Editors' 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 6-8 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, as they must project urgency and otherwise be grabbing attention all day, every day. It is not an incentive structure that promotes stability or institutionalization; it is therefore difficult to see how the energy around them might be harnessed for political good in a durable way. Instead what is more likely is, in Sam's words, institutions will be "colonized" by individual media personalities.

We talk a lot about the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism here, or freedom and fascism. But another dimension, one that we have touched on occasionally, is the struggle between institutionalism and personalism.

When we have talked about it, it has focused on political institutions specifically, for obvious reasons. But the dynamics replicate to institutions of all kinds.

Authoritarian personalism centers on one specific man who attempts to dominate the whole system. But as I mentioned in the conversation with Sam and Ryan, when you get multiple personalisms in the same system, what you end up with is honor culture dynamics.