Dragon 🐉 Letter #115: What my temporary shutout reveals about visibility, data, and preparation, with resources for building capacity outside surveillance based platforms.
Hola! I’m Ixchel Lunar (sounds like ee-shell, they/them), an Indigenous-Time ecologist, ancestral medicine guide, and rhythm witch for creative rebels, decolonial dreamers, and neuroqueer visionaries. This Substack is dedicated to weaving business, body, and belonging into something no empire can replicate. Still punk as fuck. Still cozy in the chaos.
Beautiful Wildling,
I want to speak to you as someone who has lived inside moments like this before, not as commentary but as weather. What is unfolding right now moves through daily life in ways that feel small at first and then irreversible. People are disappearing into systems built from federal contracts, data flows, and silence. Families are losing track of one another. Speech is being narrowed like never before. Attention gets fragmented. Platforms are deciding who stays visible and who vanishes.
During the uprising and backlash in Nicaragua, the shift didn’t arrive all at once. Ordinary routines tightened. Public conversation changed tone. Dissent became a classification problem. Technology made disappearing efficient. Fear learned to travel without announcements. The hardest part was not the danger itself but how quickly people were trained to normalize it.
This weekend, my Facebook account was temporarily terminated just after I accepted a small social media gig to for a long-time friend Peter Russell’s new book launch. Talk about being hit where it hurts.
I appealed to Meta and passed a super cringe video ID check. Access was returned. But it felt like a warning about how provisional visibility has become and how quickly speech can be interrupted without explanation. That knowledge is felt in the body, not the intellect.
I am not sharing this to create alarm. Alarm collapses capacity. Orientation strengthens it. Now more than ever we need to de-adrenalize ourselves to stay present. I spoke about de-adrenalizing in my convo with Nicole Havelka on Just Rest. (For details on how to de-adrenalize, TheR.E.S.T. Recipe is outlined in my Time Devotion Renewal Kit.)
Collective Tech Tools:
Part of our stabilizing orientation right now involves choosing tools and infrastructures that reduce exposure and strengthen continuity. This is not about purity or total withdrawal. It is about investing in systems that do not depend on constant surveillance or centralized permission.
If you have resources, I encourage you to actively support and implement tools like these.
Meshtastic supports open source, off grid, decentralized mesh networking. It allows devices to communicate without relying on corporate infrastructure. Communities use it when networks fail or become restricted.
Internet in a Box makes it possible to download and share libraries of knowledge without live internet access. Schools, villages, and organizers use it so learning continues when connections disappear.
Hugging Face hosts a public leaderboard of open source language models. Supporting open models keeps knowledge out of closed corporate silos.
These tools belong in collective learning spaces. They fit well into teach ins, skill shares, and community preparedness gatherings. When possible, they also belong in neighborhood lending libraries, shared tech closets, and mutual aid hubs so access does not depend on individual ownership.
This is how capacity spreads. Through shared tools, shared knowledge, and familiarity built before urgency decides for us.
Degoogling and anti-surveillance tools:
Proton provides encrypted email and services designed around privacy rather than extraction. Supporting projects like this helps build alternatives to surveillance based ecosystems.
Ladybird is a non-profit, not for sale, open source browser project in development, built without the surveillance architecture baked into mainstream browsers. Projects like this need public support to exist at all.
Location data remains one of the most dangerous vectors. Reporting from 404 Media(unfortunately this is a paywalled article and resource) documents how ICE uses commercial tools to monitor phones across entire neighborhoods. Reading this changes how many people relate to everyday apps.
This orientation is not new for me. For more than twenty five years, my work as a web developer stayed rooted in open source platforms like WordPress and Joomla, grounded in principle rather than trend. Open systems mattered to me long before they entered public debate. I chose tools people could inspect, modify, and carry forward without asking permission. Working this way shaped how I understand resilience, access, and shared stewardship at a structural level.
The tools I am naming here live in that same lineage. They are practical, usable, and already supporting real communities. Supporting them keeps alternatives alive. Spending time with them now builds familiarity and confidence before real on-the-ground pressure will narrow options and decisions will carry higher stakes.
I am also thinking about how we work with knowledge and practice during unstable times. Screens intensify stress. Constant connectivity fragments attention. Bodies need something slower and tangible.
This is why my offerings are designed as downloadable guidebooks rather than platforms.
For those who want to work with me privately and have capacity, I am available in a quiet 1:1 container right now in ways that favor depth, privacy, and steadiness.
For those without those financial resources for private work, the Time Devotion Renewal Kit and the Ancestral Wayfinding Ritual Kit exist for exactly this moment. They are meant to be downloaded, printed, and used offline. The intention is simple. Read. Mark pages. Sit in a cafe or a park. Work with your hands. Let the body lead instead of the feed.
One of my core commitments is helping people reduce screen dependence while staying connected to what matters. These guidebooks follow that ethic. Each one offers clear structure, sequential practices, and space to go slowly. Nothing requires constant internet access. Nothing is tracking you.
Support for this work helps keep it available. Support for these tools helps keep alternatives alive.
None of this replaces care for one another. It supports it.
We move through moments like this by choosing continuity over convenience and relationship over speed. That work starts small and becomes collective.
I am here.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche Mayan.
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I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua, and Mexicah, past, present, and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.
P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)
P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. It’s an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
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Copyright © 2026, Cheyenne, WY, and Veracruz, Mexico, All rights reserved. Sharing your lineage of knowledge is decolonial. When iterating, please cite me. Not citing is epistemicide.
