mcdazzler Mercury Retrograde Takeover
Hello my name is Alicia McDaid aka mcdazzler. Welcome to my first substack post. I’ll be dedicating more time and energy to this platform from here on out because I feel it will be worthwhile for my art practice and more challenging and healthy for my brain than instagram.
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Has anyone ever had this thing happen where you post multiple photos on instagram and crop them but when you go to post it the crops have completely moved? That just happened to me and instagram posted a photo of my bare chest without my consent. I know this sounds like a joke and it is kind of funny considering it happened to me but it’s actually very fucked up. I joke around about boobs a lot but I’m intentional with the risks I take and they mean something to me even if the nuances don’t translate to everyone’s intellect or taste. I’m usually OK with that because I’m generally fascinated with the places where advertising, fashion, comedy, shame, p0rn, art and entertainment intersect and posture against one another as if any one of them is more meaningful and less full of shit than the other. That being said, I don’t like feeling like someone just pulled my pants down in front of the class because of a “glitch” that has apparently been going on with this app for years.
it hits different for me when I intentionally post the photo like I just did here on Substack. But you can imagine how I might’ve felt when I saw this in my feed and wondered which of my family members or colleagues or future employers saw it and thought it was intentional. And then immediately realizing how my account will be affected for weeks and months to come as Instagram is very punishing for any community guidelines violations involving female nudity.
Anyone who’s wondering why I’m choosing to focus on this right now and not any of the other problems in the world that are completely out of my control- it’s because most of the money that I earn is dependent on the instagram platform for creative networking and now my account will be even more negatively impacted than it already was. I’m branded a wh0re and slvt shamed constantly with supposed violations on here to the point where my content reach has been greatly diminished, I’ve been doxxed and I can’t sell my stupid T-shirts. Can anyone help me? Should I seek legal council? Who might take my case on pro bono?
I found lots of post on Reddit about this crop glitch that’s been going on for years.
After I realize what it happened, I re-organized my photos to once again include screenshots of my intended cropped photo of my face, my community guidelines violation notice as well as these other Reddit posts. I thought surely the glitch that posted the photo of my tits was a random occurrence and it wouldn’t happen again when I cropped the same photo in ig for a different post. I was wrong! Why why did I attempt to make this post in a panic at 1 AM in the morning? So now I have two recent major community guidelines violations and no amount of reporting to Instagram will get them to respond to me or remove the violations from my account. I am no longer able to use such as monetized brand blah blah blah and instagram live which I don’t even use anyway but it will impact the reach of future posts even more negatively and I just feel bit tired and defeated.
Apparently mercury is in retrograde so it all makes a little more sense now. Communication breakdown isn’t always a bad thing because we are forced to retrace our steps and in doing so, question the whole foundation of the way we do or don’t communicate our needs and move through the world. For years Instagram was the way that I tricked my brain into making work consistently because it’s always something I did when I was supposed to be doing other things. When I was supposed to be Cab driving or cleaning a house or walking a dog etc. Posting felt like a posting felt like an escape, a chance to say what I wanted to say that I can’t say, a little hit of dopamine for the road… The pandemic was the first time that I felt like Oh, no this is what I’m SUPPOSED to be doing now. I’m not an artist I’m a content creator and this is my job. At least during the pandemic it helped me sell lots of T-shirts. But now Instagram is on a new campaign to force content creators to pay for additional advertising subscriptions and fees and every sixth post in my feed is an ad for a pharmaceutical drug. it seems that the time has come where I need to be more intentional about where I put my time and energy and venture into different avenues of communicating mostly for my mental health but also so that I can survive. Thriving would be nice but I don’t want to set myself up for failure.
Perfect time to focus on my substack. I’m also looking into Wharton’s 2 year MBA program which costs around $280k so after this first post I’ll start offering premium posts for a $1 monthly subscription fee. But for now I just wanted to keep you all abreast of some of the things I’m thinking about and how best to take down Peter Theil, Zuck, Musk and all those fucking guys who got rich coming up with more efficient ways to rank women into readily consumable virtual whores while simultaneously fucking the poor and working class even harder AND conditioning artists to scramble to churn out mass digestible content to feed AI war machines with their measly reward systems. As my friend Michael texted me the other day, “weird that growing up rich in apartheid south africa could fuck you up.” Anyways, thanks for stopping by and Happy Monday❣️❣️❣️