📢✨The Nexialist #0282

welcome to your weekly cyber-potion, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this weekend has been full of happenings: i had a blast playing and dancing at tropikali and celebrated my birthday at efteling, one of the netherlands amusement parks. as you can imagine, i’m now in recovery mode. now, summer seems to be approaching and i cannot wait. i’ll leave you to it! enjoy 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks this week over the past years:

ancient amazonian root urns, ocean literacy (tn#230), flow state, expand your perception, what is post-branding, craftivist manifesto, fuel a conversation (tn#178), linear opposites or closely related?, the hidden networks of everything, pyramid vs prism, out-of-place artifact, how reality got storified (tn#126), amazonize beyoncé(?), entering flow state, rituals x routine flourish of approval (tn#76), fermented content, iconographic search, context collapse, culture of proximity, rosetta stone for the digital age (tn#25)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

last friday, 12/06, lovers’ day is celebrated in brazil (dia dos namorados). it’s a huge date for retail, just like valentine’s day in other countries. i’m not sure if there is any connection to this, but another immersive dataviz by alvin chang was published at pudding.cool, mapping relationships of thousands of adults in the us, from 2017 to 2022. how are the relationships? how many fights do they have? how many times do they have sex per week/month? and one important question with a plot-twist: how did the pandemic affect their relationship?

in an age of curated lives on instagram and a loneliness pandemic, ti’s nice to see how other people are feeling/living their love lives. it’s also interesting how alvin traces back how “societal disruptions have exposed the fault lines of our relationships.” the black death shifted workforce and social mobility, the great depression threatened the modern idea of masculinity, and the 60s brought an idea of relationships as self-fulfillment.

Psychologist John Gottman observed thousands of couples during his long career, and he created a framework called the “Sound Relationship House”—basically the infrastructure of successful couples. And at the very top of this house is creating shared meaning.

brainsparks: an invisible epidemic (tn#202), happy map (tn#278), monogamy, explained (tn#6), (non)monogamy (tn#6), relationship anarchy (tn#6), decolonizing affection (tn#229), erotic intelligence (tn#1)

i’m lucky not to be in the apps for a while, as it already felt quite weird years ago to see myself as a product on a grid (talking about grindr here). now it seems that the enshittification (tn#106) is dominating and irreversible as match group is acquiring all major apps. vanessa lays out how they exploit loneliness, productize women (which are the scarcity in the straight apps) and play with everyone’s confidence to keep people in the apps.

match group has also acquired grindr and cruising app sniffies. in february grindr was testing a premium ai tier for only 500 dollars per month. i hope that this insanity pushes us to go back to flirting in real life, i’m out of words.

brainsparks: the anti-social century (tn#229), enshittification lifecycle (tn#106), capitalists killed the internet (tn#212), cranking the dopamine machine (tn#208), deep doubt era (tn#193), technofeudalism (tn#143), critic of technology (tn#121), social media x cults (tn#74), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), post-naive internet era (tn#252), dark forest theory (tn#10)

if you know a little bit about star signs, you’ve probably heard that us geminis are two-faced and love to gossip — currently we are in gemini season, so i though i’d to bring this here. gemini’s ruling planet is mercury, the messenger of the gods in roman mythology, and it represents the mind, intellect and communication. i always say: information is made to circulate.

i saw this week someone being moralistic about gossiping on social media, and while i know there is cruel/damaging gossip, gossip is a social skill – not a character flaw. we’re social creatures, hardwired to gossip and it served as a survival strategy: knowing who to trust or not, for instance. avoiding gossip can even lead to social isolation, and fear of whispers can keep us in check. i would say this is quite an effective technology to master.

Successful gossiping entails being a good team player and sharing key information with others in ways that won’t be perceived as self-serving. It’s about knowing when it’s appropriate to talk, and when it’s probably best to keep your mouth shut.

brainsparks: linguist tech support (tn#221), mercurial (tn#72), portunus (tn#268), parasocial relationships (tn#47), collectivity as a technology (tn#260), the anti-social century (tn#229), gregarious (tn#16), social and cultural infrastructure (tn#225), rice hypothesis (tn#259), post-individualism (tn#196), digiphrenia (tn#191), culture of proximity (tn#25), social cooling (tn#38)

according to otto scharmer, author of theory u, we may be entering a second axial age. i had no idea what the first axial age was, but i learned (btw, this is a must-read).

Roughly 2,500 years ago, something remarkable happened. It occurred not in one place but across the Eurasian continents, largely in parallel. Against the backdrop of Bronze Age civilizations collapsing, empires disintegrating, city-states competing and waves of migration and warfare reshaping social structures, the old mythic orders were failing. Local, myth-based traditions could no longer hold the weight of human experience. And out of that turbulence, new kinds of questions broke through: What does it mean to be human? How shall we live? What is our place in the larger order of things?

scharmer suggests there might be another similar shift underway. he says there are at least three intelligences we need balanced: artificial intelligence, organic intelligence and a field or source intelligence.

We are living through a moment of radical depletion of our social soil. Three symptoms summarize this condition: Anomie is the erosion of our moral norms, the collapse of our ethical behavior. Atomie, the breakdown of social bonds into loneliness and polarized echo chambers, is the collapse of the relational web of connections on which society depends. Atrophy is the gradual loss of the deeper human capacities needed to create, converse and collaborate in ways that embody our humanity. It is the collapse of agency itself, both individual and collective.

Beneath all three lies a fourth dimension that connects them. Just as industrial agriculture replaced the diversity of the living soil with chemical fertilizers and crop monocultures — productive in the short term, devastating over time — the current AI moment is producing an epistemic monoculture. It manifests in a single, computational form of knowing that views the world as a set of objects.

brainsparks: cultural vacuums (tn#254), 80 year cycles (tn#233), model collapse (tn#211), cosmophobia (tn#135), ai is our ultimate test (tn#225), inner rewilding (tn#164), inner development goals (tn#67), awesome anthropocene goals (tn#67), defining groupcore (tn#253)

horsegiirl is one of these artists that i find quite fascinating, and it took me a while to get her. her latest album, nature is healing, is so much fun, cute, ironic and conceptual. i mean, a horsegirl singing about nature’s healing, with organic/electronic/pc music beats. she even has a song called ‘organic intelligence.’

Why call it progress when it has life disappearing?
I think that’s actually kinda delusional
And our relationship with every single being
In my opinion, that’s a crazy miracle
Like how we share our DNA with a banana or slug
And how it’s universally agreed mosquitoes suck

brainsparks: artistry + world building (tn#192), natural intelligence (tn#168), rip sophie (tn#5)

so beautiful to see this greek/arabic collaboration, and this video/song is stunning. marina satti represented greece a couple of years ago at eurovision, and zeyne is a palestinian-jordanian singer/songwriter whose entry was denied in the us for a palestine fundraiser. more of these collabs and i would love to see arab-latino collabs too.

brainsparks: diva (tn#213), deira (tn#163), green colonialism (tn#145)

it’s fascinating to see how rebecca black has matured in her career, from the viral annoying hit friday of yesteryear (2011) to a global pop. i do sound like your parent’s friend i guess, because 15 years in indeed more than enough time to put in the work, the research and the practice. i quite enjoyed this one.

brainsparks: recession pop is back (tn#184), the alchemy of pop (tn#182)

I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist. 

I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below:

thenexialist.xyz