The Parasocialists: React Streamers, Video Essayists, Debate Bros, Podcasters, and the Cultural Politics of the Online Left

Good, accessible political commentary has always been hard to come by, but the situation today seems worse than ever. Mainstream media is pure propaganda, alternative media remains resolutely alternative, and the once-wide expanse of social media has been narrowed to a handful of platforms governed by attention-maximizing algorithms that reward no one more than the grifting reactionaries of the new right. But these same platforms have been incubating a powerful undercurrent of dissent. YouTubers, Twitch streamers, debate bros, politigram radicals, dirtbag podcasters, Twitter shitposters, and Discord goblins are pumping out leftist content that is quietly reshaping political discourse on the internet and beyond. Largely if not entirely unbound by politeness, decorum, tradition, institutions, professionalism, and profit motive, the amateur content creators of the online left are speaking truth to power while attracting audiences as diverse as they are themselves.

In The Parasocialists: React Streamers, Video Essayists, Debate Bros, Podcasters, and the Cultural Politics of the Online Left, Liam Mitchell takes an ethnographic and theoretical approach to the mediated populism of the online left. Spotlighting four of its better-known figures – Hasan Piker, ContraPoints, Vaush, and Chapo Trap House – but branching out to lesser-known ones, he reads the online left as a multivalent cultural phenomenon unified in response to its great enemy, fascism. It is, in this response, an index of the various violences wrought by the right, a comprehensible, collectively constructed map of the modern world.