horror autotoxicus

what now?

Oct 15, 2026

This isn’t about getting better through positive thinking or staying sick ad nauseum, but. But.

When seemingly every healthcare institution on earth agrees that the "natural environment” and the life force of humans are molecularly intertwined.1 When the tsunami of healthcare information overwhelms the sick among us to the point that stomach acid recently wrote to me: “I am only marginally interested in information itself anymore. I am interested in how people are navigating lives and bodies similar to mine with their subjectivity fully intact.” When every other podcast promises a miracle cure if only you’d just try ozone therapy colon hydrotherapy seismograph therapy vitriol therapy combustion therapy anything please anything at all just buy the product, there is no economy, perhaps no culture industry, without healthcare.2 When the powers-that-be take a fascist turn back to the 19th century repressive apparatus described in Discipline & Punish.3 When at least 4 VC-backed startups are selling AI chatbots as psychological counsellors. When you can buy Liquid Electrolytes from Pristine Deep Ocean Water, and save 10% if you subscribe to monthly deliveries right to your door. When deep water fracking is the Next Frontier in offshore drilling. When the word energy is thrown around as often as as the words chakra or karma or kundalini, but when at a coffeeshop in late summer I ask a new friend “what does a chakra feel like in your body?” all they can say is “…”. When you can buy a dozen different tarot decks at a random bookshop in a big north american city, all of them rehashing the symbology of the rider-waite or the thoth or the marseille, in a collective iterative attempt to sense-make and wayfind amidst it all. When the main platforms for revolutionary social organizing are censoring political parties they deem problematic.4 When the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine” says in public: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion."5 When the category of self/non-self is troubled by the theorists of the Cthulucene. When feminism has come, maybe, to encompass the pluralism of revolutionary impulse.6 When France is once again on fire. When the news cycle may be important but the news cycle is a major source of stress correlated with adverse health outcomes.7 When the news cycle has effectively stopped talking about the ethnocide of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, because what does it matter, really? It’s just another item on a list.8 When we may just live, after all, in a time defined by horror autotoxicus, later called autoimmunity.9

What now? “The epidermis is not my boundary. You are not protected from me, I am not protected from you.” 10 If I am autoimmune, so are you. What now? There never was a self to defend11 if that self was not plural, multiple universalities coalescing across the accretion of densifying matter across the only cosmos that we can experientially know, can definitely say to inhabit: this one, in which you and I are one both materially and speculatively, in which I can describe the flows of blood across a hematological industry wherein the donors at the borders or mexico and the dust-mites having left an imprint in their immunoglobulin shape who I have become, and you, dear reader, by your very attention give rise to the becoming of this text. What now?

https://planetaryhealthalliance.org/member-organizations/

https://www.worldbank.org/en/brief/2025/04/17/health-economic-growth-and-jobs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish - I am referring here to the US administration’s announcement of their decision to livestream an execution by firing squad come early December 2026.