Known for his wide-ranging comedic streams, Kai Cenat is notable for the sheer size of his following. Now, he is the first Twitch streamer to be charged with inciting a riot.
This “emergent behavior,” as Johnson calls it, comes when users of digital tech—which tends to physically isolate—suddenly erupt from the online into the real world. In Cenat’s case, that would be fans transforming from the mediated abstraction of “6.5 million followers”—just a few million smaller than the population of New York—to a crowd of kids demanding PS5s.
Johnson thinks it's naive for anyone to be shocked that a streamer on Twitch—relatively unknown despite ranking among the 50 most popular websites—could summon a crush like the one Cenat did, comparing the reaction to the media geeking out over flash mobs. “The wider cultural understanding of what Twitch is, who streamers are, how people engage with them, why they engage with them—this is much lower than with other huge web platforms,” he says.
There’s an uglier aspect to the response that needs highlighting, he adds—one adjacent to the rise of Kick, Twitch’s new “free speech” rival, and a fractious US political climate. “A lot of the responses seem very right-wing and very racist and very hostile. And that’s something that really stood out,” he says.
It seems unlikely that the disturbance will diminish Cenat’s popularity: Streamers tend to implode only when they are perceived as inauthentic. Here, wild examples include a supposedly
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