(est. 2021) explores the intersections of technology, culture, and human experience. From urban phenomena and digital spirituality to the evolving landscapes of creativity, we investigate how modern life reshapes perception, identity, and society.
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#21 — VIOL: the ‘anti-violence’ drug that is spreading through Lisbon by Mark Ellison
#20 — Signal Ghosts: The Cities Where Wi-Fi Never Dies
#19 — Digital Detox Retreats: Escaping the Algorithm by Cassandra Myrren
#18 — The Urban Sleep Crisis by Eleanor Voss
#17 — Cryptic Art: NFTs and the Revaluation of Creativity by Marcus Ellwood
#16 — Virtual Pilgrimages: Religious Experience Online by Mark Ellison
#15 — The Dark Side of Wellness: When Self-Optimization Becomes Obsession by Eleanor Voss
#14 — AI Companions and the Loneliness Epidemic by Isolde Maren
#13 — The Rise of Microdosing in Corporate Culture by Cassandra Myrren
#12 — Sonic Immunity: Healing Through Frequencies by Cassandra Myrren
#11 — The Ethics of Immortality by Adrien Veyra
#10 — Algorithmic Faith: When Machines Preach by Mark Ellison
#09 — Post-Human Erotics: Desire Beyond the Flesh by Elin Vårnes
#08 — Synthetic Memory: The Future of Personal Archives by Caio Navarro
#07 — Neurosprawl: Mapping the Brain as a City by Eleanor Voss
#06 — The Archive Will Outlive You by Liang Wei
#05 — Eternal Scroll: The Infinite Feed as a Prison by Isolde Maren
#04 — Terraforming the Mind by Alessio Romano
#03 — Digital Necromancy by Mark Ellison
#02 — Speculative Hunger: Future Diets in a Synthetic World by Cassandra Myrren
#01 — The Ecology of Glitches by Alessio Romano
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It is increasingly difficult to discern where reality ends and fiction begins, especially when real life appears to draw inspiration from — or even mirror — the imaginaries of cinema and literature. VIOL could have been written by J.G. Ballard, scored by Vangelis, marketed by some post-human sect. But it is here, unfolding in streets you and I walk every day.
The drug surfaced in Lisbon first, then Berlin, Amsterdam, New York — always in neighborhoods where the avant-garde brushes against decay. The aesthetic is deliberate: black-and-white portraits of unsmiling users, eyes fixed on something beyond the frame; phrases like “Let’s Redesign Humanity”. It’s seductive. It’s disquieting.
Philosophically, VIOL speaks to an old temptation in new clothes: the longing to re-engineer the self. Michel Foucault once wrote that modern power is exercised not by killing the body but by shaping life itself. VIOL goes further — it suggests that violence, an ancient and animal inheritance, is optional. That we can subtract it without subtracting ourselves. But can we?
In private Telegram channels and encrypted forums, users speak of their first doses in tones usually reserved for spiritual revelations:
“It was like someone dimmed a light I didn’t know was burning in me.”
“I woke up without the urge to win.”
“I stopped clenching my fists.”
Others describe it more clinically: a flattening of emotional peaks, a cooling of conflict, a curious detachment from urgency itself. If true, this is both utopia and anaesthesia.
It’s hard not to think of the 2024 film Substance, where a drug promising bodily renewal dissolves the user’s identity into a double. Like Substance, VIOL exists in a liminal zone between cure and curse. In removing the instinct to harm, does it also strip the instinct to act, to resist, to desire?
VIOL spreads not like cocaine or MDMA but like a digital religion — no street dealers, only QR codes and encrypted invitations, each guiding the curious toward a strange website. Its rhetoric borrows from Silicon Valley startups and post-spiritual retreats. The campaign’s visual language feels almost ecclesiastical: monochrome, icon-like imagery, the absence of clutter — as if preparing you for a ritual rather than a transaction. And maybe that’s the point. In an algorithmic age, where identity is a performance managed by feeds and metrics, the promise of VIOL is not just peace. It is relief from the exhausting work of being someone.
The name VIOL exploded into public attention when international YouTuber Mutahar, with 3.5 million followers, addressed it in a video four months ago, stating clearly that it was a lie and likely some sort of black-market scheme or a way to steal data from anyone who signed up—but his warning reached over 200,000 people, and curiosity only grew.
Lisbon’s adoption of VIOL is emblematic of a broader trend: the search for technological and chemical solutions to social complexity. Yet, as with all attempts to contain human behaviour through artificial means, it risks substituting understanding for suppression. Violence is not eradicated; it is displaced, refracted through circuits of pharmaceutical intervention, creating new, subtler forms of tension and alienation.
In observing VIOL, one must confront a paradox: the drive for peace, mediated by a substance, may produce a landscape more volatile than the unrest it seeks to erase. Lisbon, calm on the surface, may be quietly reconfiguring the rhythms of aggression, empathy, and dissent—an experiment in the pharmacological governance of the human psyche.
Maybe VIOL is real. Maybe it’s theatre. Maybe it’s something between the two — a fiction that has decided to test its luck in the material world. But standing before one of its posters in the narrow streets of Alfama, I couldn’t shake the thought:
If I could remove my violence — all of it — would I still recognize the person left behind? Or would I be looking at a stranger, smiling in my skin?
References
- Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press.
- Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
- Kessel, B. (2019). Neurochemical Societies: The Pharmacology of Modern Life. Routledge.
- metaviolence.com – Official campaign site, accessed May 2025.
- Mutahar. (March 2025). Is This Drug Real or The Strangest ARG Ever? YouTube.
- Rose, N. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press.
- Substance (2024). Dir. Coralie Fargeat. Los Angeles: A24.