Peter Limberg: The NPC: Subjugating or Emancipating?
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?
Poverty is the losing condition of Kaczynski's game, and the equalizer in Boltons. Before that it was fear of death, destitution. As progress advances, what qualifies an NPC will become more status based and fatally benign.
See this thought experiment from good ol William James. Is replacing the valour of war with valorised poverty not just moving to a different server, playing a slightly evolved game? War is a minigame in which status is equalized, all players NPCs.
Excerpt:
William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experiences (1902):
Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the “spirit” of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up to-day—so different from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles—in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of application for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline?
Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the remedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them. War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of power.
The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility.
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Yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted poverty be “the strenuous life,” without the need of crushing weaker peoples?
Poverty indeed is the strenuous life—without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be “the transformation of military courage,” and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.
Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty.
I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.