I have always had an interest in collaborating with horizontal collectives operating within music and art circuits - I find their operational instability moving and I am inspired by their tendency to perform values they cannot maintain.

Favela Discos, a small independent music label and artist collective based in Porto where I had been a contributing founding member since 2013, had been for 13 years my favorite playground for small-scale social and organizational engineering experiments. While the collective's output comprised a constellation of independent and aesthetically disparate experimental music and art projects, it operated on principles of horizontal decision-making, with all curatorial and financial decisions requiring consensus among its core members. This allowed me (and my peers too) to maintain complete autonomy over my individual methodologies and collaborative projects, a freedom rarely granted in more hierarchical organizations where artistic direction is centrally controlled.

By the winter of 2023, the collective's creative output had stagnated considerably. Release schedules completely halted during 2024, project ideas had become formulaic, and internal discussions increasingly focused on bureaucracy and risk mitigation rather than true artistic experimentation. The collective had developed some sort of structural sclerosis, where fear of failure and controversy gradually replaced the capacity for meaningful cultural intervention.

In January 2026 I started designing a multi-layered experiment with several simultaneous objectives: testing institutional resilience under moral panic conditions while identifying weak nodes in collective decision-making architecture, and determining whether controversy could generate sustainable audience growth within niche cultural markets. Eventually I came up witht at a straightforward idea with a very simple technical implementation: to create a provocative image that could be posted on the collective's social media and assess if it would accelerate its institutional collapse.

Using the GIMP image manipulation program I designed an image that hijacked the memetic power of the recently released Jeffrey Epstein email documents published by the USA Department of Justice. The aesthetic required careful attention to detail: redaction bars, email header structure and the text layout needed to feel legitimate enough to pass initial scrutiny while remaining obviously fabricated upon closer inspection.

The final composition was designed to have enough flexibility of interpretation to be able to divide the target's audience. It was also optimized for maximum impact, which is why local specificity mattered: explicit mention of the club Passos Manuel, and implicit references to the now defunct Cafe Au Lait nightclub (the email was dated January 7, 2016, matching an actual date of a weekly Favela Discos residency at Café Au Lait where I had performed an improvised set with Operador de Cabine Polivalente) increased perceived authenticity. The recipient alias "Burroni", a fictional fursona of the former Porto mayor Rui Moreira who besides being a sexualy deviant donkey wanted to turn the city into a My Little Pony theme park, functioned as an inside joke visible only to core members of Favela Discos while remaining neutral to general audiences. Recent reports of drink spiking at Passos Manuel added subliminal threat perception, and the direct mention of "David Ole" in the Jeffrey Epstein email and a tag to my personal Instagram page provided clear authorship while maintaining plausible deniability regarding intent.

The image was published to the Favela Discos Instagram account at 08:47 on February 3rd, 2026, with the caption "o networking é tudo" ("networking is everything"). The first supportive comment appeared within minutes. Engagement began accelerating immediately: likes accumulated at 3.2 per minute during peak hours, reaching 276 total by early afternoon versus our average of 47. Using one of my burner Instagram accounts with no identifying information linking it to my identity I published the first hostile comment at 15:34, demanding immediate removal of the post. Counter-responses emerged, and the comment thread bifurcated along predictable ideological lines. The post reached 12,847 accounts in the first six hours compared to our baseline average of 890 per post. Profile views increased from a typical 34 per day to 723. Comments arrived at unprecedented velocity - 87 in the first 3 hours, much more than our average monthly total of 73.

Peak engagement velocity occurred at around 18:00. One hour later, the post was deleted by a collective member without prior consensus vote. The internal discussion on its management chat gourp intensified immediately, generating 87 total messages between 14:24 and 22:18. The following morning at 09:33, the collective was officially dissolved.

The collapse mechanism was elegant in its simplicity. The post forced an immediate decision under time pressure: publicly defend an artistic choice by a member, remove it through consensus, or allow unilateral action. The collective's horizontal structure contained no crisis protocols nor pre-established boundaries for acceptable risk, and most importantly no mechanism to override individual veto power. █████████████ deleted the post unilaterally due to external pressures, which revealed deeper fractures: members who valued social capital within Porto's cultural circuit prioritized reputation management over artistic autonomy and freedom, while the other members of the collective had no opportunity to defend their own aesthetic choices; external actors having no formal role in the collective held effective voting rights through informal influence channels.

The post was viewed 47,832 times in 10 hours, compared to a baseline average of 890. The account lost 478 followers but gained 1,247, resulting in net growth of 769 followers. Of 143 total comments, 89 were supportive and 54 were hostile, yielding a ratio of 1.64:1 in favor of support. Sales in February 2026 increased 34% compared to January.

The institutional collapse was completed in under 25 hours. While the Instagram post achieved the highest engagement in the label's history, all scheduled 2025 releases were cancelled, the website was archived, and social media accounts frozen. The collective's back catalogue remains available but dormant. A single carefully designed image, kept online for around 10 hours, completely dismantled a 13-year-old cultural institution operating across multiple cities, associated with dozens of artists, and a back catalogue of almost 80 releases.

The effectiveness of this experience suggested me that:
- horizontal structures without crisis protocols are trivially vulnerable to time-pressure scenarios
- artists often perform transgression rather than practice it
- controversy-driven growth is sustainable
- the weakest link in collective decision-making is often external to its formal structure (with informal influence channels functioning as shadow governance mechanisms)

Further experimentation is nedded to assess whether this methodology can be scaled to larger institutional structures like marching bands. While small cultural institutions operate below the threshold of media attention, allowing for experimental interventions without external documentation, larger structures may require more sophisticated attacks.