NPCs are part of a genre you might call MMCCM: massively multiplayer crowd-controlled media . Its closest precedent is Twitch Plays Pokemon (2014), where ~1.2 million people simultaneously sent commands to a single Gameboy emulator (unbelievably, they beat the game). TikTok brought this video game dynamic to social media. They replaced the main... See more

When all these effects come together, you almost can’t tell if the streamer is human or AI-generated. They tap into our fascination with the unfamiliar and our paranoia of technology. As we pause in shock, they go viral. The timing of this is equally uncanny: humans are getting rich by pretending to act like robots at a time when robots are getting... See more

MMCCM is the most extreme and literal form of audience capture.7 You don’t just become creatively trapped by the expectations of your followers, you lend them your body. You trade micro-gestures for micro-payments. This gives the voyeuristic audience an unsettling degree of control. Unlike American Idol, where the fate of the Idol is determined... See more

(To experience the rest of this essay in full effect, I recommend playing this in the background.)

I saw pornstars, paraplegics, pretend slaves, actual homeless, cancer patients, war refugees, and waves of teenagers all competing for roses in a weird new economy, each privately praying for an algorithm to change their life. More than half acted like robots, too. I couldn’t make sense of it all in real-time, I was just a stenographer at the... See more