Peter Limberg: The NPC: Subjugating or Emancipating?
AI summary of the linked articleThe NPC meme, which began as an insult in the culture war and now has a range of meanings, is examined here through two opposing readings: Ted Kaczynski's warning and Robert Bolton's view that embracing the role can be emancipatory. Kaczynski, in his 1995 manifesto, anticipated AI replacing human labor and described a scenario where engineered, docile people would be happy but not free. Bolton argues in his article "The NPC: An Unplayable Character for Unnarratable Times" that resigning to NPC status has become desirable, offering relief from the burden of being a protagonist online. The piece frames the meme as a choice between collective subjugation and a form of opting out. |
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1 comment  To stay in the metaphorical language of online roleplaying games, the author claims that too many NPCs could crash the system, but there were and are many singleplayer roleplaying games where you are the only agentic player with a free will in the game. But this makes you the hero, and it frankly makes everybody else just an object of the player to be taken advantage of. When I think about Trump's latest term, I have to say that the knee-jerk NPC reaction to all of the things that he has been involved with have always been the sub-optimal economic outcomes. The deranging of NPCs when faced with political ambiguity or emotionally taxing events and situations is, in my mind, for sure already being taken advantage of by big players who are reading all of our texts, tweets, posts, to then form an opinion of us as rational agents, and to then exploit these knee-jerk reactions to make themselves richer. Privacy, in a way, is like security. With security, your funds are safe. And with privacy, you are psychologically safe and cognitively safe. So, I would encourage everybody to keep staying agentic and ungovernable. |
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