Caught in the loops of digital agency panic On NPCs and internet addicts

This paper seeks to recontextualise and update Timothy Melley’s concept of ‘agency panic’ to think about current discourses around online media influence and addiction. According to Melley, agency panic concerns a set of anxieties linked to the diminished sense of agency, which he sees as escalating after the Second World War. Agency panic is, for him, rooted in the counterfactual expectation of full autonomy, a fantasy that is constantly undermined by the growing influence of global networks of communication and ​capital. In our paper, we examine how an even more networked and distributed sense of agency panic manifests today by engaging with two different figures of contemporary digital culture: the non-playable character (NPC) and the internet addict. First, we look at how, in online conspiracy discourse, the NPC is the product of a process of othering whereby the conspiratorial subject externalises its own sense of compromised agency in digital environments, allowing it to sustain the fantasy of its own autonomy and independence from these environments. From there, we examine different discourses of addiction linked to online cultures as manifestations of digital agency panic. Through the language of addiction, and by promoting the ideal of autonomy as individual self-control, these discourses stigmatise and pathologise users’ various dependencies and interrelations with digital devices and services. Building on our analysis of NPC and addiction discourses, we then suggest that the panic-ridden fantasy of the liberal sovereign subject often serves as a pipeline to reactionary, misogynist, or neoliberal immunopolitical cultures set on policing the boundaries between the self and the inferior or unwanted other. We conclude by speculating on how a more distributed understanding of agential self might serve as an antidote to these immunopolitical tendencies.