Last Tuesday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on the live-videogaming site Twitch to play “Among Us” and encourage watchers to vote. At one point, 435,000 Twitch users were watching her live, and the video of her playing against fellow Rep. Ilhan Omar along with several Twitch VIPs, had more than 4.5 million views as of late Wednesday. To put those numbers in context, ranked against regular Twitch celebrities, AOC would be in the top twenty for peak views.
Polygon, a Vox Media site that covers online gaming, called Ocasio-Cortez’s stunt “the future of politics.” “This is what is possible when a modern, tech-savvy politician attracts not just supporters, but fandom,” Polygon senior editor Patricia Hernandez wrote. Unlike old-fashioned cults of personality, online fandoms organize, she added. “Fandom, in other words, has power — and many fans know how to wield it. Combine that with an authentic politician who knows how to speak candidly with her constituents, and you’ve got a potent combination of visibility and enthusiasm.”
I’ve seen this movie before, when Barack Obama ran for president and made savvy use of Facebook and MySpace. Now taste-making sites like Wired are falling over themselves to dub AOC “the interactive politician,” the same way they gushed about Obama. Just read what Hernandez writes about Ocasio-Cortez and substitute Obama’s name:
“The future of politics isn’t just young, tech-savvy, and meme-literate. It is accessible. Ocasio-Cortez talks to everyday people on Twitter and Instagram Live, and even visits constituents in Animal Crossing. These sustained efforts allow her recent Twitch stream to seem less like a political stunt and more like another genuine attempt to reach people where they live. “Pokémon Go to the polls” this is not.”
It’s great that AOC has built a big online following. But let’s be clear. There’s nothing about this that is inherently empowering of anyone but her. Mastery of various interactive platforms can be turned to authoritarian uses just as easily as democratic ones. In their 2018 book, New Power, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms coined the term “platform strongman” to describe leaders like Donald Trump, who rally “a highly empowered, anarchic, digitally savvy movement of people [to champion] a more orderly and severe, rather than more free and open, America.” They add, “this combination of an old power, authoritarian value set and a sideways, unstructured new power model lies behind some of the potent and dangerous leadership models in the world today.”
As a member of the “people’s house,” Ocasio-Cortez’s fanbase does give her a very important advantage: she doesn’t have to spend hours every day on call-time, phoning wealthy Americans and begging them for large campaign contributions. A whopping 78% of the $17.3 million that she has raised in the 2020 cycle so far has been in small, individual contributions of less than $200. Not being reliant on big donor fundraising also gives AOC more time to focus on policy or preparing for congressional hearings (where she sometimes asks a really good question, earning another round of viral attention).
But here’s what we need to do if we want to get serious about the potential of online, interactive platforms to improve the relationship between elected representatives and voters…
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