Hyperreality And The Cyborg Children At The End Of History

Social media tops the list of things I wish I never discovered. Between circular arguments with anime avatars and pornography, I sometimes long to scrub my brain clean. Like many, I’m a victim of algorithms and doomscrolling. So, imagine my horror when I discovered the NPC challenge, popularized on TikTok, a platform I pride myself on boycotting. 

NPC is an acronym that means “non-participating character.”  It comes from the world of video games, in which NPCs are background characters, pre-programmed with limited phrases and movements. A typical NPC Challenge video features a young woman dressed as an anime-like or other dolled-up character, who spends anywhere from three to ten hours interacting with virtual images of food and tokens tossed at her by viewers (players/observers) in exchange for real money. She says nonsensical phrases, like “Hmm, ice cream so good” and “Yum! Yum!”

Then it hit me that we were in Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality. For Baudrillard, the simulacra (symbols of representation) have replaced reality, and in turn, have been replaced or enhanced by upgraded symbols that detach them from reality altogether (hyperreality).  

Consider the Frutiger aero aesthetic movement inspired by Microsoft screensavers of the early 2000s. The latest in a long line of hyperreality trends focused almost exclusively on aesthetics and advertisement, the movement mimics computer screensavers that were hyper-realized versions of the natural world. Frutiger Aero aesthetics is considered a form of skeuomorphism, which is defined by integrating aspects of old designs into the new design to make it feel familiar. 

Living out a fantasy life in the real world isn’t new—LARPers (Live Action Role Players) have existed for a long time, after all. Only now, fantasy life has been absorbed and transformed into spectacle (virtual experience and social media) and now allows the player to put on a headset—what author Janet H. Murray refers to as “Immersion” technology (Hamlet on the Holodeck, 1997). 

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In these virtual realms, people get to stay in character for as long as they want, even make a living out of it, because the spectacle exists to be seen as much as to be lived, and thousands pay to be voyeurs.  The Hyperreal is to be experienced and observed, sold, and consumed through parasocial relationships. People can live for hours as “avatars” (virtual personas) in cyberspace, where most choose to be Anime, fantasy, or videogame characters, a kind of uploading of consciousness to a new body, one of their own makings, based not on their real selves but on a self that never existed—elves, trolls, orcs, et. cetera.

Technology has been blamed for the transformative rise of the spectacle but doesn’t explain what drives it. No longer solely existing in cyberspace, the spectacle has been creeping into the real world, whether Barbie-core or Furryism or Trans-speciesism.

But why?

Blame the Cyborg children at the end of history.  Millennials and Zoomers are the generation that came of age during the decadent era of Western civilization, what the Internet dubbed Late-Stage Capitalism, defined by the decline of the standards of living, rise in corporatism, broken families, social alienation and distrust, and political radicalization.

With rising housing costs, underemployment, and environmental and social degradation, there’s little of the real world that is appealing to the young—the Frutiger Aero trend has been blamed on the distress of climate change, environmental decline, and failed promises of a better world, for example.

The virtual world offers much more for the Cyborg child—raised half in this world, half in cyberspace, transported there via virtual headsets and smart devices permanently attached to their bodies. They become as much a part of the virtual as it becomes a part of them, living entire lives through avatars and trekking through worlds of great wonder and pristine wilderness, collecting  NFTs (Non-Fungible “one of a kind” Tokens) –usually digital art or goods stored in blockchains (independent data storage servers/companies) OR buying land in the Metaverse, a digital space created around the formerly known Facebook and affiliated social media sites where virtual real estate is a hot commodity. 

Not to toot my own horn but my short story, Consumption/Bought, Sold and Delivered was about a commodified virtual space that destroyed a woman’s real life. “The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus a historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.”― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Cyborg children have begun asserting their safe spaces in the real world through the postmodernist, absurdist if not nihilistic worldview that spread from academia to social and cultural institutions within the last thirty years. Postmodernism theorizes that one can create their own reality/truths and it’s just as valid as any other. 

With this new lens through which to view the world, the Cyborg children have begun to merge their two realities by layering one over the other, merging the physical world they live in with the virtual world that allows them creativity and freedom to be who they want to be. They may preserve in virtual spaces the world as they’d like it to be while bringing to the real-world aspects of their virtual life, the part that comforts them the most. 

In many ways, the cyborg children at the end of history are comparable to the children in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’ End, whose evolution into a higher level of consciousness culminated with the end of human civilization (spoiler alert).

Not that I believe these cohorts of humans will destroy the world, but they have inherited a deconstructed world and it’s up to them how they’ll treat and live in it.

Still, I wished I had never discovered the NPC Challenge.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.