This guy’s dad is the former VP of a multibillion dollar Turkish conglomerate, as well as the secretary of a government department. Mom and Dad were able to fly to their other home in NJ to give birth so he’d get US citizenship. His uncle is the founder and owner of TYT Media and gave him his media career. He went to Rutgers. He lives in a multimillion dollar mansion in the Hollywood Hills. This is by definition not the kind of person who can be a voice of the People. Saying “I recognize my privilege” over and over, while living his lifestyle, doesn’t negate his privilege and complete lack of real-life experience outside of the curated garden of the wealthy. He gets paid obscene amounts of cash to sit in his bedroom and word-vomit for 9 hours a day. Why are his unending opinions taken so seriously? He gives me strong controlled opposition vibes.
Edit: Thank you all for this discussion. I learned a lot.
Haven’t seen/heard much of his videos.
And some gamers going RW is an issue, right? Maybe he’ll be good there?So what is to be done?
Are there other people you’d recommend?Oh screw off with this bullshit. So pathetic.
Thanks for your contribution to the discussion, very insightful.
These are bot account folks. There’s been a surge of attacks against Hasan by the right and russian propaganda machine. They are opening the flood gates to undermine all the remaining progressive influencers.
That’s a new one, I’ve never been accused of being a bot for having an unpopular viewpoint before! You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?
I’ve never been accused of being a bot for having an unpopular viewpoint before!
Ah, you get used to it pretty quickly.
Evil Russia is botting on lemmy dot ml to reach a smidgen of the 60K MAU who are mostly already deluded nerds into not supporting Hasan on twitch dot tv a site of 240M MAU for geopolitical reasons of 20 dimensional chess.
I’ll state this: I know of this person in name only.
He’s a hypocrite. It’s as simple as that. His popularity is probably derived from the novelty of a member of the upper class agreeing with the lower classes and his ability to entertain them. It gives those that belong to the lower class hope of change being enacted by those with capital. The Wikipedia page states he brought a $2.7 million USD mansion. He has access to capital, and what does he do? Asks others to donate to ‘worthy’ causes whilst accruing more capital for his own vested, personal vanity projects?
From what I’ve read he is not an ally. He’s an entertainer. The capitalist system is able to create products that espouse anti-capitalist ideas. This is just another such product. It’s not controlled opposition. It’s just an individual who’s found himself the owner of a sought after product. Just another capitalist.
I’ll state this: I know of this person in name only.
surely THIS is a solid base to work off of when forming an opinion of somebody
He has access to capital, and what does he do? Asks others to donate to ‘worthy’ causes whilst accruing more capital for his own vested, personal vanity projects?
a recent donation drive run by his community for Palestinian aid raised $840,000, with at least $75,000 coming directly from his pocket. Another previous donation drive last October raised $1,236,473.25, with another $50,000 coming directly from Hasan.
My sentiment does not change. That’s akin to pocket change if he makes around $200,000 USD a month on twitch…
Consumption of luxury products and the defense of them is not something I support. Buying a mansion is antithetical to my views on socialism. An acceptable use of a mansion is to tear it down and build affordable apartments for the working people. Even then that’d be suspect, as you’d be able to build more dwellings on cheaper land… It would be more of a publicity stunt than an acceptable use of capital.
This character might say “the right things” but he does not do them. Why is he even working for Amazon? He could be streaming on peertube or build infrastructure to stream without binding himself to such an exploitative company.
He’s human. It’s not easy say the right things and do the right things. I don’t give it much thought. He’s not of interest to me, but I think it’s quite obvious why communists might not like him.
That’s not very much for a house in LA
Okay let’s do some introspection, why does Hasan Piker need to live in LA?
He could live in La Puente which has a median sale price of $700k, 20 miles from downtown LA, but for some reason he moved to LA.
It’s kind-of odd you know? That basically once a streamer, podcaster, or one of these online personalities makes it big they often move to like LA or NYC. Why is that? Why don’t they move to Nabraska or something? It’s kind of weird that there’s this seeming class of people (new media people making it big) that have an interest in moving to some of the most expensive areas of the country that seemingly have a conglomeration of other people who are part of their class.
once a streamer, podcaster, or one of these online personalities makes it big they often move to like LA or NYC. Why is that?
That’s not a streamer thing, that’s an almost everyone thing. Tons of people move to cities as soon as they can afford it, tons of those who don’t stay where they are in no small part because it’s less expensive.
Hasan literally told Business Insider that he wanted to move to LA because of fucking Entourage.
Likewise yeah people in their 20s-30s move to cities to chill, but not everyone moves to LA or NY.
What the fuck does any of that matter. How are you about to say someone shouldn’t live where they want because its expensive and they can afford it? Nebraska fucking sucks BTW.
Because this is a plain instance of him not being a class traitor to further his own career and desires.
The reality of the “stop pocket watching” argument that Hasan has successfully deployed on his fans and friends is that it’s the same argument every rich person pulls out when you question how they spend their money and what that practically says about their place and ideas for society at large.
The argument isn’t that “people shouldn’t live in LA” (okay fine maybe it is a little). The argument is that Hasan made the same choice that every influencer makes.
Beyond the very obvious influencer argument? How exactly do you think that upper middle class comes to support capitalism as a whole? They get addicted to their level of consumption like every wealthy class has done for millennia.
So the argument there isn’t “Hasan doesn’t deserve nice things”, it’s that “Hasan’s appetite for nice things is a form of class expression” and there is a point of where that class expression and the addiction to consumption overrides in what you do overrides any “do socialism” argument that you say on stream.
This is literally how the nomenklatura got fat in the USSR, they didn’t have streams but they had their local, national, and general assembly soviets. Every post-Soviet person knows an uncle who was a party apparatchik and stopped saying “do socialism” the moment the wall came down, and he was one out of maybe two/three guys in your whole extended family who happened to have a car prior to 1995.
Y’all are getting wrecked by the same attitudes that wrecked the USSR and y’all don’t even have state capitalism with socialist characteristics.
Log the fuck off.
Never heard of him.
Because he’s cool to a certain type of person and those people are vaguely leftist (just like Hasan is vaguely leftist).
That cool factor and the parasocial relationships protect him a lot in places like this where some of the more knowledgeable users will actually dunk on his sources like Ettingermentum when they do/say stupid shit. It’s incredibly funny to see.
Honestly that’s pretty much it.
As long as you don’t exploit workers there nothing wrong in having money. You probably know that Engels was rich - and to be honest he did exploit workers (owned a textile factory or something). Was he, by your definition, the kind of person who can be a voice of the people?
deleted by creator
Lol this is a misuse of statistics to make it look like Hasan isn’t rich. The median US net worth is roughly $200,000. That means 50% of people have less than $200k of net worth, and remember it’s not real money.
Hasan makes the median net worth of an American in one month on Twitch subs alone. Using just his house price as his “net worth” is laughable.
Because he’s funded by russia to split the democratic vote.
Exhibit A: Jill Stein
Mrs. Stein and Principal Putler were at the same table making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me!
Remember how libs were rehabbing GWB but then GWB never endorsed, and they got really mad?
We all know why!!! It’s because GWB is a Russian asset, why else would he invite Putin to a high school in Crawford Texas unless Putin had compromat dizinformatsiya on him in 2001. DO NOT LOOK UP WHEN PUTIN BECAME PRESIDENT THAT IS NOT RELEVANT!!! COMPOMAT! DISINFORMATSIYA!
What’s with the identity politics man? Does what he says makes sense or not? Don’t tell me you won’t listen to rich white people when they make sense because they’re rich and white.
You can advocate for hungry people after eating a meal. You can advocate fornsex worker rights even if you are a virgin.
You can’t tell people you are “working class” if you’re rich. You can’t advocate for punishing day people while pretending to be straight.
It is not complicated.
He cute though
A person’s class is defined by their relation to labor, not their wealth. He’s not exploiting labor. I’m not sure the people claiming he’s a hypocrite for having money understand anything about communist/socialist theory. Engels was famously in a very similar situation.
Plus as far as I know socialists have always been fine with class traitors who join them.
A person’s class is defined by their relation to labor, not their wealth.
This is literally not true. Like quite literally, even in socialist history this is not a true statement. Leninism particularly had some very funny hijinks about linking wealth to class.
He’s not exploiting labor.
I don’t want to really get into it, but Hasan like every other content creator indirectly exploits the labor that provides the platform that he makes money off of.
Twitch.TV is a stage that is built and maintained by workers working for a Twitch. Those workers are exploited. The stage is a means of production. The artists that use the stage also exploit those workers, because they procure use of the stage. The cool thing about Hasans typical response to this which is the thought terminating cliche of “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is that it by definition has a corollary. If there can be no ethical consumption, there can be no ethical production.
Engels was famously in a very similar situation.
Engels’ factories were all unionized.
Hasan has literally in 2019 after all the “podcasters don’t pay guests drama” that he very well knows of given his friends, had exploited people that did free work for him. There’s controversy about whether Hasan actually pays his mods. Most online personalities are not very forthcoming about how they get help with their content/community management and whether that is properly compensated, Hasan included. For a venture that’s made $12m over 5 years Hasan 100% should be paying every single person that touches anything related to his work without them having to ask, whether it’s hourly, piece work, or full time employment.
Hasan is nowhere near Engels in his understanding and treatment of labor.
I’m not sure the people claiming he’s a hypocrite for having money understand anything about communist/socialist theory.
Most of Hasan’s fans and Hasan himself don’t have understand anything about communist / socialist theory or history. This thread at large is a perfect encapsulation of this where the history and theory is bent entirely in the defense of one online entertainer in 2024. I say this as a person who occasionally watches (e.g. election night since I dind’t want to watch broadcast cable and nobody else good had election live streams).
The real problem here is the deification of Hasan and the comparison of him to Marx or Engels that’s done up and down this thread is indicative of the seriousness of the commenters in their understanding of socialism. A lot of these arguments are vibes + socialist bromides, they don’t actually do anything beyond surface level reflexive defense. Nobody actually wants to open the Pandora’s box here because as the famous tweet said “some of our faves might be implicated”.
This is literally not true. Like quite literally, even in socialist history this is not a true statement. Leninism particularly had some very funny hijinks about linking wealth to class.
That’s weird, because the class = relation to labor stuff is literally in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels
I’m not deifying Hasan, I don’t really care about Hasan. I was just correcting an incorrect sentiment in this post that having wealth means you can’t be on the side of the working class.
Everything else you said is weird too online gossip so I’ll just move on.
That’s weird, because the class = relation to labor stuff is literally in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels
I would challenge you to actually find such a quote, because such a claim doesn’t make a lot of sense in the language of Marxism. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is effectively a literary review of “how we got here” and such a definition of class excludes classes of feudalism which are covered in that work. Not only that but a peasant’s relation to labor is vastly different within the peasant class. Some peasants have a relation to labor in the same way as the bourgeoisie, some the same as the petite bourgeoisie, and some without any real relation to labor at all. And yet peasants are a distinct class according to all modern Marxists.
Kulaks were literally a class according to the Bolsheviks, which was at its clearest defined as a class based more-so on wealth than relation to labor. It wasn’t really until Maoism that a more complete understanding of socialist class was developed especially in relation to peasants since communism was mostly developed as a collaboration between educated urban intelligentsia and urban workers.
The difference between the proletarian class and the lumpen proletarian class is generally accepted in modern times not as their relation to labor but their relation to communism(or more specifically class consciousness) itself. Like the problems around the peasants most communism between 1840 ~ 1970 had trouble working through the entirety of the urban landscape, so “normal people” that were difficult to qualify or deemed morally degenerate by various authors were just put into the lumpen space. It wasn’t until the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords took a look around and said the normal people around us don’t fit into pure “proletarian” definitions. That begged the question of “does this mean that communism is doomed?”. As a natural consequence of this these groups that lead the way in the theory and practical organizing spaces to start speaking about working with and activating the lumpen proletariat in earnest rather than casting them off as dregs that could only be useful to counter revolutionary forces.
The last reason this doesn’t make sense is that wealth is capital which under a capitalist system is the means of production in and of itself. Marx himself even goes further to say that accumulation of wealth is systemic and has an equilibrium with the accumulation of misery.
"The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus- population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital (Marx’s Capital, p. 661)
Hasan has accumulated much capital, therefore according to Marx has also accumulated much misery because he is not exempt from the systemic nature of capitalism. Hasan very often in response to house gate says “There’s no ethical consumption”. The corollary here is that there’s no ethical production, and there is no ethical accumulation.
Whether your faves are implicated or not Marxism is a sociological system of the poorest, those among us who are wealthy communists should have much more personal sin to grapple with than those who are poor, that is our privilege.
Everything else you said is weird too online gossip so I’ll just move on.
This whole thread is weird too online gossip if you haven’t noticed.
I was just correcting an incorrect sentiment in this post that having wealth means you can’t be on the side of the working class.
This is true, however this is actually hard to prove, and denying Hasan’s implication in the capitalist system and his accumulation of wealth simply because Hasan is popular is a willful misunderstanding of Marxism. Having in-house conversations is literally how people advance their understandings of Marxism, what’s happening in much of this thread is denying those conversations via thought terminating cliches but from the left, because many see this as a “grand posting battle”. I’m not advocating that we have to game out a percentage of Hasan good or Hasan bad, I’m arguing that we have to understand Hasan as Marxists warts and all. That understanding is not happening because in this circumstance stan culture is at odds with Marxism.
Lastly it’s my view that if Hasan is indeed a “fellow traveler” and someone who people learn “the left”/Marxism/whatever from, he should be showing us this journey himself, instead of steeling himself because of his constant battles with H3 or Destiny or whoever. Otherwise this is just kayfabe.
Hes good at breaking down media. Gets involved on community organizing. Does good propaganda.
People are free to like who they like and make up their own minds. Why you hating? Who made you thought police?
I guess his ubiquity annoys me when he strikes me as hypocritical. Thought police? That’s just a weird thing to say. Why am I “hating?” Nobody hates the Left more than the Left.
I like that he’s focusing on the relationship between labor and the means of production and its not about being poor or rich per se.
Exactly why the infighting when we have bigger fish to fry.
Fair enough. Guess I’ll delete before the hive attacks in full.
Don’t delete. There is no hive. Let the opinions and discussion happen, read them all, see if anything sways you. If not that’s fine, if it does that’s fine too. You asked, hear the answers
You right
Anyone who doesn’t agree with you is a sheep right?
No, lmfao. But it’s clear from the overall response that the assumption is that I must be some kind of rightwing troll, just because I’m sick of the guy. Leftist =/= Hasan fan.
I only see one person who questioned if you were trolling. And the response you’ve largely gotten are because people don’t agree with your point of view.
It’s good to have advocates in positions of privilege. If we were all to rely on someone like yourself to try and change hearts and minds, how quickly and widespread can you move that message and get people to understand the plight of workers? Not as quickly as someone with privilege and influence who can help with that.
I don’t know this guy or his politics, just examining this discussion and (as with the other responses you’ve gotten) not really sure where you’re coming from with this. You said yourself your co-workers listen to this guy all day, you can see that kind of thing is important right? (If it’s the right message he is pushing of course)
Let’s not do that… Its good to talk as long as you’re also open to listening
No… Its a good discussion… Maybe add an edit or a caveat… I do feel there are a few people out there who don’t like him for the reasons you stated. But end of the day bigger fish to fry. As long as we keep that in mind it’s all good to me.
The revolution will not have a channel on youtube.
I was going to comment the same ö
Is this a “no true Scotsman” thing where only poor people with a blue collar work history are worthy of being listened to?
No. It’s a “tired of the dropping standards” thing where I’m dissatisfied with the fact that the biggest voice of our political movement is a loud condescending nepo baby who sits in his bedroom playing video games, watching youtube, and reading Reddit posts for a living, and can’t realistically claim to have any idea about the lives of the oppressed classes he claims to champion.
I suggest maybe watching the stream, then
I’m basically forced to, daily, thanks for your suggestion tho
I guess you want political and social “activists” to have a pathetic life and can’t have fun and do fun activities like playing games. What make you think that he doesn’t read interesting book etc to educate himself about certain issues? Your use of personal attacks remove all your credibility.
TBH, I don’t know much about him and read the first few paragraphs of his Wikipedia page. It says while born in New Jersey, he grew up in Turkey under Erdogan, then back to the US to study poli sci. Seems like growing up under a democracy sliding back into authoritarianism would be relevant experience. Your description of him as a “nepo baby” seems quite incomplete and makes me wonder if your perception of him is charged by emotion rather than fact.
His uncle is the owner and founder of TYT Media, and he got his start in media at… TYT. He comes from an immensely wealthy and politically connected family. He has chosen to live in Hollywood, an epicenter of capitalism at its worst.
And thanks for your edit, I think I agree that my perception of him is charged by emotion, but in addition to fact.
Is Hasan Piker really the biggest voice on the political left?
Depends on what you define left, but if it’s left of the DNC and corporate media than he’s one of the biggest no doubt about it.
Maybe I’m the one that’s out of the loop, but I’d consider myself fairly informed and on the left, and I only think I’ve heard him speak once or twice. I don’t watch any streams though, so it could just be that I’m not part of that community
Hasan’s follower gain for November - December alone is roughly the size of the entire Lemmy fediverse MAU, ~60k.
Yep, sounds like I’m the odd one out then. Although Lemmy is far from my only source of news and information
How about a loud condescending poor who sits in their bedroom playing video games, watching YouTube, reading reddit posts for a living but is super right wing?
Not like there’s a litany of journalists, professors and former finance ministers with their work available online to watch or anything
Holy shit what a lib response
