Hasan Piker calls it the bus driver test: “You get on a bus and you have 30 seconds to explain whatever online phenomena took place to the bus driver without them looking at you and going, ‘Get off the fucking bus.’” Most online discourse, no matter how heated, fails the test, he says – not least an incident last weekend, when someone on a Dublin street asked to take a picture with Piker, then held up a picture of his dog and shouted “Free Kaya!” Never mind the bus driver; trying to explain the significance of this particular event might well take the rest of this article, but the wider point is that there is a jarring overlap, or more often disconnect, between the online and offline worlds.
Piker finds himself in this in-between space more and more these days. Until fairly recently, the 34-year-old was familiar only to the very online, especially Americans in their 20s and 30s, largely thanks to his presence on the streaming channel Twitch, where he has 3 million followers. But since Donald Trump’s election, Piker has become an in-demand voice in “the real world” for his views on the beleaguered political left, and especially that inordinately fretted-over demographic, young men.
