Anons and Automatons

'... [W]e take a look at a fresh example of how a terminally-online generation is being fed to the all-monetizing void of the Internet.'

From The European Conservative

By Carlos Perona Calvete

Witness the rise of the NPC: we take a look at a fresh example of how a terminally-online generation is being fed to the all-monetizing void of the Internet.

Recently, the NPC meme has been conjured up into a new degree of reality. 

The meme in question suggests that a segment of the population, sufficiently conditioned by politically correct, mainstream media, acts like video game automatons, or Non-Player Characters (NPCs).

Today, however, becoming an NPC can be a lucrative business model. 

People—mostly young women—are making money online by pretending to be NPCs, live-streaming themselves repeating pretend-programmed reactions to their audience members’ donations. 

The product provider and her customers relate directly, albeit the platform hosting the live stream gets a cut as well. 

The market doesn’t exist apart from the culturally conditioned, materially constrained psychology of its participants—and this is what it has wrought: relationships unmediated by higher-order cognition.

Psycho-sexual, para-social, cyber-space interface comes to replace older forms of interaction in this era of automatons and anonymous audiences. 

It may not be as bad as OnlyFans, but the desire to imitate, and witness the imitation of, non-conscious programs, the draining off of human lucidity, merits contemplating. It requires that both parties numb themselves to the sense of the absurd.

We might imagine that the deeper circles of infernal descent to which global culture seems oriented are in cyberspace rather than in the real world. But they translate far worse in the real world. The worst dynamics online abide all the more terribly in the material flesh that produced them. But their catalysts are, increasingly, online.

Pretending to be an NPC, in particular, is a useful capsule, a neat virtual product to point to when critiquing what the extremely online personality and its culture (including ‘the market’) ends up as. 

Before us lie new horizons of (mainly female) spectacle and (male) simp-ery—displays of private intimacy (once a domain of the feminine), dereliction, and dissolution of public institutions (once a masculine realm). The pure viewership of the male anon and the pure void of the female automaton parody the genders until they are nothing but eyes and images (as in pornography). 

Products and payments.

But escape is possible. Our natures yearn to have the love for propriety, for privacy, rekindled in the hearth, and to hear the call to greatness outside it.