By David Futrelle
Alt-right trolls have a new insult: NPC, a sort of all-purpose replacement for formerly ubiquitous anti-SJW putdowns like “cuck” and “soyboy,” suggesting that everyone who doesn’t agree with them is a mindless, even soulless, robot, akin to a videogame Non-Player Character who can only respond to stimulus with a small number of preprogrammed lines of dialogue.
As an insult, NPC has been floating around the chans for some time, but it took off in a big way recently after a two-year-old 4chan post resurfaced on social media. In the post, one disaffected anon wrote about how he — I’m assuming it’s a he — had started to look upon most of those he encountered on a daily basis as little more than real-world NPCs,
soulless extra walking flesh piles … who autonomously follow group think and social trends in order to appear convingly [sic] human.
For these NPC “flesh piles”, he continued, politics is literally no more than a collection of handy catchphrases.
If you get in a discussion with them it’s always the same buzzwords and hackneyed arguments. … it’s like in a vidya [game] when you accidentally talk to somebody twice and they give you the exact same lines word for word once more.
As journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio has recently noted in Kotaku, this is literal dehumanization, a way for alt-rightists and their fellow travelers to reduce their “enemies [to] objects, pawns, strawmen, tools.”
But, I would add, it’s also proven to be a great way for the trolls to demonstrate what completely original thinkers they are, and how seldom they resort to meaningless buzzwords.
By the way, did I mention that these guys really hate buzzwords?
Press F to Pay Respects to these brave and original thinkers.
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Hello.
*From the tweet of @WriterOfFuture aka Lein*
Which is totally not the attitude (behavior ?) of trolls like you. Obvisouly.
Have a nice day.
@TrixiePixie
I’d say this is reminiscent of GIGO*. If they are spouting the same incoherent view time and time again, it’s unsurprising the responses sound similar. They might as well get annoyed by everyone saying “4” every time they ask “what’s 2+2?”.
Also kudos to doomcup (and their friend) for the list.
*Not implying the responses are garbage. Just that a response is largely influenced by the original content.
I love it when people follow up an utterly inane statement with “think about it”, as though all our minds should be blown.
OT but saw this in my FB feed and thought the posters here would appreciate it. Some People Are Better than Others: A Bedrock GOP Belief Since 1980: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170124
Wow. Just wow. How could you even believe everyone who doesn’t think exactly like you do is just an empty soulless shell?
Do these people even have a functioning theory of mind?
NPC – Not Pleasing Craptards?
@ TB Tabby
@ Kevin R
I think the idea appears in Carlos Castaneda – though without the redeeming reveal that everyone is human – that only some of the people one sees around are actually people. The example was set on a crowded bus. Apparently, the “enlightened” can discern which are people and which are not.
Nothing at ALL worrying about the implications of that.
@TB Tabby: “Cretinists”
Ahem, comment policy.
I agree with the substance of your post.
if you feel that people around you are not real or like robots, this is actually a sympton of disassociation. of course I don’t think these alt right guys have this, they clearly want to use it to make their “enemies” not real humans so it’s easier to hurt them. although, they already wanted to hurt and genocide their “enemies” before they decided to call them NPC so what really is the difference?
I just mention about disassociation, because when it happens to me and I feel that things and people aren’t real I hate it, I want it to stop. it is human instinct to know others are human too, it’s not comfortable to feel like others are robots or holograms. so it’s a horrible feeling. but these guys chose to say others are not human, somehow becuase they hate other people so much they want them not to be real, they’re not afraid of that feeling. I know they probably don’t feel the way people feel when they have disassociation, but it’s still a unnatural thing to do. And they say so called NPCs/SJWs are who are not like real people!
@Valentin
Interesting, didn’t know that. For me I usually just feel… not really there, out of tune, and get unrealization i.e. everything feels like a dream. At its most extreme it feels like my mind has been kicked out of my body and is somehow suffocating, but other people specifically seeming false has never been a thing.
Brains are weird.
@OP
While I’ll admit that Cambridge tech bros start to look and sound like identical P-zombies after a while, it’s pretty obvious if you actually talk to people that they all have complex inner lives. But that requires talking to them about things they’re interested in, instead of just… spouting a bunch of prefab lines about sex or toxic femininity or feeling sorry for one’s self.
Oh, irony.
This is really pretty horrifying though, especially from a “community” that has produced so many murderers already.
Oh, I see my ex is online again…
In a bit of sideways step – here’s a nice essay for ‘ladies of a certain age’ – https://medium.com/s/story/gen-x-remember-when-men-preferred-hanes-and-you-were-an-uptight-bitch-6ba6db0feb80
If you’re a Gen-Xer it combines nausea and nostalgia.
The igno-right believes that “insult” is a tool of argumentation:
IGNO: Women run EVERYTHING these days!
ME: The percentage of business owners, of CEOs, of legislators who are women is miniscule, and has barely changed in 40 years!
IGNO: You’re (more likely spelled “your”) a libt*rd cuck!
ME: Well, my feels are all hurt…. My argument, however, STANDS!!
Daft Fucker: The Earth is flat!
A Person: It isn’t, though. It’s round.
Daft Fucker: The Earth is flat!
Another Person: It’s not flat, it’s round.
Daft Fucker: The Earth is flat!
Yet Another Person: It’s round. Well, an oblate spheroid if you want to be pedantic.
Daft Fucker: Round-Earthers just repeat the same things over and over in mindless group-think! Wake up, sheeple!
@ rugbyyogi:
good article!
The majority is rarely on the side of social justice, as social justice rarely benefits them
@cyborgette
There are many different ways to disassociate and I only learned recently what I experience might be this. Generally I also have like you said, things are like a dream or I feel like I am 2 people, one inside another and the inside is watching the outside and both people are me. But if I’m thinking people are not real or are robots and actors it’s not regular for me. Maybe one or twice, but I started to research when I learned about disassociation and this is also a sympton. I think it is linked to how everything will feel like a dream.
There is so much to unpack with this concept that I have no idea where to start. I suppose that it’s only a natural outcome of our solipsistic consumer-based “customer is always right” attitudes which allow us all to be the heroes of our own story, making everyone else some kind of supporting cast in a tale centered around you. But the fact that these people are so ensconced in their little bubbles that they characterizing their basic human interactions around effing video games is nothing short of pathetic.
And I’m a guy whose interest in people is… minimal. I always say this with a hint of shame, but I know jack about my neighbours. Because they frankly strike me as dull, boring people with painfully ordinary yuppie lives that remind me of my own dull, boring painfully ordinary demi-yuppie life. It’s probably why I felt so drawn to the furry community, because at least those people were going against society’s grain. It felt like an exploration of what people were deep down, or at least what they wanted to be. Under the guise of internet anonymity, they could pretend to be another gender, another creature entirely and clearly that was fulfilling in a world that’s so saturated with self-aggrandizement and branding that it’s becoming difficult to know where the sales pitch ends and the authenticity begins.
It was ironically those online alternative communities that really rekindled my humanism and gave me a glimpse of the aspirations that we need to nurture and cherish, but far too often get pushed aside in the grind of life. It’s certainly kept me drawing and writing for 15 years now, and we all should have that opportunity to explore ourselves in that manner.
But this ongoing solipsistic erosion of empathy is maddening to witness. Are their ties to other humans so non-existent that they have trained themselves to think of anybody other than people that talk and think like them as some kind of artificial intelligence?
It’s a scary question, but there were three recent pieces of media I engaged with that have me thinking it might get to that point.
First is the guys at Chapo Trap House (I know) who had an interesting breakdown of Generation X and how their yearning for “authenticity” in a world increasingly captured by branding has left them feeling rather out of place: between their entitled Boomer parents and the adaptable Gen Z/millennials who have all but conformed to the additional voices that have found their niches in social media.
Following on from that, Robyn Pennacchia’s article that was cited a few threads ago about how a lot of the conversations going on in the marginalized communities were not being shoved into the faces of the mainstream by social media now leaves these people reeling from a culture shock that they’re having trouble processing.
I witnessed the perfect example of this in the person of Carl Benjamin last night on YouTube watching Kristi Winters and Kevin Logan break down his godawful Mythicist Milwaukee appearance. Noted creepy sex pest Richard Carrier just rolled over for Carlgon’s ranting for the most part, but he did try to point out that there is a very real tradition of activism in these social justice spheres that spend much more time calling legislators and stuffing envelopes than writing Buzzfeed articles and calling people “racist” on Twitter.
Because that’s literally what these 4chan dipshits believe: feminism and anti-racism and the LGBT movement are just Buzzfeed listicles that somehow have captured whole sectors that they thought used to belong to them. And Carl is in his mid-40s, so he’s at least at the tail end of Generation X, hence his search for “authenticity” begins and ends with the disaffection of the straight white male. Anything else must be the same self-aggrandizement that they’ve come to despise, deployed just to make smug people feel noble.
So yeah, I think Kevin R. has it on the nose:
And I have no idea how we reassert humanity to people so sheltered that they’ve allowed their empathy to atrophy this far.
Isn’t 4chan the home of Anonymous, the hive-mind collective of interchangeable nobodies?
@Marshmallow Stacey Maximal
Oh ugh, Carlos Castaneda. One of the more despicable con artists ever to walk the earth. He’s like Ayn Rand for hippies. His books were full of advice on how to be a “warrior”, ie an enlightened Buddha, but with a smug sense of superiority over all the other ordinary, unenlightened humans who lead wasted lives. In his latter years he headed a cult (with a few “chosen women” at its core, surprise surprise). Its members were ordered to abuse and cut off their families, to tell them “I send you hell”, to quit their jobs and drop out of school. They had to completely erase their pasts and were not permitted to appear in photographs. One member hit her Holocaust-survivor mother, on Castaneda’s orders. Another man, whose parents died shortly after he cut them off, was singled out for praise: “”When you really do it, don Juan told me, they die instantly, as if you were squashing a flea — and that’s all they are, fleas.”
Amy Wallace was sexually involved with him for a time. He refused to use birth control, believing that his sperm wasn’t human, but from the nagual (the world of dreams), and therefore it couldn’t possibly impregnate her. After intercourse, he would order her to leave his semen in there, because it was “burning away her humanness”.
It’s a pretty sad way of living. Thinking of yourself as some kind of hyperevolved Nietzschean warrior/sorcerer, when in reality you’re drifting through life as a ghost, unseen by others and leaving behind no footprint because you have no connections to the world.
Someone should tell these whack-a-doodle incels who are obsessed with video games that the key words are “video games.” Not “reality.”
@ Buttercup:
oh, but it was BIG in the ’70s…
“Ayn Rand for hippies” is a good description. After the U.S. military draft ended (1972/3), and eventually the war (1975 ended), it seemed like a lot of “ex-white-liberals” abandoned social conscience and gravitated to Castenada… and to Rand… and eventually to “me-ness”, money, and Reagan….
That’s heavily dependent on my perception, of course, but it sure seemed like at least all the men I knew who were active in anti-war, civil rights, worker’s rights, women’s rights, etc. just disappeared after the draft was no longer a danger….
Despite being a lifelong atheist, I’ve always thought the biblical injunction to “Love your neighbor as yourself” was very insightful in this regard. It doesn’t say you should love your neighbor as your spouse, or your child, or your pet, or anybody else you actually have strong feelings of conscious love about.
Most of us don’t have strong feelings of conscious love toward ourselves. In fact, the emotions about ourselves that we consciously experience are more likely to be negative things like disapproval, frustration, shame and so on.
But we all (or almost all, almost always) take ourselves seriously as a real human being with real rights and feelings. That’s the type of “love” this maxim requires us to show our fellow humans: not adoration or affection necessarily, but simply taking it for granted that they are as real and important as we are.
In other words, the very opposite of this right-wing bullshit of relegating them to the status of “NPCs”.
I think it’s kind of adorable that this guy thinks he’s so very special that he’s never been someone else’s “soulless extra walking flesh pile.” Because I’m sure he’s far from the only one who thinks this way.
Unless they have a super special way of differentiating themselves for one another?
Let’s just start calling them that right away, at every opportunity, thus rendering it even more meaningless.
@Kiwiwriter
Mind the comments policy regarding “crazy talk”, please.
@Kimstu
It’s actually worse than that; Evangelical Christianity tends to emphasize the “brokenness” of humans, i.e. the idea that everyone from Adam and Eve onwards is a dirty sinner and thus wholly unworthy of being in the presence of God.
So obviously, when Jesus said “love your neighbor as you do yourself”, he really meant “treat everyone like crap”, right?
You take that, and stir it in with the idea of rugged individualism and Manifest Destiny, leave to seethe for two centuries, and then you wonder why the Religious Right is so small-minded, bigoted and petty.
Then you slowly forget or discard the supposedly “Christian” basis of it, and you get these guys.
Sigh.
I guess that explain why The Baby Boomers….many who were about protesting “The Man” and Social Justice turned out to be the Generation that undid all the past Progressive changes/labor movements/”New Deal”.
I also think many got into the Lefty/Hippie/Progressive Protest stuff because they didn’t want to be forced into fighting a war (all the Feminism and Civil Rights stuff they just played along with).
I think some kids got into the youth culture out of simple teenage rebellion than anything lofty. They were bored, they wanted to bug their parents, “Flower Power” was the new “cool thing to do” and one could get laid and stoned like crazy….then they grew out of it and resumed being the 1950s child sitcom character they really were.
And now I see another reason, which you guys pointed out, “Flower Power-friendly” new spiritualities that…in retrospect…turned out to be Wingnut Trojan Horses….using the wisdom of the Aquarian Age to subvert it.
Finally; Most Boomer kids were probably apolitical “regular kids” who were okay (more or less) with their parent’s ways and conformity (even if they were a little more relaxed, slightly less prudish and enjoyed rock music). We need to remember that the big rock hits during the ACTUAL 60s were not the strange, psychedelic, pro-punky/metal, musical awesomeness of Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Who, The Kinks, etc. but less threatening stuff like Herman’s Hermits, Paul Revere & The Raiders, The Dave Clark Five, The 1910 Fruitgum Factory and The Archies.
In fact; “The Fab Four” Beatles were probably more popular than the “Sgt. Pepper’s”/”White Album”/”Let It Be” Beatles. I remember seeing a clip from some teen-friendly TV music show (like ‘American Bandstand’, ‘Hullabaloo’ or something, I can’t remember….) where the promo for “Strawberry Fields” (and The Beatles’ new look and style) was revealed to the world….
….and the kids were like….”Huh?”….and one girl was like “….they have….moustaches….” as if she was looking at the food-gunk that collects in kitchen sink drains.
Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd in 60’s U.K. had two Top-20 hits, but that was it….Teens wanted “See Emily Play” and “Arnold Layne” and NOT “Interstellar Overdrive”, “Astronomy Domine” or “Pow R Toc H”.
The fact is that; While The Boomers were indeed revolutionary and cool, the “real cool” ones were a minority or phase.
That said; Today’s Millennials and more “woke” X-ers are taking up the mantle of the “Cool Woke Boomers”, resurrecting the Dream that was prematurely declared dead at the Altamont Speedway and the Tate & LaBianca residences.
Being less inclined to “New Age” stuff; They wont be warped by the next “Carlos Castenenda” or “Jesus Freak Group” (Jesus is great Hippie Icon but many Jesus Freaks ended up morphing into Right-Wing Bible Freaks and that’s….freaky).
@Weird Eddie – Interesting observation about men melting away from progressive movements once the draft went away. I remember as a teenager in the ’80s being puzzled by all the baby boomers who had abandoned ’60s counterculture values, seemingly overnight, and were flocking to Reagan. Barely a decade had passed between “we are stardust, we are golden…” and “Greed is good”. The speed at which the change happened was head-spinning, and it made me realize how fragile the achievements of the sixties were. In retrospect, the path from hippie to yuppie makes a lot more sense to me now. There’s quite a bit of overlap between hippie ideals and right-wing libertarian rhetoric. Get the government off our backs, laissez-faire economics, individual freedom, legalizing marijuana, etc. etc. All variations on “Moooom….get out of my room!”
Castaneda’s writing fits right in with that strain of intense self-focus. There are positive aspects to spiritual exploration, of course, but so much of it always seems to end up telling people to jettison the baggage of the world (houses and jobs and family, emotional attachments, kids, responsibilities, anything distracting) and concentrate exclusively on the inner self in order to attain nirvana. Perhaps not coincidentally, that sort of detachment is far easier for men to practice and attain. Or at least, there’s less stigma attached to the man who abandons home and family to go seek deeper truths. (Women who turn their gaze inward, rather than upward, are considered selfish and hedonistic.)
Seems like some of the chan edgelords have confused cause and effect…they’re so detached from the world, they’ve decided that must mean they’re above it.
THAT; MY FRIEND I A GREAT IDEA! IT describes them perfectly AND it’s still early enough for us to snatch it up before it really catches on! Time to “trigger” these “Far-Right NPC Snowflakes”!
************
@Ariblester
Well; That certainly explains how jerk-people have been able to make Jesus of Nazareth the guy with the WORST CASE OF MIS-AIMED FANDOM IN HISTORY!
I always wondered how corrupt Churches and believers have been able to do un-Christlike stuff throughout history and still consider themselves the followers of a guy who preached peace, unconditional love, forgiveness (even of enemies), non-violence, charity, treated women as human beings, spoke out against material greed, hoarding & pompous corrupt authorities, etc. and not feel a bit of dissonance.
Now; Jesus wasn’t perfect in his pronouncements (concerning families, divorce, etc.) but I doubt he would have been cool with Pogroms, Holy Wars, Witch Hunts, Jim Crow, Apartheid, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Hate Crimes, Greed, Needless Warfare, etc.