[Pt 1/3] What Happens When You Try to Kick the Mafia Out of a City...

and halfway through there's an earthquake?

August was, well… something I still don't have words for.

art by author

The closest description I have is that you finally get up the courage to kick the Mafia out of a community because they’re draining the citizens of their will to live. You rally all your forces. Although it’s a relatively short process, it still takes the better part of a few months, not some snake oil 60-second TikTok hack. Eleven days into it, the city has an earthquake and all the first responders must redirect to just keeping people alive.

That's what happened to me. I was doing an experimental protocol to wipe my body of all the pathogenic bacteria and fungi to reset my gut microbiome so I could digest food properly. It would be an exaggeration to say I nearly died in August... but it was closer than I would've liked.

Unfortunately, my cat did die for totally unrelated reasons before the metaphorical earthquake even hit. He got killed by a pack of street dogs. Rest in peace, Señor Tanda Bean Beasley. I will put your picture on the altar for Dia de Muertos soon. His brother, Búho, and I are finding new ways of being together.

two dusty boys

Then, the earthquake.

The pharmacy gave me fluoxetine (Prozac) instead fluconazole (an antifungal). The doses are three orders of magnitude different so I ended up in the ER. I had seizures. I ground my teeth so hard they still hurt ten days later. I was waaaayyyyy delusional. One day felt like two weeks. I could barely walk or even stand, and last but not least my hands shook like a leaf. This upset me muchly, as I love to paint and draw. It was so bad I wasn't sure I would ever walk normally again.

Although I didn't weigh myself at the worst, I was probably under 90 pounds. Y'all, I was freaking the freak out. This accidental overdose made my ruptured appendix in 2019 look like a gluten-free cake in the park.

Two brushes with death knocked my Jenga tower right the f over. I've been in bed recovering and brutally prioritizing my life in the six weeks since. I see a bunch of things I've been procrastinating that absolutely must get done, and this essay marks that shift.

Imma ‘bout to say some shit you already suspect but might not want to deal with. We are about to have to kick out the cartels from our digital spaces, and it's not gonna be pretty. We are nearing peak enshittification.

Tech companies have jumped the shark in a way that hasn't been noticed by many people yet. The balance sheets are failing and customer experience and service will be the first thing the investors demand they cut. CEOs will be pressured by “shareholder value” expectations to comply. We shall see how many have the courage to actually lead.

Your experience has gotten bad, and it's about to get worse.

• AirBnB already shit the bed. I bailed over to Expedia once and for all after three unforgettably bad experiences in as many months.

• YouTube shadow-banned my comments, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. To add insult to injury, who can tolerate an ad popping up in the middle of your hour-long sound healing? No one. They made it impossible for creators to disable ads this year, so I'm bailing to Bandcamp.

• Let us not speak of the atrocity called S-P-O-T-I-F-Y.

• Twitter sold to a man who's betting that billionaires are going to have to ditch Earth and escape to Mars. Somehow I’m not holding my breath that he’s planning to save a seat on the ship for you or me.

• Facebook's the same same, not different.

• All the art started quietly disappeared from the gods’ own Tiktok feed about three months ago. This is not a minor problem. Art changes culture. Without art, we don’t have a culture, we have a cult.

• Instagram was marketed to us as a place to share our creativity – an act that builds culture, but now that it’s wired itself into our neurons and convinced us it’s indispensable for our social life and/or small business… it tightens the screws.

All of the aforementioned spaces are, like my gut, fully colonized by parasites and pathogenic life forms that are designed to drain the life force of their host. It's not personal, it's just the structure of how venture-backed, ad-driven companies are made. I bailed here to Substack years ago for all these reasons and more.

I've always had the kind of voice that the algorithms don't like.

I talk about things the people who designed the algorithms don’t want to hear. People, however, follow me because I say hard things they *do* chose to hear. (Thanks, y’all.)

Before the introduction of the Twitter algorithm, I had a steadily growing audience. Back in 2011, 4k followers was like... a lot. After the reverse chronological feed was replaced by the algorithm by default, I was suddenly whispering in the dark. It's the same for Facebook; basically everything I want to talk about (sex, drugs, and dismantling Facebook) is off-limits.

Have you noticed that none of the alternative social media platforms have taken off? Perhaps that’s because 1) we haven't been quite fed up enough yet and 2) the newcomers replicated too much of the bullshit features that made the old platforms crap in the first place.

What's coming next will not be a mere carbon copy. Mark my words – you'll know it when you see it. It will be that different.

Possibly unrelated, but is anyone else totally obsessed with Obsidian? That's what I mean by "it will be different." Obsidian is the bicycle for the mind I've been wanting all my life. Artistic brains who have a love/hate relationship with structure will appreciate. As soon as we learn to co-navigate the internet with next-gen tools like these, Google Search is done. The rest will fall like a MySpace ballon from the sky soon enough.

I will soon be making my final posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram that say basically "I'm not here, find me at the following places..." I’m not leaving the internet by any means. You can always hit reply to any of these emails. Even though I may not reply to every one of them, I read them all.

Besos from Oaxaca,
Cris and Team Dragon

P.S. I've been spending the time I'm not doomscrolling making an album of the thing the spiritual kiddies call light language and the holy rollers call speaking in tongues. It's mixed with EDM beats and is decidedly not for listening in the car. Get some headphones and possibly a consciousness-expanding substance. I'll be sending out a demo of the first single in Part 3 of 3. It's called Leaving the Fear Frequencies.

P.P.S. Part 2 will be The Madness of Pandemia Hasn’t Ended for Most of Us… here’s what you can do.