Editor's Notes: Personalism, Streamers, and Effective Statelessness
Today we released an episode of Out of the Jaws where Ryan Geddie and I interview At Dawn Campaign’s Sam Drzymala. Sam is a veteran of putting new media to work for political ends. Much of his most recent work involves wrangling streamers—people who appear on live video online for 6 to 8 hours a day—to mobilize their audiences to canvas for an election, say, or participate in a fundraising event.
Sam is optimistic about their political potential, but I’m wary of the way that communities based around a single personality tend to center entirely on, well, a person. One thing that is something of a relief about the Liberal Currents community is that it has in many ways outgrown its founders and editors. We have a very large list of people who have written for us and we’re expanding that list all the time. There are people who have been active in the Discord server for years and at this point it is as much characterized by them as it is by anyone being paid by us on a regular basis.
But Sam was quite clear that streamer communities are very siloed, indeed part of the identity of being the most engaged part of one of those communities is you are not also part of another streamer’s. And those streamers are living what is akin to the old shock jock life, but on steroids…
Continue reading this article by Adam Gurri, “Editor’s Notes: Personalism, Streamers, and Effective Statelessness,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/editors-notes-personalism-streamers-and-effective-statelessness/