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.
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.
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.
My argument isn’t that “people shouldn’t live in LA” (okay fine maybe it is a little). My 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 underlying 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 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. I have 3 of such uncles and 2 of them aren’t even blood relatives.
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.
The real problem here is that Hasan doesn’t admit these things. Hasan can’t admit these things because he doesn’t know these things. Hasan is very limited in his knowledge of “socialism”, he’s a guy who just says shit on stream. Being a class traitor is a cool coat he wears along with all his other cool coats.
I struggle to even call myself a class traitor despite the fact that I have Eastern European thrift embedded so deeply in my veins that I live way below my means. Guess what class expression doesn’t stop there. Being thrifty doesn’t stop you from being compromised by your class. That money doesn’t sit under my mattress it’s invested, which means I’m in a class of people who not only will have private money for retirement but I’m invested in the outcomes of the market like every upper middle class person.
So I’m sorry that I don’t buy the whole class traitor shit, because neither the fans giving him that title nor he can actually untangle and explain his place in the world beyond saying “stop pocket watching”. It’s one thing to call yourself a class traitor because you bought a cool eat the rich shirt, it’s another thing to actually take inventory of your life and apply socialist theory to figure that out.
Log the fuck off.
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.