To Live and Die by a Kai Cenat Stream

I’m fascinated by the ascent of livestreaming as a concept, and especially of the figures the culture has vaulted into a strange new form of celebrity, like Kai Cenat. Cenat is a New York-based personality with a massive following on the streaming platform Twitch, where an average of 35 million active daily users congregate to watch influencers play games, make music, do interviews, pull pranks, react to pop culture events—or just to live vicariously through the other side of a screen. Around 41 percent of Twitch’s total audience is teens and young adults ranging from ages 16-24, and Kai does a little bit of everything to keep their attention: He streams games, reviews new rap music drops, does themed events out in the real world, and goofs around with celebrity guests and other streamers, most of whom are Black or other people of color.

Stats don’t really do justice to how jaw-droppingly popular he is, but his IRL presence sure does. He’s become a brand magnet, signing deals with T-Mobile, and has hosted Streamer University, a four-day bootcamp that made stars of several up-and-coming content creators. Rappers from Drake to Lil Baby to Wale have reacted poorly to being criticized or otherwise written off by him. His sleep streams, which are exactly what they sound like, are appointment viewing for many. “Desireable” doesn’t begin to describe how valuable his platform has become to the entertainment ecosystem—it both supersedes and is a culmination of the detritus of scripted and reality TV, blown out into hours, even days, worth of content at a time.

Cenat’s growing popularity and the near-ceaseless churn of the format make several problematic moments even more glaring. He’s platformed controversial figures in the past, including Chris Brown and Kodak Black, who have pled guilty to domestic and sexual abuse, respectively. He misgendered fellow streamer Kris Tyson, who identifies as a woman, in 2024, and hosted a week-long event called 7 Days In, where he, friends, and a handful of guests created a fake prison environment. But I’ve always been struck by a moment from April 2024, when he said on-stream that, compared to other members of the African diaspora, African-Americans lack a distinct culture of their own. (For context, Cenat is a first-generation American whose mother is Trinidadian and father is Haitian.) This is a narrow-minded and ignorant perspective, one that’s made all the more ridiculous by the fact that Cenat has built his empire reacting to, and participating in, African-American culture in many forms.