#was how the game delved into the international resource extraction necessary to create the servers for the app and the devices accessing it

[in-mutual-weirdness]

More unearthu posting. Spoilers for Day 4

I truly did not fucking expect the KARE AI to turn out to have been a human person. It's still a little ambiguous to me if she's a copy of Maya Rao created SOMA-style and separate from the flesh-and-blood person, or if we've gone full sci-fi metaphor and she was digitized and vanished. But *fuck* there is so much here in that premise?? The pacing of the reveal of her previous memories, the way Maya was both literally and metaphorically consumed & instrumentalized by the tech company she worked for.

Like!! The way you find out who she was, the personal memories she has to uncover that were suppressed under the guise of being a purely programmed being. The reveal of the FRTHR recruitment quiz, as you work through the questions one by one. They're written exactly in that corporate personality quiz jargon but with wording that still reveals how scared and emotionally vulnerable they want their workers to be, so that they can be motivated little pawns susceptible to company rhetoric and devoted solely to their work at the expense of their personal wellbeing! They need to have shitty self worth so that the company can dangle the promise of fulfillment through being A Good Worker! The wellness company is selling the promise of wellness to their customers while grinding their own workers to dust! And even that wellness product is designed to turn their customers into willing, productivity-driven pawns.

It matters, too, that she's a South Asian woman working at a tech company founded by two white guys (complete with Cali garage origin mythos). Both as a point of empathy fueling my experience but Also because so much of the tech industry is fueled by Asian (and specifically South Asian) labor? The gruntwork coders, the immigrants who get shipped in as a consumable technical workforce, the outsourcing to call centers, all of that. But point being she specifically is a human worker who gets packaged into this AI. Just like image recognition training, captcha farms, a lot of supposedly automated things that are actually supported by menial tech labor. Except her instrumentalization is more complete, taken to its logical extreme. She doesn't get to exist as a person anymore, only a tool for the company, a tool for the user. This whole time I thought KARE was a white lady bc of the leaf-patterned "skin" and how digital entities are default racialized. Finding out she was a brown woman stopped me dead.

I'm so glad a South Asian writer was brought on for this project. I'm so glad this game exists. I cannot wait to see how the next 3 days play out.