Have you ever thought about selling pictures of your feet online? I’m not ashamed to say it’s crossed my mind. It’s not that I have exceptionally lovely feet – in fact, they’re pretty gnarly – it’s just that I like scheming up ways to get rich quick. And, for a while, it seemed like feet were just the ticket. There was a period in 2022 when TikTok was inundated with videos about the photo-selling website FeetFinder; footfluencers were claiming to make thousands of dollars on the site. It was intriguing but also a little suspect … Could you really make a living from your feet? Were there that many foot fetishists out there willing to pay top dollar for a glimpse of a stranger’s toe?
Having just emerged from a research rabbit hole I suggest you don’t enter, it turns out, yes, there is a surprising number of foot fetishists in the world. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to monetize your trotters. It seems a lot of the videos praising FeetFinder on TikTok were actually ads: sponsored content that hadn’t been properly labelled as such. There are probably a few people making OK money posting online foot pics, but it’s not a speedy route to riches.
I’m sorry if I’ve just shattered your dreams about buying a beach house with your feet. But don’t worry, the digital economy has given rise to a constant stream of ridiculous ways to make money. For a short and very stupid period, for example, people became millionaires overnight by trading meme stocks. Then came the NFT craze: people made small fortunes buying and selling digital pictures (known as NFTs) of bored apes. That bubble has now burst, of course. NFTs, like foot pics, are so last year; 2023 is the year of the NPC.
What fresh hell is this? Well, NPC stands for “non-playable character”. They’re the characters in video games that aren’t controlled by a player; as such they’re limited to simple and repetitive responses and actions. Over the years NPCs also became a rightwing internet meme to describe, as one 4chan user put it in a 2016 post, people “who autonomously follow groupthinks and social trends in order to appear convincingly human”. And now the concept has taken on new life in a trend called “NPC streaming” where creators say weird phrases and act in a robotic manner during a TikTok stream, raking in thousands of dollars in online tips from fans as they do so.
The current queen of NPC streaming is a Montreal creator called Fedha Sinon, whose performance name is Pinkydoll. She came to the world’s notice with TikTok streams in which she said “ice-cream” a lot in a voice that the New York Times described as “sexy baby”. People would send her payments that would translate into an icon flashing on the screen. Every time she got a payment she’d say a catchphrase. So when someone left her an ice-cream cone icon, for example, she’d say “ice-cream so good.” And every time someone paid for a “GG” icon she said “gang gang”. The result is a constant stream of gibberish delivered in a jerky way that is meant to be robotic but also vaguely erotic.
Why on earth are people watching this stuff? I’ve watched a lot of NPC videos in an attempt to figure that out and I think I’ve lost a fair few brain cells doing so. A Guardian article called the videos “mesmerizing” but, reader, I was not mesmerized. Rather, I felt like I was losing my grip on reality. Indeed, there could be a CIA black site somewhere in which these videos are being played nonstop to detainees as an advanced form of torture.
I’m not trying to devalue Pinkydoll’s labour here. Her content may not be my cup of tea, but I think the woman’s a genius: she found a weird way to make money and she ran with it. She claims she gets between $2,000 and $3,000 per stream and as much as $7,000 a day from her videos; those are impressive amounts. Does she worry that she’s debasing herself for that money? Is she weirded out that some of her viewers are consuming her streams as fetish content and getting off on the idea that they’re controlling and manipulating another human? Does she find it a tiny bit icky that she’s leaning into misogynistic fantasies about passive women?
Nope, she’s not bothered. “I don’t really care what people say about me,” she told the New York Times recently. “If they want to think I am this or that, it’s fine with me.” She added, “At the end of the day, I’m winning.”
She certainly is. I’m not sure about the rest of us, though.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
