Spectacle has been a consistent feature of professional streaming on Twitch, and leftists aren’t any exception–in order to drive growth upwards, there’s a business incentive to keep fanning the flames of conflict. For a long time now, this has been fueling fissures within the community–do the ends justify the means, or is the left beholden to stick more closely to its purported ideals and refuse to give in to a misguided quest for more social capital regardless of origin?
Twitch’s own history is to account for why creators often opt for the former approach–since the platform’s roots are deeply steeped in gaming, toxicity is quite commonplace. Gamergate had already sullied the ground by normalizing heated dispute, so it wasn’t at all surprising to see Twitch’s non-gaming-related parts take on a similar confrontational tone . If it has been custom to watch Ninja scream short of losing his voice while playing Fortnite, it doesn’t take much to find existing parallels within Twitch’s political sphere. The impulse to speak over each other on mere performative terms makes it harder to parse out ideas, and it lends itself to making most political debate on the platform of very little utility.
