Hola! Iām Ixchel Lunar (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.
Heads up! OoSo Studio Launch Party!
Wednesday, July 29th, 10am PT / 1pm ET, on Zoom. In our Open House, Iāll walk through my own Obsidian brain and Juniper Maiaās OoSo Studioā¢ live. Come celebrate our web app launch! Register here ā
A book Iām hyping right now:
Iām part of the Hype Team for a new book called Astrology for Changemakers by Leslie Tagorda, out September 8.
The reason I love Leslieās teachings on astrology is that she brings a poly-cultural, decolonized, and reclamation lens to inner leadership through our own astrology.
Pre-order now and you get early chapters, a printable toolkit, and a spot at her live launch party. Pre-order here ā
Beautiful Wildling,
I watched Jeniah get swarmed.1
She’s a software engineer, full-time, days spent in real codebases with real deadlines. She built a reading-journal app called Paiges, the kind of tender, specific tool people make when they love something enough to want a better way to keep track of it. She used AI coding tools to help build it, the way most working developers do now, and she said so out loud on her IG. No spin or disclaimer buried in the footer. Here is how I made this.
The anti-AI crowd on Threads decided that honesty made her a fraud. They came for her the way the internet comes for someone it has already sentenced before it asks a single question. Strangers explaining her own craft back to her like she hadnāt spent a career earning it.
Jeniahās a Black woman who writes code for a living. A white man doing the exact same thing, saying it exactly as plainly, gets a mention in yesterdayās New York Times article on vibe-coding. She got called a fraud. Some of the loudest voices in her mentions write code for a living too, people who have watched this technology start circling their own jobs and needed somewhere to put the fear. They put it on her.
Using a tool as a skilled engineer is not vibe-coding, whatever Book Threads decided that week. I saw sideways glances and hearts on the floor in the BIPOC AI WhatsApp Iām a member of. I watched the fear aim itself at the wrong person. You know that feeling where you start looking for the exits. Chest tight. Jaw locked the way it does right before I say something I canāt take back. When a wave threatens everyone, the crowd rarely reaches the people actually building the extraction machine. It reaches for the nearest person who was honest about holding the tool.
What Iām not pretending away
Here is what I am not going to pretend away. The large models were trained on scraped archives nobody consented to give. Brookings found that roughly two out of every three data centers now planned in the U.S. sit on land already in drought.2 In 2023, TIMEās Billy Perrigo reported that workers in Kenya were paid between $1.32 and $2 an hour to label the worst content on the internet, so the rest of us never have to see it.3 I did a similar work-from-home job while I was a single mom in college. It still haunts me.
The feeds are filling with slop. And the loudest founders say the quiet part out loud: they intend to replace the very people whose labor built the thing thatās replacing them.
And it goes further than labor and water. In Gaza, the Israeli military used an AI targeting system called Lavender that at one point had identified 37,000 potential targets, roughly ten percent of them, by its own intelligence sourcesā account, marked in error. A second tool, ostensibly named āWhereās Daddy,ā tracked selected Palestinians, flagging them to be struck the moment they entered their homes.4 Google and Amazon built part of the cloud infrastructure behind this under Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract.5 (Iām still extricating myself from Google.)
Closer to home, ICE now runs on facial recognition apps, biometric trackers, and cellphone location databases, and close to three in four people booked into ICE custody this year had no criminal conviction at all.6 Call it what it is. Abduction with paperwork, and AI doing the locating.
OoSo Studioā¢ is a service-as-software suite for branding, messaging, relationship marketing, and business intelligence. AI is one tool inside that suite, the way a printing press was one tool inside a publishing house. Ownership decided what the press printed. Cooperative ownership decides what ours is for too.
This sits inside the same question OoSo Studioā¢ was built to answer, just at a different scale: who owns the data, who gets targeted by what it produces, who decided that was acceptable. Data sovereignty was never abstract to me. Itās the literal difference between an archive that serves the person who built it and one that can be turned against them, or against someone they love.
I built it anyway
I hold all of that. And I built OoSo Studio anyway, as a cooperative that runs on these tools.
The harm is real. The ownership question is a different fight. That oneās mine to have.
I have not owned a car in ten years. I donāt unsubscribe from creators because they drive one. We know where the polycrisis footprint actually comes from: cis-heteronormative, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal hegemony (h/t bell hooks and Laverne Cox).7 Attacking each other for swimming in water we are all trying not to drown in was never the fight worth having.
My ancestors held complicity and resistance in the same bloodstream. Ancestors who served in the Revolutionary War and the wars against Indigenous nations, and then deserted from the Confederate one. With mixed lineage, purity was never an option in my lineage. Position was. So here is mine: I do not own land, commodities, or stocks. But I built OoSo Studioā¢ to be owned, collectively, by the people using it, because refusing ownership altogether leaves it in the hands of whoever wants it most.
The tool you havenāt found yet
Jeniahās pile-on ran on something older than ethics, the verdict a body learns to expect long before AI existed, the one that says the problem lives inside you, and you should have solved yourself better by now.
You may know this pattern from somewhere that has nothing to do with software. The tool changes every few months, and you keep hoping the next one is finally the one that holds what youāve actually built. Notion, then Roam, then whatever comes after Roam. A folder system you rebuild every January. An archive that lives in twenty-two places and none of them talk to each other. You tell yourself the problem is that you havenāt found the right system yet, the right workflow, the right way to use the AI everyone else seems to have already figured out. So you keep looking. Keep learning a new tool. Keep almost getting there.
That belief did not arrive by accident. Extraction did not begin with AI, and the tool has changed a dozen times since the plantation ledger and the factory clock while the demand underneath it stayed exactly the same: urgency at whatever speed the machine of the day could produce. Silvia Federici traced part of this further back than most people want to go. The witch hunts that criminalized womenās autonomous relationship to Time and body were the labor discipline that made industrial capitalism possible in the first place (h/t Federici).8 And once you were labeled a witch, they could take your land. The whole thing was a Time and land grab. Itās still happening in Gaza.
Your relationship to your own tools was never meant to be a private referendum on your character. It was built to feel that way so the actual question stays buried.
Somewhere in that search, one question gets buried under all the smaller ones about which tool or which system: who owns it. Who can see inside your archive. Who profits when you finally find the workflow that works. The moment that question surfaces, the search changes shape entirely.
The override that lives in the body
There is a second override running underneath the first, and it lives in the body, not the argument.
Some of you may have read Jeniahās story and felt the pull to defend her by matching the mobās speed, post fast, post first, get ahead of the pile-on before it finds you too. Some of you felt the opposite pull, the guilt-spiral kind, replaying every AI-assisted sentence youāve ever published and wondering if youāre the fraud they havenāt found yet. Both are the same override wearing different clothes. Both ask the body to move faster than it can actually feel.
I know this override by its exact signature, because I feel it too. The tight chest I mentioned earlier is data. Itās the same signal that shows up when a clientās calendar has no room in it, when a launch date gets moved up because someone else moved theirs, when the pace being asked of you was never actually yours to keep. The body keeps its own ledger of who is setting the terms. It usually knows before the mind catches up.
Thereās a voice underneath the scramble that says something like this: if I stop to feel this out, I will fall behind, and falling behind is the actual danger, not the decision Iām about to make in a hurry. That voice was installed the same way the deadline was, by a system built to profit from your urgency and indifferent to whether the pace serving it is one your body can hold.
Here is the quieter fact most tool-and-ethics arguments skip entirely. A system built to move at your rhythm instead of demanding volume isnāt a feature. Itās a somatic intervention, the same kind of intervention as a breath before a hard conversation, or a boundary held past the point of comfort. The tool that waits on you is doing something in the body that the tool that rushes you canāt do, no matter how ethically it was trained.
What integrity can hide
Thereās a third override, and it doesnāt look like override. It looks like integrity.
Go back to Jeniahās mentions for a second, past the technical argument, into the actual fear driving it. The people swarming her were enforcing a boundary of belonging more than debating a technique: hold this position or lose your place in the community thatās kept you safe.
(The irony isnāt lost on me. This is unfolding on Threads, a Meta platform, the same company whose AI moderation already canceled my account once without a word of explanation. I call what happens next algorithmic social severance, people quietly sorted out of the room by systems that never have to announce theyāre watching, learning to sort themselves out before the system even has to bother. Nobody locks the door. Enough of us close it ourselves.)
That threat lands hardest on people whoāve had to build community from scratch, the ones whose family or industry or hometown never held them, so the online room became the real one. Losing it isnāt a metaphor. It can feel like losing the room, period.
Severance like that rarely stops at one door. A shared score sorts someone out of a hiring queue for a full year, and the same low mark follows them to dozens of other companies using that vendor. A platformās moderation AI sorts them out of a room next.9 And if a universal basic income ever gets paid through a programmable digital currency, the same mechanism could sort someone out of the ability to buy groceries at all, a balance that stops working. This isnāt hypothetical. Chinaās digital yuan already has working expiry dates and spending limits built in, no court order required, no appeal available, an off switch that sits on someone elseās end of a connection you donāt control.10
The voice underneath that fear sounds something like this: if I say this openly, the people who see me clearly right now might not recognize me anymore. (Or worse, this content may never get any lift.)
I know that voice. Iāve spent my adult life finding rooms that would hold me after ones that should have didnāt. I understand exactly what it costs to risk one on a position that might not be popular.
Refusing a technology outright can be the right, true stance for a person, and for some of you it is, completely, no argument from me. But for a lot of founders, especially ones already stretched thin holding Queer or BIPOC or neuro-emergent community on top of a body of work, purity becomes its own override, a performance that keeps you further from the room instead of closer to it.
Donna Haraway warned about this forty years before any of us had heard of a large language model. Leaving the room costs you your seat in it when the terms get decided without you (h/t Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto).11 Absence has a cost too. It doesnāt announce itself the way a pile-on does.
The boundary that actually holds is about who owns what gets built, and who decides the terms. Naming that once, clearly, is different from performing a position for an audience. And when we name it, guess what? The room doesnāt empty out. The people who actually see you (and can no longer unsee the systemic structures) stay. The ones who needed you to perform purity for them were never in your corner to begin with.
We were never outside technology
My Maya ancestors were technologists before Western thought had a word for it. Traditional Ecological Knowledge, the accumulated wisdom of land, medicine, and technology passed through ceremony and the body, has operated for thousands of years without servers, cloud storage, or venture capital, and it still carries data and holds memory today.
The Cholqāij has counted days for more than two thousand years and is still counting. An early Maya mathematicianās name, Sak Tahn Waax, was just decoded from āa set of 11 hieroglyphs found amid more than 50 faint mathematical āmicrotextsā painted on and etched into a wall in a small rectangular room at Xultun called structure 10K-2,ā renowned for tracking the cycles of Mars and Venus.12 And our weavers held pattern as information and messages, in thread, long before Europe punched its first card.
When Europe finally did punch a card, it was Joseph Marie Jacquardās loom in 1804, storing woven patterns as holes in paper.13 Ada Lovelace looked at Charles Babbageās design for the Analytical Engine in 1843 and reached for the loom to explain what it did.14 The engine would weave algebraic patterns the way Jacquardās loom wove flowers and leaves. Computing descends from weaving, and the people who kept building it afterward got erased from the story on purpose, the same way the loomās actual origin usually is.
Six women programmed ENIAC, the first all-electronic general-purpose computer, and were written out of the story once the war that needed them ended.15 Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson calculated the trajectories that put a man into orbit, working in a segregated facility, called ācomputersā before the machines took their job title.16
Grace Hopper invented the compiler and believed computing should belong to more people, not fewer gatekeepers.17 Lynn Conway built the microchip architecture behind the first supercomputers, and IBM fired her the week she told them she was transitioning. They apologized fifty-two years later.18 Sophie Wilson designed the chip probably running the device youāre reading this on right now, and most people have never heard her name.19
We were never outside technology. We were coded out of the story, and some of us were coded out twice, once for what we built and again for who we were while building it.
Thatās the actual problem OoSo Studioā¢ was built to answer, not the tool: who gets to be legible in the story, who gets remembered as the maker instead of the material, who owns the archive after the war or the deadline or the news cycle moves on. We built OoSo Studioā¢ as a Proudly BIPOC- and Queer-led Consumer Software Cooperative for exactly this reason.
Members arenāt customers renting access to somebody elseās extraction machine. They hold a real stake in what gets built, which means their names stay in the story whether or not anyone outside the cooperative ever hears them.
adrienne maree brown teaches that change moves in fractals, that the pattern at the small scale is the pattern at the large scale, and that we get to choose which pattern weāre propagating (h/t brown, Emergent Strategy).20 Refusing ownership entirely leaves the pattern in the hands of whoever wants it most. So we wrote the refusal into the structure instead of a mission statement nobody reads.
No stolen voices. Your branding and messaging engine learns from your own archive, with your consent, not a scrape of the internet.
No hostage data. Plain text, yours, exportable any time.
No volume machine. The tools work at your rhythm. The system waits on you, not the other way around.
No erased teachers. Citation is structural here, not a courtesy. Kelly Diels ingrained in me that citation is a feminist practice (h/t Diels).21 Not citing is epistemicide.
No absentee ownership. Itās a cooperative. Members hold a stake in what theyāre building on, not a login they rent.
This is Nepantla in practice, the liminal in-between threshold held as home instead of a problem to solve (h/t Gloria AnzaldĆŗa, Borderlands/La Frontera).22 Most approaches ask you to optimize yourself inside conditions built to extract from you. This one says the conditions are the problem, and the answer isnāt self-improvement. Itās reclamation, rebuilding the room so it can actually hold what you already are.
The morning this lands
Picture the morning this lands for you. You open your laptop the way you do every day: a message waiting, a client or collaborator asking for something, a new AI headline in your feed promising to either replace you or liberate you, depending which newsletter you trust that week. Some months ago this would have sent you into scramble: decide fast and sort the ethics out later, or freeze until someone louder told you it was safe to move.
Now something different happens. A pauseā¦ an actual breath, coming from your body not needing permission to check its own timing. You weigh whatās being asked of you against what you already decided, not what the loudest post this week decided for you. The archive underneath you is yours. You built it, or youāre building it, with people who hold a real stake in what happens to it. Nobody can rent it out from under you while youāre not looking.
The answer comes clean. Yes. No. Not yet. No scramble underneath it. No guilt spiral waiting on the other side either.
Thatās a cosmological shift, the kind that changes your relationship to your own tools so they become what they always should have been, a relationship to your body of work, with terms you set, inside a community that actually holds you when you set them.
What it means for you
I wonāt run a purity test on anyone already doing the work. The people harmed most by extraction donāt need one more tool built for them by people who donāt share their stakes. They need infrastructure built by and for BIPOC, Queer and marginalized founders, owned collectively, tended at their pace.
If you want to see this before you commit to anything, come to the Launch Party Open House: Wednesday, July 29th, 10am PT / 1pm ET, on Zoom. I’ll walk through my own Obsidian brain and Juniper Maiaās OoSo Studioā¢ live, the actual thing running. Register here ā
If youāre carrying a body of work that deserves better than twenty-two scattered folders and a guilt spiral about whether AI tools are allowed, thereās a door that doesnāt ask you to commit to anything bigger than itself: the Stellar World Code (includes a session with me). Itās where OoSo Studioā¢ starts: your voice, your brand strategy, and your lineage built into language a second brain (a digital archive) can actually hold without flattening it.
If you go on to become a member of the Studio later, youāll get a $400 credit towards enrollment.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. Maltiox (mahl-tee-osh) is K’iche’ Maya for deep gratitude and sacred acknowledgment.
š Get your Moon Phase (free calculator) ā
āš½ Meet OoSo Studio ā
š©š½āš¤āš©š¾ Ways to work with me…
šļø Book me for your Podcast, speaking event, or programā¦
āØ Do Epic Shit. Stay Intact.
Walk in beauty. Live your magic. Go wild.
Your Sanctuary to Cultivate Wild Presence for Thriving with a Planet in Transition
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. Itās an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
Thanks for reading! If you loved it, tell your friends to .
We may include other affiliate links in our content. Thank you for supporting our work.
Jeniah (@hertechlegacy on Threads), a full-time software engineer, and her reading-journal app Paiges: The Reading Journal (https://paiges.app). She faced a pile-on on Threads after being open about using AI coding tools to help build the app. Profile: https://www.threads.com/@hertechlegacy
Brookings, āAI, data centers, and water.ā Roughly two-thirds of about 809 planned U.S. data centers sit on land that has recently been in drought. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/
Billy Perrigo, āExclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic,ā TIME, January 18, 2023. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
CBC News, “Israel Accused of Using AI to Choose Gaza Targets,” on the Lavender and “Where’s Daddy” targeting systems. https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.7166391
Al-Shabaka, “AI for War: Big Tech Empowering Israel’s Crimes and Occupation,” on Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud and machine learning contract between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government. https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/ai-for-war-big-tech-empowering-israels-crimes-and-occupation/
Cato Institute, “5% of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions.” https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convictions-73-no-convictions
The formulation draws on bell hooks’s “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” extended by Laverne Cox, who names cis-normativity within it in her public talks.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).
Mobley v. Workday, Inc., a federal class and collective action alleging Workday’s AI-powered applicant screening tools discriminated against job seekers by race, age, and disability across the thousands of employers using its platform. A federal judge allowed the core discrimination claims to proceed in June 2026. https://legalclarity.org/workday-lawsuit-ai-hiring-discrimination-case-and-rulings/
Lu Lei, deputy administrator of China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, publicly endorsed “programmable features” for the digital yuan, including expiration dates and limits on where funds can be spent, February 2024. https://www.dlnews.com/articles/regulation/china-official-touts-programmable-features-in-digital-yuan/
Donna Haraway, āA Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,ā 1985. https://web.archive.org/web/20120214194015/http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
Archaeologists identified the name of Sak Tahn Waax, a Classic Maya astronomer-mathematician, in wall inscriptions at Xultun, Guatemala, alongside a mathematical formula linking the cycles of Mars and Venus, dated to 781 CE. National Geographic, “Archaeologists decipher the name of a Maya astronomer for the first time,” July 2026. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/first-maya-astronomer-mathematician-name
The Jacquard loom (Joseph Marie Jacquard, c. 1804) used punched cards to store a woven pattern, widely credited as a precursor to programmable computing. https://www.britannica.com/technology/Jacquard-loom
Ada Lovelace, āNotes by the Translatorā (Note A) to her translation of L. F. Menabrea, āSketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,ā Scientific Memoirs 3 (1843).
Florida Tech, “Women in Computing Throughout History and Beyond,” on the six women who programmed ENIAC and went largely uncredited for decades. https://online.fit.edu/degrees/undergraduate/cis/the-history-of-women-in-computing/
Brookings Institution, “Hidden Figures Highlights the Ongoing Legacy of Women and Minorities in STEM,” on Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/hidden-figures-highlights-the-ongoing-legacy-of-women-and-minorities-in-stem/
U.S. Senator Deb Fischer, “Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace: Pioneers in Tech.” https://www.fischer.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2018/7/grace-hopper-and-ada-lovelace-pioneers-in-tech
University of Liverpool, “10 LGBTQIA+ Tech Pioneers That Inspire Us,” on Lynn Conway, fired from IBM in 1968 after coming out as transgender. IBM formally apologized in 2020. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/it/blog/community/10lgbtqiatechpioneersthatinspireus/
Exeter Students’ Guild, “The LGBTQ+ Pioneers Who Changed STEM,” on Sophie Wilson, co-designer of the original ARM processor architecture. https://www.exeterguild.com/article-post/the-lgbtq-pioneers-who-changed-stem
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017)
Kelly Diels, “My Values + Feminist Business Practices,” kellydiels.com. https://kellydiels.com/my-feminist-business-practices/
Gloria AnzaldĆŗa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
š Get your Moon Phase (free calculator) ā
āš½ Meet OoSo Studio ā
š©š½āš¤āš©š¾ Ways to work with meā¦
šļø Book me for your Podcast, speaking event, or programā¦
āØ Do Epic Shit. Stay Intact.
Walk in beauty. Live your magic. Go wild.
Your Sanctuary to Cultivate Wild Presence for Thriving with a Planet in Transition
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. Itās an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
Thanks for reading! If you loved it, tell your friends to subscribe.
We may include other affiliate links in our content. Thank you for supporting our work.
Copyright Ā© 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.
