E3 A Speed Freak’s Critique of Empire; S7: Owning the Libs

What if addiction isn’t a thing?Or at least not the thing we’ve been taught to see.This episode starts as a response to a Substack post and rapidly becomes something else: a critique of the way Western culture decides what counts as knowledge, whose stories are allowed to matter, and which explanations make it onto the menu.Because every system comes with a menu.There are approved causes.Approved solutions.Approved experts.Approved ways of talking.And then there are all the things that don’t fit.What if a stimulant wasn’t an escape from life, but an enhancement of a life you genuinely wanted more of?What if the story of someone’s drug use can’t be separated from sleep, sexuality, immigration, AIDS, colonialism, desire, exhaustion, geography, economics, and history?What if the problem isn’t that people refuse to tell the truth about addiction?What if the problem is that the available truths are too small?This episode wanders through Deleuze and Guattari, Alcoholics Anonymous, speed, insomnia, El Salvador, gay survival, and the politics of explanation itself.Not because these topics are unrelated.Because they may be impossible to separate.“A colonial mindset wants to locate the problem somewhere else. It definitely doesn’t want to point at itself.”If you’ve ever felt like your experience disappeared the moment somebody gave it a diagnosis, this one’s for you.