was really insane. That was definitely the final straw for me to really tilt over in the anti-capitalist direction.”

And so, Piker embraced socialism, a political ideology that encompasses a wide range of social and economic beliefs, but which fundamentally argues that workers or a central governing body should control the means of
production — aka buildings and tools that create basic necessities, goods, and services — instead of private companies which generally prioritize profit above all else. Socialists like Piker believe more of the benefits of collective labor should be going to individual workers, rather than companies and bosses who rarely, if ever, do the lion’s share of the work. Socialists in the United States are often critical of both the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which they argue continually prop up corporate interests even on rare occasions when their rhetoric suggests otherwise. Proponents of socialism often push for socialized systems like universal healthcare and a universal basic income, arguing that a society truly for and by the people should meet everyone’s basic needs.

Piker’s path to Twitch was a little more circuitous than his one to socialism. He grew up playing pirated video games in Turkey, where legit copies of big hits were hard to come by. For a time, games functioned as his north star; he regularly drew video game characters and aspired to become an illustrator for a video game developer. But Piker went on to abandon that hobby after his first year of college. Even during his self-described “normie” years, however, he maintained a familiarity with the gaming space.

After college, Piker ended up getting a job with The Young Turks, a progressive-leaning online news program founded by his uncle, Cenk Uygur. Around this time, in 2014, a right-leaning reactionary movement within video games called Gamergate began to take off on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Piker, who was producing leftist commentary videos for The Young Turks, found himself sharing online real estate with a movement that would go on to pioneer tactics and produce stars for the alt-right.

“I saw the YouTube commentary space infested with these neckbearded weirdos that were super right wing,” says Piker. “I mean, they fucking hated me. They were not fond of me at all. They were not fond of The Young Turks.
They were blowing up. They were gaining a lot of prominence. And a lot of gamers were being radicalized by these commentators that made themselves out to be centrists but clearly weren’t.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, Piker was finding success with a Facebook show he’d created called Breakdown, in which he took a punchy, crunchy approach to analyzing buzzy topics like millennial entitlement and Trump’s Muslim ban. But after a while, he began to feel he was hitting a ceiling.

“[Piker] is kind of irrepressible, I think is the right way to describe it,” says Uygur, Piker’s former boss and current/always uncle. “As soon as he’s doing great on Facebook, he’s thinking, ‘Oh, I gotta expand to a different thing that will give me a different skill set and bring in new eyes.’”

Piker largely concurs with that characterization of events — with the caveat that his uncle’s company wasn’t paying him enough.

“They basically got other hosts on [Breakdown] instead of giving me more money to work with,” says Piker. “I had no control over that, and I felt that I was always gonna be in my uncle’s shadow no matter what, if I stayed there. . . . And I wanted to get better at speaking off the cuff, because I was horrible at it.”

Piker wanted to build a living, breathing community, one united around his principles. He felt that in order to accomplish his goal, he’d need to meet people where they were at — not where po-faced political scholars wanted them to be.

“I wanted to show people authentically that you can be leftist and have fun,” says Piker. “It doesn’t have to be about constantly woke-scolding people and appearing as the biggest joy killer, as though having fun is actually
bourgeois decadence.”

Others who’ve followed in Piker’s wake, like a smaller leftist Twitch streamer named Michael “Mike from PA” Beyer, see this as a core element of his appeal.

“[Piker] is, in his person, a refutation of a lot of the stereotypes of the left, right? He is a large, strong, attractive, funny guy who you want to be friends with, but he also has the values of the left,” says Beyer, who has previously collaborated with Piker. “He can just refute, in himself, a lot of the stereotypes about soy boy blue-haired cringe — you know, [the idea that] if you vote for the liberals, they won’t let you laugh at jokes. He just refutes all of that instantly.”

Marcus “DJWheat” Graham, a streamer since the earliest days of the medium and a broadcast journalism major before that, sees in Piker a continuation not just of irreverent political pundits like Jon Stewart but also shock jocks like Howard Stern. Piker is unafraid to communicate complex points using vulgar language. If a viewer comes at him with an idea he finds odious or unsavory, he’s just as likely to make a joke about sleeping with their mom as he is to boot them from chat (often he’ll do both).

“[Shock jock humor] is always gonna be an entertaining style of content,” says Graham. “I think that it transforms and shifts a little bit over time, where you look at the shock jocks of even twenty years ago whether it’s on radio or whatever, and there’s a lot of misogyny, there’s a lot of homophobia, there’s a lot of shock for the wrong reasons. I think the shock jocks of today are more creative and clever. It’s not just about being a bunch of degenerates. . . . You’ve got [Piker], who is kind of a shock jock. Definitely in a political world knows how to talk about things in a different way — the way he presents his position and so on.”

Piker only really found himself on his current course following the 2018 Fortnite boom. Alongside millions of other people, he watched then-Twitch kingpin Tyler “Ninja” Blevins play the sensationally popular battle royale game with rap superstar Drake, and everything clicked into place: He needed to be on Twitch. He was already playing Fortnite for hours each day, and he was doing so with journalists and podcasters like the hosts of the leftist show Chapo Trap House, who similarly endeavored to change people’s preconceived notions of leftism by embracing an edgier vibe. Why not broadcast it?

“I could play Fortnite and have these conversations that can make for entertaining and interesting commentary,” says Piker. “So I strapped a [camera] to my PlayStation 4 and started streaming. I got seventeen people my first stream. Thirty-five people [after that]. . . . And that’s how I started in the space.”

Piker did not want his Twitch channel to grow explosively—at least, not at first. He’d watched gaming communities, forums, and subreddits get overrun by alt-right elements, and he came to understand the delicate ecosystem that is a new online community. After all, it only takes a handful of loud, determined bad actors to chase away hundreds or thousands of well-meaning individuals.

Think of it like going to a bar where somebody’s violently drunk or a restaurant with several screaming babies; if you encounter the same unpleasant disruption a few times in a row, you’re probably going to give up on coming back.

“I didn’t want to be mentioned in mainstream spaces because that opens my community growth,” says Piker when I ask him about that interaction. “That changes the speed.”

Growing at a deliberate pace allowed Piker to be more hands-on in curating his community. Like other streamers, he relied on moderators to put the riffraff in time-out — or ban them outright — but he also gained a reputation
for wading into the muck himself. To this day, Piker pretty regularly calls out chatters who habitually disrupt the flow of conversation or are clearly trying to egg him on. Consistently making examples of the worst of the worst, he believes, has allowed him to create an environment in which he’s able to actually engage with chat, unlike many other streamers of his size.

“I think that’s why I’ve been able to navigate through the space and maintain a community of thirty to forty thousand — sometimes a hundred and fifty thousand — people [simultaneously],” says Piker, “where I can still have a back-and-forth conversation with anyone and everyone and do that in a productive manner while I’m talking about risky things that most streamers would never even consider talking about.”

Members of Piker’s community agree with this assessment.

“Even for a Twitch streamer, [Piker]’s intense about keeping up with his chat,” says Salem Saberhagen, a fan who runs a popular Piker meme account on Instagram called “Hasanabiposting.” “Fifty thousand people can be watching, chat whizzing by, and he’ll catch one of us joking, asking questions, or talking shit. And of course the odds of him actually going back and forth with chatters makes them even more eager to interact. It tickles this little social need inside all of us, I think, for better or worse.”

By many measures, Piker grew quickly despite his best efforts to keep everybody from piling into the pool at once, even in 2019 and early 2020 when he was establishing himself. Regular audiences of hundreds grew to audiences of thousands. In early 2019 he had fewer than thirty thousand Twitch followers. By the same time the next year, he had over two hundred thousand. He couldn’t maintain his oasis forever.

Before long, Piker and The Young Turks came to what Uygur calls a “mutual decision” to separate due to both Piker’s desire for independence and the potential for his unconstrained commentary to be associated with The Young Turks. Working outside the bounds of mainstream media but still running a more traditional network than Piker, Uygur now believes his nephew’s ascent was inevitable.

“The Young Turks, we’re not as large as the mainstream media, but we don’t get the same leeway [as Piker] because we still have to be cognizant of advertisers generally and other companies,” he says. “When you’re a one-man shop on Twitch, you can say not only the things that are true like we do, but you can say it in the irreverent way that audiences and especially young audiences connect to. And so a guy like [Piker] was bound to arise. He’s just particularly adept at it, so he was the perfect guy for the perfect time.”

By the time 2020 rolled around, Twitch audiences began to regard Piker not just as a worthwhile follow, but as indispensable viewing. This is because, in a year of pandemic- and election-borne unpredictability, he did not simply report the news. Instead, he cut through the clutter — curated the chaos — in a distinctly modern fashion. Instead of reading off a teleprompter or arguing with talking heads, he pulled information from a variety of sources, web browser bristling with links to breaking news on Twitter and YouTube, as well as networks like CNN and Fox News. He used the same tools any of us might have access to, and viewers saw what he saw: His web browser, a chat panel, and a video feed of Piker himself. There was nothing fancy about it, but that was part of the appeal: Piker effectively showed his work, earning more immediate trust than the distant, suit-clad anchors on mainstream networks. And if somebody doubted him, they could say as much in chat, at which point he’d either throw down with them (verbally, of course) or correct the record.

As Vice put it in a piece about Piker’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election: “While your parents were most likely watching CNN’s John King tap around an electoral map on a giant touchscreen, Piker sorted through exit polls and early reporting the same way I did: clicking frantically between tabs of different news sites, YouTube streams, and various chats. Last night I watched Piker and his guests play for time as he clicked on the wrong tab in his disorganized browser at least three times. I saw myself, and the way that I engage with politics and the news, in not just Piker’s political opinions but the way he uses the internet itself. . . . Piker is able to identify and discuss that politician’s tweet, the way that reporters analyze the news and comment on it in articles and on social media, and the raw polling data in a way that helps explain our current moment—and he does it in a way that makes politics legible and understandable, even at its most cruel and confusing.”

Beyer believes old news media institutions are crumbling away precisely because they failed to take advantage of the sorts of tools to which Piker and himself have access.

“If there’s breaking news, I have four thousand people watching [in chat],” says Beyer. “Someone could bring me official stuff right away. I can also [take] that information that people are getting to me and try to teach my audience how to be less susceptible to fake news—to be skeptical and how to interpret information and look at sources and who’s saying things. And so I think the generation gap is the biggest reason that old forms of media are dying, because they don’t take advantage of the opportunities and they don’t provide the interactivity which I think the younger generations want from their content.”

Moreover, Piker provided context through a coherent lens: The systems we’ve relied upon for decades, he posited, are failing us because they’re built to turn a quick and dirty profit — not to last. This positioned him as a refreshing alternative to mainstream news in the eyes of fed-up millennials and zoomers; where even liberal networks were, at most, only willing to tickle at the idea that the capitalist status quo might be failing the broader populace, Piker made that case on no uncertain terms every single day. For viewers, it was like having a doctor finally diagnose a sickness after years of being told nothing was wrong. There was a relief in finding someone who could tell them, effectively, that they were not crazy.

This, in part, is why Piker is able to perform the herculean task of functioning as a hybrid political commentator/news network for eight-plus hours per day: The principal characters might change, but the underlying causes of
America’s biggest problems remain the same.

“I have a worldview and a foundation that I’ve built on what I believe in and what I want to say about any particular subject. The way things are in America and all around the world, really, is that these systems of oppression don’t necessarily change,” says Piker. “Sometimes I’ll pull up a video from 2016, and I’ll be like, ‘This is the exact same thing I said in 2016 about abortion.’ And unfortunately, it’s still the exact same thing I would say about abortion, police brutality, labor rights, wealth inequality — you name it. None of those issues have been solved. So I already have a lot of things that I have said and a lot of things I believe that I find myself repeating.”

This is not to say that Piker is infallible, nor does he regard himself that way. He regularly tells viewers that he’s just a normal guy and that if he can grasp a concept, anybody can. The rest is a collective effort. In some cases, he leans on his chat—far more media-literate than the average band of Twitch viewers—to pull up and fact-check information. Oftentimes, though, he trusts the expertise of traditional journalists.

“There’s a lot legacy media still does that someone like myself will never do,” says Piker. “In my opinion, they should never do op-ed stuff. They should keep doing journalism instead—good journalism—because that is the most important part of their job. Whether I agree with them or not, whether I agree with publishers or not, whether I yell about the New York Times or the Washington Post regularly, it doesn’t change the reality that they’re still doing something that is necessary and incredibly important.”