Some Tech Guy Wants To Turn Poor People Into Real-World NPCS

Remember the last time a cryptocurrency evangelist showed any semblance of humanity? Neither do we, but our likely naive belief in humankind brokind has led us to believe we found something that is just too heart-wrenching even for them.

"Big Chief" had found a lot of success on Critterz, a for-profit Minecraft-based game right from the get-go. His recipe? Simple, having a bunch of kids in the Philippines building for him 8 hours a day in exchange for some chump change in the game's once-valuable cryptocurrency. 

Even though it turned a profit for a while, he saw his investments dwindling because of the crypto crash of last year and because for cryptocurrencies to gain value, their users need to keep them and not sell them right away. It turns out that holding (or #HODLing if you're weird) isn't possible when you need to spend all the money that you own to survive. His tiny but cruel empire ended up crashing down completely when even the people behind Minecraft understood that NFTs suck, but this inspired a somehow even crappier person to come up with an even nastier plan – yeah, this isn't the worst guy in this piece.

Mikhai Kossar, a guy from a firm called Wolves DAO, an NFT investment firm that keeps an eye on the games market to see how they can make it worse has looked at the Critterz case and thought about a "solution". This solution would have people (probably underage) working full-time as NPCs in video game worlds. This is straight-up vile, yes, but also embarrassing because we don't need to read the works of a little-known philosopher to know it is wrong. This exists in popular culture already. It's called Westworld, a novel/film/tv series that tries to show that having a theme park whose inhabitants are sentient creatures that exist solely to be abused by rich visitors doesn't rule, actually. And if even that's too hard to understand, then at least try reading this tweet:

Top Image: Critterz