Microlooting the next EU budget
Hasan Piker, Dwarkesh Patel, and what the leaked AgoraEU text still misses.
Some of you read that headline and immediately thought: oh God, he’s doing a Hasan Piker take. Others wondered if I meant microdosing. To both groups all I can say is: hear me out.
Hasan Piker is a prominent political streamer in the US. He broadcasts on Twitch, talks for hours about politics, capitalism, war, media, and whatever else is currently making people angry on the internet. He is extremely online, and very good at generating attention. He is also, depending on your politics, either an unusually effective communicator to young audiences, an outrage merchant with a webcam, or some combination of the two. The precise mix is not our main concern today, which is nice, because adjudicating Hasan Piker discourse is not what I hoped to do with my one wild and precious life.
The recent controversy came after Piker appeared on a New York Times Opinion podcast in an episode about “microlooting”: the idea that small-scale theft from large retailers such as Whole Foods can be understood or at least discussed, as a form of political protest.
You will be shocked to learn that this did not produce a calm and context-rich debate about property, capitalism, public order or moral philosophy.
Noah Smith wrote one of the more useful responses, making the fairly obvious but still necessary point that if you steal from a store owned by Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos is unlikely to be the person meaningfully harmed by your act of revolutionary lemon acquisition. The costs are more likely to be borne by workers, customers, and local communities. So if your plan for confronting extractive capitalism is shoplifting from the self-checkout area, you may want to workshop the theory of change a little more.
Piker is a known quantity, his politics and style are not unpredictable. He has built a large and extremely engaged audience precisely because he is not a cautious, polished, institution-trained commentator who says “on the one hand” often enough to be safely invited to donor dinners. So why does the New York Times want him in the room?
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I think the Times wants him for his energy, youth relevance, cultural proximity, the sense that the conversation is happening somewhere alive rather than on a panel with the word “epistemology” in its title. Piker, meanwhile, gets institutional legitimacy, a place inside the symbolic architecture of respectable public debate.
This is not necessarily a scandal, the important thing is that both sides understand the transaction. And for today’s edition, I think it’s important to acknowledge that this transaction is becoming one of the defining features of the modern information ecosystem.
Let’s look at someone radically different from Piker: Dwarkesh Patel.
Patel is a young, very plugged-in interviewer whose podcast has become an important venue for conversations about AI, technology, science, economics, and power. He is a solo-ish creator with a podcast, yet some of the most influential people in technology, industry and politics now sit down with him for long, detailed conversations. His recent conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang turned, productively, into a debate about US export controls on advanced AI chips, the kind of exchange most legacy outlets would struggle to produce at the same level.
Hasan Piker’s creator influence is emotional, combative, parasocial, and ideological. Dwarkesh Patel represents creator influence as specialist institution: prepared, technically fluent, trusted by a hugely powerful audience.
Neither is a newsroom, and neither fits comfortably into the institutional categories through which public policy understands the media sector. And yet both are important parts of the information ecosystem: they shape what people know, argue about, what elites respond to, what ideas become legitimate, and what millions of people encounter as political or technical reality.
So when we think about the future of the information ecosystem, it’s worth keeping these new kinds of information entrepreneurs in mind. Which brings us, more directly than you might expect, to the latest leaked text of the AgoraEU proposal.
What is EU funding actually for?
The text, obtained by Contexte, contains some very good news.