Stock Character Syndrome

Main Character Syndrome Wouldn't Be Such a Problem if the Characters Were Three-Dimensional

“Sad Clown Looking in Mirror,” courtesy of Anna Stills

One of the many self-diagnoses that have run riot on TikTok for the past two years is Main Character Syndrome. Not as serious or damning as narcissism, MCS is when you think your life is a movie and you are the main character. As Charlie Squire says in her Substack evil female, the Internet has flattened us to the point where we are only legible as stock characters. I would argue that this is the syndrome we should be worried about.

Personal Style Is Dead And The Algorithm Killed It

While social media may not have directly caused this syndrome, it is as good a breeding ground for it as ground beef molded by unwashed hands is for an E. Coli outbreak. The hashtag labeling system that Twitter popularized has done an especially fine job of that. Even the most poignant, vulnerable, personal expressions on there are often saddled to mental health hashtags like #depression #anxiety that not only limit the depth of what was just said, but also the audience for it. Supposedly using the hashtags increases SEO optimization, but this is yet another social media scratch-off con job. An appropriate hashtag will not help you bulldoze past Lana Del Rey’s sad girl tweets. Especially as Google increasingly puts sponsored content on the front page, connections and status IRL are more likely to get your content seen. Even the extremely online would be well advised to engage with other Twitter users through likes, comments, even DMs than to simply slap on a hashtag as a weak Hail Mary play. On the off chance that it pays off, what is actually gained? Or, to the point, what is lost? Are they there for you or are they there for the two-dimensional avatar you have created? Is this a gain for you or for the mental illness mascot you have calcified into?

Stock Character Syndrome is a disease with many faces. The neurotic. The jock. The beauty queen. The crackpot. The wiseass. The bad bitch. The player. The punk. The DJ. The folkie. All of these and more have been around for decades and were not invented online. Perhaps for this reason TikTok felt it necessary to invent even more stock characters. Feral girl. Rockstar girlfriend. Trad wife. Bimbo. Barbie. Coastal grandma. E-boy. Chad. Sad girl. Femcel. Solar punk.

One stock character that has been around for thousands of years is the clown. As podcasts gained popularity, stand-ups gave us such a candid look at their backstage lives that some comedians, like Pete Holmes and Marc Maron, have even reported that audiences were more eager to hear about their day to day than hearing some well-crafted bit about relationships.

As stand-ups have gained depth, today’s new clowns have actually retreated into being more clown-like than most stand-ups, with physical comedy and sound effects playing better with the global audience of TikTok than wordy monologues or freeform conversations. Comedy is not the only thing being flattened by TikTok. Musicians that are singer-songwriters are losing out to pop hopefuls with songs under three minutes with no pre-chorus or third chorus.

One stock character that has gotten a lot of press lately is the nepo baby. Many are baffled by the recent interest: from the beginning of Hollywood, being the child of a movie star was a fast pass for success. But 1920s Hollywood did not have nepo babies with Instagram accounts mentioned in US Weekly. A nepo baby may have unfairly gotten an audition, but they had to act. They didn’t have the luxury of getting showered with attention for a picture they took of themselves at Republique. Back then, a newspaper photographer had to take the picture and deem it fit to print. But today’s nepo babies scan as spoiled beauty queens and vapid himbos. An illuminating contrast can be made with acclaimed director Paul Thomas Anderson, whose father worked at ABC. Paul Thomas Anderson is widely believed to be a genius though. His craftsmanship inoculates him from being a stock character, let alone a nepo baby.

Paradoxically, the NPC (non-player character) phenomenon is comprised of stock characters, but the NPCs themselves aren’t always the ones who are the stock characters. On Reddit, Twitter and 4Chan, many right-wingers and post-liberals use the term NPC as an insult to denigrate any liberal that seems to stick to the Democrat talking points and hashtags. But, as this otherwise alarmist video brilliantly points out, when TikTokers do man-on-the -street interviews with alleged NPCs, it turns out that the NPCs, being older, lonelier, possibly mentally ill, do not fit into the category of “normal” that the younger interviewer has. Meaning failure to present yourself as a stock character appropriate for an older person (rascally grandpa, coastal grandma) might get you labeled as an NPC when, actually, it is the interviewer themselves who does a fine job fitting into the stock character of Obnoxious TikTok Brat.

This is to say nothing about the actual NPCs online: the spambots and AI monstrosities that have proliferated to the point of inspiring a conspiracy theory of how most people online are actual bots. Though this theory has been summarily dismissed, a news story earlier this year about AI gaining sentience hasn’t been as easy to shoo away. The problem, as Erik Hoel perceptively points out, is that the scientific community still doesn’t have a strong theory or definition of consciousness. What a time! As AI becomes more and more three dimensional, humans become more and more one-dimensional so the machine god can bestow them with the heavenly gift of fame.

John Locke famously concluded that since the soul is too nebulous a concept to discuss, it is not worth philosophical inquiry like it was in classical times. But was Locke’s son preening in front of his phone trying to become a Pretty Boy for empty validation from an audience, half of which might not even exist?

Luke Burgis would no doubt posit that this has to do with Silicon Valley’s rampant utilitarian philosophy violently disrupting the previously tranquil waters of reason and faith. Through movements like Rational Altruism, reason has approached religion. And, as I previously mentioned, Eastern philosophy was bowdlerized into McMindfulness, keeping what the average liberal coastal American deemed useful and mindlessly throwing away whatever was difficult to contend with. John Locke, whose philosophy is as central to liberalism as Marx’s is to Marxism, famously concluded that since the soul is too nebulous a concept to discuss, it is not worth philosophical inquiry like it was in classical times. But was Locke’s son preening in front of his phone trying to become a Pretty Boy for empty validation from an audience, half of which might not even exist?

Not only is it important to wrestle with what the soul is or what consciousness is, but another hopefully effective countermeasure against Stock Character syndrome is acknowledging the root of the problem. The very reason the Internet was invented in the first place was to collect and organize data on counterinsurgents. From its inception, in other words, the Internet was meant to shrink humans down to bite-sized data points that can fit easily into box on a grid. Or, as James Bridle so eloquently puts it in New Dark Age:

Computational thinking insists on the easy answer, which requires the least amount of cognitive effort to arrive at. Moreover, it insists that there is an answer – one, inviolable answer that can be arrived at – at all. The ‘debate’ on climate change, where it is not a simple conspiracy of petrocapitalism, is characterised by this computational inability to deal with uncertainty. Uncertainty, mathematically and scientifically understood, is not the same as unknowing. Uncertainty, in scientific, climatological terms, is a measure of precisely what we do know. And as our computational systems expand, they show us ever more clearly how much we do not know.

But even the inventors of the computer and the Internet had no idea how willingly people were willing to squeeze themselves into the grid boxes.

If Jonathan Haidt is to be believed, then Gen Z might be the most vulnerable to Stock Character Syndrome. According to Haidt, Gen Z children, due to helicopter parenting, were not properly socialized on playgrounds with other children their own age. With this context in mind, imagine how terrifying it must have been to enter a dizzying new world of Instagram and selfies! Is it any wonder that these teens might opt to become stock characters like they may see in a teenage soap or like the influencers who seem so free from the burden of anxiety? Or, if they have anxiety, wouldn’t it make more sense to bring “awareness” to it like so and so who tweeted their way into a book deal? I do not have the fondest playground memories, but the playground in many ways forged the person I am today and I am infinitely grateful that I didn’t have TikTok as a teen. MTV did a fine enough job pressuring teens to become either fit dance club royalty or outrageously rebellious alt rockers (or mall gangstas of course). But at least these were trends that came every few years, not every few months.

Times have gotten so strange, I am considering rereading Carl Jung, someone whom I long dismissed as unscientific and woo woo mystical. I have no choice but to consider his theory of archetypes though. Jung believed that we all have mythic, ancient characters nestled withing our collective unconscious. Many of these characters resemble the stock characters that we play online. But, while archetypes manifest certain characteristics consciously, it is a Jungian psychoanalyst’s job to reveal to the patient what archetypes unwittingly control their lives. By being made aware of the archetypes (notice the plural here) that control us, we can theoretically cultivate a more whole, three-dimensional self that is motivated by self knowledge rather than self absorption.

I cannot in good faith even suggest this as a Band-Aid, let alone a lifelong treatment. But I hope that spreading awareness of Stock Character Syndrome (which you can do by forwarding and sharing this post) will lead to a future where the machines have no fucking idea what to do with us.