TRANSCRIPT
(Roll video of Hasan Piker podcast)
Hasan Piker: We’re gonna keep bringing in immigrants into this country on purpose just so they can f*** your sister and then maybe even your daughter We’re gonna destroy the white race, b***h. That’s what we’re here to do!
Black Pigeon Speaks: Hasan Piker, well, he has built his brand around deliberately provocative rhetoric, as well as his circus-use of Mao imagery, revolutionary aesthetics and these have propelled this Turkish Muslim to essentially become the e-celebrity face associated with Progressive Democratic Socialism in the United States.
On the opposite side of the political spectrum sits Asmongold – I’m not exactly sure how to say that, but we’ll go with that – another enormous internet personality who has increasingly become the standard-bearer for online right-wing and anti-establishment audiences.
The famously filthy nature of this gaming-goblin-turned-political-commentator has practically become part of his public mythology, particularly after reports that his girlfriend developed a rash while staying in his disgustingly filthy home and his resulting mess requiring a serious cleaning – or so I’ve read.
At first glance, Hasan and Asmongold represent completely opposite political universes. One offers revolutionary rhetoric and the other anti-establishment conservatism. One attacks capitalism and Israel the other frequently attacks the institutions and cultural assumptions of the modern Left, as well as shoring-up unwavering support for Israel.
(Roll video of Asmongold podcast)
Asmongold: (Reading CBS NEWS article) “Jewish American pedophiles [?] go to Israel for safety.” Uh-oh. That sounds like bullshit. I don’t believe this.
Black Pigeon Speaks: But here’s the thing: both of these men exist with inside the same unprofessionalized e-celebrity influencer economy and not only that, they both belong to the same e-celebrity talent agency.
Yeah, and from the outset of this video, I should say I’m not an expert on either of these e-celebrities. It is the industry behind them that we will put into focus.
(Promo)
Black Pigeon Speaks: Online platforms are pretty clear that when a particular set of ideas – nationalism and social cohesion, for example – become too dangerous for a platform’s walled gardens.
Those voices explaining them can simply be de-ranked, demonetized, banned or pushed-out, while the more acceptable and monetizable representatives remain available to fill the vacuum.
Currently, the internet political marketplace is constantly replacing yesterday’s acceptable dissident with tomorrow’s more profitable controversy, especially with the muzzle taken off of Twitter and its transformation into X and the rise of Rumble.
And flavors of the month do change. For a long time Tim Pool, for example was acceptable and obviously algorithmically-boosted by much of the online establishment, because he presented himself as a disaffected liberal, a former Left-Wing journalist who had become increasingly skeptical of the political movement he once belonged to basically a feckless fence-sitter.
And then, there’s Lauren Southern and Pearl, for example two women who are set to face off this autumn debating over the so-called “Manosphere”, a political ecosystem Southern, herself has claimed creating, even as her public positions, allies and enemies are reinvented seemingly every few weeks.
And this is the important thing to understand about modern internet politics and that is the personalities change faster than the audience does, in that the supposed political opposites Hasan Piker and Asmongold they are both part of the exact same overlapping professional infrastructure behind the scenes and that should make you reconsider what exactly it means when these people are called “independent internet personalities”
Now, let me explain this. The e-celebrity talent agency, Night Media, well, it emerged from the professionalization of the YouTube economy with executives and investors bringing experience from sports management, advertising, digital media and major entertainment companies.
This is no longer some guy helping his friend upload videos to YouTube. It is an industry. There are managers, sponsors, marketing firms, analytic companies, brand partnerships and increasingly-sophisticated systems for identifying which personalities can reach which audiences. And then essentially, curating entire baskets of personalities for every conceivable ideological niche, giving every demographic its preferred mouthpiece.
Now, most people no longer even care about the quality of the information. What they care about is the personality behind the camera, delivering it. [No, they care about the narrative and having their own opinions reinforced].
And this is where the transformation becomes considerably more profound than simply replacing CNN with YouTube, because increasingly, the product isn’t merely a physical object being advertised to you. The narrative is the product.
And once marketing becomes primarily a competition over narratives, the recommendation systems distributing those narratives becomes something considerably more consequential than an advertising tool. They become cultural machinery.
For most of human history, the major cultural narratives came from institutions that at least claimed some broader purpose: religion, family, community, nation, philosophy, tradition.
Now, increasingly, cultural context is being assembled by advertising systems, recommendation algorithms and engagement metrics.
Literal mathematical systems are helping determine which cultural stories proliferate. And the algorithms don’t have moral philosophy they don’t understand the difference between social cohesion and social destruction. And This is where the concept of a post hyper-normalization of society becomes useful.
The old Soviet idea of hyper normalization described a system in which propaganda maintained the appearance of normality even though everyone could see that reality was increasingly detached from the official narrative.
The modern version works entirely different. Instead of one official narrative being imposed from above, millions of personal narratives are being generated simultaneously, each one tailored to a different audience and the resulting feedback loops gradually construct the informational environment in which people understand their world.
For example, two people can wake up consume completely different media ecosystems and by the end of the day, possess radically different explanations for what is happening in the world around them.
They aren’t merely disagreeing about politics. They are operating from different narrative perspectives and cannot even agree on what reality is. And once people’s entire understanding of the world is mediated through these feedback loops, political arguments become almost impossible to resolve, because the disagreement begins several layers beneath the actual argument.
One person sees oppression another sees hysteria. One sees fascism The other sees communism. What both sides mostly fail to see is the real threat of societal collapse, because of this.
And this is why, in part, contemporary political movements in the West and the US, in particular are so demonstrably emotionally intense, even in societies that, by historical standards remain extraordinarily prosperous. And therein lies the danger of handing cultural distribution over to systems whose primary objective is optimization, without any corresponding moral framework.
And this is why companies such as Night Media, with its roster of e-celebrities is so interesting, as it exists within a system increasingly capable of assembling recognizable faces for different ideological and cultural demographics.
A socialist audience gets its socialist celebrities. A right-wing audience gets its right-wing celebrities. The Manosphere gets its personalities, the gaming world gets its personalities and every audience gets the impression that its chosen representatives emerged organically from the community. And once the curtain is drawn back, the suddenly Independent rebel, well, he’s sitting inside the same commercial infrastructure as his purported ideological enemies.
For example, you have Hasan Piker the multimillionaire Supposed socialist who says something outrageous. And then, Asmongold the multimillionaire supposed filth goblin, well, he responds. Someone clips the response. Another personality reacts to the clip. The audience starts fighting. The algorithm notices the engagement and suddenly, one argument has become an entire week’s worth of content and both men, along with their shared talent agency Night Media profit.
This is not a flaw in the system. This is the system working. Each side gets its villain. Each side gets its hero. Each side gets confirmation that the other side is completely insane and the machine gets another profitable cycle of attention. And two supposedly opposite political e-celebrities can simultaneously then benefit from the same ecosystem.
So perhaps, then the real story isn’t Hasan Piker vs Asmongold, it is the transformation of political disagreement into an entertainment industry, where personalities are products, narratives are the merchandise, algorithms are the distribution network and attention is the currency.
The modern internet didn’t eliminate the gatekeepers, it created new ones. And unlike the old gatekeepers, these ones don’t necessarily look like gatekeepers, they look like your favorite streamer cosplaying as Mao or living in filth.
And perhaps the greatest trick of all: You don’t have to control what people think when you can control which narratives become impossible to escape.