"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.