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2018·The platform era

The NPC meme

A grey blank face used to accuse other people of not really thinking.

You might remember it as NPC Wojak, Are you an NPC?

A meme

This Moment began as a post on social media, not as a video upload.

The story

What this was

A 4chan post of 7 July 2016 asked are you an NPC, borrowing the video-game term for a character with scripted lines. Drawn as a featureless grey Wojak, it became a standard way to dismiss people as unthinking, and by the 2018 American midterms it had moved from image boards to news coverage; Twitter removed over 1,500 accounts using it that October.

It first appeared in 2018, during the platform era.

You were there

More from 2018

The same internet

The platform era

More like this

Related

Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a post on social media, not as a video upload.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
A 4chan post of 7 July 2016 asked are you an NPC, borrowing the video-game term for a character with scripted lines. Drawn as a featureless grey Wojak, it became a standard way to dismiss people as unthinking, and by the 2018 American midterms it had moved from image boards to news coverage; Twitter removed over 1,500 accounts using it that October.
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