Bad people who spend too long on social media call normies NPCs as in video-game NPCs who follow a closed behavioural loop. Wikipedia says this slur was popular with the Twitter far right in October 2018. Two years before that, Maciej Ceglowski warned:
I’ve even seen people in the so-called rationalist community refer to people who they don’t think are effective as ‘Non Player Characters’, or NPCs, a term borrowed from video games. This is a horrible way to look at the world.
Sometime in 2016, an anonymous coward on 4Chan wrote:
I have a theory that there are only a fixed quantity of souls on planet Earth that cycle continuously through reincarnation. However, since the human growth rate is so severe, the soulless extra walking flesh piles around us are NPC’s (sic), or ultimate normalfags, who autonomously follow group think and social trends in order to appear convincingly human.
Kotaku says that this post was rediscovered by the far right in 2018.
Scott Alexander’s novel Unsong has an angel tell a human character that there was a shortage of divine light for creating souls so “I THOUGHT I WOULD SOLVE THE MORAL CRISIS AND THE RESOURCE ALLOCATION PROBLEM SIMULTANEOUSLY BY REMOVING THE SOULS FROM PEOPLE IN NORTHEAST AFRICA SO THEY STOPPED HAVING CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCES.” He posted that chapter in August 2016 (unsongbook.com). Was he reading or posting on 4chan?
Did any posts on LessWrong use this insult before August 2016?
Edit: In HPMOR by Eliezer Yudkowsky (written in 2009 and 2010), rationalist Harry Potter calls people who don’t do what he tells them NPCs. I don’t think Yud’s Harry says they have no souls but he has contempt for them.
I’m pretty sure the term was used by Gamergate harassers back in 2014 already. Fits the whole “this was a rehearsal for the real thing” framing too.
Amanda Marcotte remembers that but I don’t see examples in her link https://www.salon.com/2025/02/24/what-elon-musks-on-workers-owes-to-gamergate/ It looks like the Wikipedia page was written by someone who noticed the slur on Twitter in 2018 or later, and its focused on the meme graphic not the slur “you are just a mindless machine that exists for my pleasure or as an obstacle to overcome.” I think Marcotte served in the Internet Feminism Wars on the feminist side.
The reporting on Gamergate that I can find focuses on the death threats and doxing not insults but “NPC” sounds like the kind of slur that the anti-feminists would have used.
Yep. My memory is propped up by a tweet back then that my (now deleted) tweeter account must have retweeted. Oral history is all we get in this glorious world where data is so vigorously duplicated
Okay that’s actually crazy. Even if 4chan connection isn’t true, the fact that Scott has written “northeast africa has people without souls”… like, what the hell?
Yeah that’s a fucked up thing to say, but it’s supposed to be. It’s been quite a while since I read Unsong, but in the context of a work that’s packed to the gills with allusions to biblical stories and the various interpretations of those stories, “Northeast Africa” has a much more specific implication than if it had referred to any other part of the continent.
I think that’s a reference to a bizarre argument in Christian apologetics that claims God’s slaughter of the firstborn in Exodus was not actually an evil act because he had presciently created them all without souls in the first place. Which is pretty fucked up.
On the enshittified site someone posted this take on Alexander’s take on the kabbalah and Jewish thought https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/unsong-a-study-in-misrepresentation
Might also want to link the sneerclub thread on it there if you have it handy, I think it explained a few references and things, at least from what I can tell this take is very tongue in cheek, but I do not know enough about the subject to talk about it.
The author occasionally posts to slatestarcodex, we kind of tried to explain what was wrong with Scott Alexander and I think she halfway got it… I also see her around the comments in sneerclub occasionally, so at least she is staying aware of things…
Within the world-building of the story, the way the logic is structured makes sense in a ruthless utilitarian way (although Scott’s narration and framing is way too sympathetic to the murderously autistic angel that did it), but taken in the context outside the story of the sort of racism Scott likes to promote, yeah it is really bad.
We had previous discussion of Unsong on the old site. (Kind of cringing about the fact that I liked the story at one point and only gradually noticed all the problematic stuff and poor writing quality stuff.)
I’ve seen this concept mixed with the simulation “hypothesis”. The logic goes that if future simulators are running a “rescue simulation” but only cared (or at least cared more) about the interesting or more agentic people (i.e. rich/white/westerner/lesswronger), they might only fully simulate those people and leave simpler nonsapient scripts/algorithms piloting the other people (i.e. poor/irrational/foreign people).
So basically literally positing a mechanism by which they are the only real people and other people are literally NPCs.
@scruiser There’s a logical inverse to this argument which I had a go at back in 2016: if you’re running a simulation, how far back SHOULD you go to get to your species’ origin? All the way to the first eukaryotes? (Concept collapses into ludicrous recursive tail-chasing.)
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/cytological-utopia-and-the-rap.html
I’m convinced the popularity of the simulation theory is a direct result of ketamine abuse. Dissociatives make everything seem unreal. Weirdest drugs I’ve ever done.
But then it wouldn’t be a proper simulation for those people being saved. This is the level of historical of a Ridley Scott movie.
Poor historical accuracy in favor of meme potential is why our reality is so comically absurd.You can basically use the simulation hypothesis to justify anything you want by proposing some weird motive or goals of the simulators. It almost makes God-of-the-gaps religious arguments seem sane and well-founded by comparison!Yeah the god argument is wat invalidates it for me, then it no longer is an ancestor/rescue simulation, it is just a simulation thought experiment where everything goes. I’m basically trying to point out a motte/bailey here. Where they make arguments for specific simulation stuff where it is convenient for them, but as soon as there is pushback it is ‘but they have the power of gods’.
It gets even worse, as under our computing paradigm, you can’t properly make simulations of the whole world, it is too computationally expensive. But, the ‘real’ people being simulated are people working in those fields (because lets be honest, it isn’t violinists making these arguments, not the people the 4channers are claiming are real). Which means their simulation is useless, as the simulation is incorrect in their important work. It is like simulating newton, but instead of in gravity he lives in a space station without gravity. It is no longer a proper simulation of the man, it is just some weird experiment, and well, now the simgods can do anything and we can’t say anything useful about anything so it all falls apart into mental masturbation. Cops and robbers for adults ‘no you can’t shoot me I have a forcefield’.
E: wanted to look for a proper definition of ‘rescue simulation’ as now I’m running on half remembered sentences and vibes, so I looked into r/SimulationTheory/ and just looking at the subjects of the posts made me sad and made me realize how many people are going to lose a lot of their grip on reality. Hope they can come back (not everybody of course, look at the replies here to ‘chatgpt confirms sim theory’)
HPMOR chapter 88 from 2010 has the line
Harry’s brain flagged this as I’m talking to NPCs again and he spun on his heel and dashed back for the broomstick.
Someone who thinks like that will lose in the long run, but they can do a hell of a lot of damage in the short run.
It’s not very nice to call ppl NPCs or soulless, but it’s not just a far right thing. Other ppl do it too. It’s just one of many ways to be mean.
I think it’s a very “edgy teenager” thing to say, regardless of what cultural or political tribe this mental teenager pledges allegiance to.
I think there’s some ideology underpinning it, though it’s definitely not clear-cut. It goes beyond “sheeple” or “bluepilled” because NPCs literally exist for the sake of the player character of the game. Like, part of why you can justify the violent chaos of a game of Saints Row 3 or whatever is that the only reason those “civilians” exist is to give the player the choice to fuck with them, and the primary way of interacting with anything in that game is shooting it or beating it down with comically large sex toys. I don’t know how universal it is, but the Rationalist version of this simulation argument that I’ve seen relies on a conflation of power and agency, so the people who are obviously PCs are the privileged and the powerful. There is something uniquely distasteful about arguing that not only do rich white dudes know better than you, but that you literally exist only to serve a role in their stories.
Seems like it only makes sense if you played CRPGS but not TTRPGS, LARP, or participatory fiction online? Yud is in to sex games but maybe he does not see it as playing a role?
