Thank you for the roses

TikTok, NPCs, and the pitfalls of agency gambling

Welcome to Essay Architecture. If you’re new to this Substack, you might want to start with A Pattern Language or Year of the Wiki or Best American Essays? because today’s post has nothing to do with essays. Today’s post is the first act of a new commitment: to share a monthly essay that goes off-script. This one’s about NPC streamers on TikTok (the pinnacle of being on-script). I see them as the most extreme expression of Creator Economy incentives, and a reminder to value your agency. It’s a trip. Since it’s long, I recommend reading it in a browser so it doesn’t get cut off in your email client (and if you read on desktop, you get the bonus of hovering footnotes). Enjoy.

Would you slap yourself in the face 250 times a day if it paid for your wedding? Would you pretend to electrocute yourself on camera for an hour a day if it paid more than your full-time job? Would you lock yourself in your room for a year if it brought you a million followers? No? What about 10 million? These “hypothetical exchange scenarios” used to be safely contained in the imagination of high school cafeterias. Now, thanks to TikTok, there’s a marketplace to reward life-changing money to the shameless few who can stick to a gimmick.

Pinkydoll was the first human to get famous for letting thousands of spectators simultaneously control her body. She went viral because Elon retweeted a clip of her livestream (twice). All of Twitter saw confusing clips of an influencer that appeared to be short-circuiting, but most of us didn’t get the underlying mechanic: the crowd pays for emojis that trigger pre-decided moves. So for 1.4 cents, you can flash an emoji rose on her screen, and then she’ll sniff that invisible rose and say, “thank you for the rose!” The streamers who do this are known as NPCs, non-player characters. Like a background character in a video game, they have no agency. They’re only programmed to do a handful of tricks, over and over.

If you’ve never seen someone get possessed by their audience for money, this video might be helpful context.

Supposedly, Pinkydoll is the queen of the genre. Apparently, she made $10k per stream at her peak.¹ Inevitably, she spawned thousands of imitators. I never imagined this could be a legitimate way to make money online until I learned there were $3.48 billion of in-app transactions in 2023. On any given day there’s millions of dollars for NPCs to fight over. Napkin math suggests the TikTok Live tipping market could be twice the size of the Substack subscription market.²

I decided to install TikTok and investigate this oddity. I mounted my phone, went to the Live section, swiped until I found an NPC streamer, and then live-wrote whatever I saw in extreme detail.³ Often it was an intimate affair: just me, a room of 45 strangers, and someone attempting to milk us for tips in exceedingly strange ways. Since these algorithms interpret every second you look at something as permission to show you more of it, and since I’d spend minutes word-sketching each streamer, it led me into an NPC K-Hole that I’ll never forget.

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 technocircus. Despite my analytical lens to all of this, I still got hypnotized from exposure—I found myself whistling jingles, repeating catchphrases (out loud, to myself), and thinking “I could do this…”—and so I deleted TikTok after a week.

19 months later, I feel compelled to publish this. It’s not just because TikTok is in limbo,⁴ or because this trend re-emerged,⁵ but because it so clearly shows the machinery of the Creator Economy. It’s a warning. As platforms tighten the feedback loops between consumers and creators, the incentives get stronger and stranger.⁶ I’m not saying we’re all about to pivot to zombie streaming; but the NPC is a symptom and symbol of our times. When we over-optimize for metrics and monetization, we turn into mechanical cartoons of ourselves.

I want this essay to read like a cross between a sociological media study and a 30-minute TikTok binge that makes you feel nauseous (sorry). My goal is to convince you that, in an age where platforms tempt you to gamble your agency for engagement, you should go off script.

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Dancing for tips in the uncanny valley:

How does one make money on that dancing app? Substack has subscriptions. YouTube shares ad revenue. TikTok lets you tip creators during live streams, but instead of paying them in USD, you pick between a hundred emojis that range in value from 1.4 cents to $500. TikTok gamified tipping. A single feature—“video gifts”—changed the role of a creator from an artist-in-control to a shtick-designer

A menu of emojis you can buy for your favorite TikTok Like creator

Here’s an orienting example: Imagine opening the Live feed to find a very short but very jacked Russian bodybuilder in front of a table of weights in escalating sizes. For 1 rose—the cheapest gift—he’ll curl the tiny weight. But for 1 corgi (worth $4.18), he'll curl the biggest weight. The rules are written on cardboard behind him. Someone is now gifting roses as fast as they can tap, and now you’re watching this little man with huge biceps furiously pump out 139 curls in a row with a comically small weight, switching arms as necessary. For an insignificant amount of money, you mess with strangers and make them dance. At least he gets fit.

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 character—a pixellated, mindless Ash Ketchum—with real humans, with real hopes. They created a marketplace to match hordes of paying clickers with people willing to be controlled.

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 through a 24-hour voting window, the Idol becomes a mechanical puppet, operated in real-time by a faceless Other that is hypnotizing itself.

Since the creator is incentivized to act like a robot, they try to look like a robot too. It feels ethically weird to control a human-looking stranger like a slave, but robots want you to control them. Machines have no agency, free-will, or preference in outcome, and so a machine aesthetic is an implicit invitation. They consent. Streamers alter their looks, movements, and voice—pushing themselves into that eerie space where things look almost but not quite human: the uncanny valley. I saw clowns, angels, furries, and mechanical drag queens. I heard abnormal voice impressions of babies, demons, and cartoon characters. I even saw an audience control a robot ventriloquist who controlled a small robot hand puppet. 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 quite good at pretending to be human.

You know those street-performers⁸ who look like robots and stand still for hours, only changing poses after you tip them? We have upshifted that into a new Internet phenomenon. NPC streamers are the robo-buskers on the sidewalks of the Internet, except they don’t have to paint themselves silver (though some do) nor have extraordinary motor control of their limbs (only 3 in ~500 did). Instead, they act like a background character from Grand Theft Auto. They slowly bob in place with their arms forward, awaiting your instructions, easing the tension with the Wii theme song on loop.

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

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Outliers in appearance:

When I first came across Pinkydoll on TikTok Live there were 44,000 people watching, eclipsing the attendance of most Mets or Yankees games. She’d iterate through dozens of memorized catchphrases with precision and stamina. In addition to “thank you for the roses!” she’s most known for saying, “Mmm!” [slurp] “Ice Cream So Good! Yes, yes, yes.” A barrage of ice cream cones would flood the screen, and she’d get stuck in a slurp-loop.⁹ Whenever she exposed her tongue, you’d see her face turn staticky, revealing that some deep-fake makeup filter must be on. Unlike baseball stadiums, I assume 1-5% of the crowd was actively masturbating.

Many of the top NPC streamers are pornstars. In addition to making money from video gifts, their streams are top-of-funnel marketing for their OnlyFans (where creators earn ~$5b per year). Of course there’s no nudity allowed on TikTok,¹⁰ but it’s not against the content policy to moan “yes” and fake an orgasm. This subgenre of NPC streaming is like interactive techno-burlesque: a performative fusion of choreography, costume, and satire, all with sexual undertones. My guess is that the same people who pay for 1:1 Internet camming are also paying for NPC streaming. The difference: hyper-optimized fetish matchmaking happens in digital daylight. A few weirdos get to control a public sexbot, and the scrollerbys don’t even know it’s softcore sex work; they just stop and rubberneck like it’s a puzzling car accident, and so the crowd grows.

Amidst the bright colors and hypnotizing loops, comments rush down the screen faster than you can read: “bleach my eyes,” speculations on the decline of the west, a conspiracy theory on Pinkydoll being an MKUltra project, talks of a sex tape, hundreds of people sharing their cell phone numbers, shilling for her crypto scam, $CREAM, and advertisements for her new cohort-based course, “How to Be Popular.”

It’s not just the attractive NPCs who hold attention and go viral, it’s anyone who looks … different. Take the Surya-Manurung family from Indonesia, where 4 of 5 siblings carry a rare genetic disease causing their face to change shape and swell over time. They have converted their looks into influence (3.2 million TikTok followers) more successfully than model/influencer Emily Ratajowski (2.7 million). I found them singing high-pitched karaoke covers for roses and hearts to 5,200 people. “AMERICA, WE LOVE YOU!” “CALIFORNIA, WE LOVE YOU!” When you look into the purchasing power parity (PPP) of the Indonesian Rupiah, you realize they’re making a month’s salary in a single stream. The comment section was cautious and polite, and took great offense to anyone calling them “lizard people.”

A satirical ad from 1847, criticizing the sideshows of the circus

The difference between this and “Deformito-Mania” of the 19th century is that you can now go direct-to-consumer without a middleman. TikTok has a disabled community that is building awareness and monetizing their self-expression. A lot of what I’ve seen is inspirational,¹¹ but I also can’t help but wonder if TikTok is exploiting them. Consider the finances of P.T. Barnum’s circus: a few made extreme wealth, like General Tom Thumb—a 3’-4” dwarf who became internationally famous for his Napoleon impression—while most acts only made 1% of the revenue they generated.

Would TikTok intentionally skew their algorithms to get people hooked on the unfamiliar, and then take a huge cut? I found many Reddit comments of this nature:

“My feed shows people with severe burns to the point where they have no face whatsoever, or are born with horrible congenital defects where they look like they're in a third world location and severely suffering … [it’s] honestly super fucking upsetting to me. I've never once liked or watched any of this content, and I continuously report that I'm not interested…, yet it still comes up on my [For You Page].”

On TikTok Live I frequently saw a DJ with no jaw, people with rectangle heads, people with backwards heads, paraplegics, a man with a micro-penis willing to answer all of your questions, and a girl with no arms who shows us how to apply makeup with your feet. Some do their own thing, some follow the NPC format, and some just ask for likes or medicine.

It’s known that physical outliers¹² draw crowds, and so TikTok’s suite of dysmorphic camera filters helps creators go viral. I saw a guy claim to have “Waseman syndrome,” causing his eyes to be offset (one eye was closer to his forehead, and the other down by his lips). Given the range of severe conditions I’d seen, he had me fooled. But I sensed something was off when he said, “If we boost this to 100,000 likes, I’ll remove my deformity filter so you can see what my face really looks like.”

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Recreational Torture Markets:

I often saw a guy sleeping on a platform suspended over a pool of water, and one time I considered it: should I pull the trigger? I was one of 12 people watching. For less than a dollar, I could participate in this digital dunk tank. I wasn’t sure if my emoji was connected to the dunk machine through the TikTok API, or if an off-screen friend pulled a lever. In any case, I hesitated. Is it wrong to dunk this stranger even though he’s inviting me to? Was he actually sleeping, or faking? Could this money help him? Or does he have a handler who takes a cut? As I did the moral calculus, someone else made him plunge. He fell into the water, and on turned the strobe lights and Korean party music. He did a dance and yelled into the camera: “I LOVE YOU!”

Obviously, violence is banned on TikTok Live, but some NPCs invite you to inflict mild forms of torture. Nothing illegal. Nothing extreme (no cutting off fingers). Just the low-pain laugh-inducing psychological torture. Even though there’s consent and it's packaged as a game, something feels weird when it's online. As a kid I had no issue with a dunk tank at a carnival, but it just feels wrong through a smartphone: (1) since you’re not physically there, the consequences don’t register, (2) you’re part of a mob and they can’t see your face, (3) there’s an endless feed of ways to inflict displeasure on strangers for leisure, and (4) you have to pay for it with roses.

So who pays for this? I’d guess it’s someone with a casual attitude over juvenile mockery. Perhaps it’s TikTok’s core demographic: high schoolers.

As a teenager I’d routinely contribute $1 or $3 to watch somebody do something stupid. Most kids wouldn’t budge for under $5, so we’d pool together our leftover lunch money until the reward was big enough for someone to cave. It was the thrill of the hour. There was an escalating suspense as the mob-leader raised funding. Who would it be today? Over time, you learned your friend’s price and preference for pain. For example, I’d never drink a “golden cobra”—a concoction of all the leftover drinks + condiments, usually mustard—even if it went up to $25. But for less than $10, I’d get hit in the face with an industrial rubber band.

At a single lunch table, there’s only so much experimentation and price discovery that can happen; but when you connect 10 million high schoolers through a gamified market of recreational torture, there are no limits. It’s a gig economy for humiliation. It’s Jackass as a platform.

Most gimmicks took the form of traditional high school stunts. BradySlaps slapped himself for every rose. One kid had different emojis mapped to different condiment chugs. Another kid would rapidly hit +1 on a calculator on his quest to a million, tempting you to pay him $20 to reset him at 0.¹³ But it’s the stranger stunts that paid well. Electrocution Girl would react to lightning bolt emojis by pretending to have mini-seizures, and so she spasmed around her room to the sound of Blink 182 hits. She later revealed she made $68/hour doing this. The weirder the stunt, the more likely you are to make McKinsey rates.

TikTok does what they can to prevent harm,¹⁴ but they can’t seem to catch trouble in real-time. It took them at least 39 days to ban Bucket Hat Burke, whose plan was to lock himself in his room until he reached 1 million followers. He got tens of thousands.

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Fated to Pretend:

When everything is anchored in pretending, you lose your grip on what’s real.

One night I saw a young black kid playing out the trope of being a slave on a plantation: he was in overalls and a straw hat, with a cotton field in the background, rehashing racist stereotypes around fried chicken and shoot-ups, all with a goofy frozen smile (again, bobbing in place to the Wii theme song). Like a professional wrestler, a good NPC knows how to provoke a crowd. The comment section started bidding on him like it was a live auction ($10. $12. $25!). Of course it’s an act, which means someone can be disturbingly racist and you don’t know if they’re part of the bit or not.

A few minutes in, I saw a comment flash by, saying he’d get banned from TikTok if he didn’t end the stream. I wondered if human trafficking is a content category that companies can’t tolerate, even if it’s satire. $120, now. Given the torrent of comments, did he miss the warning? I panicked for him: he had 2,425 followers, and I felt the pain of losing years of work over a stupid stunt. $300. For the first time, I participated. I jumped in to try to save him. To break through the message flood, I left short, repetitive comments like, “Did you see the message from TikTok?!” and “You’re about to get banned!” Eventually, someone replied to me: “Dude, those perma-ban warnings are fake.” Apparently, NPC streamers try to psyche out each other with fake warnings so they don’t climb the TikTok leaderboard faster than them. Fooled again.

Even though there’s no actual pain being inflicted, some NPCs will pretend to be in extreme pain to (1) heighten the drama, and (2) tap into sadism. Once I saw a teenager hysterically crying as he held a bicycle pump connected to a 6’ balloon above his head; it was filled with white powder and grew with every rose. He pleaded with you to stop. There’s a recurring “Disturb My Job” gimmick, where a guy works at a computer and filters his face to be in a permanent scrunch of pain; every like triggers a maniacal clown laugh, and certain gifts require him to put on a horse head and dance to Gangnam Style. Others appear normal until they have a pretend psychotic meltdown over a specific gift: “NO PANDAS! NO ROSES!”

In between the various rose competitions, you’ll sometimes swipe straight into a cinder block shelter in Syria, with a shot of a father with 6 kids, all reading Islamic prayers, with a message saying, “Help. No Food. War,” and a PayPal link. This is not a stunt. They have very real concerns and likely have no idea how video gifts work on TikTok Live.

The juxtaposition of tragedy and satire, pranks and pain, all united under the same emoji economy, creates weird misunderstandings. One time I flicked into a hospital room. She had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a blood cancer of the lymph nodes. 100 people watching. She had light eyebrows, freckles, and a shaved head—maybe 12 years old. “If you’re new here, make sure you hit that button to follow along my journey.” She told us she was about to get chemo at 6pm. 135 people now. 13,000 likes. She said she loved supportive comments, and then started asking her audience for a “universe,” the highest-priced video gift on TikTok Live, worth $500. You could see the ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights above her, but someone asked in the comments: “are you really in a hospital?”

The constant trickery creates a context where everything is a game, even when it’s not. I saw a few homeless people sleeping on a sidewalk covered in blankets. For 399 coins, you can wake them up with a stupid song and make them do the Chicken Dance. I was there when someone did it. The song played, but unlike the kid who was fake-sleeping in the dunk tank, they were actually passed out. Their unresponsiveness gave them more autonomy than any of the NPCs, but the crowd was pissed: “WTF, this is fake.”

For every devastating thing I saw, there was at least one moment that was equally uplifting. I donated a few thousand likes to five Kenyans dancing through a cloud of dust and emojis as they climbed to a million likes, earning the title of the #4 TikTok account in the world that week. Their faces were joyous, either because they loved dancing, or because they were making life-changing money, or both. But even the feel-good winners have a darker function in the rose economy. They are the jackpots on the casino floor. They inspire anyone watching with a new sense of hope (“That is possible. I could do that”). And so more people get roped in to the hope of hacking a market glitch to escape the machinery of their circumstance.

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The pitfalls of agency gambling:

As Pinkydolly went viral, she told Business Insider, “I don’t care about the haters—what’s important is my son is going to have a beautiful life.” She’s a single mom. Before she was Pinkydoll, she was Fedha Fernande Nkoy Sinon: a Canadian small business owner who just went out of business. At her peak, she made a year’s income in ~2 weeks. Pinkydoll effectively won the TikTok lottery,¹⁵ but like all people who suddenly get rich or famous, something backfires. Months later her OnlyFans videos leaked online and she followed up with a post crying that her son would one day find them. The algorithmic williwaw¹⁶ slowed down, and she’s since been looking for new lottery tickets. Today you can find her experimenting with a fusion genre called “glizzy mukbang”—in addition to eating enormous quantities of food on camera in a single sitting, all the food is shaped like a penis: bananas, burritos, or 20 pounds of hot dogs.

Underneath these bizarre antics are fairly regular people—they come online to realize the great promise of the Internet: financial independence through self-publishing. Many NPCs even bake their money problems into their bit. NPC Kyle would yell “Lowe’s doesn’t pay enough!” while holding BBQ tongs in each hand, clicking them to match his words. NPC Dora the Explorer, while doing a perfect impression, would get meta: “You guys are paying for my credit card bill!” She’d tilt her head, smile, and hold it for 15 seconds before speaking again. “You guys are paying for my credit card bill!”

Some NPC streamers “job-stack” and run a TikTok Live session during their shift.¹⁷ The most illuminating example I saw was of an on-site construction worker. #NPC-at-work. He was wearing an orange vest and holding one of those two-sided STOP/SLOW signs to help orient oncoming cars around roadwork. Bobbing in place to the Barbie theme song, he’d react to emojis with “gang gangggg” and “NO GLIZZIES! I’M ALLERGIC!” He filled the silence with meows and banter: “Lookin’ like a fool in public? Yes, yes, yesss. Send roses!” 2.1k live, 25k likes. He’d often break character to focus on his job (to prevent cars from crashing), but then he’d immediately slip back into his trance.

There’s nothing wrong with trading some agency in the moment to unlock more agency in the future. This is called a job. The difference is NPCs gamble all their agency, through a machine aesthetic that is literally dehumanizing. They give up full motor-control for the small chance of making 100x their hourly rate. The reality is that 95% of these streamers don’t make anything, 4% make $10s of dollars, 0.9% make $100s of dollars, and 0.1% make Pinkydoll money. It is an extreme power law distribution, just like the Creator Economy. Both scenes suggest that the most successful will be the least agentic.

As I spent that week on TikTok writing about streamers getting physically captured by their audience, I was getting psychologically captured by my own. I had just gone (semi) viral on Twitter: 100k likes for a thread on Kurt Vonnegut. I was bent on recreating that success by writing more threads, optimizing through metrics, and responding to all the data that was rapidly spilling into my notifications. I really would’ve rather been writing essays, but I just left my full-time job and had no income, and so it felt responsible to gamble with my agency. I thought that if I spent 80% of my writing on niche threads, then I could write myself out of the matrix, and then one day, I could write about whatever I wanted. There are clear aesthetic differences between a literary threadboi and a glizzy mukbang star, but the mechanics are the same: I was an NPC. It worked. My monthly growth rate increased by 12x, but it came with the cost of polluting my attention, my intentions, and my creative practice, and so I gave up growth-hacking after 2 months.

If you imagine yourself creating for the rest of your life, then maybe the best move is to be agentic, starting today. Maybe it goes unnoticed at the scale of weeks and months, but it brings you compounding advantages: (1) The freedom to do whatever you want means you’re less likely to burn out,¹⁸ and more likely to stick around for a decade. (2) By focusing on the work (instead of growth) you’ll eventually make stuff that’s good enough to spread on its own.

Agency is a nice ideal to aspire to, but it requires the courage to be perpetually misunderstood. Agency means you shed through topics, tempos, tones, mediums, and identities faster than the Internet’s refresh rate. The cost of personal evolution is that your audience’s model of you is constantly lagging. You become hard to explain. Every act of creative freedom risks disappointing the people who pledged to support you. Some leave. But many stay to follow your zigzag¹⁹ path. As Internet niches get conquered by bots and content entrepreneurs, I think unpredictability will be refreshing.

To claim agency is to show up to the attention casino and resist many forces, both your natural desire to be liked, and also the gravity of the roulette table. You have to live among algorithms without caving to them. As Emerson said, “[self reliance] is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Of course, TikTok will never admit that it harbors dark patterns and corrupting forces. Now that you know how complicated TikTok Live is, I want you to see how the company markets this feature:

“TikTok LIVE is where the party's at – it's all about real-time fun, self-expression, and letting your creativity shine. Going LIVE on TikTok means unlocking a world of possibilities and connecting with awesome people. It's the place for all creators because it's the place for you to totally be yourself!”

I know that NPCs make up a small percent of TikTok streamers, but to infer that a gamified tipping market is a place to be totally yourself is another sign to me that we’re living through The Great Gaslighting. For almost two decades, social media companies have romanticized their mission to better the world, while they’re secretly shaking the beehive, robbing the agency of a generation, and making extraordinary money from it all.

There is something sinister about making the rose the penny of their economy. Since it’s the cheapest gift, it’s the one everyone sees. It’s become the emblem of a weird system where a mob floods your stream with roses as they judge, thirst, or laugh at you. The symbol of appreciation has been inverted. The flower of beauty, twisted (in Latin, torture means “to twist”). The whole thing feels like circus-as-software, a carnival erupting in every pocket, luring us all to watch or join the freak show, promising gold, without the ringmaster sharing an important term that almost no one knows: TikTok takes 77% of every rose.²⁰

Thanks for everyone who gave feedback on earlier forms of this draft:

Yehudis Milchtein

,

Garrett Kincaid

,

Charlie D. Becker

,

Matt Švarcs Richardson

,

Randall Bennington

,

Becky Isjwara

,

Jeff Giesea

,

James Taylor Foreman

,

Nat Lee

,

Libby Fosters

. And also thanks to everyone who shared thoughts on Notes to help shape my conclusion:

Paul Millerd

,

Ani

,

Ved Shankar

,

DeeJay Hart

,

Janice Campbell

.

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Footnotes:

1. Pinkydoll isn’t necessarily the first or highest paid NPC streamer, but she was the face of the 2023 craze. Natuecoco invented the format in 2021, and there are rumors that Nicki Minaj tried it for an hour and made $100k. While Pinkydoll might have made $10k once, her average stream was probably closer to $2-5k.

2. DeepSeek estimated that TikTok video gifts count for 2/3 of in-app transactions, and so even if the app takes a massive cut, creators could still earn over $500m per year from them. For Substack, I estimate that $259m per year goes to writers (3 million paid subscribers x $8/mo x 90% revenue). Even though NPC streamers are just one breed of gimmick within the TikTok Live ecosystem, it’s interesting but perhaps not surprising to learn that gamified tips for live interactive brainrot are 2x the size of the subscription market for independent publishers.

3. To get a sense of how chaotic it was to experience all of this live, I wanted to share notes of two typical NPC streamers that didn’t make it into the essay.

“NPC JACK BLACK? Sorcerer hands, “Good morning, welcome to the live—a glizzy!?” Two handed slurp. Insane Robin Williams impression. Then, a deep manly voice. Wizard hands. Fake crying for .5 seconds. “I LOVE likes!” A brief moment of self-consciousness: “Ahhhh! I am weird.” Emoji pops up: “ICE cream so GOOOOD morning!” Singing in Italian. Eating corn. (More hyper-insane randomness).

ELMO VOICE. Jacked black guy. Braided hair, bright colors, fake blue eyes, goatee, bling, tie-dye shirt in a half-toga, childish, feminine. Now pretending to have an orgasm. Eating fried chicken off a frying pan. “Wait I’m gonna drop my chicken!” Fake seizure in distress. 1.4k viewers.”

4. The app was banned for a day on January 19, 2025, before getting a 75-day extension from the President. This means endless TikTok think pieces (like this one) until April 4th. Will TikTok be forced to sell? To who? No one is quite sure if Mr. Beast is serious about his intentions to bid on the app, but if that rumor comes true, you can be sure that TikTok will take the form of a stunt marketplace, if not softcore Squid Game.

5. After fizzling out, the NPC trend re-emerged and played a major role in the biggest Twitch stream ever. In December of 2024, Kai Cenat locked him and his friends in his house for 30 days and streamed it. Mafiathon 2 had +50 million unique viewers and 632k peak viewers. It raised $3.6 million and 50% of airtime was NPC streaming. During the day, Kai would mingle with Snoop Dog, Serena Willams, Bill Nye, and other inter-generational celebrities; during the night, you’d watch NPC streamers working the chat in the middle of a room filled with Kai’s friends in sleeping bags. If you paid enough money, a drummer would play a drum solo and wake everyone up. More notably, Kevin Hart said that NPC Miles Morales—dressed as Spiderman, titled “King of NPC,” and rumored to be dating Pinkydoll—was “actually really fucking good.” I imagine that every year we might see an NPC break into public consciousness in ways that are hard to conceive.

6. Nick Land warned us about runaway circuits of feedback between profit and desire that lead to an alien market intelligence that experiments without concern for human reason or judgment. So basically, as markets get more efficient, they make less sense. It harnesses the irrational desires of a mob into demand, and any individual can step up to meet that supply, regardless if they understand it. This reminds me of the office workers in Severance who randomly sort numbers into random folders without knowing why. I saw an NPC streamer post a video where she was severely perplexed at how random her money-maker was.

7. In 2022, a year before NPC streaming went viral,

Gurwinder

published an essay called The Perils of Audience Capture. It featured 24-year-old Nicholas Perry who wanted to build a YouTube audience by “playing violin and extolling the virtues of veganism.” It didn’t click, so he experimented and eventually realized he could go viral by filming himself eating unreasonable, torturous quantities of food. The “mukbang” genre led him to eat more and more, until he gained millions of followers (4.6M+) and hundreds of pounds (411#). He became an inversion of himself—Nikocado Avocado: a loud, obnoxious spectacle, but rich. The rush of virality is enough to corrupt your health and sense of self. He became a useful symbol and a reminder to not lose yourself to external feedback from the market.

Update: In September of 2024, it was revealed that the last two years of Nikocado Avocado content was pre-recorded. He used that time to get healthy and lose 250 pounds. Before he revealed the truth to his audience, he made a villain-like speech to his audience in a panda mask:

“Two steps ahead. I am always two steps ahead. This has been the greatest social experiment of my entire life. It’s alluring. It’s compelling. It’s gripping to observe all these unwell disoriented beings roam the Internet in search of stories, ideas, rivalries, where they feel encourage or engaged, where they involved themselves with the stories and become a product of influence. Thirsty for distraction from time unspent, spoiling their minds yet stimulating them at the same time. It’s brilliant. And it’s dangerous. I feel as if I’m monitoring ants on an ant farm: one follows another, follows another, follows another. It’s mesmerizing. It’s spell-binding. All these little consumers, all of them lost, bored. People. People will consume anything that they’re told to consume... [etc.]”

Comments say it might be remembered as the biggest plot twist of YouTube history.

8. My first impression was that NPC stremain was a form of digital busking, but that’s not the right metaphor. Street performers are often virtuosos with decades of cultivated skill. They are outliers of talent. NPC streamers are outliers of unfamiliarity: they are humans that regress back into the uncanny valley.

9. GlizzyBot is an example of satire about satire. To poke fun at the sexualization of the genre, a normal looking guy would dress up in a hotdog suite, do his best robot impression, deliver catchphrases that were exclusively about blowjobs, and then augment the skit with hydraulic, gagging sound effects as he sucked air. His lines included: “entering glizzy overdrive,” “enhancing grip by 80%,” “enabling eye contact mode,” “frat house mode activated,” etc.

10. Terms and conditions:

According to TikTok's community guidelines, content that is not allowed on a TikTok live stream includes: violence, hate speech, nudity, promoting criminal activities, child sexual abuse material, non-consensual sexual acts, excessive gore, self-harm promotion, sexual solicitation of minors, and content that exploits, abuses, or endangers children; essentially, anything that is considered harmful, offensive, or illegal.

11. I came across someone named Ron from Tuscon, who had been paralyzed for 46 years from a diving accident. There was no gimmick, he was just sharing his wisdom with 1,100 people live, and I wrote this down: “Love life. Life is a gift. I’m here to remind you all that life is a gift. Empathy is what it’s all about. Empathy, not sympathy. It’s a positive emotion. You don’t pity me, you don’t feel sorry for me and my withered limbs. So much was taken away from me, but so much was given back, more than you can imagine.”

12. I struggled to find the right language to describe a broad range of disabilities. If you use a historical term like “freak show,” it’s direct, but obviously offensive. If you use politically correct euphemisms, you remove the negativity, but also the precision. I wonder if the term “outlier” is helpful here. It has no embedded judgment, and instead implies that something is statistically different from a larger set. There are many different ways someone can be an outlier, and in recent years the term has evolved to have positive connotations; outliers are rare, valued, respected. It’s a celebration of being extremely different, and covers situations that are both in and out of your control.

13. This is part of a genre on TikTok I call “pay to ruin a fake game,” except I’m not sure if the people paying know it’s fake. You swipe into somebody manually clicking a counter, and they seem to be somewhere like 999,999,999,999,253. ONLY 750 MORE AND THEY HIT A QUADRILLION? That’s pretty cool. But hey, if you give this guy a “galaxy” (a $14 emoji), he has to start all the way over! As he furiously clicks, he begs you not to give him a galaxy. Some people will give him “roses” ($0.014), which slice him down 100 points or so. He’s basically hovering in the same range until someone gives him $14 USD (this might sound inconsequential, but someone in Burundi only has to trick one person per week to get by).

I couldn’t resist doing the math. Let’s say this guy (with a lot of practice) can get to 500 clicks per minute … it would take him 3.81 million years to get to a quadrillion clicks. This is not just longer than TikTok’s existence, this is roughly 10x longer than Homo sapiens.

And for just $20, you set the ticker back to 0.

14. During the video gift frenzy in the summer of 2023, several Chinese streamers died from binge drinking challenges on Douyin (China’s internal version of TikTok). The app bans drinking, but it didn’t stop them from spawning new accounts each time. Brother Huang knew the risks: his friend died from drinking for tips, just weeks before. But Huang was in serious debt. They found a sign on his wall that said, “money is more important than life.”

15. I used the phrase TikTok lottery as a metaphor, but I should clarify that there are also actual lotteries on TikTok Live. As people donate roses, they get their name written into a pool. I saw one that had 1,082 entries. I had no idea what the prize was or how it would get delivered, but ROSIESPINS had 46.8k likes and she promised she’s spin once we hit 50k. I was hooked and so I waited. “ULUV is the winner!” The prize is … you get to be the first entry in the next round? “Next spin at 100k likes!” as she manually types rose donators into an Excel spreadsheet. Is this endless?

16. A williwaw is a sudden strong gust of wind that comes from the mountains. Feels like a good word for the random, unexplainable, on-and-off algorithmic forces.

17. I swiped into the kitchen of a McDonalds to find two blonde guys vaping and serving orders. Between high-pitched piercing beeps, you’d hear “low on nuggets,” and “y’all need a coke?” Mundane stuff. I was live viewer #54. I watched it climb into the thousands until they finally checked their phone to a, “WHAT THE FUUUUU—.” Comments were rushing in, like “back dude kinda cute.” One of them stared into the screen like a caveman as the other fretted that they’d get fired if they went too viral.

18. Paul Graham’s advice to startups is don’t die, and I think that applies to online creators too. “Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!” Low agency stunts are only sustainable for a very short time period. It’s too random to continue for months without any signs of traction. This is why the movement basically died out. On the other hand, high agency work is internally rewarding.

19. From Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.”

20. TikTok isn’t transparent on what their actual cut it is. It seemed to have started at 50% and then went up to around 70%. This BBC article covers how Syrian refugees who made up to $1,000/hour streaming actually kept less than 30%. Once you have the roses, you also have to convert those into “TikTok coins” so you can convert those back to your currency, which apparently incurs another 10-25% in fees.