Orin Gor­don

Sev­er­al years ago, IShowSpeed, Kai Ce­nat and oth­er stream­ers start­ed mak­ing mul­ti­ple ap­pear­ances in our Twit­ter (now X) feeds. I’d look at their X videos out of click cu­rios­i­ty.

Stream­ing is the con­tin­u­ous trans­mis­sion of au­dio or video con­tent, from stream­er to con­sumer via a stream­ing plat­form, with­out the need for a down­load. For da­ta and stor­age-poor teenagers or peo­ple in their ear­ly 20s (the main au­di­ence for stream­ers), it is a god­send.

Stream­ers live a good chunk of their dai­ly life on­line. That show is played out on pop­u­lar live-stream­ing plat­forms such as Twitch, which is owned by Ama­zon. The au­di­ence is re­al-time, glob­al, and ac­ces­si­ble by chat.

For non-gam­ing stream­ers, it must be hell­ish­ly dif­fi­cult to keep gen­er­at­ing in­ter­est­ing, live con­tent for hours, but the most pop­u­lar stream­ers in the world put up big num­bers.

Amer­i­can Kai Ce­nat, 24, has 20 mil­lion fol­low­ers, the largest num­ber of Twitch sub­scribers in the world. He has pulled in a mil­lion view­ers dur­ing live events. For all the at­ten­tion that Speed gen­er­at­ed from his time in Trinidad, Ce­nat is the one who ac­tu­al­ly has Tri­ni roots. His moth­er is from T&T, and his fa­ther is from Haiti.

Who is Speed? He’s on­ly 21, his giv­en name is Dar­ren Watkins, he’s Amer­i­can, and is a big fan of foot­ball—soc­cer to his coun­try­men/women. He wor­ships Cris­tiano Ronal­do.

Speed is ath­let­ic, shows su­perb phys­i­cal con­di­tion­ing, and has chal­lenged Olympic cham­pi­on Noah Lyles and in­ter­net fit­ness per­son­al­i­ty Ash­ton Hall to races. We learned from well-known Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence (AI) maven Re­nee Cum­mings that he is trained by for­mer T&T Olympic ath­lete Ato Boldon.

I’ve nev­er con­sumed stream­ing con­tent. My ac­cess to briefly clipped con­tent was through X. Speed’s stream­ing blitz through the Caribbean made me look at his cre­ativ­i­ty with a dif­fer­ent pair of eyes. His con­tent punched through non-stream­ing plat­forms and gen­er­at­ed con­sid­er­able in­ter­est among the wider pub­lic dur­ing his vis­its to Trinidad and oth­er is­lands up the Caribbean chain.

The most in­ter­est­ing thing it re­vealed was the pro­fes­sion­al pol­ish of the whole op­er­a­tion. Speed’s ap­peal is his spon­tane­ity, and he seem­ing­ly nev­er backs down from a chal­lenge—be­ing up for any­thing and every­thing—but he has pro­gressed his ca­reer and grown his fol­low­ing through good plan­ning.

Bring­ing in Boldon for ath­let­ic train­ing and get­ting him­self in­to the shape he has speaks to the se­ri­ous­ness of in­tent. At every Caribbean coun­try stop, he wore the na­tion­al foot­ball jer­sey, print­ed with his name and num­ber 7, Ronal­do’s num­ber. That is no small de­tail. It’s care­ful plan­ning. His en­tourage in­clud­ed sea­soned pros such as Che Kothari, the high­ly-re­gard­ed Cana­di­an man­ag­er of Machel Mon­tano.

When Speed’s videos first start­ed land­ing in my X feed years ago, I found his hy­per­ac­tive ig­no­rance to be an­noy­ing. Speed’s schtick was to put him­self in a sit­u­a­tion or in the pres­ence of some­one he didn’t know, and re­act to it. The re­ac­tion was the con­tent. As with for­mer Ar­se­nal man­ag­er Ar­sene Wenger, it was oil and wa­ter, cringe-in­duc­ing.

How­ev­er, a lot of it is watch­able con­tent and the num­bers agree. Speed, to his cred­it, takes cre­ative risks for his craft and seems to pos­sess the un­shake­able self-con­fi­dence to not seem to care if it comes off or not.

The young au­di­ence of stream­ers is be­ing in­creas­ing­ly court­ed by politi­cians. A large num­ber of them reached vot­ing age in 2024, and the Trump cam­paign made a de­ter­mined ef­fort to reach them. Par­tic­u­lar­ly young men, and suc­cess­ful­ly for the most part.

Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez was the first main­stream De­mo­c­rat that I can re­mem­ber cam­paign­ing through Twitch stream­ing, and try­ing to bring stream­ers in­to the po­lit­i­cal tent. They are, in­creas­ing­ly, a pow­er­ful de­mo­graph­ic force. There is an on­go­ing de­bate in De­mo­c­ra­t­ic po­lit­i­cal cir­cles about whether to court Twitch stream­er Hasan Pik­er (aka Hasan­abi), who has a big fol­low­ing, but whose views on Is­rael and Pales­tine are po­lar­is­ing for De­mo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates.

The ques­tion that the Caribbean coun­tries that Speed touched down in will an­swer is whether they are an eco­nom­ic force as well...whether the huge views be­ing gen­er­at­ed bring peo­ple or mon­ey or both to the coun­try. Trinida­di­an dig­i­tal an­a­lyst Keron Rose says that when Speed touched down in Trinidad, his livestream gen­er­at­ed 4.4 mil­lion views glob­al­ly, and on­line search­es for “Trinidad” shot up sharply.