Text Samira Larouci | PHOTOGRAPHY DEAN MAJD | STYLING GINGER EDMISTON
Few things confuse people as much as Hasan Piker’s body. The Twitch streamer, also known as HasanAbi, has taken to wearing suits as a form of armour lately. “I used to wear T-shirts all the time,” he says. “But then I figured I should start wearing a suit and a tie because there are a lot of adults watching on Fox News—if they see me saying something in the clips, they’ll be more receptive to what I have to say if I’m in a more appealing format.”
His logic is surprisingly pragmatic. Years spent under constant scrutiny have honed his sensitivity to perception. “When I got the first barrage of negative coverage a couple of months ago, and a bunch of think tanks decided I was the real enemy they must forcibly excise from American politics, that’s when I started wearing suits.”
Whether he’s wearing vintage Zegna trousers bought secondhand for $30 or a WASP-y corduroy blazer, at 6’4”, Piker’s superhero build has become a vessel for other people’s assumptions, fantasies, and anxieties. For many, it remains difficult to reconcile the body with the politics. The New York Times once called him “a progressive mind in a MAGA body”, a notion he laughs off. The description is inherently loaded. And it says as much about contemporary political aesthetics as it does about Piker; the suggestion that his body and his politics belong to opposing worlds is a reflection of how quickly appearance has become a political shorthand.
There is a longstanding argument that the pursuit of endless self-improvement mirrors the logic of capitalism itself. The body becomes another asset to refine and another site of labour. Piker draws a line between the two. Although to his audience, the separation is arbitrary. He belongs to the first generation of public figures for whom contradiction is almost a prerequisite. As one of America’s most watched political streamers, his ability to deliver complex political takes in verbiage more readily associated with the underbelly of Reddit and 4chan than cable news has allowed his message to transcend tired binaries, earning him a colossal following of predominantly young men.
The old gatekeepers have lost their monopoly on influence. Piker’s expletive-laden, stream-of-consciousness style has given the kids a leftist spokesperson who quite literally speaks their language amid the exhausted panopticon of broadcast media. And it isn’t hyperbole; he played a significant role in the momentum surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign.
In recent months, his ability to galvanise typically neutral voters and provoke institutions has made it impossible for the mainstream press to ignore what is, at its core, a one-man show. At the time of writing, he has been both subpoenaed by the US government for a recent trip to Cuba and banned from entering the UK as his visit was considered “not conducive to the public good”. Both developments have transformed him into one of the most contested political figures on the internet.
It’s said that every medium produces its own revolution, and streaming has ushered in its own breed of celebrity. They exist in a space where entertainer, activist, journalist, and meme are no longer mutually exclusive categories. And in this process, fandom has become a form of authority. Few people sit at that intersection more completely than Piker.
Streaming has turned devotion into a participatory act. He spends much of his life inside what is essentially a group chat with millions of people. Viewers share memes, send him articles to read aloud and react to, contribute to a sprawling kaleidoscope of in-jokes and collective lore, and argue with him in real time. It’s a level of intimacy and shitposting more commonly associated with fried, late-night conversations between friends on a sofa than a broadcast that reaches millions.
The arrangement is enormously rewarding. It’s also deeply suffocating. The internet has become both a necessary element and fundamental enemy of his freedom. His 2024 election-night stream reportedly drew 7.5 million viewers, while CNN’s coverage averaged roughly 5.1 million. It is a surreal and somewhat absurd reality: a one-man bedroom broadcast now sits beside one of America’s largest news networks.
For all the proximity to fame that his life now affords, Piker still thinks in resolutely material terms. “My politics revolve around the working class. Even in a city like Los Angeles, where there are a lot of wealthy people, there’s a great deal of workers as well—delivery drivers, postal service workers, baristas, teachers, nurses. But I do get very frustrated when I see the politics of my neighbours.” It’s a tension that’s mirrored in his daily life as America’s most prominent socialist commentator, who also built his audience on Twitch, a platform owned by Amazon.
He recently attended the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. “I’ve never been in a room where every single person was a person that I had seen on TV or in a movie. I really wanted to speak to Dua Lipa and Javier Bardem, but I was far too intimidated. I just couldn’t do it. I was a coward. I turned to Finneas [O’Connell] and was like, ‘Dude, you’re my island. You’re my saviour here.’”
Raised between Istanbul and Ankara, Piker describes himself as inquisitive and stubborn. He argued constantly with teachers and disappeared entirely into his interests. When he wasn’t reading satirical political newspapers from the local market, he was playing video games or waiting for the latest issue of Level, a Turkish gaming magazine that he read cover to cover.
“I always wanted to be extroverted,” he admits. “I always wanted to be social, but I was a fairly antisocial person.” Today, more than 10.4 million people follow him across his channels. “I spent a good deal of time drawing and not doing much else. I would upload my works of art on DeviantArt, read English books, and watch American shows that I would download off the internet.” Like most of the diaspora, Piker’s America was assembled through the myth-making of films and television.
“I had this belief that the American dream was achievable, that I was gonna go to school here, I was gonna have a robust social life,” he recalls. “And many of those things did happen. But I also had this faulty idea of what the American dream looked like. And then my experiences with the privatised healthcare system slowly chipped away at my confidence that this American dream was a reality at all—or even remotely achievable.”
He also spent years immersed in Dota, a game renowned for its ruthless meritocracy, where every player begins with access to the same tools, creating a genuinely level playing field. Its devotees often describe it as more of a worldview than a video game. Streaming for up to ten hours a day across the week – part labour, part performance, and sheer compulsion, he says – his daily routine borders on monastic. He wakes up, takes his dog Kaya for a walk, plays basketball, hits the gym, then suits up and logs on for the remainder of the day.
“I’m an entertainer first,” he asserts, adding that streaming is less about being understood and more about people wanting their biases confirmed. “There are a lot of people who will encounter my commentary in a short clip online that’s unbelievably negatively framed, and develop a fairly negative attitude about who I am and what I represent because they’ve never encountered this perspective at all.” Clip-farming may be reactionary and bereft of context, but it’s also unavoidable. His loyal audience come from the streams, but his reputation is sculpted by third-party clippers. At a certain point, the stream and the person become difficult to separate. “Streaming is everything. It’s just me. It’s who I am. It’s not like I’m putting on a different act or anything. I think it’s impossible to do that for eight hours at a stretch.”
Citing the likes of Elvis and Michael Jackson, Piker argues that superstardom depended on a society capable of directing its attention in the same direction at the same time, and is therefore unlikely today. Yet his own ascent from fringe internet commentator to the peripheries of the mainstream suggests that splintering has merely changed the way influence looks rather than our collective appetite for it.
For someone who spends most of his time analysing power, he has remarkably little faith in his own influence. Few streamers find themselves banned by one government, debated by another, and treated as a matter of public concern across multiple countries. “I just don’t think the media is that powerful. I think it’s powerful if it’s united. The way the media treats me is as if I’m some socialist kingmaker, and I don’t think that way at all. I don’t see myself that way at all.”
In many ways, the allegory of Piker has eclipsed the reality. “You have to be comfortable with yourself and who you are in order to consent to being in front of tens of thousands – if not millions – of people all the time, and have them pick apart every single thing you say and do, down to micro movements.” His audience spans everyone from devoted “HasanAbi heads” with deeply parasocial attachments to people who have been sending him death threats for more than a decade. Faced with either extreme, he follows the same rule: “Never admit weakness on the internet, especially because when they see that it works, they’ll do it more. But they never stop anyway, so who cares?”
For the most part, Piker speaks about criticism with a remarkable degree of detachment. Occasionally, however, a hint of vulnerability slips through. “When I get inundated with hate raids and things of that nature, there will often be a brief moment when I’ll stop and think, Damn, maybe I am a bad person. These people freaking hate me. But I quickly snap out of that when I go out into the real world and encounter normal people. That rounds my perspective quite a bit.”
Even his bedroom isn’t safe from critique, he explains with a laugh: “I’ll have political candidates on and people will be like, ‘Oh, how humiliating. They had to go into a room full of toys. What the hell is this process?’ We’re liberal people. We care about the optics.” Extreme visibility has a way of transforming people into symbols, and Piker has spent years living in the gap between who he actually is and what other people imagine him to be. “It’s not great,” he adds, grinning. “But again, it’s the cost of doing business. It’s the same with death threats. It’d be nice if I didn’t have to deal with them, but I’m used to it. The way I see it is, look, we all have hurdles, right? God knows I have less than most, so I’m very fortunate. I’m very privileged, and I recognise that.”
He is under no illusion about the advantages he has benefitted from. Candid about his privilege and the role of his appearance in his success, he also understands that his Muslim name and heritage are rarely perceived in isolation, despite not being religious himself. “If I said all the things that I have said throughout my career, but my name was Hank and I was whiter and grew up in Kansas or something, my reception would be far different. If people knew me as Hank from Kentucky, and I was saying these things, I genuinely think people would be like, ‘Oh, he’s dope. He’s awesome.’ But that’s just how biases work, and I understand it.”
Considering Piker now lives in West Hollywood, there’s an irony to all of this that he readily acknowledges. “Technically, I am the fresh-off-the-boat immigrant who did achieve the American dream.” But he remains acutely aware of the circumstances that made it possible. “Unlike many of the other people who have arrived at this level of success, I’m not confused about the factors that played a massive role in this. I didn’t choose to be born into a relatively affluent family and have a decent education. Regardless of my family’s financial conditions by the time I got to college, I had that foundation. I was also fortunate enough to be born into a family that gave birth to me on US soil so that I could have American citizenship and come here.”
After college, he landed a job at The Young Turks, which he describes as his uncle Cenk Uygur’s 26-person YouTube channel that wasn’t a massively successful franchise. “It was relatively niche [at the time]. But again, nepotism recipient, right? I understand that, every step of the way, luck played a major role. And now, I like to say I win the lottery every single day with my current job. I don’t take it for granted.” Freedom, in his view, is far too dependent on luck. “It shouldn’t have to be like that. You shouldn’t have to win the lottery every day to get to a level of financial success and therefore freedom. Because that’s what was most consequential for me. Reaching a certain level of financial success and financial independence meant freedom—to say whatever I wanna say without any editorial constraints and navigate through tricky situations or fly around the country when I choose to do so. Freedom to say, ‘Hey, I’m not gonna work today if I don’t feel like it.’”
But days off are a myth, he clarifies. “I never take that option. I’ve consistently streamed pretty much every single day for the last six years now, but the very fact that I could stop if I wanted for an extended period of time? That’s freedom. The beauty of it is the freedom itself. Being able to do that takes off so much of the pressure. It almost makes it easier for me to never take days off because I don’t feel the need to do it. But the fact that I can is almost like a superpower.”
Strip away the audience and the discourse, and Piker is still a 34-year-old who binges anime, doesn’t listen to music, and tries (often unsuccessfully) to keep up with his latest hyper-fixation. Lately, that means books on Cuba and Mao and the development of the Chinese Communist Party. “My future is boring; it’s just streaming, hopefully to a larger audience with a lot more impact. I want to leave the world a better place than I found it. That’s my mission. I know it sounds corny, but that’s truly what it is. I want to raise class consciousness amongst the working class.”
He adjusts his cap and glances at the time. Another eight-hour stream is about to begin. There is no tidy separation between the man and the medium. After years spent broadcasting himself to millions, the distinction feels almost irrelevant. The internet has allowed him to live largely on his own terms, but it’s also demanded something in return.
“It’s taken my privacy and my sanity.”
Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 06 | Order Here
Grooming MIRNA JOSE and ALEXA HERNANDEZ, producer IMAD ELSHEIKH, set dresser BRE ANDY, line producer AMNA ALI, production PIQUE, florist NAOKO DE OLIVEIRA at KABUKI.NY, video EMILIO CHAVEZ, lighting tech JAE KIM, photo assistant DILLON MCNEIL, 2nd photo assistant PAULINHO RUSSEL, styling assistants HOPE WEBER and CAMI CUSHMAN, production assistant ABE RICHARDS