🛟✨The Nexialist #0177

online culture curators | meme manifesto | encyclopedia — circle of knowledge | tech radar | thomassons | genesis | brat | ugly boys | luchtballon

Jun 13, 2024

welcome to another week of your cyber-intuitive zine, the nexialist

hey you! i hope this message finds you and treats you well. last week i i published the newsletter by mistake the evening before, and i could feel my heart on my throat when i noticed the mistake. gladly, that lasted only a couple of seconds when i reminded myself that no one cares about what time the nexialist is coming to their inbox. it’s funny/off-putting how the superindustry of the imaginary works and gets us on this content treadmill.

this week, there are some thoughts and links about curatorship, memes, the mindblowing origin of the word encyclopedia (or one of them), a tiny bit of self-promotion and other cultural signals. enjoy! 🫀✨

my 35th birthday happens this saturday, so send me good wishes and vibrations, or if you’re feeling generous, buy me a coffee, become a paid subscriber or simply ask your friends to subscribe. everything helps!

—Rodrigo Turra

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🫀online culture curators

this piece by kyle chayka from the new yorker gave me a war fuzzy feeling and bunch of brainsparks. “The New Generation of Online Culture Curators: In a digital landscape overrun by algorithms and A.I., we need human guides to help us decide what’s worth paying attention to.” so it does make me feel seen for what i do here every week and for work. it made me think how even though the algorithm can help me finding content that i like, the best pieces of content i’ve shared here were recommended by humans, because humans add context and emotions.

Digital platforms are largely devoted to making users consume more, faster—think of TikTok’s frenetic “For You” feed or Spotify’s automated playlists. Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.

when i started reading, i had some reservations. here we go again trying to rebuild trust for influencers. soon, kyle gifted us with the distiction:

In a previous era of the Internet, we might have thought of figures like these simply as influencers, whose ability to attract large followings online gives them a power that sometimes surpasses that of traditional publications. But the idea of an influencer has, as Reilly put it, become “a little flattened over time,” connoting shallow, uninformed, even misleading content dictated by sponsors. “There’s a distinction between influencing and what I do,” Reilly insisted. The archetypal influencer produces life-style porn of one form or another, playing up the aspirational glamour of their own home or meals or vacations. The new wave of curators is more outward-looking, borrowing from the influencer’s playbook and piggybacking on social media’s intimate interaction with followers in order to address a body of culture beyond themselves.

brainsparks: content curation approaches (tn#54), knowledge curatorship (tn#14), curation and synthesis (tn#5), dark forest theory (tn#10), superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28), deinfluencer (tn#111), distributed trust (tn#81)

🧊meme manifesto

i’m warning you, the iceberg, this meme manifesto project, is a rabbit hole, and i recommend that you take a dive there. meme manifesto is a transmedia project that was born out of the desire to prove that memes are more than mere “funny viral images”. you can navigate it as a forever scrolling page in the iceberg page and go through the history of modern memes, this language we’ve been using, polishing (and underestimating). or you can visit the detective walls which offer more analysis on different kinds of memes.

here’s the first part of the manifesto:

We believe that memes are the latest iteration of the one true power that defines us as a species:
The faculty to understand, interpret and alter our reality through linguistic and symbolic patterns of meaning.
To understand this power means to hold the keys to control the uncertain grounds on which our common social world is built.
Memes are a powerful new cultural technology that should be respected and treated as such.
This website is a small contribution to the ongoing collective effort to gain a better understanding of what memes are, how they work and what they can do.
May it help its visitors to navigate the memesphere and embrace the Era of High Weirdness.

brainspark: memes, emojis and the rosetta stone (tn#9), digital fluency (tn#28), design threads (tn#88)

📚encyclopedia — circle of knowledge

thank you, daiane, for sharing this from the calouste gulbekian museum in lisbon. it blew my mind to understand where the word encyclopedia comes from. how had i not realized this before? it is quite poetic to think of knowledge as a circles, growing and intersecting.

This newly discovered manuscript reflects an astounding effort to represent, in visual form, the concept of "encyclopedia”, a word that derives from the Greek and means "connected by circles", "learning" or even, in other words, a "circle of knowledge". No other shape in nature captures information as comprehensively as the circle and sphere. However, circles offer great technical challenges, particularly to the craftsman, who uses a compass and ruler, but also to the reader, who is forced to physically engage with the manuscript, turning the book or his own body, to be able to read it. .
Its diagrams and texts convey information that is simultaneously ancient, medieval and modern and were compiled by the Persian scholar Mirza Muhammad al-Akhbāri (c. 1764-1817). Detailed archival work revealed that, despite the damage caused by the Lisbon floods in 1967, the Gulbenkian manuscript is the most exquisitely crafted among the few copies preserved in libraries around the world.

this is the fifth part of a series of exhibitions called “the power of the word: a participatory curatorial project at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, involving principally Arabic and Persian speakers who join curatorial and educational staff and guest researchers to study the Middle East collection. It aims to enhance our experience of these works by encouraging collaborative research and vibrant, contemporary interpretations which affirm intangible culture.”

🛟tech radar

learning about the origin of encyclopedia and the optimal circular shape to retain content had an extra layer for me: working with envisioning, the emerging technology research that i do together with

Michell Zappa

is shared beautifully in this radar shaped, interactive infographic (Fabio and Thomaz do their magic there). this is one of the latest ones for eit deep tech talent initiative, which aims to skill one million people within deep tech fields by 2025.

brainsparks: centaur mindset (tn#106)

🪜thomassons

“Thomasson: noun \ to-ma-son \ a preserved architectural relic which serves no purpose”.

stairs that lead to nowhere. doors or windows in the middle of nothing. a dead-end bridge. i never knew there was a specific term for these leftover structures that just stay behind, and many times are upkept for no apparent reason. since the 70s in japa,, spotting these structures is a thing, with books published and even its own illustrated encyclopedia. this post in messynessychic is full of examples and a brief history (including the odd name).

It’s hard to explain exactly why these useless Thomassons would fascinate anyone, but I think what I personally find most intriguing (or amusing), is the implication of laziness in an unexpected place. A Thomasson is just the sort of thing that has “not my job” written all over it.

it got me thinking how many “social/cultural thomassons” we hold in our culture, or even “thomasson habits” we still have in our lives. values/opinions/behaviours that are outdated and still we don’t get rid of them.

brainspark: heterotopia (tn#90), out-of-place artifact (tn#126)

📱genesis

wow, i got chills within the first minute of raye’s new ep (and they kept coming). it’s about so many important things of our time: mental health, addiction, everything mediated by technology, aesthetic pressure, imperative of success/productivity.

Yes, I edit my pictures to make my waist look slimmer
And make my ass look bigger so that I'm someone you aspire to
Let me in your algorithm, please
I know I'll only be important if I'm someone you would like, follow, share, and subscribe to

brainstorm: parasocial relationships (tn#47), cold noses (tn#122)

🐸brat

well, i’ve been obsessing over charli xcx’s new album brat (and its deluxe version: brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not). i’m not the only one loving it, as it’s been critically aclaimed as the best voted album of the year so far (95 on metacritic).

the sound is very charli, hyperpop, but she pushes it even further. the lyrics are so personal and vulnerable. i cried listening to So I, a song filled with regret over not being a better friend to sophie, who passed away. she even sings about her desire on being a mother and considering pausing her carreer. it’s impressive to see such a synthetic sound being coated with so much intimacy and truth.

brainsparks: anti-design (tn#169), glitch nostalgia (tn#34), the cult of ugly aesthetics (tn#134), rip sophie (tn#5)

❤️ugly boys

talking about the cult of ugly aesthetics, the new song/video by brazilian rapper ebony is about how much she loves ugly boys. i’m impressed with her flow, attitude and production.

🎈luchtballon

joost klein, the dutch artist who represented the netherlands on eurovision (and was banned) released a new song. in the aesthetics of ps2, which follows the ugly thread of today’s nexialist. apparently it’s filled with symbols and easter eggs about the whole eurovision situation. to me it’s amazing how this whole thing actually got him more followers and listeners (including myself).

brainspark: eurovision in crisis (tn#173)

see you next week, brats🫀✨

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