The NPC: Subjugating or Emancipating?

The article traces how the NPC meme, once an insult from the right toward the left, has become something some people embrace, and it sets two readings of that shift against each other. Ted Kaczynski's 1995 manifesto is presented as a dark forecast in which AI-driven obsolescence leads elites to engineer a docile population of NPCs, a collective subjugation. Robert Bolton, in his article "The NPC: An Unplayable Character for Unnarratable Times," argues instead that resigning to NPC status can be emancipatory, offering relief from the burden of being the protagonist of one's online presence. The piece closes by framing the NPC as either a warning about totalitarianism or a symbol of emancipation.