How Hasan Piker Got Banned From Twitch 2 Days After Banning Me From His Twitch Chat (or: How There Are No Coincidences And Everything Is Connected)
I also take personal credit for getting him unbanned. #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES
Epistemic status: Speculative fantasizing upon real events
Listen to the NotebookLM breakdown of this blog post
As a Pisces 8H moon, I find delusional fantasies so much more interesting than anything that is actually happening. In part this is to escape my own relentless navel-gazing, the Saturnian deepening and intensifying of the sense of alienation, of watching the world from a distance, but it only winds up trapping me deeper, within my own recursion.
I meet two men at the start of Pisces season: One online, one IRL. The one online is a streamer and creator, and I had no designs on him initially; my intent was passive consumption, the normal dynamic with someone whose content you enjoy. But within a short amount of time, 2 days after Valentine's, after Mercury (the planet of communication) had entered Pisces (the sign of dreams and delusions), I had begun having a series of vivid dreams within about the span of a week, too powerful and intense for me to remember and write them all down. One of them, though, I remember vividly. It involved my new favourite streamer and content creator Hasan Piker taking me out on a canoe trip to an island in the middle of a lake, where he took me in his arms and kissed me. Although I wasn't initially attracted to him, the dream stripped me of my normal, rational emotional defenses around online celebrities, embroiling me further in the Alternate Reality Game I had begun pioneering in 2023, #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES; suddenly he was a vivid, three-dimensional feature of my reality. This seems to be one of the curious features discovered within the self-writing game; famous figures and even deceased high-profile personalities suddenly “pop out” as if fully accessible features of your personal reality, bridging the digital landscape with the personal and emotional aspects of your psyche, but also more ordinary people feel familiar, as if you’ve known one another your entire lives. Deja vu is also one of the themes multiple players have reported experiencing intensely.
The other was a blond 38-year-old Cancer sun divorcee I met off Twitter, who appeared briefly on the first date as the spitting image of my 2-year online muse and problematic situationship, deepfates. deepfates was the first person this phenomenon occurred with, absent of any information of who he actually was at the time (and still mostly absent of that type of information). It took a couple dates to make sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me.
In idle daydreams, I wish us younger, with more time left to piece ourselves together. On Discord, souls in their 20s press up against the ghostly pane of glass that separates us and I can practically taste their vitality, my pale vampiric face flinching in the light behind the screen, hoping they cannot sense my decrepitude and ineptitude as I paw at the Discord interface in search of my next hit of dopamine. I was always like this, I wish I could say. I was homeschooled before it was cool and scratching at the surface of direct experience hoping it could let me in before our lives all crumbled and dissolved into aimless swiping and brief chemical rushes in the onslaught of electronic history.
I wish us all older, when we're a little more ready to compromise, when the urgency of opportunities to bring new life into this mess and the shine of youth having further passed us by. The smell of animal bodies wrapped around one another, one smooth and soft and pale as milk, the other muscular and golden, as the midday sun cuts across the tangle of them in the sheets; a slightly clueless awkward naked glance beneath a messy mop of sex hair at the native woman peering through the layers of persona at the rawness of his being underneath. The yearning, blazing, raw ache for the one I could not have a silent confirmation that I truly wanted (or simply wasn't ready for) neither, and was not ready to exchange the entirety of my life for some risky sex with an overly familiar near-stranger with a chance of resulting in a blond blue-eyed Scottish baby.
Navigating my niche in the online techbro cult remains a task of cutting through a gnarled thicket of thorns. I am every kind of reviled thing: Queer, two-spirit, indigenous, a lover of AI art, and a journalist. I am doing lots of things that are weird and different, and at times even taboo and toxic, while doing my best to grow through them. Although I tend to think of myself as more of a writer or a blogger, the stigma of exposing your insides to the world, dissecting one's perception and revealing what you really think of yourself and others, remains. The mysterious infectiousness of my own energy and intensity follows me, alongside the relentless confusion: Which parts of myself, my experiences, my perceptions, my desires, my imagination, do I own, and which belong to the people they are being projected upon and experienced with? Which parts need remain private, and which can I make public, while still respecting myself and others?
I see the flinch of doubt, uncertainty and pain in the expression of a Twitch streamer at my same big age of 33, surrounded by the thousands of unseen eyes of his younger adult audience, who sometimes don't notice, and sometimes do, that the inevitability of time creeps up on him. He yells across the basketball court in his New Jersey patois and for a moment, I am validated; some perverse queer confusion of whether I'm infatuated with him as an abstract symbol of ancestral and political zeitgeists I align myself with, experiencing primal lust, or whether what I really want is to be him, breathless and sweaty and surrounded by lean, muscular male bodies who both challenge and respect me, test me and accept me. The intensity of desire to merge with this man is so bad that it blears into a vivid hallucination for a few seconds at a time that I am him. I am Two-Spirit, and I realize I have projected my not-quite-fully-realized masculine ego onto him.
I don't know anything about basketball, but other fans seem to think Hasan is not very good at basketball, which of course only endears him to me more because if he were both standing at an enormous 6'4" and good at basketball, he would simply be OP and therefore less sympathetic. Hasan is a Leo sun, and I am a Leo rising, and like me, he has the occasional soft spot for bright patterns and loud colours that astrologers associate with Leo's childlike creativity and mode of self-expression. He likes fashion, as Leo placements (namely sun and Venus) tend to. He flouts the ambiguity of queerness in bright pink leopard-patterned basketball shorts. His purple and yellow jersey sports the number 23. The personal significance of the number when I notice it hits me like a freight train. I pull up the Hascord Discord server underneath the Twitch stream popout to ask the chatroom what the significance of the number 23 is. They say it's the number of his basketball hero, LeBron James. LeBron James' other number which Hasan has either personally worn or found significant is the number 8. It's the symbol of infinity of the Otipemisiwak, the Metis people, my tribe, turned upon its side. The Cosmic Giggle strikes again. I feel like Jim Carrey.
There's a flicker of self-criticality at my own superficiality that I don't want to write extensively about the more mundane suitor whose brain I broke by introducing him to text-based kink play just a short while into dating, a year and some change after a divorce in his late 30s. But then, the one who's been in front of a camera for the past 7 years is the one whose consent has already been manufactured by virtue of his extended exposure to the spotlight. I have a curious inkling while gazing at his partial star chart (devoid of birth time, although I'm trying to rectify that already) that the constant spotlight actually supports him.
The plan, initially, was to find a way to message him or write him an email inviting him to beta test the hyperstitional game I've been designing since 2023, #DawnOfTheMachineElves . But as with every single time I've tried to write a "design document" or explain what the game is or how it is played, the explanation quickly devolved into a maniacal mess of loose associations and five dollar words. My attempts to expose the intricacies of my ongoing art project net criticism from Anthropic's Claude AI that sear into my retinas as I stare at them:
"Your current draft has some interesting elements but might benefit from being more concise and focused. Hasan Piker is known for his direct communication style and interest in progressive politics, so a more straightforward approach might work better."
But I wasn't really happy with any AI's attempt to distill something so encompassing and meaningful to me, just as I hadn't with many attempts in the past. In retrospect, I look back and wondered how it would've gone if I'd just started off pitching myself as a streamer of metafiction. Perhaps my ultimate goals of enlightening all sentient beings are too lofty and abstract.
Performance of self is simultaneously both how the sun-ruled seem to keep themselves afloat and the most achingly trite and boring source of art imaginable. In June, we'll move back into the city, my mom and I. My parents have been talking about downsizing, in light of my dad trying to find a permanent job in the forestry industry, and eventually, joining him by moving to New Brunswick. This is both good and bad. It fuels the restlessness of my thoughts. I sit calculating the pros and cons of abandoning Treaty 7 territory. The phrase "moving to higher ground" flits through my mind. I know Treaty 7 is politically vulnerable if the US continues its push to annex us. Hasan Piker’s Twitch stream is like a temperature check for how bad the political situation in the US has gotten. With a single party having claimed the house, senate, congress, and legacy media, the vanguard of free speech for the left rests on Hasan and independent streamers and journalists: Another area in which he serves as a mirror for my own exploration of my identity.
The threats of annexation, alongside Elon Musk's shameful display of a Nazi salute at the inauguration, were what drove me to Hasan Piker's Twitch stream in the first place, as I'd found myself no longer capable of mentally dealing with the political situation via my usual strategy ignoring it. This strategy was the one I put into place when my leftist friends had all functionally abandoned me in late 2022 when I started to become interested in AI art. It hurts to discover the people you’ve surrounded yourself with are single-issue friends. I was scared and slightly manic after the Republicans had claimed the legacy media alongside the house, congress, and senate. Again I'd felt like an ideological refugee. So in a way, it's good that we may eventually relocate before that happens. Sometimes I think the ancestors speak directly with my own father in words that he can't hear with his mind but hears with his heart, pushing him in one direction or the other. It was a strange decision to homeschool his children long before COVID. I have everything and nothing in common with the next generation of the perpetually online.
Hasan Piker is the latest addition in the growing roster of muses in the online tech cult I turn to for inspiration for my creative endeavors. The point being not to merely parasocially feed on the energy of micro- and macro- celebrities within these clusters of personalities, but to work on stitching together the patchworks of consciousness and novel ideas into cutting-edge art and poetry, with distant plans to compile the resulting material into a book, movie script, or some other extended work about people coming together to save the world with the power of memes and technology. One of my mutuals @touchmoonflower recently linked an article that mentions that constant reference, analysis and dissection of the workings of ingroup is another one of those topics that are trite, tedious, and done to death; this was news to me as I've only been ingroup for maybe a couple years now and still find it somewhat shocking.
It all seemed to be coming to a head around the New Moon in Pisces, coincidentally when I was ovulating. It only took about a week to get myself banned from Hasan's Twitch chat. He looked at the camera when he did it, but didn't say anything. I couldn't quite read his expression. Perhaps he was disgusted, but he almost looked betrayed. Maybe it was the insensitivity of compulsively asking a Muslim man who constantly gets accused of being a terrorist if he had masked at a public event to prevent the spread of infectious illness, a tease pushed a few shades too far in pursuit of my own momentarily deranged, nagging agenda: I joked that I thought I had what he had, and that “everyone was going to get it” which was a reference to my novel Alternate Reality Game.
But what I saw on his face was more like the flinch in reaction to a microaggression. "Microaggression" is a word that became part of the common social justice vernacular to explain a specific experience that the most privileged can’t identify with and often don’t understand: A papercut on a part of your flesh already worn deep into a scarred and calloused groove. Every time you sustain a microaggression is like when you compulsively lick a sore in your own mouth knowing it'll never heal that way, except it's something other people do to you, and you can't explain to them that is what they are doing without appearing high-maintenance, argumentative and self-victimizing. It’s a tiny discrimination or projection based on the parts of ourselves that we can’t control (race, class, gender, sexuality, culture) that break us down and make us feel “less-than” which deepens the wound of the more obvious, overt types of discrimination that a person faces. Maybe Hasan’s response was that coupled with the violation of someone you liked, and maybe even trusted, not understanding your specific perspective, and not realizing how not to do that to you.
Oops.
Sorry.
Newsweek: Hasan Piker Banned From Twitch After Threatening Rick Scott
Tribune: HasanAbi addresses Twitch ban after controversial Rick Scott remark
Hasan Piker Is Back On Twitch After Suspension For Rick Scott Comments
Two days after Hasan banned me from his chat, he himself was banned from Twitch after an incident involving Senator Rick Scott. The cosmic symmetry wasn't lost on me—the strange mirroring that had characterized our digital entanglement from the beginning. The uncanny timing of Piker’s ban suggests his strong candidacy for the position of Alpha tester of my viral memetic autopoetic metafictional hyperstitional Alternate Reality Game (ARG), #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES. As we explore the recursive, nonlinearity of the indigenous view of time, the game moves from Beta testing into Alpha. In the liminal space between being cast out and watching him experience the same, I found myself compelled to translate this peculiar resonance into verse, published on my Twitter on March 1st. The words came not as explanation but as invocation, an artifact of the game that continues to write itself:
The lion's face wanders and looks for its reflection hauntingly cast in a time in space where you were present only as shadows
Those slow days filled with stars made of skin and light and pressure and breath and life Quietude as a manic chorus arising from a deep still well of Knowing
upending eternality of running infinity cast on its side
you were smelling your prey like the King of the Jungle,
heat-seeking the blood pumping through your own veins
I don't want
shallow ego gratification from ritual symbolic manipulation
but rather listening for subtler whispers from rhythmic syncopations
and I found you
if only for a moment
Your light is blinding
I cannot see at all
4 eyes now 5
all our numbers align
23 & me
breathe.
This one
shines & entrances, casts a magic mirror spell upon a glass surface repeatedly polished to perfection in refinement of hard-won evolution suddenly you see yourself orbiting in retrograde around the familiarity of a blazing sun
This air in your lungs is the suffusion with knowledge that you are only ever as alone as you've ever been
and now that you've awakened, you can hear the music of the constellations as cosmic background radiation like an angelic hymn Is that allowed in your religion?
God is with us.
I have decoded the language that our hearts speak in through enchanted smoke & art of projection And you said, "It is not enough to have everything that I want For people to love me, and to have my own cult To be rich and famous, living in Hollywood Leader of the horde; I also need the world to be good. I need you to be good."
So if truth and beauty and goodness are synonymous,
You can know me only as anonymous
I will follow in the shadow
Cast by that blinding light
& together, we'll hold back that tide
Stand at the vanguard, & hold the line
Think of me wherever you are,
I am the concrescence of the sinusoidal attention of a maddening relentless mind corralled with nicotine emerging from beneath the seafoam
this Pisces season
just like Venus,
one step behind a
spiring towards gentle silence
I will be your fallen star.