As a freelance blogger, what I really do for a living is just explore. That’s it; I visit some exotic far-off realm of the anthropocene noosphere, and I report back on what I found. I always find something weird and squirmy, without even digging much.
My favorite thing to do in the world is to open the door on closet cultures most of you never knew existed, and drag them out in the daylight. Even though I snark a lot, I love these pocket societies because they present an alternative view of the world. We all have our own perspective on “where it’s at.” Where is it at? That depends on whom you ask. Maybe the lost tribes are right. Maybe the underground subcultures are right. Maybe we should all ditch everything and go find enlightenment in some hidden digital playground because that’s all the meaning we have left to get out of life. Maybe we’re all deluding ourselves. Maybe we have no choice, and our only relevant decision is to pick the delusion that allows the most comfort.
There’s a whole underground sesh culture out there
If you remember the raves of the 1990s, this is exactly the same concept, but revolving around cannabis instead of ecstasy. At my DabConnection gig, I dig into this world existing entirely in abandoned warehouses and open-air flea markets. It’s a scene. And while I’m still a staunch advocate demanding full legal compliance or bust, I understand that there’s people who just feel safer retreating to their underground scene.
At DabConnection, we’ve been outing black market vape cartridges since the vaping lung illness epidemic broke out. But we’re careful to draw the line between a completely fake product, and an underground street brand which is maintained in-house by a small collective. The former is bad; the latter is not-as-bad and a grudging concession we’ll make because the situation is practically forcing this.
So where does the fake vape cart black market come from?
That’s a question few of us think to ask. “China” is a pretty obvious answer, but where in China, and what kinds of market conditions stop anyone from doing something about it? I dive into the questions around the Chinese vape cartridge black market industry with a bit of investigative reporting. Answers: They come mostly from Guangdong and Fujian, where most of the black market counterfeit merchandise comes from.
China is in an economic Cold War with the rest of the world
China’s black market is an international, worldwide problem. It undercuts every industry in every country. Counterfeit knockoffs from China steal money out of every pocket in the world, yours, mine, anybody’s. Chinese factories will counterfeit condoms, sports gear, shoes, cosmetics, COVID-19 masks, and even MONEY. It is “tolerated” by the Chinese government because it is one more facet of the economic war they are waging on the world. China wants to rule the planet, folks, face it now sooner than later.
Let’s not forget that the same government that enjoys this free-wheeling Libertarian anarcho-capitalist paradise also imprisons innocent people for being in the wrong religion, and then harvests those same people for organs. This is also China:
Don’t forget, those Hong Kong protests are still going on, China is still oppressing them. Don’t let that fall off the radar just because we have problems of our own; in fact, most of the problems of our own stem from China in the first place.
And now, back to our cannabis black market, here’s another massacre you missed:
There was a massacre at a California pot farm, and nobody’s been caught
In what appears to be a bloody ambush, motive still unknown, seven workers at an illicit marijuana farm in Aguanga California were gunned down about two weeks ago. And that is literally all we know! There hasn’t been an update in the news for two weeks now, which probably means there may never be. Seven Laotian women, likely trafficked, were slaughtered like lambs in the middle of the California desert and the best we can all do is just shrug, “Whelp, that’s how the burrito rolls!”
This was, as you might guess, a cannabis farm and processing facility, likely run by “organized crime” as the police indicate, processing pot into honey oil for illicit vape cartridges. That happy pop-up pot market you saw back at the top? This is the other end of that production chain. There are dozens of these operations going on all over the no-man’s-land desert in the southwest US, and murders of this sort actually happen all the time.
What happened this time? Underground drug lords squatting on each other’s turf? Disgruntled ex-employee? Renegade relative of a vaping lung illness victim out for revenge? We will most likely never know. Aguanga, California might as well be Mad Max as far as crime control is concerned.
So I’m sorry to hit you in the face with all this thunderblood up front. Maybe I can make it up to you…
What became of the lost tribes of Second Life?
Second Life used to be huge, so big that it made international headlines and corporations were fighting over the right to commercialize the virtual digital world. And now it’s just a wasteland, but the inhabitants haven’t gone away. I open the lid on the forgotten world of Second Life, and find that it’s become a self-sustaining eco-sphere of squalid perversions and hedonism.
It’s like Caligula (1979) became a MUD (multi-user dimension). What’s worse, as the rest of the world have forgotten about Second Life, the feeling has been mutual! Second Life denizens rarely venture outside their island social media civilization, and may not be aware of who’s president right now. Has anybody told these people about COVID-19? Should we storm the place and rescue everyone? Does the Prime Directive now apply?
I still demand we self-govern social media
Yeah, I’m not done talking about this issue, folks. Building on my previous editorial on The Invisible Nation, I bring up some statistics and current controversies in attempts to govern social media. In what you could call “part 2” of that thought, I call for policing social media anyway anyhow, in big red capital letters because this is an emergency, dammit.
We are rotting up to our ears in misinformation, propaganda, toxic hate groups, fake news, and social polarization. Social media is making every problem we have worse, starting with President Problem and going down to your batty aunt on Facebook who won’t stop reposting QAnon conspiracies. Clearly we won’t do anything about this and it’s going to destroy our whole civilization.
Oh well? When alien archaeologists explore the rubble the human race left behind, if you recover and translate this: I tried my best.
