The Psycho-Tech series began with the reading of the Francis Haugen Papers — the leak of internal Facebook documents that exposed the company's outrageous practices, including internal reports on the increase in suicide rates among teenage girls due to body image dysphoria and other psychological harms generated by social media use. It was from this milestone that I started using medications as a visual and conceptual element in the series.
One of the works, titled Psycho Hate Profit, directly alludes to the fact that digital platforms use anything that generates engagement as a revenue source — and hatred, as a human emotion, has proven to be one of their most powerful weapons. This phenomenon is visible, for example, in the spread of false discourses and fake news which, according to the Francis Haugen Papers themselves, are removed at negligible rates: Facebook removes between 3% and 5% of hate speech, and less than 1% of content classified as "violence and incitement".
The work Psycho Hate Profit materializes this critique: by using medication capsules as raw material, it tensions the relationship between the psychological suffering induced by the platforms and the profit derived from it — a perverse equation in which mental health becomes a currency of exchange.
