The rise of BreadTube and the battle for the soul of the internet

YouTube, once a digital harbour for miscellaneous cat-compilations and grainy videos of people falling over, has become a primary news source for a dizzying proportion of adults across the western world. According to the Pew Research Centre, around 26 per cent of adults in the US say they get their news from YouTube. 

In the UK, Ofcom research suggests that number stands at 27 per ent for young people. But YouTube, along with Twitch (another ascendant streaming platform), aren’t like other media services.  Obsessive viewing and radicalisation are baked into the system, which serves up addictive, continuous content through its cutting-edge algorithms. When one three-hour long video ends, another similar one is recommended – and on and on for hours and hours of the listener’s day.

During the mid 2010s, YouTube’s lax terms of service left it ripe for alt-right commentators, who’d take to its airwaves, speaking for hours to disaffected young people, permitted to say almost anything on their official channel without fear of being "departnered". 

The platform also cultivated a new form of broadcast/viewer relationship. It’s not unusual for politically inclined YouTube and Twitch viewers to tune into content for hours at a time. For much of this time, the video side of things is immaterial. The audience are listeners,  lending half an ear while preoccupied with some other activity – most often gaming, the Internet’s supranational pastime. For a frightening number of viewers, this half an ear has, at one time or another, been lent to ultra-right political streamers: ranging from libertarian chauvinists to full-blown white supremacists.

So how did the politics of the Internet – or at least YouTube – become so right wing? It effectively started in the US with a 2014 phenomenon known as Gamergate. This was a complex jumbled affair, sparked by (false) accusations of an unethical sexual relationship between a game developer and an industry journalist.  Following those claims, embittered gamers came together online to wage cultural war on what they saw as an insurgent feminist agenda ruining the gaming industry. As Gamergate faded, many of them stuck around on YouTube, advancing online cultural and political commentary, decrying ‘femi-nazis’ and political correctness, and advancing conspiracy theories.

When the 2016 Trump campaign was boosted by the online alt-right, many of these previously unacceptable tendencies swelled on the internet. Suddenly it became routine to come across YouTubers discussing white-supremacy, eugenics, a subservient female class, or the Jewish question. After Trump’s election, Richard Spencer, the notorious American neo-Nazi, credited internet cultures for marshalling far-right hegemony: “We memed alt-right into existence,” he claimed. Many of the memes and message-boards that Spencer referenced would have overlapped with the far-right streamers and commentators initiated in the wake of Gamergate.  

One of these early influential personalities was Canadian YouTuber, Stefan Molyneux, a white nationalist whose rambling philosophical lectures drew hundreds of millions of views. Molyneux has now been banned from YouTube – a rare achievement given the site’s poor governance. But before his channel was taken down, he fostered a huge following for such conspiratorial claims that Star Wars: The Last Jedi sub-textually prophesised the “quasi extinction” of the white race, that humanity was not a single species, and that all violence is essentially the fault of women mistreating their children. 

Molineux unsurprisingly shilled consistently for Trump, as well as for Marie Le Penn in France and Geert Wilders in Holland. And despite being banned by YouTube and Twitter, he’s still an online force.

Another of Gamergate’s furies was a man from Swindon called Sargon (real name Carl Benjamin), who took to YouTube in 2014 to complain about “gender ideologues”, naming himself after the pre-Babylonian conqueror, Sargon of Akkad. Benjamin might pass as your average chubby IT guy, but he has raked in hundreds of thousands of subscribers with his views on “eco-fascism” and “social justice losers” and crude provocations. You may remember him standing as a Ukip candidate in 2019 when he tweeted that he “wouldn’t even rape” Labour MP Jess Philips.  

And it’s not just men (though it predominantly is). A hugely influential alt-right commentator is nationalist millennial Lauren Southern, another Canadian, who has been banned from the UK after being questioned under the Terrorism Act 2000.

Some refer to people of this alt-right stripe as "the intellectual dark web", which is a strange badge of honour, considering the dark-web was made famous primarily as a place to procure drugs, hitmen and child-pornography. But what really ties them together is a climate of fear, and a feeling that their way of life is under threat by alien influences – be it immigrants, political correctness, feminism or just a vague woke miasma. Whatever it is, it’s the power of nightmares. The commentators never dream of a better future.  Although YouTube has, in the past few years, moved to ban accounts of figures such as Alex Jones and David Duke for violating hate speech regulations, many of these pundits remain syndicated.

The left has been late to this political party. However, over the past couple of years, an alternative counter-culture has emerged on YouTube and Twitch. Known as Breadtube (after Kropotkin’s anarchist text, A Conquest of Bread), its commentators have been trying, quite successfully, to intervene in the right-wing recruitment narrative – lifting viewers out of the rabbit-hole, or, at least, shifting them over to a new one.

One of the leading Breadtube streamers right now is Hassan Piker, who has more than 850,000 Twitch followers with a dizzying total of 40 million views. Recently, on his channel, he streamed his play-through of the online game Among Us with Congressional representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar – an event viewed live by hundreds of thousands of people. Piker had worked for The Young Turks (his uncle Cenk Uygur’s now infamous online news show), before launching his own show on Twitch.

If you watch one of Piker’s streams, you may well be thrown by the apparent lack of effort. Piker mostly just reacts to things – other streamers or online articles – from the comfort of a gaming chair. His fans express themselves in a cascading chat bar on the side of the screen, suggesting features for him to cover. It sounds boring but, like his alt-right rivals, it is a format that can be oddly entrancing. There’s an authenticity to its lack of rehearsal and seemingly random discussion.

Another successful left-wing streamer is Cushbomb – better known as Matt Christman, from the wildly successful, no-holds-barred political podcast, Chapo Trap House. On his channel, he brings a dose of philosophy, game theory and literary knowledge to the streaming realm. 

Often unflatteringly cropped, Cushbomb gives his views on global politics and the American Experiment, pausing to suck on a vape-pen before reflecting on whatever comes into his mind – be it Marx, the Democratic Party or the films of Alan J Pakula. He and his Chapo cohort were enthused by Senator Bernie Sanders, whom they revered as a Moses-like figure, set to lead the US out of a barren neoliberal desert. After Sanders’ defeat in the Democratic primaries, Cushbomb came to define the US election as a mostly symbolic toss-up between the “don’t be an a***hole” party and the “don’t be a p***y party”.      

A less cynical voice comes from libertarian socialist Vaush, who makes a solid living debating with left- and right-wing streamers. He’s what people online might call “a debate-lord”, a sub-sect of commentator popularised by right-wing avatars Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder, who rose to fame stealing on to college campuses to aggressively debate bewildered undergraduates. His approach is often confrontational, adopting a rhetorical scorched earth policy, attempting to make debate opponents, or dissenting viewers, feel stupid (or “owned” as the Internet puts it).

In contrast to Cushbomb, Vaush begged his viewers not to be disheartened by Sanders’ defeat, decrying what he called “Bernie or Busters”. Vaush has almost 300,000 subscribers and conforms exactly to the industrial prototype for a professional online streamer, complete with a thick matt of facial hair, glasses and a weighty, stolid build. On his modest set, with just a few manga pictures arranged behind his gamer chair, he will soapbox for hours, in an elastic conversation with his lines of chat, or even debating his viewers.

Vaush emerged from the community of an early Breadtuber named Destiny, another former gamer turned political commentator – the two have since suffered a protracted, public falling out. Destiny (real name Steven Bonnell) refined an echo-chamber that, due to its format, overlapped with many alt-right circles. Viewers would stumble across Destiny on their way down the alt-right rabbit hole and his debates with leading right-wing commentators were credited by the New York Times as a significant “deradicalising” force for those drawn to the far-right. Vaush has taken on this aspect of Destiny’s mantel and his debates with Molyneux, Sargon of Akaad and others have been watched, collectively, millions of times.

“I would go on Destiny’s stream from time to time,” Vaush told me before going live on stream, “and eventually people in Destiny’s community encouraged me to start my own. Since then it’s just been up and up.”

Vaush contends that the soul of the internet pines for ruthlessness and vitriol. “The problem,” he says, “is the online left before me was very academic … but what motivates conservative thought online is ruthless, aggressive content. It’s contempt, that’s what drives them. So when all the lefty YouTubers are these nice, foppish, queer characters, it doesn’t really speak to that demographic of insecure white men. So, I’m loud and aggressive and I want to show people that you can be all these things without being part of the problem politically.”

Vaush considers the radical online left problematic in its politics, too.  “Most of it is set on this incredibly narcissistic ‘doomerism’ that prevents people from engaging in meaningful action.” He calls this phenomenon “purity politics … the idea that if you want to be politically effective you have to scratch and claw … people who are obsessed with the aesthetic of political effectiveness [which] leads them to do stupid things like not vote in a critical election, or besmirch liberals as proto-fascists. These tendencies make for great content but terrible political advocacy.”

“The YouTube political space," Vaush admits, “is undeniably right leaning. But it’s not just that it’s right leaning, it’s where are those right-leaning views going?” While the vast majority of America’s left-leaning population will tune into moderate, liberal programming, on the right it’s a different story, where “a vastly disproportionate number of them go to hard-right perspectives. We’re talking about people going well beyond fiscal responsibility or low taxes and flirting instead with ethnic nationalism and de-suffragising women.”

Twitch is slightly more effective than YouTube at subverting what Vaush calls “the pipeline” as it has far stricter terms of service. The platform even moved to suspend the Trump campaign’s account last summer. Hate speech is more readily policed on the platform and this has led to an influx of left-leaning commentators, because those commentators tend not to transgress its guidelines.

Vaush, it should be stated, is an exception to this rule, having been banned from Twitch after proposing the US invade Israel in defence of Palestinians. Vaush reflects on the indefinite ban with a degree of levity and detachment. He sees it as him “going too far criticising Israeli imperialism”. Though Twitch was previously his preferred medium, Vaush continues to gain viewers on YouTube.

When I asked Vaush to describe his average viewer, he told me that “up to 25 percent of his viewership” are too young to vote. This likely holds true for a great many streamers, and part of what weaves them together is their deployment of the internet’s new language – the vocabulary of comment threads and message-boards. Streamers like Hasan Piker and Vaush speak this language fluently, harnessing the metrical comportment of memes and posting to rally their audiences. This language, a vernacular steeped in irony and symbolism, takes mastery and is constantly changing.

One consistent criticism put to streamers is that the majority of their audience tend to be male. This reflects the nature of the platforms’ demographics: 62 per cent of YouTube viewers are male, 65 per cent of Twitch. Vaush recognises this and wants to change it: “I think I do relatively well with incorporation of women. Which I’m proud of because I am a very shouty man, and I do appeal to masculine tendencies … but I have a lot of trans viewers, a lot of them are gay. You can tell this from polling and from the memes that come out of my community. I’m proud of this because something that characterises the online right is an absolute abject cruelty to trans people.”

The most prominent female voice of the online left is Natalie Wynn, who broadcasts as ContraPoints. Wynn, a trans-woman from Baltimore, doesn’t stream, like Vaush or Piker, but rather makes bespoke and often surreal video explainers – half lecture-series, half absurdist theatre. She uses her knowledge of philosophy and classical literature to riff on politics, gender and sexuality. Her content is the opposite to most other lefty YouTubers in that it’s all about pizzazz, utilising home-made sets and costumes to be as visually arresting as possible. 

Like Vaush, she marshalled her fan-base to turn out for Biden, imploring fellow, disheartened Bernie supporters to vote. Or, as she told almost a million viewers: “If I have to crawl off the goddam floor on 4 November, brush aside the empty wine bottles, and pick my phone to discover that Caligula Jackson is president for life … I am going to chew my way through the bathroom tiles and I will not stop until I reach the gates of hell.”

Following last weeks ‘coup attempt’ on the Capitol, tech monopolies like Google, Amazon and Facebook have begun an aggressive crackdown against anyone spreading misinformation and hate speech online, culminating in the indefinite suspension of Donald Trump from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even YouTube. Thousands of other accounts have now also been suspended from Twitter, and more punitive measures from YouTube may be yet to come. Another consequential turn was the seemingly co-ordinated move by Google, Apple and Amazon to effectively take the app, Parler – a veritable bastion of far-right radicalisation – offline.

These now prohibited voices on social media - now turned digital asylum seekers - invariably tend towards the far-right, and, for many of the lefty streamers and vloggers, this banishment is a deliverance.  In a recent video, Piker triumphantly hailed the suspensions as ‘something that should be a teachable moment for conservatives’ about the merits of regulating speech. Vaush similarly asserted that, whilst he believes tech monopolies have ‘too much power’, the suspension of Trump’s various social media accounts was an unequivocally good thing. Either way, this week’s events could prove to be a turning point in the Internet’s cold war.  

Spend any time observing the twisted world of online politics and it becomes obvious that a popular streamer can engender a sense of community far more effectively, and far more passionately than any columnist or TV talking head or newspaper comment section. Like it or not, this phenomenon is here to stay. However, there’s a sadness, too and it’s hard to shake the vague, lingering feeling of loneliness that permeates these cultures. Watching thousands of comments fly past in the chat, you can’t escape the sense that every one of those commenters, on the other side of the screen, are alone in their rooms – tied together in a strange state of shared solitude.