Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game about social exploration.
Welp, it's that time again. Every few hundred years America runs into a bug in its system called, "What do we do with our slaves?"
Not slaves in the way you are thinking, of course. Slaves in the literal definition, as in, noun; a person who is legal property of another and is forced to obey them. Or the verb, which is to work excessively hard. So the capitalist version of a slave, like laborers, soldiers, prisoners, and athletes.
This bug occurs when a problem arrives in America that it can't shoot. The bug just keeps on keeping on, indiscriminately corrupting every player it comes across on the server, like a child calling an adult ugly because it doesn't know there are some things you just don't say to certain people even if it's objectively true.
Anyway, in that indiscriminate swath of death lies the bug. If slaves stop slaving, the bug has no way to spread, but if slaves stop slaving, money has no way to spread. Dilemma, Dilemma.
How do you get a slave to accept their place? As in, accept the reality that somebody gotta die to keep the machine running, and that somebody was always the slave, even though it wasn't expressly stated in the new slave patch notes. Well, there are a few fixes.
The first is to pay the slave in exposure, a common occurrence in the entertainment industry. It's the deceptively simple practice of encouraging cannon fodder into place by saying thank you and promising to shout them out on Instagram.
Grocery, supply chain, and infrastructure workers have all been knighted as "essential jobs." And will receive a set number of salams until they fuck up the order or someone figures out a way to force them to do it. Because slaves not slaving is a problem America can shoot. This social currency stimulus package absolves the need for complicated fixes like higher wages or unions. Who would want that?
There are more fixes but none of those are gonna happen and I gotta catch some Bluegill to donate to the museum and they only jumpin' from 9am to 4pm. I might grab some Char and Yellow perch to make some quick cash and get my crib lookin' right.
Wait, is Animal Crossing actually a saccharine imbued dystopian hellscape, analogous to the slow march toward the dark reality our waking life is currently on a path for? Nah, I'm trippin.
Shouts to info, rip TB, rip TC rip Tall-T. Love is wise, hatred is foolish. Get out there and do great things, we believe in you. Also Jobs.
The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Sublimate
