NPCs – Grey Enlightenment

The NPC meme finally breaks into the mainstream after Twitter bans 1,500 NPC accounts for ‘voter suppression’:

The propagation of this meme, which originated on 4chan and probably also Reddit, and has since been picked up by the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media, agrees with the meme propagation process I wrote about earlier. There are probably dozens of journalists from New York TImes, Vox, QZ, etc. who are constantly scouring 4chan, 8chan, /r/The_Donald for memes that are newsworthy. A decade ago, it would have been the opposite: 4chan, Reddit, etc. as merely aggregators of news produced by journalists, not the source of the news itself. Reddit and 4chan are still mostly aggregators, but certain subs such as /pol/ and /r/_The_Donald serve both functions. That’s also how Pizzagate become news, along with Q anon, the WWE CNN gif, and a bunch of other stuff.

So, as I gather, it would seem an NPC is basically the same thing as a bugman or a normie. It’s a consumer of mainstream information who repeats/regurgitates what he is told to believe; incapable of original thought or critical thinking; cares about the approval of others too much; consumer of mainstream culture (such as the latest movies, music, and TV shows). I think it’s implied that an NPC has an average IQ. But then the question is, can someone with a significantly above average-IQ be an NPC. If a physicist and a newscaster retweet identical anti-Trump talking points, the latter would definitely be considered an NPC/bugman/normie/etc., but would the physicist also be one? A way around this is, someone who is an expert in a technical, high-IQ subject and has idiosyncrasies, is more immune from the NPC label someone someone who is neither.

The NPC meme is effective because it dehumanizes the subject to nothing more than a grey-faced facsimile. To say they are non-participating implies the absence of free will and purposeful thought, but rather that NPCs are pre-programmed automatons that exhibit human-like characteristics but without being fully human in spirit/soul. This is reminiscent of the concept of philosophical zombies:

A ‘zombie’, in the philosophical sense, is an exact physical duplicate of a person –you, for instance – but without any experiential consciousness. It therefore has identical physical properties to you, but different mental properties – it has no phenomenal consciousness.