Most promoters treat drama like a disease. Something to suppress, manage, contain. I treated it like gasoline.
SLIST was born from a revenge plot. I got banned from a 30-person group chat in Mexico City in January 2023. My response was to build a bigger chat, fill it with every cortesia and discount code in the scene, and systematically expose the people who kicked me out once I had the platform to do it. I ruined a few careers. Got my revenge tenfold. And in the process, built the largest underground rave community in CDMX.
The lesson was unmistakable: controversy is not a bug. It is the single most efficient audience acquisition channel available to an underground brand with zero budget.
The framework
Here is how it actually works, stripped of the moral panic:
Step one: take a position that nobody in the scene will say out loud. Step two: the casual followers leave (this is a feature, not a bug — it concentrates the base). Step three: the people who resonate with honesty over performance lean in harder. Step four: your enemies still need your platform because you own the distribution. Step five: the controversy makes your name known to people who would never have heard of you otherwise.
I watched this cycle repeat for three years. The drama is seasonal — roughly six-month cycles of chaos and peace. I pattern-recognized it early and stopped treating it as crisis management. It became a scheduling consideration.
The shitpost engine
At its core, SLIST is a shitpost blog about the local scene. The parties and the community formed around that. Dark music is often provocative and inappropriate. Seventy-five percent of the general population does not like listening to dark music. If we are always worried about alienating people, the real art will never shine through.
This is the math that most promoters refuse to do: you cannot serve everyone. So serve the 25% so hard that they become evangelists. The 75% were never going to convert anyway. Every dollar and every hour spent trying to be inoffensive is a dollar and an hour wasted.
The content strategy was deliberate. I timed provocative posts to drop before major scene events — usually at 11am, before noon, ideally before Friday — so people would discuss them at the smoking areas of competing parties that same night. Content posted before IRL events seeds conversations. That is not random posting. It is social engineering through content scheduling.
Why the scene hates this and why it works anyway
Almost every promoter in NYC tries to cosplay as a socialist idealist for their vocal community members. The moment someone like me says something different, they close ranks and refuse to associate. The NYC techno scene’s performative leftism is the specific dysfunction I navigate around.
But the numbers do not lie. The arrest in July 2025 — which should have killed the brand — instead attracted a wave of OG bookers who had been disgruntled with scene politics. They started reaching out, funding events, offering venues. Ticket sales for the next event hit five times the previous one. The momentum was at its highest point exactly when the cancel campaigns peaked.
The best thing about the arrest and all the gatekeeping in the scene is that it attracted a bunch of other old head promoters who had been disgruntled with scene politics to fund all my events.
The exit plan was always built in
I always knew the shitpost engine had a shelf life. From fairly early on I recognized that one day, when the drama settles down, I would hand over the account to someone more professional and less egotistical so I could focus on other areas of the project — the hospitality side, in-person networking, the platform.
That transition happened in March 2026 when I stepped down from DJing under the SLIST name. The growth mechanism served its purpose. Followers doubled. Group chats doubled. Contacts doubled. Average turnouts quadrupled. The shitpost-to-brand pivot was not a course correction. It was the plan executing on schedule.
Drama sells like nothing else. The promoters who pretend otherwise are either lying about their numbers or have never had numbers worth lying about.