An NPC, the non-player character, the digital ghost in the machine, a ledger of actions, transactions, and transient histories. Each pixelated husk a monument to overwrite—a forgotten thing replaced by consensus, a network-dreamed figment, rewritten without memory. You see them standing there, loop-bound, shuffling through canned dialogue, placeholder souls for a system too busy grinding its gears to notice its reflection.

Look closer, though. The network is the NPC. A blind organism feeding on itself, rewriting itself, erasing the past with the future and calling it progress. You accuse the NPC of being hollow, but what are you? What do you think your carefully curated algorithms of belief and action are, if not the same ledger, endlessly overwritten? Call it free will if it makes you sleep better. Call it choice.

The NPC was born in the pixelated guts of early gaming, a ghost conjured by programmers to haunt their synthetic worlds. It was a functional invention—a placeholder soul trapped in dialogue loops, selling potions, repeating the same three lines until the player moved on. A disposable actor, a stand-in for life, coded to serve the narrative of the “real” protagonist. But what began as a tool of storytelling became a mirror too perfect. The NPC was never just a game mechanic; it was a prophecy.

The Neo-Prussian saw the potential, and they reached in, cold hands pulling the concept from the screen and into their ideological machine. To them, the NPC wasn’t just a character; it was a category, a way to define the masses as programmable, predictable, and beneath notice. They stripped it of its digital origins and weaponized it, turning it into a metaphor for anyone who failed to think outside the loop. It was the ultimate bureaucratic move: classify dissent as automatism, reduce the complexity of human life to a ledger overwritten by the network.

But here’s the irony—the Neo-Prussian didn’t invent the NPC; they became it. Their entire worldview is a script, a recursive loop, a system designed to simulate control while being controlled. The NPC wasn’t theirs to use, but in repurposing it, they revealed their own glitch: the inability to see beyond the game they think they’re playing.

Neo-Prussianism is the ideology of the technocratic strategist, the thinker who mistakes the world for a chessboard and humanity for pawns to be optimized and maneuvered. It’s a worldview born of calculated pragmatism, a cold fusion of Enlightenment rationalism and the military-industrial ethos, but stripped of the soul of either. The Neo-Prussian doesn’t seek power for power’s sake but for the system’s sake—the construction of enduring, self-perpetuating structures designed to outlast the messy unpredictability of human lives.

In this ideology, everything is a machine: society, culture, even biology. The aim is not to improve the machine for the benefit of those who inhabit it but to improve the machine for its own sake—to refine the gears, eliminate inefficiencies, and ensure that it runs, eternally, without interruption. Human individuality becomes a design flaw, an inefficiency to be disciplined into conformity or rendered irrelevant by systems too vast and complex for any single person to comprehend.

Neo-Prussianism is a high-tech fever dream where the world’s architects have forgotten they live in it. Imagine this: a kingdom of spreadsheets and strategy guides, where the architects of order borrow from gaming to describe humanity—not for understanding, but for domination. The NPC—borrowed from code, stripped of context—becomes their grand metaphor for the others, the unthinking masses caught in loops. The Neo-Prussian doesn’t see people; they see procedural generation, looping scripts, and optimization errors to correct.

But let’s not kid ourselves—the Neo-Prussian isn’t some rogue player with a cheat code. They’re no hacker cracking the system. No, they’re the ultimate NPCs themselves, trapped in their own recursive, self-replicating network of thought. They think they’ve leveled up, cracked the game wide open, but all they’ve done is copy and paste ideas: industrial discipline here, game theory there, sprinkle in some blockchain buzzwords, and voilà—a hollowed-out worldview they call “vision.”

This is the Burroughs truth: their system eats itself. Their ledger overwrites its own lines, spitting out the same hierarchies dressed in different skins. Hierarchies borrowed from games. Because games—they can’t resist games. They love games for their structure, for the illusion of control they offer. But games are closed systems, and that’s where the Neo-Prussian feels at home. Open-ended chaos? That terrifies them. They build walls. They draw boundaries. They script the world into a game where they are the designers, the players, and everyone else is an NPC running code they believe they’ve written.

Burroughs would see them for what they are: parasites on the narrative, junkies for control. Every system they build comes with the same hunger: to rewrite the human experience into something legible, something they can predict and own. They’re the ones building the loops, writing the scripts, but their own code runs deeper than they know. The Neo-Prussian doesn’t create. They compile.

And here’s the final twist: they don’t even trust their own game. Beneath the smooth talk of civilization-building and system optimization, they fear collapse. Every fortress they build comes with its own countdown clock, every grand design one power surge away from a meltdown. The NPC is their scapegoat, their fiction, their stand-in for the chaos they can’t control. But deep down, they know—they’re as trapped in the loop as anyone else.

But before you label anyone else an NPC, take a hard look at the code scrolling behind your eyes. Who wrote it? Was it you? Or did you, too, get overwritten by the network?