#npcs

On Twitter, Musk banned an account that reported on the movements of his private jet (that is, an account that republished public information), because he said that it made him feel unsafe. Musk also changed how Twitter's block button worked to make it easier for gang-stalkers, griefers, harassers, and trolls to attack their victims, who are disproportionately marginalized: women, queers, people of color:

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-block-x-blue-sky-rcna176130

Musk's fears are vivid and real to him, but the fears of millions of Twitter users are just scripted NPC behaviors. In some important sense, those people don't actually exist for Musk. Or, as Musk put it on Rogan:

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-5321299/how-empathy-came-to-be-seen-as-a-weakness-in-conservative-circles

Not for nothing: this is also how being in a K-hole feels. Under ketamine sedation, it's easy to feel like the whole world, your whole life to that moment, was a dream or a hallucination. The whole universe is just a figment of your imagination, and you are its god and creator. In a K-hole, other people aren't real.

Now, as it happens, there's a long moral tradition that condemns people who treat others as unreal, as means to an end, rather than as ends unto themselves. For Kant, this is so odious that he said it violated the "categorical imperative":

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/persons-means/

Or, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax put it:

Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.

https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

But when you are seeing like a billionaire, that's how people appear to you: as things. It's the mindset that leads to you offering your subordinate a thoroughbred horse in exchange for fucking you:

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flight-attendant-who-accused-elon-musk-of-sexual-misconduct-2022-5

Seeing like a billionaire is when you view people as aggregated masses without any real interiority or will. Hence "high agency," the term that people who aspire to extreme wealth and power use to describe themselves. If the elite are high agency, then it follows that the masses are low agency. They have few desires or real feelings:

https://www.highagency.com/

It's not just Musk who views people this way. Mark Zuckerberg has been treating people as things for his entire life, ever since he started Facebook in his dorm-room so that he could nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads. In Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams' whistleblower memoir of her time as a top FB exec, we get a picture of Zuck as someone who just doesn't think that other people are real enough to matter:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

It's no wonder that Zuck thinks that chatbots can replace our friends:

https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zuckerberg-ai-friends-hinge-ceo/

At some foundational level, he thinks we are all chatbots, automata driven by manipulable inputs that drive deterministic outcomes. This is a guy who claims to have invented a mind-control ray using warmed-over Skinnerian behavior mod techniques:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

Sam Altman, another person who sees like a billionaire, and wants to replace our friends with chatbots, claims that humanity is nothing more than a "stochastic parrot" – a statistical autocompleting program that does not truly understand or think:

https://x.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728?lang=en

Billionaires have to be solopsists, or at least, selective solopsists, who don't really believe in the humanity of the people who create their wealth and whom they wield their power over. This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.