People had always imagined that robots would look like us, but these forklifts hint at a different future — one in which robots are made in the image of the work, not the worker.

For the question of whether robots will be the same shape as humans is not a settled one. In fact, it is a point of some debate in the robotics sector. Elon Musk promises legions of humanoid Tesla robots, poised to take over manual labor and build a colony on Mars. And his is not a particularly wacky view; other executives, including those less given to overconfident predictions, have made similar forecasts. In his lecture delivered to the Cosmos Institute last month in Oxford, the Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark predicted that, by April 2028, bipedal robots will “begin to do useful work in the real world in partnership with human tradespeople”. While being bipedal does not mean a robot is identical to a human, it certainly denotes it being closer in form to us than to a forklift.

As recently as this time last year, a wide rollout of electronic colleagues looked unlikely. Even in China, the world leader of the humanoid robotics market, the stumbling and malfunctioning first cohort of robot competitors in the Beijing half-marathon were treated as more of an entertaining sideshow than a serious sign of things to come. Clark himself appeared relatively pessimistic about the capabilities of humanoid robots at the time; in response to an Amazon research paper about the performance of a specialized robotics system for stowing items in the company’s warehouses, he noted that state-of-the art automation was coming from designing highly specific hardware and “carefully structuring your system around a few core tasks”. The experiment, he wrote, “should temper our expectations for bipedal robots leading to some massive improvement in automation — at least in the short term.”

What changed? It may simply be that this massive improvement has arrived. At this year’s Beijing half-marathon, several robots outpaced human participants, even breaking records. This feat had serious implications, demonstrating the kind of durability that might soon make the technology suitable for industrial applications.

On that basis, Clark’s prediction — that more human-like machines will start trickling into the workforce next year — starts to sound plausible, though we can expect humans would still be on-site to correct for their defects. Manual labor will be slowly automated. Or it may be that Clark believes the underlying AI systems are becoming so powerful, so fast, that the obstacles will be swept away. The robots’ cognitive abilities will catch up with their strength and dexterity. Manual labor will be rapidly automated.

“Truly general intelligence would obviate some of the flaws,” Clark wrote in his sceptical 2025 missive. “So if bipeds arrive at the same time as a generally capable intelligence, I’ll need to eat my words.”

This is now the precipice at which we find ourselves. As AI improves, those in the field say robots will become more capable of learning for themselves, of adapting to new environments without pre-programming, and even employing reasoning. They’ll be easily able to work in an Amazon warehouse — and then some. The ultimate prize, as Clark says, would be truly general intelligence: a system that can turn its hand to any task without specific training. Many imagine that, in this scenario, the machine most suited to carrying around a general, human-like intelligence would be in the shape of a person. After all, the world is built for humans, and humans have the dexterity to adapt to a vast range of manual tasks.

Many industrial robots, by contrast, are made to complete one specific task from a set point. Or else they operate entirely inside facilities built for them: look, for example, at the fulfillment centers of British grocery delivery giant Ocado, where a “hive” of robots roll across a grid system, picking and packing orders.

The question is whether the economy will demand robots that can venture into unexpected environments. For this, humans are far more adaptable, taking on stairs and uneven terrain. We climb ladders and traverse scaffolding and even rooftops. It’s hard to imagine a machine able to do all that if it isn’t shaped like us.

Clark is probably correct that the bipedal assistants will arrive sooner rather than later, precisely because they might be a stopgap between human work and a totally different way of making things. The trades of the future could look more like the work of British startup Automated Architecture, which makes mobile, robotic micro-factories that can build pre-fabricated components of a house quickly and closer to its final site. Inside the micro-factory, one large robotic arm performs tasks that might typically require several different production lines, producing floors, walls and roofs. Human workforces are still needed to assemble the timber-frame panels, but the process minimizes how much construction is needed on-site by pre-making all the elements for the shell of a building. Think of it like buying a gingerbread house kit instead of baking all the pieces from scratch.

In this way, the robotics of industry can go beyond the human approach to a task. Why climb a ladder when you could send a drone? These are already used for surveys and roof inspections. With the right dexterity, perhaps they will be able to perform the fixes as well.

Humanoids, argues Josef Chen, the founder of London-based restaurant industry robotics firm Kaikaku AI, are like the equivalent of a pick-up truck on a construction site. “Even though it’s not used for any serious work, people just have it for optionality.” In this analogy, you turn to a digger for digging, a crane for lifting. You wouldn’t expect the truck to do those specialist tasks, even though it can be useful for transportation, towing, or navigating tricky ground.

Those who believe in the utility of the human-shaped robot, though, believe that getting it right could unlock huge gains — and huge threats to the human workforce. As Clark wrote back in 2023, “true economic growth from AI happens when you don’t need to design for robots”. If an army of person-shaped droids start arriving in human workplaces, with no adjustments needed for them, it is easy to envision how this would accelerate workforce displacement.

Matvey Boguslavskiy, a hardware researcher and director of the Society for Technological Advancement, doesn’t buy that. “I think the future economy is going to have robots with many different form factors, doing many different things,” he says. Indeed, if robot arms or vehicles or dog-like quadrupeds prove vastly more efficient than humans, the argument about whether the world has to be redesigned for robots falls flat: the economic incentive will be enough to justify a redesign.

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So if applications in the workplace favor the specialized machinery end of the robotics scale, then perhaps the promise of the humanoid robot is in the home. Whereas a factory might have space for several machines, each built for a different purpose, homes are more cramped. It would be difficult and expensive to accommodate an ironing robot, a cooking robot, a gardener robot, and so on — but what if they were all rolled into one? .

But here the robots will encounter another obstacle: human disquiet. There is something freakish about Tesla’s Optimus, or Boston Dynamics’ Atlas. The way they are lined up like an army in some promotional videos doesn’t help. It’s also in how close they are to being human-shaped, yet how far, almost like there’s a real person under there wearing a creepy costume. It’s the almost-ness that gets you. The heads are almost the right size, the hands almost lifelike — if often clothed in serial killer black gloves.

It may be that we’re too conditioned by science fiction horrors to accept humanoid robots. But the reason those fictional visions terrify us in the first place is because they tap into a primal fear — of a monster, or döppelganger.

To make robotics more palatable in the home, many companies are making devices less threatening by ramping up their apparent cuteness. Pixar has a lot to answer for here. Everyone I speak to on this subject cites Wall-E and the success the animation studio had in making a boxy, metal robot into a lovable character. One startup robotics lab even brought in Toy Story screenwriter Alec Sokolow as creative director when developing Ongo, a smart desk lamp with big, Disney-worthy eyes.

There seems to be strong consumer demand for such devices, at least among gadget obsessives. There are countless Kickstarters for small robotic companions and widgets that receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance orders. However, an interactive paperweight can only do so much. To load the dishwasher, you need grip, spatial reasoning, and a way to get high enough to open or close it. If we really want a smoother life with no chores, there would seem to be few options beyond either hiring another human to help or letting humanoids into the home.

What’s the way forward? Boguslavskiy thinks one of the most useful forms will be the small, wheeled vehicle. We have already seen these catch on for vacuuming and mowing lawns autonomously. Why not for other tasks too?

Or if the human shape proves useful, the most acceptable forms might be some compromise between the humanoid and the cute. Take a look at Fauna Robotics, a New York-based company which was acquired by Amazon in March. Their products are deliberately fun to look at, with bright colors and jaunty eyebrows. Crucially, they avoid uncanny valley reactions by not trying to make the robot — named Sprout — look too human. It has Lego-like hands and a head that resembles a Wi-Fi modem. It looks like what it is: a machine. Sprout is also small, at 107cm tall, so won’t tower menacingly over a child.

Or there’s Memo, from California-based Sunday Robotics. Sometimes described as humanoid, the robot nevertheless does away with cumbersome feet, instead rolling around on wheels. With its permanent baseball cap, it looks more like a character in a children’s film than a chilling centurion of the future.

These non-threatening interfaces serve a deeper purpose than just saving children a fright. They strive to make it possible for us to live alongside intelligent machines. Though AI continues to seep into life and work, there are still many people who avoid using the technology or even encountering it as much as possible. When AI enters the physical world, it becomes less easy to ignore, and triggers in some people a sense of revulsion and anger. We have seen this in the repeated attacks on delivery robots and driverless cars.

People in the tech industry who delight in the miracle of creating motion, who have fun hacking together hardware projects on the side, perhaps underestimate how far there is to go on public acceptance of robots. Creepy, faceless, six-foot Cybermen are probably not going to help.

But Rasmussen, who had worked both in sports coverage and as a communications director for a hockey team, knew something about the audience that outsiders didn’t: true fans always want more.

There’s a similar calculation being made right now in Silicon Valley, where new entertainment brands are targeting an audience of tech obsessives who, like the sports fans, can’t get enough daily updates, insights and data from the most influential people in their industry. And last month, that growing power struggle to control the future of “new media” came to a head with OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN and the launch of a16z-backed rival show, MTS.

TBPN is a daily live show about the tech business, hosted by two tech entrepreneurs, Jordi Hays and John Coogan. Unlike many of their nerdy peers, they are relatively natural on camera: relaxed but not rambling. They are also hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts; like Ant & Dec with an upscale Hollywood gym membership.

Given that both have founded successful companies, which have matured and secured handsome acquisitions, they have significant cachet with business leaders; guests appreciate that the hosts have had skin in the game. And as a result, people like Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir boss Alex Karp, and the Collison brothers, who founded Stripe, are happy to come on. They know they won’t be subjected to an aggressive grilling. 

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The idea of fandom is key to the genre. It’s taken as a given that the viewer has a keen interest in the space, so the conversation can get pretty technical very quickly. In one recent episode, for example, the hosts were digging into semantic layers and scheme migrations with one guest, before batting around energy and geopolitical hypotheticals with fossil fuels advocate Alex Epstein the next.

Called the SportsCenter of Silicon Valley, it has also borrowed its look from the sports shows, with its split-screen discussions and canned sound effects. Even its full title, the Technology Business Programming Network, is a nod to ESPN.

And it has worked. Since its launch in late 2024, TBPN has become the biggest show in its niche — which you might call techno-capitalism. Yet it remains relatively small, pulling in an average of 70,000 viewers per episode. This is deliberate. According to Coogan, their high-value ideal audience numbers only around 200,000 founders, executives and adjacent people. Their goal, he says, “was to create a platform to reach the core audience… If we start bringing in new topics just to reach 10M views, it wouldn’t feel natural and we would lose the core audience we have worked to build.” 

Certainly, it can be hard to get a general audience invested in the comings and goings of founders and funders, new AI model releases, and the B2B Saas of it all. So the TBPN approach is unapologetic. It’s not trying to sell tech to a new audience.

That focus clearly paid off, given OpenAI bought it in a surprise move last month for somewhere in the “low hundreds of millions”. The company suggested that the acquisition would help prepare the world for the changes wrought by AI. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO for AGI deployment, wrote that the business has “a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates — with builders and people using the technology at the center”, and that TBPN had already created such a space.

The rationale doesn’t quite ring true. TBPN is not the place for long, philosophical discussions about superintelligence; if this is what the frontier lab wants it could have bought out Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast. Instead, it looks more like an attempt to acquire some likability: befriending the jocks for a bit of second-hand popularity.

And that’s partly why the venture hit the right note. Where the 2010s tech sector took pains to show off its DEI credentials, today, there has been a notable vibe shift: tech bros are increasingly embracing their “bro-ness”. TBPN’s original name was even Technology Brothers. They’re taking a page out of another masculine-coded industry’s playbook.

But even more significant is that so much of what sports media invented suits the internet immensely well. Live event coverage and post-match chats can translate into the era of the multi-hour Twitch livestream. Turning commentators into personalities in their own right goes hand in hand with the increasing focus on turning journalists into influencers — and vice versa.

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Tech is not the first sector where a sports DNA has proven revitalizing for its coverage. Fast-talking stock markets commentator Jim Cramer, a son of Philadelphia’s all-consuming sports culture, first tried his hand at sports reporting before moving into finance, and eventually becoming famous as the host of the SportsCenter-esque Mad Money. More recently, startup media brands such as The Ringer, brainchild of ESPN alum, cover the business of Hollywood with a sports fan fervor, with casting announcements dissected like they’re player drafts and awards shows like tournaments. 

Imitators have sprung up in the wake of TBPN’s success. There’s the European answer etn., which riffs on TBPN’s schtick right down the hosts appearing in promo imagery wearing matching suits. And now we have MTS.

The new show takes its name from “monitoring the situation”, an online meme used to describe the semi-serious way in which news junkies and day traders on X keep up with current affairs. This new entrant doesn’t seem to have quite found its footing yet, despite the opportune timing: many X users suspect that TBPN has been disappeared from their feeds, owing to Elon Musk’s longstanding feud with the show’s new boss, Sam Altman. MTS is a little bit more internet-poisoned than TBPN, bringing together the worlds of rambling politics livestreams with tech twitter discourse. 

But crucially it sees TBPN’s bet on the persistent interest in tech news and raises it. Like its pioneering cable forbearers, MTS is live, all the time. Or at least it aspires to be. These early weeks have been punctuated with off-air stretches. And when it’s online, even the channel’s most interesting segments struggle to justify being stretched out. The success or failure of the venture will hinge on whether it can demonstrate there is a truly bottomless appetite for tech news discussion, in the way there is for sports.

For the technology industry, the existence of and investment in these shows is a sign of self-consciousness among executives and companies. They know that they are the entertainment now, as the huge interest in blow-by-blow accounts of the Musk v. Altman underscores. They even have fanbases. 

Those parasocial relationships will only become more intense this year as SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and others eye joining the stock market. Soon, those viewers will also be shareholders. That dynamic of obsessive ownership already defines so much of our culture, from prediction markets gamblers sending journalists death threats to the easily-provoked wrath of K-pop stans. 

These shows, though, highlight a weakness at the heart of big tech. They reveal it to be a sector that would prefer to build its own media ecosystem than engage with the existing one. Suspicion of journalists — and attempts to remake their profession from the outside — has never been more acute in the tech world. So it feels easier in that context for industry bosses to retreat to home turf. But too much navel-gazing and non-confrontational chatting will only entrench the industry’s insularity and keep it further detached from the public opinion about AI and other disruptive technologies. Having built themselves a fans-only enclosure, they might fail to notice when the crowd turns ugly.

Its founder, Demis Hassabis, occupies a similarly odd place in the firmament of tech luminaries. He has a Nobel Prize and a knighthood, and commands enormous respect within his community, but he’s not really famous. He hasn’t crossed into the realm of celebrity in the manner of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. His rival in the AI race, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, has a far bigger public profile. Even Anthropic founder, Dario Amodei, is becoming more widely known, if only because of February’s dust-up between his company and the Trump administration’s Department of War.

Interviews with Hassabis often lead one to believe that this low profile is deliberate. His dedication, he claims, is to the work of expanding human knowledge, and deeper dives into his biography balance signs of his genius with markers of his normality; he may have been a childhood chess prodigy, but he loves a game of table football with the guys.

Though a new biography of Hassabis, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence, succeeds in poking some holes in this narrative, its author, Sebastian Mallaby, essentially comes to the conclusion that the humility is genuine. For one thing, when quizzed about extravagances, Hassabis yields only that he has a Liverpool season ticket. While this sets him apart from his Silicon Valley peers, with their private planes and multiple homes, really, Hassabis is doing the same thing as all of them: fashioning a persona.

Hassabis seems aware that history has its eyes on him. Mallaby, for his part, observes that his subject revels in “maximalist ambition”, talking casually of a post-scarcity society and of mining asteroids. Because of the nature of their world-changing technology, the people involved in AI’s creation seem to experience events on two planes: how they are happening in the moment, and how consequential they might be in the history of the world. Both Hassabis and Mallaby remain hyper-conscious of this throughout the book. There are countless references to the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Hassabis is drawn to the ambition of the physicist’s endeavor, alluding to it as he starts to bring top researchers together to form DeepMind. Mallaby sees it as a parable about the innovator’s impulse to solve a technical problem no matter the consequences.

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Hassabis does come across as someone who has become accustomed to telling a certain set of stories about himself. One formative episode is given particular significance. At 11 years old, exhausted and stressed from the competitive chess circuit, Hassabis concedes a game to an adult opponent at a tournament. His rival then relishes pointing out how he could have won. This moment of defeat, in Hassabis’ telling, triggers a realization that his fellow chess champs are using their cognitive power to win a game rather than solve hard scientific problems. This supposedly sows the seeds for the career that Hassabis would one day embark on.

It’s a significant recurring anecdote because he uses it to accentuate his humility — or even his humanity. He was just a little boy. And yet he traveled the world going up against adults. An exceptional little boy, then. It is also a reminder that his ultimate inspiration is the human brain, its sanctity paramount to both Hassabis’s research and his self-image. Elsewhere, after all, he posits that the development of superhuman AI will reveal the secrets of nature and so bring man closer to God. “For me,” he tells Mallaby, “science is a spiritual endeavor”.

There are striking echoes of history here. Until the dawn of modernity and secularism, political figures had to insist on their ultimate servitude to God even as they sought hard power in the temporal world. Thomas Cromwell, in his famous portrait by Holbein, appears in the sober garb of a serious power-player — one who has just orchestrated the submission of England’s clergy to King Henry VIII, fundamentally changing the shape of religion in England forever. Yet a Book of Hours sits on the table in front of him, signaling his continued devotion.

If we are to believe predictions, AI will have a far greater effect on our society than did the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Such a change cannot be forced through without backlash. To mediate it, today’s AI bosses must project respect for the human, even as they build something that could surpass us. As Cromwell doffed his cap to faith, even while ushering in shattering changes to religion, his Silicon Valley successors must position their work as serving humanity while upending daily life. Hassabis has repeatedly demonstrated this respect, idolizing the human brain through his neuroscience research and talking of a quasi-religious calling to unlock the secrets of life.

To figure out what’s really driving his protagonist, Mallaby is particularly concerned with what Hassabis and his ilk are reading. His ignorance of the books of the AI prophet Ray Kurzweil sets Hassabis apart from other attendees at the Peter Thiel-backed Singularity Summit, a hive of the early AI scene. Of far greater literary interest to Hassabis is the eponymous protagonist in Ender’s Game. The story of a gifted child tasked with saving humanity resonated so deeply with Hassabis that he asked Mallaby to read it in advance of their first interview. Elsewhere, great scientists are his chosen models. “Isaac Newton, Alan Turing, all my heroes,” Hassabis says of walking down a street in Cambridge. “I could feel them in the bones of the stone, their intellect and vision. They were almost calling out to me.” He is often getting goosebumps like this, taking pictures of the Nobel Foundation’s guestbook signed by Einstein and Feynman. It is charming, suggestive of the eager, nerdy young boy under the surface. But it is also another way of self-fashioning, absorbing those figures into his own story. Here they stood and now I am here too.

Hassabis also defines himself against others, especially OpenAI’s Sam Altman: “I’m doing it for knowledge and science. He seems like he’s doing it for power.” He seems a little baffled by Altman, who comes from a new mold. Instead of Hassabis’s deference to the God-like power of nature, Altman starts to build a cult-like following for himself.

This all makes me wonder how much of the access granted for the book, and the production of the DeepMind documentary, The Thinking Game, and the appearances at world conferences and in interviews, is actually about Hassabis craving recognition. Altman, remember, not only kicked off an AI race by releasing ChatGPT, but in doing so made himself the defining figure of AI.

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Admittedly, some of Hassabis’s efforts to build his public profile predate the release of ChatGPT. But the invisible hero narrative feeds back into those twin competing pillars of exceptionalism and humility on which Hassabis perches his identity. Mallaby allows his subject to speak at length in the final pages, where Hassabis sets out his own vision of his place in the world. “I’m a weird British outlier, on this little island here, and I’ve made my own path. I’ve followed my passions and tried to stay true to what I believe in.” His refusal to leave London, for which he gets a lot of credit in British policy circles, becomes part of a narrative of being not like the other tech bros.

It should hardly be surprising that someone who spends much of his time thinking about consciousness, both human and artificial, might be particularly preoccupied with his own identity — and how that should be projected. “In my world, humanism and spiritualism and science all go together,” he says. And, like Cromwell, it is to a Renaissance figure that he looks for a model. “Da Vinci is my favorite because everything’s just flowing into one river. And that’s how I try to live.” The meaning is obscure, but Hassabis seems less enthusiastic to incorporate that element of his personality which thrives on competition and the exercising of power —though he is willing to accept them when Mallaby points them out. “I have to do what’s necessary.”

Hassabis, in short, appears to be banking on a longer-term legacy, one that emerges long after the machinations of the court are concluded. But if he or any of his rivals actually succeeds in creating AGI, this careful self-fashioning may become less relevant. If you change the world, it won’t be the books or paintings that dictate your reputation, but the consequences.

Piker, a native of New Jersey, is a leftist darling of Twitch, the livestreaming platform that has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2014. Pretty much every day of the week, he logs on and discusses the news online to an audience of hundreds of thousands, often for seven or eight hours at a time.

And despite his resolution to remain an online personality, Piker has effected something of a breakthrough to the mainstream since Donald Trump’s re-election. Interviewed by Variety, GQ and Wired in the past months, he has also appeared on television and on podcasts produced by NPR and Crooked Media. The normies, for want of a better term, are suddenly paying attention. On the night of the American election, viewer numbers on his live coverage were larger than those of ABC News and the Associated Press.

Piker is the culmination of a particular attitude of political commentary: the hyper-online pundit who attracts both admiration and suspicion for being in touch with the youth. Heralded as a voice of the Left, despite his insistence that the Left cannot podcast its way out of its current malaise, he is the most famous among a cohort of influencers who have made their names talking about politics and current affairs on Twitch.

The rise of the Twitch commentator tells us much about how online audiences now prefer to engage in politics. It’s interactive, real-time and personality-led. Viewers don’t want to simply receive wisdom via the old-fashioned one-way street of a newspaper column or a late-night monologue. They want to interrupt a chain of thought live on air, send digital gifts, root for a team, leave an angry comment.

This revolution is happening everywhere, especially in places young men congregate on the internet. Why watch a distant-seeming porn star when you can message an OnlyFans model? Why be content with a passive index fund when you can participate in a short squeeze by buying shares from your phone?

Be it gaming, gambling or gooning, there’s a desire for an extra layer of participation. Where it leads is to a form of political engagement that is gamified, just like everything else.

Twitch itself was designed for games. Originating as a spin-off of the more generalist site Justin.tv, it quickly eclipsed its parent and became synonymous with that very 21st-century phenomenon: watching other people play video games online.

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Many who made their names in livestreaming started out by simply playing video games on camera, chatting as they did so with the live audience. But politics was always there in the background. The gamut runs from transgender activist Keffals, to the debater Destiny, to Right-leaning provocateur Asmongold. They shifted as it became clear their audience liked it when they went on political rants or got into arguments. Maybe some of their audience hated it, but that, too, was interaction.

The inflection point came in the pandemic, when a house-bound global viewership swelled the numbers of people looking for online entertainment and community. This was also when Twitch emerged as a political force, emblemized in 2020 when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the platform for a livestream of Among Us and gathered streamers, including Piker, to play the imposter-hunting game. It showed off her nous for online communication with voters, yes, but it also conferred legitimacy on Twitch. Here was an audience ready to engage with politics, if only political communicators would learn how to talk to them.

In many ways, political livestreamers make sense as a natural continuation of how politics is discussed online and how audiences interact with it. Thanks to the array of content and algorithmic tailoring, you can assemble a set of commentators you love — or love to loathe. The internet has long been a place to find your own personal Fox News.

Piker himself is part of an online political programming dynasty. His uncle Cenk Uygur is a co-founder of The Young Turks (TYT), a Left-leaning web series that trailblazed this kind of highly watchable, highly shareable discourse in the 2000s and spawned a massive network of related shows and pundits.

But while TYT adopted the sets and suits of the cable shows that came before it, Twitch streams have a DIY affectation. Gaming chairs, soft backlighting, carefully assembled memorabilia. It’s the same aesthetic that has defined YouTube for the past decade or more: that of an adult who finally has the funds to create the bedroom they wish they’d had as a teenager.

The tone is often casual, unrehearsed. It’s not uncommon for streamers to be live for five, six, seven hours at a time. Like the early webcam celebrities, they might just leave the camera on while they go about their lives, getting work done and gaming. The more organized shows might have an agenda of news stories to discuss and guests to debate or interview, but they can still be marathon sessions that are frequently interrupted by what users say in the “Chat”.

And that’s the real difference of the livestream era. Twitch — and its main rivals, Kick and YouTube Live — allow a level of interaction that shapes the discussion. Streamers respond to comments left in the live chat, sometimes even opening links their viewers send them and reacting to videos or articles live.

Creators are incentivized to interact because in doing so, they build a sense of community that keeps viewers coming back; fans in turn are motivated to keep commenting, keep sending digital gifts, in the hopes of getting a response. There’s a back-and-forth that makes it more engaging than the one-way communication of a Politics Live episode, or even than the discrete, curated moments of audience interaction on shows like Question Time.

Not only do audiences get to engage directly with content, they can shape it. The writer Samuel Rafanell-Williams calls this “online epistemic collaboration”, in which viewers are “involved in the meaning-making process during broadcasts”.

But this impulse to interact should be understood in the wider context of where internet content is going, in politics and beyond.

We know by now that attention is the currency of the online world, and that ways to hoard it are prized. What political livestreamers have cracked is that interaction makes everything that bit more exciting, the equivalent of playing a character in a video game rather than watching them in a film.

Perhaps not uncoincidentally, it’s a similar dynamic that powers OnlyFans. While users can look at the infinite reams of pornography available for free, they prefer to pay for access to a specific creator’s work. For a fee, they can make requests for custom content and even message their preferred performers — though they might in fact be talking to a bot or a professional “chatter”.

Some of the internet’s political pundits even combine the two worlds. Denims, who spends several multi-hour sessions a week keeping her audience up to date with the news on Twitch, also happens to post photos of herself in e-girl garb on Instagram. It’s all done with a knowing wink, very Margot-Robbie-in-the-bathtub. But it’s also built around things that are known to hoover up attention, especially the attention of young men.

Then there’s gambling. Like gaming, betting has long been intertwined with livestreaming. Ed Craven, the founder of Kick, also set up the online casino Stake. There is a whole subgenre of livestreaming dedicated to gambling live on air: if you want to keep viewers hooked, a wager is an easy way to create dramatic tension.

Going even deeper into the crypto caverns, there are also sites like Pump.fun. The token creation platform, which was set up early last year, allows anyone to make a so-called “memecoin” and attract investment to it. Users quickly began using it to make crypto tributes to their favorite public figures and watch the price go up or down with public favor. What could be more interactive than speculation?

That gold rush for attention can lead to some dark places. Nothing demonstrated this better than when Pump.fun introduced a livestreaming feature. Because the streams were tied even more directly to the creator’s financial rewards than other platforms, they quickly devolved into shocking, grotesque or illegal behavior.

While those streams weren’t political (unless you count the guy who pledged to shout “heil Hitler” a million times on camera if his memecoin hit a certain value) they demonstrate the nastiest endpoint of the attention-seeking domain.

In the case of Twitch, there is something intriguing about the possibilities of a malleable, participatory discourse. But there is also a danger that online debate becomes more about participation than the real outcomes.

The internet writer Ryan Broderick spotted this trend back in 2020, when he described it as the “Twitch theory of politics” on a podcast. Voters had stopped trusting politicians to deliver any policies they actually wanted, he argued, such that the only thing left to get out of politics was entertainment. “Suddenly the government — and politics in general and policy — become like an abstract thing,” he said. “It’s like a game, and you want to invest in personalities to play that game. And so what you’re doing is you are supporting your streamer, your influencer, to play the game of politics.”

In the intervening years, that dynamic has become more acute, and audiences have gone from wanting to watch this kayfabe display to wanting to participate. Indeed, platforms such as Twitch are allowing participants — both creators and viewers alike — to try on new political personae, watching what leads to the strongest reaction from those around them. This is not to say there’s any lack of conviction in today’s political discourse, it’s just that it has become secondary to attention. But attention is not the same as reflective engagement. The formats and platforms that originally seemed to reward authenticity — to the benefit of Piker and others — were really at the vanguard of our society’s profound loss of authenticity. Gamification and attention-seeking are anathema to deep engagement. But perhaps deep engagement was never what we really wanted.

The city, he said, could return to that former glory. A second “Big Bang” is possible, but some changes are needed. Playing a central part, he promised the crowd, would be crypto.

The Reform leader has been wooing the blockchain industry lately. Crypto might seem like an odd bedfellow for Reform given some of the party’s more nostalgic inclinations, but in Farage’s hands the industry becomes a throwback. Seemingly reminding him of his rip-roaring days on the floor of the London Metals Exchange, crypto allows him to talk about a sparkling vision of Britain as a financial hub once again.

This is not a jam and Jerusalem brand of nostalgia, but one of big hair and big phones and lunch at Sweetings. Crucially, this is a pre-Blair vision.

Farage has criticized the autonomy New Labour gave to both the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England. Shifting power to those bodies, he argues, has allowed politicians to distance themselves from the regulations that put more burdens onto business. “We have to go back to the more old-fashioned way,” he told the crypto crowd last month. That is, elected officials must make the decisions and face the consequences directly.

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For anyone familiar with the über-libertarian origins of crypto, increasing the involvement of central government may not sound particularly, well, punk. What you have to understand is that crypto is no longer the reserve of cypherpunks and Twitter anons; it is a thriving niche of the financial industry that employs just as many policy consultants and business development people as it does cracked hackers.

While there is certainly still an anarchic undercurrent, it is the “white collar crypto” contingent — both traditional finance firms adopting blockchain and crypto-native companies trying to stay on the straight and narrow — that would like to see politicians taking the sector more seriously.

Exact figures on the size of the UK’s crypto sector are hard to come by, and slightly depend on how you define the umbrella: everything from institutional investing in tokenized gold to Web3 gaming startups could be part of it. What we do know is that London has a leg-up on the rest of Europe, still just about benefiting from its reputation as the region’s financial center. A report from K33 Research found that there were around 13,000 people employed by the sector in the UK back in 2023, triple that of closest competitor Germany.

Farage has therefore spotted crypto as a small but potentially influential area in which he can own the conversation. He has little competition. Politicians from other parties seem unable to talk about crypto, perhaps terrified of its less salubrious associations with fraud and speculation.

This was not always the case. While they were still in power, some of the more technologically literate Conservatives made steps towards embracing the crypto sector. As Chancellor, Rishi Sunak embraced a series of since-abandoned projects (sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one who remembers the shelved Royal Mint NFT) and made noises about making Britain a crypto hub. Matt Hancock was a blockchain advocate while he was a junior minister in DSIT and continued to be so long after it was fashionable. Bim Afolami made inroads with the industry during his brief stint as City Minister before being booted both out of government and out of his Hertfordshire seat last year.

The problem was that not much happened. At one point crypto was seen as a potential area in which the UK could have asserted its newfound independence from the EU, but instead it fell behind: the bloc became the first territory to pass legislation that was specifically designed for cryptocurrency, rather than regulating it under existing laws, in 2023. That regulatory certainty has threatened London’s position as the leading crypto location in the region, as companies plot expansion plans in the EU.

By last year’s election, crypto was fully off the agenda, and although the FCA is now finally plodding towards a regulatory regime for the sector, the new government has not staked out much ground here. That may partly be because it is already onto its third City Minister. In fairness Lucy Rigby, appointed in September, has already been out and about talking about tokenization and meeting the founder of crypto leader OXK in recent weeks, but we are yet to see a shift in government policy.

Farage, meanwhile, gets to claim he was an early advocate for crypto. In fact he has been known to say he was the first politician to back it — something I imagine several Tories would dispute if any of them were still in public life.

Some of Farage’s earliest statements on crypto were made while he was working with Southbank Investment Trust. Back in 2020, he helped launch their investment newsletter, contributing his thoughts on investment opportunities, including crypto.

But what really seems to have bolstered both his conviction about the crypto space and his position within it was that whole kerfuffle with Coutts. When Farage publicly challenged the closure of his account with the Natwest subsidiary in 2023, he faced sneers and skepticism. Yet the conclusion of the whole affair proved he had been justified, allowing him to fashion himself as a kind of martyr to debanking. The experience has given him some common ground with crypto bros.

Debanking is a major issue for founders, employees and even customers of crypto companies. In the UK, half of firms in crypto and Web3 have either been rejected from opening an account or had one closed. Banks often put these decisions down to their anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your customer (KYC) obligations. But some think the approach is heavy-handed, likely to catch those with a legitimate connection to crypto, or even those with only a passing association.

While Farage’s experience was different, debanking still gives him a common cause. Several crypto-adjacent issues also fit into Reform’s wider approach to civil liberties. The party has begun incorporating online freedoms into its platform, pledging to repeal the Online Safety Act and criticizing the police response to social media posts. A natural extension of that approach would be online financial freedom, allowing investors to put their money in whichever assets they please. Recent proposed limits on how much individuals can hold in stablecoins have provided a useful political wedge issue there.

Resistance to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) also goes hand in hand with the party’s opposition to digital ID. Issued and controlled by monetary authorities, CBDCs are unsurprisingly not always popular with crypto advocates. Farage even said at the Web3 conference that he would go to prison rather than be forced to use a CBDC. A brave stand, no doubt, though slightly undercut by the fact that the Bank of England has been cooling on plans for a digital pound and doesn’t look likely to introduce one anytime soon.

Perhaps none of this is surprising. Anyone who has followed the way Donald Trump has interacted with crypto will see a possible model for Farage. The crypto-rich became a lucrative source of donations to the campaign, and more recently to the White House’s new ballroom. Reform certainly seems conscious of a similar opportunity, having dedicated a page on its website pointing donors towards how to make a contribution using crypto.

Since taking office, Trump has continued to signal his favor for the industry. In March, for example, he issued an executive order to establish a Bitcoin federal reserve. Farage, for his part, says he has urged both the Bank of England and the Chancellor to use Bitcoin seized as part of criminal investigations to begin such a fund, saying it would help “further legitimize this space”.

Trump’s relationship with crypto, though, has raised eyebrows, not least when it comes to the dealings of his family’s own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Farage will need to tread carefully to avoid similar suspicion — speaking at crypto events has already become part of his portfolio of side hustles. Whether he actually owns any crypto-assets himself though is unclear — there is no obligation, currently, for MPs to declare their crypto holdings in the same way they might for shares. Then there’s his association with crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who previously donated to the Brexit Party and more recently paid for two of Farage’s trips to the States.

Whether you think Farage is a true Bitcoin believer or an opportunist though, he demonstrates a deeper understanding of crypto than the US President, a former skeptic who seems guided by his sons in his crypto endeavors. In shaping a political narrative around the industry, too, the two men have very different approaches. While both might connect this new technology to their reminiscences about a financial heyday, Farage recognizes the frustration of the industry and positions himself as an underdog alongside them, a martyr to the cause. In his telling, it’s more Passion of the Christ than Art of the Deal: just a way to make Britain a richer place, by bringing more well-paid jobs to London — if only Reeves would let them.

What exactly would that entail? Probably reining in the powers of both the Bank of England and FCA. But those expecting a bonfire of red tape and quangos may be disappointed. Farage isn’t totally anti-regulation, recognizing that it can help stimulate investment when the rules are clear. In a world where he wins the next election, the FCA’s new regime will likely already be in place. Barring any major objections, it seems unlikely he would change it, preferring stability and clarity for businesses.

Where he might look at changes would be on the consumer side. Regulation can be bad when it “protects idiots from themselves”, Farage said at the conference. Regulators often have to find a balance between allowing people freedom to do what they will with their money and preventing them from coming to harm. That has led in some situations to rather tight rules for ordinary investors: up until October, only professionals were permitted to invest in crypto-based exchange-traded notes (ETNS). It would not be surprising if a Farage administration tipped the scales in favor of consumer freedom rather than risk aversion.

The right approach to that depends on whether you think crypto should be seen as analogous to stocks and shares or more like a wager on the horses. Finding a way to legitimize some of the trading going on in grey zones could be beneficial, not least for the Treasury’s coffers: the FCA reckons some 12% of adults own some kind of crypto asset. But it could come at a cost of consumer protection if firms are not held to the same standards as other financial institutions.

None of this, though, is necessarily a game changer when it comes to elections. Crypto can be a way of opening conversations about individual liberties, or over-regulation, or business investment. But it doesn’t tend to be a primary issue for voters, nor was it the magic bullet for reaching male voters in the US elections that some thought it might be.

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Where it might make a difference is more broadly in the City’s buy-in to the Reform agenda. When I worked on a financial newspaper in 2017, it would have been hard to imagine Farage winning anyone round, so soon after Brexit. Now, he’s making speeches at Banking Hall and promising to appoint people with business experience as ministers, while bankers take meetings with his team behind closed doors. Crypto is just one item on an allegedly pro-business, pro-entrepreneur agenda, and also fits neatly into Farage’s stated desire to reward risk-takers.

People in the industry like to say that the crash that came after the collapse of FTX was actually a good thing, washing many of the bad actors and speculators out of the space. This is both true to some extent and difficult to take seriously, since those who have left always seem to be replaced by others. The excesses of the NFT boom have been exchanged for memecoins. Scams and hacks are still an everyday feature of the cryptosphere.

In this context, Farage’s retro-futuristic vision of a crypto-enabled “Big Bang” sounds risky. But it’s a calculated risk. Despite some of crypto’s crazier corners, the white-collar portion of the blockchain industry is increasingly professionalizing, having been embraced by a once-skeptical Wall Street. Major firms take pains to show that they are compliant with local laws and are preparing for massive IPOs. Respected technology and finance firms are incorporating stablecoins into their plans for the future.

Much as Farage might think of himself as a maverick, he is following a path that global regulators and governments have already cut. As crypto sells itself as a legitimate, wealth-generating sector, countries around the world are figuring out how to give it room to grow. In fact, the UK is already working to align its approach with the US on digital assets and other financial innovations. His pitch, then, is far more psychological, symbolic even. It’s about recognizing a group that has at times felt ignored or dismissed. Whether it’s based on fact or not, that can be a very effective message.