What Is NPC, the Mainstream Media’s New Favorite Far-Right Scapegoat?
Time And Again, The Mainstream Media Proves That The Only Meme It Can Come Up With Is Itself
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Last week, a trolling campaign on Twitter organized by a bot farm with unknown origins spilled over onto The New York Times. The next day, it was covered by The Daily Dot, followed by the BBC.
NPCs are meant to represent people who do not think for themselves or are incapable of having an internal monologue. However, journos at the Mainstream Media have been claiming that it’s a new “Pro-Trump…liberal-bashing meme”.
Of course, by covering it all in the same fashion, the media is just proving to conservatives they too are NPCs. It’s a meme that truly works for every facet of liberal criticism of the right. — Ellen Ioanes
When I began to see the bot accounts that were mentioned in every Mainstream Media outlet’s coverage of the NPC meme last week, I immediately suspected a shill operation. All of a sudden, the NPC meme had a political bent.
The bot accounts in question had profile pictures styled as “SJW” variants of the normally threadbare NPC Wojak, replete with colored hair, hipster beards and “woke” bios calling conservatives “Nazis”. This probably lead Twitter’s Trust & Safety Council to claim that these NPC-themed accounts were responsible for election tampering, which resulted in over 1,500 permanent suspensions.
Unfortunately for MSNPC journos, the Mainstream Media was very late to this scoop. In reality, the NPC meme was first used on Twitter in March earlier this year, and had nothing at all to do with politics.
Furthermore, instead of using sources, MSM journos dispensed with fact-checking and simply blamed 4Chan, a website long heralded as the toilet of the internet. Truth be told, however, the NPC meme did not even get its start there.
In fact, the NPC meme originated on the /biz/ section of a much more obscure image board called Warosu. The meme has been shared on that platform since 2014, with the vast majority of references alluding to the social and financial problems typically associated with corporate wage-slavery.
On Dehumanization
The NPC meme was never intended to dehumanize. This element of the meme developed tangentially, as a byproduct of delusional Progressivist fears about a future in which the far right has usurped control over every last pixelated vestige of Nintendo Switch Online.
“SJWs”, in fact, never had a concrete place in the NPC meme until Kotaku explicitly incorporated them in their Gamergate-motivated Anti-Gamer Screed about NPCs in early October, in which they drew in Mark Kern, gaming industry veteran and former team lead of Vanilla World of Warcraft, alleging that his tweets were meant to “compare so-called SJWs to these NPCs.”
Truthfully, the NPC meme was only ever about rejecting that grey, force-fed monoculture of popular discourse in favor of a personal ethic that favored heroism and Skin in the Game.
On Heroism
Contrary to what they would have you believe, the NPC is merely an interior foil for the risk-taking, dungeon-crawling, free-spirited adventurer on their quest to fill up their spellbooks and unlock their talents on the path to max level.
The NPC is that portion of ourselves that is disposed to perceive the world and accept its facts at their most coarse-grained resolution, that part of us that merely repeats socially acceptable mantras when it is safe to do so, and ignores the call to face uncomfortable truths in favor of docile conformity when it is not.
In this sense, a reflection on the NPC within us all is an attempt to “re-humanize” the soul in a world where commercial, political and even romantic life has come to be dominated by Big Efficiency, which is the notion that Life-as-a-Service, in the form of Tinder and UberEats, rather than family and tradition, offer the best template for navigating the chaos of modern social life.
Whereas babushka values allegory over Scientism, the NPC pedant requires that you provide them a peer-reviewed social psychology paper for every claim you put forward. It is precisely this unrelenting drive to reverse aeons of robust folk wisdom and usher civilization into the Globohomogeny of an Anti-Lindy Age that the NPC meme so rightly pinpoints and criticizes.
Of course, by explicitly politicizing their coverage of what was once a benign meme about qualities characteristic of a hero, such as courage, bravery, fortitude and unselfishness, the Mainstream Media proved to everybody once again that they are their own biggest enemy, a self-immolating LVL?? ☠️ Elite Raid Boss NPC.
The NPC Question asks, “How do you know if your opinions are not already programmed? How do you know that your beliefs are not correlated with your neighbors, just like the credit-worthiness of almost every new subprime mortgage in the run up to the Great Recession?”
As much as the debate on Twitter can attest to the complexity of the question, it is more often true that highly complex problems rarely require complex answers. Complexity theorists themselves know that it is often better to under-fit your model and get some things wrong than to over-optimize and get it all wrong.
Similarly, you are better off to take a joke in stride than to scrupulously unravel its each and every potential hidden meaning, unless you want to come off as prude and destroy your own reputation in the process.
So how can you tell who the real NPCs are? I think we’ve already proven that.
do {
var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
var dataURL = canvas.toDataURL('image/jpeg', 0.001);
var blob = dataURItoBlob(dataURL);
var fd = new FormData(document.forms[0]);
fd.append('low_res_MSPaint_' + i, blob);
i++;
} while (MSM.aggro < 9000);
Martin is founder of Selo Oils, where he sells Croatia’s most authentic extra virgin olive oil. He is uncompromising in his contempt for shills and Canola Oil. You should follow him on Twitter.
