Hasan Piker, ‘Ayatollah of Woke,’ Calls for AI’s End

Hasan Piker dedicates seven to eight hours daily, seven days a week, to streaming on Twitch. The far-left political commentator began his career in 2013 as an intern for the Young Turks, occasionally hosting segments. Over a decade later, he has become a dominant newsfluencer with the top channel in Twitch’s Politics and Commentary category. More than 3 million followers tune in for his takes on the crumbling American empire, foreign policy, and his insistence that Bernie would have won. He is also widely considered quite attractive. Piker works out every available morning and eats one pound of chicken with rice at 6 pm. His remaining free time goes toward research, planning streams, and clashing with users who deploy AI avatars.

His phone is an iPhone 16 Pro Max. For years, he clung to old iPhones on principle. “I would do the classic iPhone-on-its-last-leg on principle, because I hate the planned obsolescence and I just am a very stubborn person. I’d have the oldest possible iPhone I could for as long as I could until I’d have it basically stuck to an electrical outlet for it to work.” Now, he says, he needs the latest model for cybersecurity. “That’s what the civil rights lawyers I talk to tell me. We’re kind of all just trying to do our very best for privacy and for security against warrantless surveillance by the government. But they tell me, ‘You got to get the newest and you got to always keep it updated.’” He finds the new iOS frustrating. “It’s been very frustrating for me, because I hate the new iOS, Liquid Ass. It’s so ugly. It’s so unintuitive. I cannot believe it. It’s so frustrating.”

His computer is an Intel PC, gifted by Starforge. It is a prebuilt sent by friends. His previous machine, built by Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips, was called “Big Red.” He still uses it as a secondary. “It’s a behemoth that has the USSR crest and Jeff Bezos’ head on a dinner plate on it. It’s beautiful. There’s a YouTube video where he makes it and gifts it to me. He took out one of the legs so it always leans left.” He also owns an iPad. “I’m a ‘screenager’ now officially. When I traveled, I used to just use my phone, but then I realized I’m on planes for 15 hours at a time. Why am I putting myself through this?”

His daily average screen time across Apple devices (excluding PC) is 7 hours and 8 minutes. “Oh my Lord. That’s a lot. Last week I spent 22 hours and 14 minutes on Twitter. And my daily average is three hours and 42 minutes on Twitter alone. But to be fair, I read articles off Twitter, so I don’t know if it’s counting that as well.” He used to delete Twitter from his phone. “It made me an angrier person, especially post–Elon Musk takeover. I realized I would just be getting into arguments or just straight-up having a bad time. I’d sit on my couch, and I’d turn on Twitter, and I would just see some of the dumbest people on the planet, just the most racist, toxic people on the planet. I noticed that it was making me lose faith in humanity, so I would delete it and then only download it when I was traveling to places.” Now he is back on. “I feel like woke is coming back, and as the Ayatollah of Woke, I have to make sure that I’m on the front line. I’m fighting the battle in the trenches directly in enemy territory.”

He uses Apple Podcasts for music. “I don’t listen to any music. I only listen to podcasts. I definitely used to listen to music a lot more back in the day, but I had a Walkman and then a Discman. When I was growing up in Turkey, I’d burn CDs and stuff. And then I had an iPod. Since 2014, my diet has mostly consisted of podcasts and nothing else, because I don’t have time.” His regular listens include Chapo Trap House, Trueanon, The Daily, Up First, NPR Politics, NPR News, Democracy Now, and sometimes Consider This.

His unacknowledged notifications include 1,049 emails, 225 texts, 352 missed calls, 6,353 Discord notifications, 3 Signal notifications, and 7 WhatsApp messages. “My unread emails used to give me anxiety, but they don’t anymore, because I don’t ever use my email. I have people now that do my comms, luckily. I primarily text.” He ignores most notifications. “I don’t even see these notifications. After a while, it’s just gone. It is what it is. I just don’t care. I don’t know.”

The last person he FaceTimed was a group of friends. “I’m a texter, but sometimes I’ll do a FaceTime. I don’t mind it, especially if it’s a friend I haven’t seen in a while. My family always loves FaceTiming. We FaceTime basically every day in the morning.”

The last thing he Googled was “Belly of the Whale.” He was trying to search for “Belly of the Beast,” a Cuban news outlet that does English-language coverage. “I wanted to pull imagery for them, because I’m about to interview one of them today. But instead of that, I ended up accidentally Googling ‘Belly of the Whale song.’ I have no idea what that is.”

The last video he took was of himself doing an incline bench press at 205 pounds for reps. The last screenshot he took, he refuses to reveal. “A high-profile politician’s comms person.”

He does not use AI. “I don’t use AI. I think there’s a real problem with cognitive offloading. There’s a real problem with hallucinations within AI. I think that AI is making humanity dumber in general. Whenever I write a tweet and then the replies to it are like, ‘@Grock explain what he means,’ I’m like, ‘You’re literally not recognizing that you’re getting a robot to try to train you. You are lesser than a human now. You are a lesser human being for this reason.’ That’s how I feel about it. I’m very frustrated.” He acknowledges that future readers may see him as smug and elitist. “I know that eventually people will look back at the statements that I’m making right now and read it,if they’re still capable of reading,and say, ‘Oh, you were so smug and so elitist.’ And I think it’s devastating. Not for the ways in which Sam Altman and all these other AI people greatly overemphasize how powerful and scary their new tool is in an effort to fundraise another $500 billion for their projects to fearmonger people into thinking that the AI is actually much smarter than it actually is or whatever, but it’s truly devastating for a multitude of reasons.

Cognitive offloading, capacity for being a vehicle of unlimited misinformation, which we’ve seen already. And last but not least, of course, or probably the most significant, is the labor displacement mechanism.”