July 14, 2023 - 10:00am
In the TV series Westworld, high-paying guests visit a fictional amusement park in which they can act out their fantasies on androids pretending to be human. In 2023, people can do the same for a fraction of the cost on TikTok, except they make their demands on humans pretending to be androids.
The latest “trend” on TikTok and now Twitter is watching livestreams of people role-playing as “NPCs”, or non-playable characters in video games. This involves content creators acting like avatars, often using anime face filters and other infantilising guises. They perform various “looped” animations, such as lightly bouncing up and down whilst staring at the camera, much like a character would do on a “loading” screen.
These influencers then “come to life” when they are sent tokens or gifts by their audience, which appear on the screen like emojis and are visible to viewers. The would-be NPC reacts accordingly, often performing strange, repetitive, implicitly sexual behaviours such as licking and saying “yum yum so good” if they are sent a virtual ice cream.
https://twitter.com/lind_trann/status/1679379193056862208?s=46
It’s not quite the Wild West of Westworld, but it is a disturbing new online subculture that shows how willing people are to push their content to new bizarre depths in the hopes of going viral. There’s also a lot of money to be made: each one of these tokens or gifts has monetary value. Users buy TikTok “coins” in various packages (65 coins is roughly equal to $1) which they can then use to buy gifts for content creators. The scheme has been widely criticised for enabling children to be exploited into giving these gifts, or just for perpetuating a kind of gambling, escort culture in which people pay for parasocial online relationships.
TikTok Live has always been the unfettered underbelly of the app, with a reputation for more unnerving content — for example, people streaming while they sleep, or acting out horror movies — but NPCs are a new hybrid monster altogether: a crossover between OnlyFans and VTube. VTubers, or virtual YouTubers, use a virtual avatar to create online content, often employing motion capture software to translate their actual movements and facial expressions so that their avatars emote and move just like a real person. VTuber content racks up around 1.5 billion views a month, with the most popular creators boasting follower counts of over 14 million.
Both NPC creators and VTubers are therefore capitalising on developments in technology (AI, the metaverse, motion tracking and face detection software, filters) and popular culture (the rise of anime and K-pop, live-streaming, the appeal of being able to virtualise yourself). Some may see this as another harmless evolution of the Internet, which has always prioritised the weird over the wonderful.
Yet there is something deeply unsettling about normalising role-playing the ultimate submissive woman: fetishising an avatar with no real autonomy. The expressionless, pre-programmed, surreal behaviour of Pinkydoll, one such creator, is not funny but frightening. She is basically willing to dehumanise herself for donations that satisfy some sort of control kink. It’s PG prostitution: pay, and she’ll perform in a submissive, suggestive, subtly sexy way. It’s nowhere near as violent or sadistic as what happens in Westworld, but it’s a start.
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SubscribeSheer cowardice from Spitfire’s CEO! He could have just ignored it.
What kind of bottom crawling spineless creep is Will Evans.
Great opportunity to shaft his co-founder?
I thought it a piece of opportunism on Evan’s part too. Just like denunciation was used in Stalinist Russia and China to move rivals on. Sadly the creative sector is full of this bullshit.
Yeah, with Spitefire
“accusations of “hate” are hurled at anyone who merely disagrees ”
Just further evidence that all the tactics, and the underlying philosophy for the Trans brigade is simply borrowed from quasi- Marxist feminist/black rights/gay rights movements.
Taken on its own, the trans jokers are nothing. But a world where blacks must be elves and clone troopers, girls must be allowed into boy scouts, gay pride must be celebrate, you must pretend women footballers or tennis players are as good as men. And anyone suggesting otherwise (Damore) gets sacked.
Is also a world where you must pretend “trans women” are women, there is no difference between them and normal female athletes, they must be allowed into girls bathrooms, and anyone suggesting otherwise gets sacked.
…except it’s got nothing to do with Marxism, feminism or black rights or gay rights, but everything to do with the culture of rampant consumption and the supremacy of the individual!
100% It’s a backlash against women’s rights, and it’s being used to prop up the very forces of Capitalism that it pretends to seek to oppose.
“they must be allowed into girls bathrooms”
No they must NOT. They should be castrated for the first offence and crucified for the second, no ifs or buts.
Could someone please explain what all this ‘trans’ nonsense is about? Until this excellent essay I was completely unaware of it. Here in Arcadia we live a very simple life, in perhaps the most idyllic landscape on earth, untrammelled by any such excitement.
It seems it involves deliberate child mutilation:Is that possible in the Western World in the early twenty first century? Or is it some form of religious cult whose antics I have stupidity misinterpreted and thus inadvertently vilified?
It is a construct created by a man called John Money. He is worth looking into if you want to find out how far the rabbit hole goes.
Many thanks indeed!
What a truly appalling account.
Money deserved to have been hanged, and he would no doubt have made a great colleague of the late (Dr) Joseph Mengele and his Auschwitz cronies.
Thanks for the name – I’ve just read the Wikipedia entry and would recommend that most people would be appalled at the influence of someone so obviously . . . I can’t think of an appropriate word to go here.
Malevolent?
R Wright is either ignorant of the historical facts or deliberately lying as part of a sly agit-prop campaign.
Trans people are NOT a “construct by a man called John Money”.
We have historical records of trans people across cultures & geography stretching back millennia.
Modern research on trans people dates back to Dr Magnus Hirschfeld whose work began in the late 1800s. His huge research library in gay and trans people was one of the very first book burnings by the nazis once they came to power.
Anti trans activists such as R Wright need to stop lying – whether through ignorance or deliberate mendacity – in their efforts to hide the research in & history of trans people. It didn’t work in 1933. It shouldn’t work today.
Surely these are the people we used to refer to as either “fairies” or “butch”. They were quite harmless and didn’t go around castrating children as far as I recall. So what is the problem now may I ask?
.
Read the interim Cass report and understand why the Tavistock clinic has had to close. This poisoness ideology which flies in the face of truth is well organised and everywhere. Schools, hospitals, prisons, media.. if you agree that a man can become a woman fine, but if you question it welcome to the club of concerned individuals, parents and families who need to protect ourselves whilst fighting back to reveal the nonsense which threatens us.
Jeez Charles, it’s been written about extensively on Unherd, or are you just joking?
Sorry, not paying attention!
Just watched GB News interview of Andrew Doyle about his new new book on this issue – if all of us don’t fight against this witch hunt and quasi religious movement that seeks to cancel all of us, then humanity is lost. We must all stand up and fight this bigotry. If we let these minority kunts win, then we might as well declare our country a communist fascist state. Unherd and Gb News we support you. JK we support you.
Just ordered his book
It’s the lack of religion that causes this. People are taught as children that being “nice” is one of the highest moral imperatives, but ordinary life gives very few opportunities to demonstrate to others that you’re a nice person. Especially so if you work in management and must deal with the realities of running a company. Being pious used to provide lots of rather arbitrary ways to show that you’re a nice, well socialized person. With those gone, people get desperate and engage in these destructive acts.
If you’re not on the left you can probably handle this because your worldview is that the world sometimes sucks, sometimes being nice leads to bad outcomes for all and so on. On the left, not so much. Result: the moment someone says “here’s an opportunity to show how nice you are” they grab it, unthinkingly. Punishing the person who “hurt” others, who wasn’t “nice”, is a way to show how nice that person is.
Of course it could also be just a way for people on the left to purge non-progressivists. Just as they always have, throughout history. At some point maybe this needs to turned around on them and people need to start getting cancelled for saying woke things. Such people sure are dangerous to have around!
I’ve met plenty of horrible “Christian” people who seem to think asking God for forgiveness on a Sunday excused them for their nasty midweek behaviour. Personally, I think the internet has magnified the problem. Keyboard warriors and virtue signalling, that’s where the problem is.
Exactly that. Before Twitter and FB we didn’t have anonymous abuses or cancel culture. If one were to be confronted with bigots we could have a real fight because both parties’ ID is known. Now, the social networks have failed us by allowing anonymous bigots to attach people without sanction: what happens to good old fashion debates?
An interesting description for what the term “gender”(as in “gender ideology”) carries within it, is given by Carl Trueman. He elaborates on a sociological phenomenon call Expressive Individualism. I would call it Gnostic Expressive Individualism.
Expressive individualism is the notion that every individual has an inner core of feelings and in order to be authentic I need to be able to give outward expression – one might say I need to be able to live outwardly consistent with my inner core of feelings. […] My primary responsibility is towards myself and my own authenticity. […] the real me is this inner core of feelings. So the most significant things that can be done to me are the things that affect that inner core of feeling or stop me giving full expression outwardly to that inner core of feeling,…
This ties together four features I have noted from expressions of social justice ideology – the primacy of the feelings of self, and of their full expression/performativity, authenticity and a seeming narcissism or self absorption.
How ironic, and depressing, that this media company exploits a name, Spitfire, that represents the best of Britain at a time, with the Queen, when we were sticking up for tolerance against tyrants. Now we have modern Puritan tyrants like Evans. Who’ll save us from these bampots?
“Spitfire”? More like a damp log.
The last time I looked we are in a country that has freedom of speech and expression!
Stop this madness Christian Henson and JK Rowling are the good guys. I support them both.
hey cool
What actually is cool?
Can we have a bit more?
Wow. Just never ending with the Soviet metaphors. Did a communist hurt you? Like, as a kid? P.S, it is up to the CEO how he runs his company. Transphobia might not be good for business.
Except it’s not necessarily transphobia, though. It seems to be more to do with the treatment of children who experience gender dysphoria, and whether or not there are only two sexes (with the occasional intersex person). You are right about one thing though, unfortunately, it does appear that it is now bad for business to challenge some particular views – or is it? They don’t seem to want to risk it.
re: “It’s not necessarily transphobia.”
You should remove the word “necessarily”. Supporting JK Rowling and being concerned about children’s safety have nothing whatsoever to do with transphobia. JK Rowling has never uttered a transphobic word, though trans activists desperately want the world to think otherwise.
Let us see how consistent you are. If a CEO should decide that it would be good for business to have an all-male, all-white, all-heterosexual staff, or that any female employees should be young, beautiful and wearing high heels, would you still back his sovereign right to decide?