# Peter Limberg: The NPC: Subjugating or Emancipating? Source: https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/peter-limberg-the-npc-subjugating?isFreemail=true&post_id=148964504&publication_id=1447345&r=6d366&triedRedirect=true&triggerShare=true Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Peter-Limberg-The-NPC-Subjugating-or-Emancipating?index=0x685bc05d8db686d8ee3416d56f612024cdeb82ec03679e8e16fc5004f3af9f7e1434c375 Submitted by naomiii.eth on 2025-06-25 UTC, 17 upvotes, 1 comment ## Summary The 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. ## Article Peter Limberg is a writer and philosopher based in Toronto, Canada. “One must imagine [the NPC] happy.” - Albert Camus, paraphrased The NPC meme has gone through a progression. It started as a memetic diss from the culture war right toward the culture war left, claiming that those who parrot the political cause de jour are “non-playable characters”—a phrase from RPG games that describes preprogrammed, unplayable characters. Once the meme started going viral, it was declared as dehumanizing by a series of articles, which only fuelled the meme. Although the NPC meme was originally aimed at the culture war left, the culture war right eventually found itself NPCified. Like the Borg in Star Trek, assimilating everything in sight, resistance was deemed futile. Everyone is now at risk of becoming an NPC. The meme took a stranger turn in 2023, with people beginning to embrace the NPC, as if it were something good. The NPC meme evolved with Gen Z on TikTok mimicking NPC movements, alongside the rise of “NPC streamers,” where live streamers perform repetitive, preprogrammed behaviors for monetary gain. A dark perspective on the NPC meme comes from Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who anticipated the rise of NPCs in his 1995 manifesto. He described a scenario where “the machines”—now understood as AI—completely replace human labor, making it obsolete and rendering society utterly dependent on technology. If the ruling elite retains control over the machines, they will view the now-unnecessary masses as liabilities. This leads to a grim choice: either eliminate the surplus population or brainwash them into a docile and servile state, making them “happy,” effectively reducing them to NPCs. “Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.” - Ted Kaczynski NPCs become non-threats because they are non-players, lacking the agency to engage meaningfully in the game. Perpetually stuck in life and fearful of standing out, they never truly participate in serious play—indeed, they aren't even aware of what the game is. If Kaczynski was correct, then the proactive embrace of NPC memes could be seen as a collective act of subjugation. An alternative perspective comes from foresight strategist Robert Bolton, who argues in his recent article “The NPC: An Unplayable Character for Unnarratable Times” that the meme has evolved beyond its original pejorative use and has become something desirable. Embracing the NPC role simplifies one’s experience, alleviating the pressure to be the protagonist of one’s online presence.1 “So resigning to NPC status has become desirable; some say emancipatory. You give yourself a gift: temporary relief from the burden of protagonism, a chance to simply be and observe without the weight of narrative responsibility.” - Robert Bolton The NPC requires no biography or coherent story of self. In adopting the meme, it becomes an act of rebellion against the delusion of playability, offering respite from the complexity of the metacrisis. If enough NPCs emerge, they could potentially crash the simulation, rendering the game unplayable. By becoming unplayable, one avoids being played, giving happiness a chance through opting out of an unwinnable game. To be an NPC, then, has two meanings. In Kaczynski’s thesis, someone is non-playable, a person in the game with no agency. In Bolton’s antithesis, someone is unplayable, a person opting out of the game with agency. The NPC: A meme foreshadowing the collective subjugation of global totalitarianism, or a stigma of unthought transforming into a surprising symbol of emancipation? ## Comments **tim**: 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.