Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a game about the gig economy.
A short time ago I slang laptops. Top of the line, high tech stuff. How'd a stone cold moron such as myself backflip onto the head of that pin? Practice.
But I wasn't there to be the smart guy, there were plenty of people in the company more than desperate for that role. I was there to fix a bug in their approach to courting the American hypertech market. The bug is that reason, science, and numbers are seen as an existential threat here, a chill breeze through the uncanny valley of dunning-kruger and cognitive dissonance.
The laptop had too many of those and they couldn't figure out how to explain its value proposition without using them. So they hired me, a clown/part-time sith-lord, basically the Jar-Jar Binks of tech, to use every underhanded marketing trick in the book to convince my people to pay four thousand dollars for what they want instead of five hundred dollars for what they need. Talk about eazy jobs.
It's absolutely unnecessary to do the job using my style, but I like to learn a little about the product sometimes, so I reached out to the laptops engineer for background. He agreed to deep dive the product with me on the condition I escorted him to the Tenderloin for a sidequest. I said of course, because being one of the handpicked, curated, and consistently audited black people in tech means saying no to any co-workers request, above or below you, is basically a resignation.
During the trip back while talking about the laptops chip he said:
"The whole thing runs on a five dollar chip from Taiwan just like everything else. America is too fuckin' dumb to ever produce the chip to scale and people keep pretending like the guardrails are gonna stay in place. Psh, man... And everybody in the supply chain, they lie so confidently and have no idea what they are talking about. No offence. All it takes is China to march on Taipei, or a plague, or act of Allah, and then the forecasts break and the dominos fall and Suzie doesn't get her smart oven and there is no more farming equipment and then what man? ... America is fucked and the people that fucked it are gonna pretend they didn't see it comin'."
This was in 2014, and if it wasn't apparent the sidequest was weed. I can be honest now and say I had nooo idea what this kid was talking about at the time, it was just too high level for my Shrek brain. I get it now.
Anyway, shouts to information, well done, but special shouts to Caffeine. You stuck with my peoples through the "BET of Streaming" jokes, the cold shoulders, and the technical issues to become one of the first true green book websites and lighthouse on the new world shore. That said, please tell Mr. White to set my battle with Geechi up or be ok with the smoke. Lux is fine too. Danny if no one else answers the phone.
Rip. tc rip. tb rip Tall-T. Love is wise, hatred is foolish. Get out there and do great things, we believe in you. Also Jobs.
