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Peak Sold Nearly 2 Million Copies Last Week During Steam Sale
Peak secured a staggering number of copies sold last week on Steam during a sale, which remains live and could push figures even higher.
The post Peak Sold Nearly 2 Million Copies Last Week During Steam Sale appeared first on Insider Gaming.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard. When you nudge the "buy" button a few pixels over and see how sales rise or fall, you're interacting with people as a mass. The dashboard tells you how "sales" respond to a change in the UI, but not how *people* are affected by that change.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The dashboard can't tell you whether the change meant some people couldn't locate a buy-button and thus didn't get a thing they needed, nor can it tell you whether some people bought something they regretted.
Analytics allow you to relate to people the like a Simcity player, by making a zoning change and observing the population-scale outcomes: put a road through a residential block and watch the traffic numbers improve while the happiness of the sims in that block declines.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But there's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit *lots* of people. You have to be willing to cheat your investors by lying about "full-self driving," you have to be willing to maim your workers, you have to be willing to rain space debris down on people near your launchpad.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If you think of those people as truly real - as being just as capable as you are of experiencing stress, sorrow, fear and anxiety - you couldn't possible set these crimes in motion. You have to view these people as NPCs, devoid of the rich interiority that you marinate in.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
William Gibson described this mindset beautifully in *Idoru*, in a scene where a TV executive describes his audience:
> Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
> It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.
(Not for nothing, Musk frequently pumps millions of dollars into elections in the hopes of influencing all those NPCs into voting for his favored candidates, irrespective of whether those candidates will make those voters better off:)
pbswisconsin.org/news-item/mus…
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Musk's plan to pull back from politics follows flop in Wisconsin court election
PBS Wisconsin (Here & Now)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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:
msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinio…
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Elon Musk's softening of the block feature on X is bewildering
Zeeshan Aleem (MSNBC)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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.
npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-53212…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For Kant, this is so odious that it violates the "categorical imperative":
plato.stanford.edu/entries/per…
Or, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax put it:
> Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.
brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com…
But when you see 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:
businessinsider.com/spacex-pai…
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SpaceX paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who accused Elon Musk of sexual misconduct
Rich McHugh (Business Insider)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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:
highagency.com/
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High Agency in 30 Minutes - George Mack
www.highagency.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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:
pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuc…
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Pluralistic: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s ‘Careless People’ (23 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's no wonder that Zuck thinks that chatbots can replace our friends:
fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zu…
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:
pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah…
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Mark Zuckerberg’s dream for AI chatbots to become your friend is as unhealthful as ‘junk food,’ Hinge CEO says
Sydney Lake (Fortune)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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:
x.com/sama/status/159947183025…
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 weild their power over.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.
*Billionaires just don't think we're real*.
eof/
moggie
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Gamers have been using "NPC" as a pejorative for years now.
@pluralistic
Cory Doctorow
in reply to moggie • • •Claire, The Ultimate Worrier
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Marijke Luttekes
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •I was not prepared for *that* image to show up on my timeline.
The eyes, especially. Creepy.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Marijke Luttekes • • •Timothy Wolodzko
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Timothy Wolodzko • • •Pheonix
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
eLearningTechie
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
NOS 🅰️ ®️ ✝️ U
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •> In some important sense, those people don't actually exist for Musk.In some important sense, those people don't actually exist for Musk.
Small editorial mistake, i guess?
Cory Doctorow
in reply to NOS 🅰️ ®️ ✝️ U • • •bm
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •I think billionaires believe that every single step of technological advancement, throughout all of human history, has been in the service of ignoring other, unreal humans.
Whoever built the first human shelter, clearly, CLEARLY he was the ur-sigma male, the zenith of agency of his day, the Adam from whom all these great men descend from! Whereas the rest of us, all our ideas have been secondhand ever since; the second shelter clearly, CLEARLY was built by the first NPC.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
kris
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Toni Aittoniemi
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Chris Brand
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •noodlejetski
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •noodlejetski :verified_gay: (@noodlejetski@masto.ai)
MastodonCory Doctorow reshared this.