hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this weekend, it’s world pride is in amsterdam. i know the event can be criticized for its commercial focus, but after the attack last weekend at berlin pride, it’s a proof prides need to keep happening all over the world. i will be celebrating for the first time in one of the boats, and i’m so excited. i will leave you to this week’s nexialist which was a bit of a rabbit hole. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🇧🇷 equilibrivm ii

after 3 months of releasing equilibrivm (tn#275) anitta gifted the world with a sequel, and i’m so proud to show her off here. i do know we’ve always had artists showcasing the diversity and beauty of brazilian spirituality in their art, but to see an artist of this caliber releasing something like this gives me goosebumps. i don’t even follow the faiths she is representing, but i was getting chills and crying while watching it. the amount of afro-brazilian and indigenous elements, represent brazil’s syncretism (tn#44) in such a beautiful light — and i probably don’t get half of them.

you can see the visual research is so rich, the lyrics, the collabs and the different brazilian rhythms, anitta’s artistry is undeniable. as much as this a “new era” it feels authentic. we are walking through her spiritual learnings with her. one of the themes i saw in few songs is to get off our screens, take it slow, have moments introspection. this is how this work moves the zeitgeist forward.

haters online were complaining she used ai, and the artists that participated proceded to share their artisanal intelligence (tn#149) and ancestral intelligence videos, from the design of the outfits, sets and other visuals used in the video. it was all made by humans.

brainsparks: rock doido (tn#241), amazonize the world (tn#153), funk generation (tn#171), carranca (tn#238), luedji luna (tn#97), caju (tn#187), fetish, glamour & grammar (tn#75), syncretism (tn#44), appreciation or… (tn#20), more-than-human aesthetics (tn#200), profane (tn#170), artistry + world building (tn#192)

🔔 beeldenstorm

seeing anitta highlighting all these beautiful religious/spiritual brazilian symbology reminded me of something i’d read about here in amsterdam but never looked into, so i’m bringing this rabbit hole for you as well.

beeldenstorm: outbreaks of destruction of religious images that occurred in Europe in the 16th century, known in English as the Great Iconoclasm or Iconoclastic Fury. During these spates of iconoclasm, Catholic art and many forms of church fittings and decoration were destroyed in unofficial or mob actions by Calvinist Protestant crowds as part of the Protestant Reformation. Most of the destruction was of art in churches and public places.

i remember learning about this, but so briefly, in school. imagine how much art and heritage was lost in the name of power disputes. yet another case of cosmophobia (tn#135): “this monotheist regime in which there is only one way of existence, inherent of colonialism.” it also made me think of phillistinism (tn#85): “the attitudes, habits, and characteristics of a person who deprecates art and beauty, spirituality and intellect. As a derogatory term philistine describes a person who is narrow-minded and hostile to the life of the mind, whose materialistic worldview and tastes indicate an indifference to cultural and aesthetic values.”

it’s also a reminder that even if syncretism can be reclaimed as beautiful, what took place in brazil and many other invaded countries, happened as a way to keep their faiths alive during oppressive and violent rule, substituting/mixing religious symbols/rituals. btw, this kind of religious intolerance and violence still takes place in brazil and i think that’s what makes it even more powerful what anitta is creating.

brainsparks: cosmophobia (tn#135), syncretism (tn#44)

☦️ iconoclasm

yes, you’re in the rabbit hole with me. hold my hand. and don’t genuflect.

i grew up 7th day adventist, so there was not a lot of imagery in church, and no saints, not even jesus’ mother (i know, boring) — and i remember hearing the explanation was the second of the ten commandments: do not make worship statues or images as gods. the catholic church conveniently forgot that for many years.

the beeldenstorm happenned in the 1500s, but centuries before there was another dispute against religious images: the byzantine iconoclasm, from 726 to 842 ad.

following major military threats and losses to arab muslim armies, byzantine emperors like leo iii wondered why their empire was shrinking and thought maybe it was “divine punishment for idolatry”. or that was the perfect excuse: emperors wanted to limit the immense wealth and political influence held by monasteries and monks who created and defended these sacred objects.

this culminated at the second council of nicaea which made all these mental gymnastics on why they could still venerate images and break the second commandment:

The Council determined that the honorary veneration (timētikē proskynēsis) of icons was permitted, and that the true adoration (alēthinē latreia) was reserved for God alone. It further stated that honor given to an icon passes through to its subject and therefore is not idolatrous as the iconoclasts believed.

it’s just fascinating how our image-obsessed culture started so long ago. it’s also a window into how early humans understood power is built with images and stories. now we have ai-powered jesus and godgpt (tn#232).

brainsparks: ARTificial (tn#123), the earthquake that changed history (tn#81), truth windows (tn#165), what will replace religion? (tn#81), crypto as ritual and religion (tn#58), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), an apocalyptic meditation on doomscrolling (tn#145), digital esoterism (tn#116)

💥 iconoclash

then i arrived at bruno latour’s concept of iconoclash, which i was not familiar with. i still haven’t read this book, but it’s still worth mentioning. the book was written in 2002 with peter weibel, and it seems so relevant to bring this concept in an age of synthetic imagery, maybe a hyper-iconophile culture.

This book offers new insights from new perspectives from the front of the image wars governing the actual world in the field of politics, religion, art, and science. The general drama that is being set in the book is the sort of double bind in which we are put by two contradictory injunctions: “If only we could do without images!” and “We cannot do without images!”. The first injunction is an appeal to get rid of all images, to become an iconoclast; the second is an appeal to respect images as our only possible mediation, to become an iconophile. The quandary of the many artists, saints, scientists, militants who populate the chapters of this book is that they are taken in between those two contradictory urges; this is what we call an iconclash, that is, a deep uncertainty on the power, sanctity, and violence of images. This uncertainty is what is explored by crossing the boundary between four domains of iconoclasm and iconophily that are rarely brought together, namely the world of scientists and their instruments, that of artists and their works of art, the realm of the devout and their faiths, and the domain of politics and their many representatives. Some images attract our rage, spite, and suspicion; others, on the contrary, are deemed beyond dispute; still others leave us indifferent.

brainsparks: post-branding (tn#178), the vanishing designer (tn#81), death of a fantastic machine (tn#231), when images matter more than reality (tn#155), deep doubt era (tn#193), super industry of the imaginary (tn#28), a blurry jpeg of the web (tn#111), engines for the imagination (tn#85), synthetic media (tn#18), synthetic porn (tn#242)

🙏🏻 cognitive dissonance of colonialism

again, articulating so well some recent cultural moments and connecting the dots: white jesus, the uproar over lupita nyong’o playing helen of troy and andrew tate’s masculinity all stemming from the same colonial wound. it’s worth the read.

Being scared that your framework for beauty is not the same as the rest of the world is hilarious and kind of weak. The online furor over Lupita Nyong’o’s casting and the fools who claim to have any understanding of the ancient Greek world, having literally never read the Odyssey, entered a museum, or read a myth, speaks to the shallowness of thought that fuels the reactive masculinity of online bros. Nolan’s casting has sparked an online war, only proving that Helen, as Lupita, could start one.

i haven’t watched nolan’s odyssey yet, but recently i found a phrase by horace about with this idea that rome conquered greece militarily, but greece “conquered” rome culturally, profoundly shaping roman art, philosophy, literature, education, religion, and architecture. this echoes the syncretic vibe i was talking about before.

Captive Greece captured her savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium. — Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio. - Horace’s Epistles, Book 2, Epistle 1.

brainsparks: philistinism (tn#85), olympic outrage (tn#184), cosmophobia (tn#135), cultural vacuums (tn#254)

💶 wildlife banknotes

talking about icons, banknotes/coins imagery have been used as way to assert power for centuries. it is a tool of soft power and shows what a country/region chooses to celebrate. Last week, the European Central Bank unveiled the finalists for the new euro banknotes, inviting people to vote. it gave me too many feelings, even if Amsterdam is basically cashless at this point.

first, why would they copycat brazilian money (tn#3) adding wildlife to the notes — i was feeling possessive about that idea, until i realized several countries include animals in their banknotes. i also think it’s somehow considered greenwashing to put animals in the notes when capitalism is the very system destroying wildlife. maybe i’m missing smth.

Showcasing species on currency is an opportunity to foster national pride and raise awareness of each nation’s unique fauna. But for threatened species, there is no guarantee this will ultimately lead to their protection.

then when voting, i realized i liked much more the ones that included the birds + brutalist/modernist buildings, and not the ones with important people.

brainsparks: wine animals (tn#223), brazilian money (tn#3), the cult of ugly aesthetics (tn#134), how did the world get so ugly? (tn#247)

🐚cowrie shells

in the end, adding wildlife to our money is going back to the start of a global economy. cowrie shells became the first global money — its latin name is monetaria moneta. you can see them in anitta’s video, as they’re also used in accessories, and búzios rituals.

In an age of paper money, metal coins, and cards as common means of exchange, the concept of shells as currency may sound inefficient. However, cowrie shells were impossible to forge, were not easily broken, could not be melted down into something else, and were always of a similar size, shape, and weight. Besides currency, they could be easily incorporated into any ritual, ceremonial, or everyday object. This was especially the case in many regions throughout East, Central, and West Africa.

brainsparks: crypto as ritual and religion (tn#58), tulip mania (tn#275), how europe stole africa (tn#102)

👁️ reach out

talking about brutalist buildings, i had to include this here. victoria monét’s video is so stunning with the choreography, the voguing, the outfits matched with the lighting and angles of the salk institute in la jolla, california. so chic.

brainsparks: brutalist (tn#280)

see you next week, brutalists 💶✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. these days have been hectic around here (and in here 🧠), so i’ll just have a short intro and ask you to send me some good vibes. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🍽️ menu history

another amazing visualization from pudding.cool, this time about the history of menus, or how menus tell us our history. this is focused on the us, but i would love to see this from different cities/countries. you can view the full stunning menus from the frank buttolph collection and the analysis of each meal in this 8-course-experience tell us about that moment in time. from the french wannabe decades zeitgeist, to the introduction of à la carte and different cuisines, to a broken ice monopoly… i was invested — and wondering what qr code menus have to say about us.

A menu describes what a restaurant serves-but a menu also describes who is being served.

They reflect the class, gender, political, technological, and environmental shifts of history.

brainsparks: decadence (tn#242), snobbery vs spicy (tn#193), warmer climate, spicier food (tn#145), methexis in darkness (tn#85), cosplaying as poor (tn#62), hooked on coffee (tn#164)

💳 surveillance pricing

another reason to hate qr code menus… a few years ago i wrote about this but it had such a harmless name, dynamic pricing. the discourse was that it would be more accessible for people with lower incomes, but we all see what’s happening, right?. i love the rebrand, calling it for what it is, surveillance pricing: “Most of the things you interact with online are tracking your location, your device type, and your digital footprint to predict exactly how desperate you are to buy something. If the algorithm thinks you have money, or simply lack options, it alters the price in real-time.” chris shows how difficult it is to trick theses systems. btw, this is the same country saying brazil’s pix is unfair market practice. unfair to whom?

brainsparks: protesting under surveillance (tn#232), surveilance as love language (tn#209), panopticon aesthetics (tn#218), critic of tech (tn#121), how supermarkets rewired the planet (tn#241), failures of globalization (tn#236), a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163)

🇬🇪 born from culture

level six is a creative studio that has been making this stunning series called born from culture, and as title says, this one is based in georgia (the country). this is the ensemble apkhazeti and i’m still in awe of how they move, their clothes (and the beautiful moustaches), all of it mixed with different soundtracks. watch the other ones as well, about the samoans and the māori.

brainsparks: culture is the client (tn#203), storm (tn#276), collectivity as a technology (tn#260)

🪡 hairdresser x archeology

sam kean, author of dinner with king tut: how rogue archeologists are recreating the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of lost civilizations.” in this video, he tells us some stories from ancient rome: how they were producing self-healing concrete, their iconic fermented fish sauce, and my favorite: the story of how a hairdresser solved an ancient rome mystery.

her name is janice stephens, from baltimore, and at a museum she started wondering about the beautiful hairdos in the ancient roman statues. she tried to replicate them at home, without success, and got curious, found research papers, but it was not making sense. when using google translate to check a phrase from latin she understood: the hairdos were sewn with a needle and thread. stephens published a paper and is now one of the leading experts in roman beauty/hairstyling. she calls herself an experimental archeologist of ancient hairdressing. such a nexialist thing to do!

brainsparks: ancient amazonian urns (tn#230), roman baths (tn#98), ancient jungle cities (tn#222), ancestral future (tn#112), el dorado (tn#78), 5000 years of coexistence (tn#170), out-of-place artifact (tn#126), lycurgus cup (tn#243), ancient computer (tn#48), shipwrecked treasures (tn#219)

🐕 canicular = dog days

i thought i had shared this here before, but the word canicular arrived in my inbox this week and i couldn’t find a mention here in the nexialist. a few years ago i started a playlist with these summer songs that went beyond the usual “summer song” radio vibe, maybe more mellow. lana del rey’s summertime sadness was the inspiration. the dog days are yet not over in europe (even if in amsterdam the weather hasn’t been the best)

The Latin word canicula, meaning “small dog,” is the diminutive form of canis, source of the English word canine. Canicula was also the name for Sirius, the star that represents the hound of the hunter Orion in the constellation named for that Roman mythological figure. Because the first visible rising of Sirius occurs during the summer, the hot sultry days that occur from early July to early September came to be called dies caniculares, or as we know them in English, “the dog days.”

brainsparks: cucumber time (tn#185), dog (tn#196), doggos (tn#34), top dog (tn#117), rose of the winds (tn#181)

🌚 lunatic

since we’re looking up at the sky and celestial bodies, i remembered how learning this made my jaw drop: “Lunatic is a term referring to a person who is seen as mentally ill, dangerous, foolish,or crazy — conditions once attributed to “lunacy”. The word derives from lunaticus meaning “of the moon” or “moonstruck.”

The term “lunatic” derives from the Latin word lunaticus, which originally referred mainly to epilepsy and madness, as diseases thought to be caused by the moon. The King James Version of the Bible records “lunatick” in the Gospel of Matthew, which has been interpreted as a reference to epilepsy. By the fourth and fifth centuries, astrologers were commonly using the term to refer to neurological and psychiatric diseases. Pliny the Elder argued that the full moon induced individuals to lunacy and epilepsy by effects on the brain analogous to the nocturnal dew. Until at least 1700, it was also a common belief that the moon influenced fevers, rheumatism, episodes of epilepsy and other diseases.

brainsparks: cloud forms (tn#271), naming clouds (tn#271), rose of the winds (tn#181), blue skies (tn#1)

🌌 soft sapphic soul

d’leesa is the synthpop diva we need right now, singing some soft sapphic soul to cleanse your timeline and heal your soul. thank me later.

What emotions do you usually pull from when writing songs?

Definitely yearning.

brainsparks: soft porn (tn#104),

👄 putinho

i recently shared bia soull’s pornografia auditiva (tn#278), and this video just came out, i’m so obsessed. the lyrics are not for the faint-hearted, extra sexy

someone commented: “If two women can’t reproduce, how come Bia Soull and Nanda Tsunami are my mothers?

brainsparks: brazilian female rappers (tn#278), ugly boys (tn#177), i’m bad (tn#110), quente (tn#281)

see you next week, lunatics 🌚✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this week’s nexialist is a bit shorter but also more irl than usual, which feels quite nice. i will leave you to it 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🎩 asset, liability & equity

last week, i got to see ark’s performance at the internationaal theater amsterdam, and i’m so proud. “asset, liability & equity: morality is a currency you spend without knowing the price.” i didn’t know what i signed up to watch, but since this is ark’s third piece i’ve watched, i knew i would be in good hands. and i’m glad it went that way. without giving spoilers, i didn’t quite know i would be so uncomfortable, and i appreciate art that makes that. more importantly, it was a reminder how art can explain you things without words, but feelings. one thing that stayed with me, how have we normalized violence in our feeds, and how that numbs us.

Asset Liability & Equity is part collaborative choreography, part domineering improv. In an absurdist spectacle with the intensity of an arena, the presenter, the MC of the performance, creates an environment in which dancers and audience together feel the toll of capital, complicity, power, status and gratification. In this new production, Connor Schumacher challenges the audience to be more than a voyeur and makes them an active participant of the offering.

i was also happy to meet a nexialist reader in the audience and we had a quick chat! thank you for reading and supporting the newsletter, you know who you are <3

brainsparks: raging against various elements (tn#210), euterpians (tn#197), architecture of the invisible (tn#193), somebody that i used to know (tn#163), artistry & worldbuilding (tn#192), body is art (tn#192), duelo (tn#188), artist imperfection (tn#38), fascism is here (tn#226)

🚲 biking naked through amsterdam

this weekend, i did something for the first time: biking naked through amsterdam, and it was such an amazing experience. I decided to tell all about it in my other substack, . i’m expecting to lose some subscribers for the nudity, so maybe don’t go read it if you want to see me in my birthday suit. bare with me.

If you haven’t heard about it, the WNBR is a global event organized in several cities around the globe. Nudity here is used as a reminder of the vulnerability of cyclists on the road the protest is against car culture. It’s also meant to “deliver a vision of a cleaner, safer, body-positive world.” The first concept happened in Zaragoza, Spain, back in 2001 as ciclonudista, and in 2003 it got its current name.

I know, you’re probably thinking Amsterdam doesn’t need that with such an advanced bike culture/infrastructure, but cyclists are feeling increasingly unsafe as casualties have jumped 25% in the past 10 years. Since I moved here, biking has become my daily transport of choice, to the point I miss my bike dearly whenever I travel. And yes, I feel the change over the past 8 years.

brainsparks: anasyrma, how to feel better naked, bigorexia, body shaming stories, bff nude portraits, nakedness: deeply human, gymnasium (tn#79), kids at nudist beaches (tn#88), traffic: conflict or dance? (tn#88), naked truth (tn#13), nakedness (tn#13), naked attraction (tn#197), piss in amsterdam (tn#197), heterotopia, plaskrul (tn#90), amsterdam in the summer (tn#185)

🌉 the bridge

kelela’s much anticipated album, new avatar, came out, and i’ve heard it a couple of times. i had the privilege of watching her live in amsterdam 3 years ago, and wow, not only her productions are impectable, but she commanded the stage so beautifully. also, this collab with pinkpantheress is delicious, and such a queer video full of kissing. so good!

It’s what we don’t say (They’re kind of like, dark)
Your eyes, they look away (They scream, “Attention”)
Now we goin’ ‘round and ‘round
Leavin’ me to figure out (They’re kind of like, dark)
With you, it’s a game

brainsparks: kelela’s raven (tn#134), girl like me (tn#277), stateside (tn#223), men embracing (tn#283), queer the future (tn#5), straight men kiss (tn#95)

📖 umyazu

while reading sentiers, i came across this text by mandy brown. i’ve been thinking a lot about something similar, how the attention economy is actually a distraction economy.

The attention economy is misnamed. Our attention is not being harvested but rather suppressed, flattened out, demeaned into submission. We do not attend anything when we doomscroll or binge watch or tap tap tap one notification after another; we abandon—ourselves, our bodies, our kith and kin.

she frames it through reading. “reading is the art of attention” — and it’s true. i’m struggling to read books, but during my last 10 day vacation i was able to read 3 books that had been collecting dust. mandy connects it to le guin’s the telling, written in 2000. i haven’t read that one yet, but it’s worth reading this. with attention.

In The Telling, the last of Le Guin’s novels set in the Hainish universe, a young Terran observer named Sutty sets out for the planet Aka. In the forty years it takes for her to arrive, the main continent’s literary and democratic culture is supplanted by a capitalist state, intent on speed-running through industrialization. Books are pulped and writing banned; libraries are closed. The old languages and gestures are outlawed, along with homosexuality, home-cooked food, bartering. Citizens become “producer-consumers” and must orient all of their lives to those two actions. Ordinary life becomes subsumed into regimented, surveilled, and homogenized routines.

and this:

There’s a prevailing narrative that says we’ve lost our ability to pay attention, that we need drugs or discipline or sternly-worded warnings about the dangers of social media to deal with this growing public health threat. This narrative completely obscures the fact that annihilating attention is a political project with clear benefits for the billionaire class: if we cannot attend the world, neither can we intercede in it. We become passive recipients of their worldbuilding, disenfranchised from our own responsibility to make sense of—and therefore to remake—the world around us.

brainsparks: the state of culture 2024 (tn#164), fracking eyeballs (tn#150), superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28), amusing ourselves to death (tn#208), program or be programmed (tn#200), critic of technology (tn#121), social media x cults (tn#74), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), deep doubt era (tn#193), harrison bergeron (tn#43)

👁️ religion

during these days off, i was reading byung-chul han’s the disappearance of rituals and he mentions the origin of the word religion, which has many possibilities, but somehow it’s tied to attention:

This noun of action was derived by Cicero from relegere “go through again” (in reading or in thought), from re- “again” (see re-) + legere “read” (see lecture (n.)). […] Another possible origin is religiens “careful,” opposite of negligens.

it got me thinking about the attention (or distraction) economy, and how it hijacks and empties meaning around us.

brainsparks: fascism is here (tn#226), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), crypto as ritual and religion (tn#58), what will replace religion? (tn#81), cultural vacuums (tn#254)

see you next week, bridges 🌉✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. i’m back to reality in amsterdam and full of catching up to do, so it’s a shorter than the usual nexialist. i will leave you to it 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

80 year cycles, unthinkable futures, the technium, social change map, homo crustaceous (tn#233), time of monsters, clown in mainstream, rose of the winds (tn#181), merpeople, latin blood. blue mind theory, dirty words: community (tn#129), meta morphism , sophistry, el dorado, data as the new soil, not oil (tn#78). lil nas x’s digital fluency, social constructs, men in the media, relearning fertilization, spiral sperm, super industry of the imaginary, creative effectiveness (tn#28)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🐇 pornotopia

i’ve been meaning to read paul b. preciado’s pornotopia for a while, so i got myself a copy last time i went to brazil, and i could finally read it during these days off, when i devoured it. it has completely shifted how i look at masculinity and just how we relate to technology, sex and pornography today.

preciado walks us through the history hugh hefner and how his playboy empire created the new ideal of urban masculinity during the cold war by using architecture, surveillance, media, drugs and sex. the book has so much more than this but, for instance, his iconic rotating round bed was not only used to “play” with the bunnies, but it was also his office, and it was filmed and recorded, like a studio. also, he was fashionably hooked to amphetamines, so that he could work for hours.

it does seem he anticipated a few decades our current affairs: onlyfans and streaming intimacies, endless content production and surveillance, working from anywhere, anytime. this whole chapter was missing from how porn became the american dream (tn#278)

i was also not aware of pornotopia as a concept:

In critical theory, pornotopia describes an imagined space determined by sexual fantasies and dominated by human sexual activity, expressed in and encompassing erotica and pornography. The word was coined by the American literary critic Steven Marcus in his 1966 book The Other Victorians, deriving inspiration from nineteenth-century English literature on sexuality by moralists, physicians, and erotic authors.

brainsparks: the alpha male myth, colonial masculinity (tn#127), masculinity (tn#48), straight men kiss (tn#95), on heteropessimism (tn#174), male objectification through the ages (tn#127), heterotopia (tn#90)

🤬 euphemism threadmill

john mcwhorter, professor of linguistics, wrote this and the subtitle got me: “euphemisms are like underwear: best changed frequently.” i always wondered how/why euphemisms keep changing, and this seems to be true everywhere, even it if the article is focused in the context of the united states. what would be called “cash assistance for the differently abled” could have been “welfare for cripples” back then.

What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion. We think of euphemisms as one-time events, where one prissily coins a way of saying something that detracts from something unpleasant about it. That serves perfectly well as a definition of what euphemism is, but misses the point that euphemism tends to require regular renewal. This is because thought changes more slowly than we can change the words for it, and has a way of catching up with our new coinages.

brainsparks: makeshift signs (tn#280)

🪩 one step away

ok, i am part of the people who are obsessed with madonna’s new album/era. i don’t know about you, but it does feel like an invitation to leave the house and go party.

People think that dance music is superficial
But they’ve got it all wrong
The dance floor is not just a place, it’s a threshold
A ritualistic space where movement replaces language

another book i read during these days off was byung-chul han’s the disappearance of rituals, and i know madonna has done her research there too. there’s another song called love without words, an ode to electronic musioc.

He juxtaposes a community without communication — where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning — to today’s communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics.

brainsparks: confessions ii (tn#281),madonna-ology (tn#211)

🫈 dancing apes

by coincidence, i had this saved to share here a couple weeks ago. it’s a clip/remix taken from lucky people center international (1998) by johan soderberg and erik pauser (now in my watchlist).

somehow humans invented this trick, or whatever you might call it, of synchronizing group activity and the movements of each individual to a common pulse. maybe to a drum, maybe to hand clapping. maybe the original pulse was stumping on the ground. repetitive monotonous rhythms. the monotonous highly repetitive music… so we are the dancing apes.

brainsparks: electronic body music (tn#84), architecture ft. music (tn#15)

🪭 human again

i’ve been following genesis awusu’s for a bit of time and i was loving his sound, but this is next level to my taste. it’s always strange to me when i’m enhoying a male artist, it’s when i realize most of the music i listen to is by women. love that such a camp reference is being used — and the guillotine.

I wrote this song when I was thinking about apathy. Living in the digital age of misinformation is genuinely brain-frying sometimes. So much global gaslighting, so much to cry and scream about; it’s easier to just flip the switch off and sink into base hedonism to feel human again. But it’s really important to care. You can party too. Care about the rights and freedoms that let you party. Care about all the people around the world who wanna party just like you. Keep fighting, kicking and screaming so the party doesn’t die

i was listening to it thinking it reminded me of something, and it was new order’s blue monday — and i just realized this is the first time i watched their official video — there are hand drawings and a dog, can we please go back to this?

brainsparks: stampede (tn#267), get inspired (tn#98), digital guillotine aka digitine (tn#173)

⚽️ gencup

honestly, i was trying not to be so invested in this world cup, but i’m brazilian and my boyfriend is argentinian, so there’s no other choice. the gencup project by zeh fernandes makes super cool and soothing posters by using data of each game, combining football, code and graphic design. above is the blueprint, but i recommend going to the gencup website to see how each game is playes.

brainsparks: fio maravilha (tn#159), voice of brazil (tn#246), sportswashing (tn#96)

see you next week, humans 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well! this week, i’m enjoying the sea, the sun and some relaxing time in stunning toscany with my boyfriend and my friend. that’s why you’ll notice this is mostly a musical edition, as my time reading were reserved for books (i’ll bring more about that in the upcoming weeks). we’re halfway through the year, can you believe? i’m always reminded by my younger sister’s birthday on july 1st (feliz aniversário, bibica!). well, i’ll leave you to it. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

chatgpt won’t make you dumb, godgpt, protesting under surveillance, neoperreo, ney matogrosso, how to study culture, the end of strategy as we know it (tn#232), nearbywiki, calculating empires (tn#180), iboru, funk rave (tn#128), poe’s Law, the evolution of pop culture, where did the long tail go?, the kate bush push, don’t hug me. i’m scared (tn#77), pronoia, protopia futures, biohackers vs. big pharma, codpieces, why do we have butts?, 😭 or 😭? , same gender lyrics (tn#27)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

👖 jeans

a few years ago i discovered boy harsher and had the opportunity to see them in amsterdam. they haven’t released anything for a couple of years, so i was ecstatic to see a new release. and this is so good, mixing country with latex. this good stuff is right up my alley.

brainsparks: machina (tn#54)

💖 the unmistakable softness

years ago in brazil there was a yearly trend around children’s day (october 12th) for queer people to show their gayest kid photo, it was called ‘criança viada’ (translated as something in the line of queer kid). the same name was used a few years later by an artist, bia leite, on the queermuseu, in porto alegre. i still remember the noise the conservatives made back then and the exhibition had to be shut, because of this and other works they deemed blasphemous.

needless to say i was thrilled to learn organizes a yearly collection of the same caliber called ‘the unmistakable softness’ which becomes a video.

brainsparks: softness as a technology (tn#95)

🇳🇿 my boy

kiwi/māori singer teeks released such a beautiful soul song with stunning homoerotic imagery/theme. i had never heard of him before, but i’m happy to see this level of production with a gay narrative. you cannot deny the ‘heated rivalry’ impact. i mentioned years ago how important it is to have same-sex love in lyrics, and this is what i mean.

brainsparks: same gender lyrics (tn#27), his sweat (tn#159), rush (tn#130), queer the future (tn#5), gay body culture goes mainstream (tn#190), bigorexia (tn#79), male objetification through the ages (tn#127)

💞 be my valentine

talking about gay love, i’m living for this lesbian 80s romance, starring adèle exarchopoulos. theodora seems to release only bangers.

brainsparks: des mythos (tn#264)

🇳🇬 yorupop

“YoruPop is more than just singing in Yoruba. It is about the rhythm, the melodies, the vocal delivery and the cultural essence behind the music.” solana is a lagos-based artist and i’m already in love with this yorupop hit, i got chills listening to it.

brainsparks: somersaults (tn#266), pop andino (tn#189)

👠 wo, man

loving this groovy combination of south korea and nigeria.

brainsparks: super shy (tn#130)

🧂 azúcar y sal

the 80s synthwave/retrowave game is so good here, we need more of this. i almost bought myself a suit with shoulder pads while listening to it. “you are salt, you are sugar, you are the wine, you are bread.”

brainsparks: remota batucada (tn#54)

😉 wink wink

charli’s new phase is really good, first because i’m loving the move to change to sound from the maximalist idea, to a more indie-rock reference. the second because she’s mastering her irony towards the industry, the fans, and we are all just going with it. is the start a “go touch grass” message?

brainsparks: brat (tn#177), brat reaction (tn#182), crash (tn#63), ss26 (tn#279), (masturbation) data is beautiful (tn#139), residue (tn#263)

🌟 starlight

sam quealy’s album is still one of my favorites this year, so i’m happy to see another video/single from that coming out.

brainsparks: girls night (tn#263)

🥂 hangover girl

when two artists that i love join efforts i just need to share it. i always say i’m myss keta’s unofficial ambassador for brazilians. i’m happy to see a bit of her mouth, and i always wonder if she’s using some kind of prosthetics to hide her identity when she does that. it’s incredible to see this bar, because it could 100% be in são paulo.

brainsparks: myss keta (tn#209), slut techno (tn#139), vendetta (tn#211), nevrotika (tn#201), 160bpm (tn#209), they want to be me (tn#197), mil€ (tn#219), señoras bien (tn#119)

see you next week, divas 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. it’s finally summer in this side of the globe (happy belated solstice!) and the temperature in amsterdam has been tropical. for this reason, this week’s nexialist is shorter than usual and more focused on audio-visual findings: i don’t have ac to enjoy any extra time in front of the computer, the sun is cracking (as we say in brazil, “o sol tá de rachar"), and being outside is necessary. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

post-ai-hype?, death of a fantastic machine (tn#231), #tnwconference, cyborg art, social health, capitalism 2.0, urban future (tn#179), self-fulfilling cyberpunk, cypherpunk, solarpunk and lunarpunk. gambiarra > kludge, the alpha male myth. colonial masculinity. male objectification through the ages (tn#127), discriminator, third eye(lid), eye floaters (tn#26)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🌸 spring awakening

last weekend, juan and i watched the first musical i ever saw live 20 years ago here in amsterdam. it was quite emotional to hear all the songs i still knew by heart. it also felt weird because i had forgotten a lot of the story, and i was questioning if either i was too young/innocent to understand all the nuances, or if my english was not so good, so it did feel like a rediscovery.

the musical is based on a banned german play/tragedy from the end of the 19th century, and even if it’s that old, the themes are still so contemporary: puberty, sexuality, r*pe, child abuse, homosexuality, su*cide, teenage pregnancy and abortion. it’s frustrating to see how we are still discussing these themes more than 120 years later.

“this coming-of-age story set in late-19th-century Germany. It follows a group of teenagers navigating the turbulence of puberty and awakening sexuality. Oppressive, uncommunicative adults demand absolute obedience, which triggers a tragic sequence of events...”

the show ends with the song of purple summer, and we watched it on the first day of summer, under a heatwave. sometimes time rhymes.

brainsparks: sloshing time (tn#151)

👨‍❤️‍👨 men embracing

by coincidence, i was browsing these photos from the same period of the musical: a collection of men embracing from victorian times. i love seeing these, as these moments are quite rare to come by, and they let us take peek at affection between men in such a conservative time.

Men affectionately hold hands, drape their legs over one another and sit in each other’s laps, enjoying intimate physical contact without any evident trace of the self-consciousness one might expect from the stiff portraiture of the late 19th century.

None of the portraits include captions or identifying information, leaving the relationships between the sitters to the imagination of the viewer.

(via messy nessy chic)

brainsparks: queer the future (tn#5), vintage flirt (tn#21), predicting the past (tn#80), fruity men (tn#182), the alpha male myth, colonial masculinity (tn#127), masculinity (tn#48), straight men kiss (tn#95), on heteropessimism (tn#174)

🏁 reverse

mnek knows how to make a banger, and this time it’s no different. the 90s/y2k pop vibes are there, the sports car, the parking lot (?) but make it 100% gay. it’s pride month, but we need more of this the whole year.

brainsparks: taste so good (tn#73), rush (tn#130), lesbian gaze (tn#24)

🇵🇹 feeling so nice

i’ve shared maro music here before, and her music is so chill. i’m going on vacations this week and this is the perfect soundtrack for that. i thought she filmed somewhere in portugal because of their christ the redeemer, but it’s in italy.

brainsparks: amsterdam in the summer (tn#185), end of summer (tn#236), tempo (tn#44), nuragic civilization (tn#83)

🇷🇴 morenito

inna is the queen of eurosummer, and i did not know she’s from romania until now. this hit though, morenito, is in full spanish and i’m here for it.

🔥 quente

i didn’t know amanda sarmento, but this song found its way to my feed, my heart and my body. for the non-portuguese speakers, quente means hot/caliente, and even if we don’t usually use it in the same sense, amanda is pushing for it (or is gen-z using it and i’m not informed?). also, i love she’s talking about being hot and being a business woman:

This woman is on fire
When I get bored I’ll call you
I’ll make room in my schedule and put you in
I can’t right now, I’m plotting with my partners
I have plans
Plans and business
Things that can’t wait more than a year
I’m preparing a plan to get rich this year

the video reminded me of tinashe’s classic superlove.

see you next week, solticious ppl 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

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? ☕️

💘 a love story

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)

👨🏻‍❤️‍💋‍👨🏻 the dating app scam

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)

🤫 gossip as a social skill

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)

🌐 second axial age

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)

🌿 nature is healing

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)

🇵🇸 a’ti

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)

📢 speakerphone

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)

see you next week, gossippers 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message find you well! last year, my spotify wrapped said my musical age (or whatever they called it) was that of a sweet 16 year-old. that meant a lot, because 33 is the age people stop their music discovery. next monday, i’m turning 37 and probably my age will change for next year’s spotify wrapped: just before i’d gotten that data-powered diagnostic, i had started a sort of project: going to the gym became a moment to listen to my favorite pop artist’s discography, one album per session, in order, from oldest to newest. an album is usually 1 hour, so it’s perfect. since then i’ve been listening to madonna, britney spears, rihanna, beyoncé (yes, including destiny’s child) and now i’m at kylie minogue. shakira is next. (keep reading to get why i’m telling you this).

now, i’ll leave you to it. wish me luck as i dj at this weekend’s tropikali festival and celebrate my birthday on monday. 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

birthday effect, unsilence gaza, gaza sound man, decolonizing affection, the anti-social century (tn#229), online culture curators, meme manifesto, encyclopedia — circle of knowledge, thomassons (tn#177), beat diaspora, plantations, computers, industrial control, vernacular architecture, kulturindustrie, reworking, referencing, releasing, gender theory, body neutrality, measuring manhood (tn#215), fetish, glamour & grammar, new currencies, three elements of innovation, the art of living outside of conventions (tn#75), olygendered brazilian music, lesbian gaze, dyke camp, BDSM test, queering the future, decolonizing foresight (tn#24)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

📿 confessions ii

all of that in the intro to tell you one of my favorite madonna’s album is confessions on a dancefloor (the twenty years edition is to die for) — maybe because i was there when it was released, even if i was young. needless to say i was thrilled to hear she’s releasing confessions ii, and the film/teaser is proof that madonna’s still got it: there are clear hits, amazing cameos, self-referencing/easter eggs for the fans, cruising, lasers coming out of butts/vaginas — yes, we needed that in 2026. if you still doubt madonna’s relevance in the zeitgeist, go study madonna-ology (tn#211). i love her quote for the ageists: “the most controversial thing i have ever done is to stick around.”

brainsparks: loneliness (tn#159), rush (tn#130), plaskrul / pee curl (tn#90), hanky code (tn#269), gay semiotics (tn#269), the queer code (tn#92), pajubá (tn#240), queering the future (tn#24), queering the map (tn#143), queer health (tn#141), same gender lyrics (tn#27), queer the future (tn#5), queer history of the piers (tn#176)

⛔️ the decline of deviance

i’ve shared quite a few texts on this theme here: from a stagnated culture to a stagnated self (remember languishing (tn#16)?) well, expands on that and adds some nuance. “where has all the weirdness gone?” teenagers drink less, crime is declining, flattened internet, sameness in architecture, blanding, stuck science… deviance is declining, for the good and for the bad.

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline.

maybe madonna’s confessions ii laser performance was aiming at deviance — even if peaches was doing it in 2015, singing “so much beauty coming out of my ass.” i might be stretching it too far, but maybe she sees the erotic as a beacon of hope? i’m into that.

brainsparks: hypernormalization (tn#210), hypernormative (tn#200), normosis: the pathology of normality (tn#38), risk-aversion (tn#168), the age of average (tn#115), how did the world get so ugly? (tn#247), conformity x dissent (tn#73), countercultureless society (tn#73), counterculture x counter-futures (tn#10), languishing (tn#16), hyperoptimization (tn#210), the most creative time ever (tn#183)

🧶 radical play

“the most radical act in an age of outrage is to play” is a such a nice reminder and call-to-action by zander phelps for everyone to play (away from the screen, pls).

We must reclaim our agency. Real-world play, such as tossing a ball, learning to juggle, or building something with friends, reintroduces novelty, problem-solving, and collaboration. It broadens capacity in ways no algorithm can replicate. In the process, it trains adaptability, the very trait children need to navigate a world that will never be perfectly curated for them.

brainsparks: continent of play (tn#240), drops of joy (tn#16), play-full future (tn#121), third places (tn#90), imaginals vs imagination (tn#19), playscape (tn#67), play-full future (tn#121), parallel play (tn#198), independence x autonomy (tn#67)

👁️ trompe l'oeil

i’m having a crush at the cosmos.so newsletter sequence. they share internet microdoses, short interviews, objects they love, other links and aesthetic studies. this week they brought trompe l’oeil — french for deceive the eye — and its modern evolution, traître l’oeil.

When Gerrit Dou painted a curtain in 17th-century Leiden, the goal was for the viewer to try to pull it aside. Trompe l’oeil was the ultimate painterly skill, where a painter’s genius was measured by how easily they could make you confused. Schiaparelli brought the same logic to fashion in 1927 with a knitted bow that looked tied at the chest. For decades the trick held — Gaultier’s printed torsos, Galliano’s layered denim at Dior, Louis Vuitton’s ankle boot hand-painted to look like pumps with a white sock. Deception as craft.

But modern-day trompe l’oeil has become traître l’oeil, or betray the eye. Instead of trying to fool you, the illusion immediately sabotages itself. Loewe sent out a pixelated polo that looked yanked from a loading screen. Prada knitted fake cardigans onto shirts, then Miuccia told the press: “We played with fake, not with fiction.” Acne stamped keychains onto denim. Ottolinger printed a full shirt-and-tie onto a bodysuit. In the era of AI, the most comforting illusion is the one that proudly admits it is a lie.

brainsparks: third eye(lid) (tn#26), eye floaters (tn#26), surreal matador (tn#27)

🫣 the prohibition of images

shared such a personal view and a historical journey about the prohibition of images and it’s worth the read.

The image that numbs you replaces what it represents and keeps you from looking at it. This is what the ancients called the idol. The prohibition that targeted this mechanism has changed hands four times: Jewish and Muslim aniconism, Adorno after Auschwitz, the selective iconoclasm of the Republic, the platforms that turned it inside out. And it comes back today from below, as an intimate refusal, at the exact moment the idol installs itself as official aesthetic.

brainsparks: death of a fantastic machine (tn#231), when images matter more than reality (tn#155), deep doubt era (tn#193), the anti-social century (tn#229), addictive intelligence (tn#186), personal machines and portable worlds (tn#132), a blurry jpeg of the web (tn#111)

🍬 hyper-commercialism

stop eating lady gaga’s oreos (or: the great switcheroo) is another post by that i needed to share. you know my weak spot for hyper-anything, so when i read this term in the text i pulled this here. from a still existing anti-commercialism attitude in the 90s to poptimism, to the vibe shift of hating billionaires (but loving famous people), this gave me a lot to think about the current state of affairs.

I think this is why we now tolerate such blatant greed among famous people: we think we have a chance of becoming one of them. We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities.

(Of course, the celebrities we look up to are also millionaires, but their riches are incidental to their fame, rather than the other way around.)

brainsparks: the hypercurious mind (tn#272), the perils of hyper-literacy (tn#264), hyperstition (tn#262), hyper-optimization (tn#210), hypernormalization (tn#210), hypernormative (tn#200), hyperpunditry (tn#224), hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary (tn#118), parasocial relationships (tn#47), parasocial boundaries (tn#189), the other vibe shift (tn#102)

👽 extraterrestrial tongues

maybe you’ve seen it in your feed, but the brazilian internet has been talking about an ufo recorded by a guy living on his farm, mayk leão, in the countryside of paraná. this happened as spielberg’s new movie, disclosure day, comes out, and the noises were eerily similar (i even thought it was some kind of marketing stunt for some time).

meanwhile, this aeon piece about extraterrestrial tongues showed up in my e-mail while having this story in mind, and because ‘the arrival’ is still one of my favorite films, 10 years later. in this text, by a philosopher of language, we learn how alien languages from fiction, or conlangs (constructed languages) are actually unsatisfying, as they still somehow replicate human language. as then he takes us by the hand to imagine how these languages could be something else completely.

As a philosopher of language, I find this unsatisfying. The space of possible languages is vast, and full of exotic languages that are much weirder and stranger than any we have yet imagined. We should explore what those might be – and for more than intellectual curiosity alone. If we one day encounter aliens through first contact or a signal sent across the galaxy, their language might be nothing like ours. After all, humans have evolved with certain cognitive abilities and limitations. Expecting intelligent beings with alternative origins to use languages like ours betrays an anthropocentric view of the cosmos. If we want to move beyond exchanging prime number sequences to figuring out what the extraterrestrials are actually saying, we need to be prepared.

brainsparks: craving aliens (tn#272), pluribus (tn#261), grok (tn#141), how sci-fi has changed (tn#186), do you speak whale? (tn#20), decoding birdsong (tn#196), ai to talk to animals (tn#185), non-human perceptions + umwelt (tn#86), scientist (tn#169)

🐀 pleasure, plague & panic

pleasure, plague, and panic: why cruise ship outbreaks still haunt us. with that hantavirus story happening a few weeks ago, christos lynteris brings us to different historical ‘naval epidemics’ through history. it’s such a familiar story that hits the news every now and then, but i had never put so much thought into it. it’s interesting how often there is a layer of class: the contained people have money to go in these cruises and they’re shocked to learn they need to be in quarantine. the case of the sénégal in 1901 was interesting to learn about:

The press at the time expressed horror at the confinement and provided sobering testimonies by and photos of the confined passengers. Were these to have been migrants, colonial subjects, or pilgrims to Mecca — cohorts regularly subjected to disease-related quarantines across the French Empire and beyond — nobody would have paid the slightest attention to the incident. However, it was instead a lofty slice of the French elite that suddenly found itself exposed to rat-borne plague and subjected to quarantine on a barren island, no less on a vessel embodying modernity and progress.

brainsparks: the warehouse, in plain sight (tn#279), plantations, computers, industrial control (tn#125), data center dystopia (tn#241), how supermarkets rewired the planet (tn#241)

see you next week, hyper-nexialists 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well! my birthday month has officially started, along with priDEMONth. this week is busy with work and social events, so i’ll leave you to it. somehow the selection this week was more spatial and embodied (or not), so i hope it inspires you to leave the screen (or at least go out more). take care and enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

atypography, the tonnetz, when space becomes sound, mystery in the digital age (tn#228), queer histories of the piers, shifting realities, a history of delusions, lagoon music (tn#176), the future is ancestral, connecting the amazon(?), carbon colonialism, lana’s beauty in sadness, concatenate (tn#124), amazonize the world, homo mammals, contextomy, social media x cults, (own)ership (tn#74), sixth sense: echolocation, interoception, cASMArt, permission to be creative, the edge of democracy, brazilianness (tn#23)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🗒️ makeshift signs

we’ve all seen these makeshift signs around us: handwritten or even printed notes letting us know how something works (or doesn’t), mostly temporary and simultaneously eternal. “entrance through other door”, “breathe and try again, the door is a bit hard to push” (okay, maybe that’s specific to me, i just saw it recently at the cat art museum in amsterdam). designer kate canales has been collecting photos of those improvised signs for over 20 years with a beautiful lesson that got me emotional and reframed how i see these signs, as a reminder of something (spoiler alert!):

No matter how you may feel about the advancement of technology in our everyday lives, these signs are evidence that we still need each other out here in the real world, to do some very basic things. The person who came before us took the time to leave some instructions to make sure that our experience is a little bit better than theirs. And that is a sign of humanity that I am always happy to stumble upon.

brainsparks: gambiarra > kludge (tn#127), humancore (tn#132), cozy futurism (tn#17), scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), collective effervescente, egregore (tn#11), collectivity as a technology (tn#260)

🪑 the poetics of space

from shared this and it was so timely with this week’s themes i had been reading/collecting. i don’t think i had paid attention to these details she mentioned, and i will be moving forward.

During our conversation, Reinette spoke about her fascination with what she calls the ‘poetics of space’ - the subtle ways environments influence how people feel, think and behave.

She has strong views on collaborative spaces, and how to help people relax. Soft edges and warmer lighting are a given, but some of her observations are more surprising. Square tables instead of rectangular ones help everyone feel equal. Moveable chairs, rather than fixed seating, give people agency. People contribute more freely when they feel comfortable and in control of their position within a space.

brainsparks: online body (tn#268), third places (tn#90), heterotopia (tn#90), frictio-maxxing (tn#259), a frictionless world is boring as fuck (tn#163), fetishizing friction (tn#235), seedless fruit: futureless tech (tn#198),

🏢 institutional gothic

since protein shared how niche online lore becomes a cultural blueprint i’ve been eagerly waiting to watch backrooms, even if i was not part of the whole lore:

For those who don’t know, the story is the product of a form of decentralised, collective storytelling the internet calls a “creepypasta,” where short horror stories are shared and reshaped across forums like Reddit and 4Chan, evolving as they spread. Collective storytelling born from the bowels of the internet.

this weekend, i finally watched the movie and i actually loved it, it felt fresh, psychological and unexpected (plus, it was not a prequel, sequel or some tired-ass-ip). i was on the edge of the seat, and the whole liminality/emptiness of it was genius.

the director is kane parsons and he is now the youngest director, at 20, to open at no.1 in the us. it feels exciting to see what emerges on the emerging hangover of the age of average (tn#115).

shira chess shared this text on the mit press reader, coining a new genre: ‘backrooms’ and the rise of the institutional gothic: a new spin on an old genre replaces flesh-and-blood monsters with the mundanity of modern bureaucracy.’ it’s the dread of corporate america translated into liminal spaces, the horror of our times.

Which brings us to the Institutional Gothic. Like the traditional Gothic, the Institutional Gothic involves uncanny spaces, malevolent forces, and overwhelming discomfort related to spatiality and power. But where the traditional Gothic is dark and looming with ornate architecture, the Institutional Gothic occurs in winding or otherwise empty office spaces, consumed by machine-made mundanity and the unforgiving gaze of noisy overhead fluorescent lighting. The antagonists, once bloodthirsty lords, are instead soulless corporations. The protagonists, once women at the mercy of those lords, are now often white men, wandering fearfully or uncomfortably through those catacombs.

brainsparks: the warehouse, in plain sight (tn#279), plantations, computers, industrial control (tn#125), heterotopia (tn#90), fordian slip (tn#191), data center dystopia (tn#241), how supermarkets rewired the planet (tn#241), data centers on indigenous land (tn#244), wtf is an office job? (tn#94)

🏗️ brutalist

kim petras has released a new album, detour, and i still need to listen to it. but i have been hooked to brutalist. i guess it’s the first time i hear this word in a song, and even cooler to learn the song is an allegory to gender dysphoria.

brainsparks: priDEMONth (tn#123), queer the future (tn#5), feed the beast (tn#128), ss26 (tn#279), slut techno (tn#139)

🤝 the four corners of trust

from the concept bureau shared this 2x2 matrix, and i was immediately drawn to it. the spectrums go from rational to emotional systems of trust, and from repairing to replacing platforms of trust. there are other manifestations outside of this framework, but this does help visualize trust better than i had before. it got me thinking about how i might perceive trust, even if it changes.

These axes then present 4 narratives that have risen to the top of our culture, and they all sound familiar when you put them into a plea for trust:

Rational Repair: “Trust me, I know how to fix this.”

Emotional Repair: “Trust me, I care about fixing this.”

Rational Replace: “Trust me, I know how to build something different.”

Emotional Replace: “Trust me, I’m burning it all down.”

brainsparks: cultural vacuums (tn#254), distributed trust (tn#81), trust in tech (tn#94), post-naive internet era (tn#252), unthinkable futures (tn#233)

🧍 the final frontier of capital

echoes baudrillard and writes how ‘the body is the final frontier of capital: or, the beauty industrial complex comes for the boys.’ yes, it’s about looksmaxing, clavicular and this weird place masculinity and the manosphere are at. eugene zooms out to how the system creates this, instead of purely looking at it with disdain (my words).

But there’s a reason milquetoast liberals love to focus on figures like Andrew Tate. He’s a fetish; the face onto which systemic failure can be projected, deplatformed, and declared solved. The problem is Tate. Ban Tate. Except the conditions that made Tate possible remain entirely intact, and the next Tate is already filming his first spiritually Dubai livestream in a rented Bugatti clipped into a million pieces by a teenager in Manila.

brainsparks: body futurism (tn#268), life after lifestyle (tn#91), competitive wellness (tn#220), productizing yourself (tn#68), the body is art (tn#192), self-esteem crisis (tn#210), hyper-optimization (tn#210), hypernormalization (tn#210), the new soft boys (tn#227), let ‘performative males’ be (tn#242), race to the bottom of human dignity (tn#240)

🔨 looksmaxxing

and explain what -maxxing says about culture and the zeitgeist. if the “core” suffix takeover was about aesthetics, -maxxing is about ruthless optimization. it’s worth watching the whole analysis.

also, i was unaware of the origin of the -maxxing term (china-maxxing, friction-maxxing, etc). i really thought people were taking from the manosphere and making it mainstream and it was feeling bleak: since when are masculinists creating mainstream slang? the lgbtqia+ community (emphasis on the t) are the ones in charge of that. it turns out it’s from gaming/rpg:

You may be forgiven for assuming “maxxing” comes from looksmaxxing, ergo, incel-derived. But its true foundation is gamer language - specifically, the RPG practice of min-maxing: optimising your character’s stat lines for a single output (damage, healing, survivability) even if it makes your avatar look like it fell backwards into the SNL costume wardrobe. The point here is extracting maximum performance from a single quantifiable metric, whatever collateral damage that requires.

brainsparks: male objectification through the ages (tn#127), the alpha male myth (tn#127), fake-alpha male (tn#259), gay body culture goes mainstream (tn#190), coinbase commercial breakdown (tn#272)

see you next week, brain-maxxers 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well! this week, i’ve been enjoying the sun, the shade, the water, the outside as one does when the sun comes out in the netherlands. it’s so great to be a bit less in front of the screen and more touching grass, wow. i’ll leave you to it! enjoy 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

digital garden, de-capitalizing language, murmuration brain, the new soft boys, scuttlebutt (tn#227), the posthumous memoirs of bras cubas, the disappearance of men (tn#175), priDEMONth, eudaimonic vs. hedonic, the age of re-enchantment, the age of pleasure, pleasure activism, ARTificial (tn#123), conformity x dissent, countercultureless society, the ownership economy, to be cringe is to be free, imaginology (tn#73), dandelion, wish-processing facility. the ultimate gaslighting, bubblegum misogyny. storytelling periodic table (tn#22)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🌊 atlantis’ strange secret

it’s stronger than me: i have a weak spot for these videos about atlantis and i keep myself from clicking most of the times. but when i saw dami lee made this (there’s a second part coming), i had to watch it: her video about a new pyramid theory (tn#263) is still living in my head.

what is fascinating about this narrative is how a morality tale about an ideal society told by plato, turned into a map, which turns into a history, then a religion, then a nazi racial theory, all in two thousand years of back and forth. how one idea from so long ago is influenced by the zeitgeist it reemerges in, and in turn influences back its present.

brainsparks: hy-brasil (tn#39), zealandia, the 8th continent (tn#39), ancient computer (tn#48), a dweller of two planets (tn#141), lemuria (tn#141), out-of-place artifact (tn#126), archeology of the future (tn#183)

🧱 underwater wall

by coincidence, i had this post lined up even before watching dami lee’s atlantis video: 7,000-year-old underwater wall raises questions about ancient engineering — and lost-city legends. the largest underwater structure found in france is man-made, and researchers dated the wall between 5,800 and 5,300 b.c. “that’s centuries older than Stonehenge, and millennia older than the pyramids of giza.” the text by frank jacobs is so nice to read, as he also shares local folklore about the area, including a stunning sunken city and witches that summed storms and shipwrecks.

brainsparks: shiprwrecked treasures (tn#219), the oceans are one (tn#140), subsea cables (tn#140), nuragic civilization (tn#83), greatest historical discoveries ‘24-25 (tn#237), how the dutch beat the ocean (tn#173)

❄️ militarized snowflakes

another content i had lined up by coincidence, as dami lee also mentions renaissance star fort cities like the visionary ideal city sforzinda and palmanova, when they were obsessed with the geometry of it all. this reminds me there’s a fort village i’m yet to visit in the netherlands (fort bourtange). it’s interesting how something built for military and strategic purposes can be so beautiful. today this doesn’t seem to be the case…

The resulting star forts (so called because of their multiple fortified extrusions) solved a technological crisis. Medieval fortresses, built to withstand ladders, catapults, and siege engines, were no match for gunpowder-powered artillery, the 15th century’s major military innovation. A cannon could easily take out vertical masonry walls that had stood unconquered for centuries.

brainsparks: amsterdam’s map, explained (tn#246), hydropunk (tn#196), brasilia, urbanism utopia? (tn#83), vernacular architecture (tn#125)

🏬 the warehouse, in plain sight

from star-shaped fortresses to our stunning warehouses: how did the world get so ugly? (tn#247). all this architectural talk makes me share this text by charmaine chua that has been in my head for weeks: the warehouse, in plain sight. “that concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture — of markets, workers, and, now, people detained by immigration agents. It’s a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly.” i remembered this ted-talk about how architecture helped music evolve (tn#15), but this is a much darker turn on how architecture, in this case the warehouse, has evolved from a commercial solution in the 1800s to a placelessness machine, and now detention centers run by ice: “a concealed infrastructure created by capitalists, adapted by fascists”.

It’s important not to overextend carceral metaphors when nearly 2 million people are in actual conditions of unfreedom in U.S. jails, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and detention centers. But our cultural atlas needs to recognize also the 6 million transportation and warehousing workers bound by supply chains. As geographer Jacob Bolton has observed, the chains function more as “supply nets — matrices of interconnected lines, prone to becoming tangled, within which workers all too frequently find themselves snared.”

brainsparks: architecture ft music (tn#15), plantations, computers, industrial control (tn#125), heterotopia (tn#90), fordian slip (tn#191), monobloc (tn#213), data center dystopia (tn#241), how supermarkets rewired the planet (tn#241), data centers on indigenous land (tn#244), neighborism (tn#278)

🖊️ strategy and planning scrapbook

isn’t it amazing when people are organized AND generous to share that with other people? strategist alex morris launched the strategy & planning scrapbook, with “a curated collection of strategy frameworks, creative provocations, and planning tools — compiled from years of practice in brand strategy and advertising.” it’s 150+ pages in a zine-style format.

01 Defining the Problem
Problem framing, strategic thinking, and positioning.

02 Insights
Finding insights, research methods, and consumer behavior.

03 Writing the Brief
What a brief is, principles, visual examples, and prompts.

04 Communication & Framing
Frameworks, heuristics, and how to phrase things.

05 Briefs in Practice
Working with creatives, brief evaluation, and real-world advice.

06 Evaluating the Creative
Evaluation frameworks, creative critique, and what makes good work.

brainsparks: design fiction as strategy (tn#224), the end of strategy as we know it (tn#232), strategy in the era of ai (tn#165), post-branding (tn#178)

🧠 great questions

this month, i’m taking rádio novelo’s course about audio storytelling (in portuguese), it’s so cool to learn directly from the people i hear the most in podcasts. this story corps link was shared there about great questions to ask for a great conversation. i think a lot of us unlearned the art of small talk and having that great ping-pong conversation and the questions listed here are quite inspiring. it also got me thinking about how asking better questions/prompts also determines our relationship with our ai tools, which are primarily chat-based today.

brainsparks: good conversations have lots of doorknobs (tn#207), fuel a conversation (tn#178), new rules of gathering (tn#37), how to speak so that people want to listen (tn#61),toolkit for utopian thinking (tn#210), storytelling periodic table (tn#22)

💪🏼 protect human autonomy

danielle cavalli writes about how to protect human autonomy in an age of ai. first, cavalli takes a step back to explore the concept of autonomy, which is so rich that it reframed how i understand it. i was pretty sure i knew what i meant, and now i see so many takes that the term is more ample. depending on its definition, it’s also a fantasy, or one of those “necessary fictions.” one of my favorite reads so far this year.

Designing ways to protect human autonomy is hard work, but it begins with abandoning the fantasy of self-sovereignty, recognizing that autonomy is not a feature of a disembodied mind. Autonomy is an entangled, fragile process that constantly contracts and expands, and it is underpinned by our cognitive substrate — in humans, our brains embedded in bodies and worlds — upon which we build our senses of self. We may own our brains, but we are not their absolute masters.

brainsparks: self-outsourcing age (tn#17), independence x autonomy (tn#67), addictive intelligence (tn#186), whisperverse (tn#194), deep doubt era (tn#193), liveware (tn#56), ontological design (tn#3), homo crustaceous (tn#233), neurorights (tn#132), ai is our ultimate test (tn#225)

🏍️ on technological bullshit

the syllabus shared this link and i immediately had to click, since it is a very much alive problem in amsterdam: the fatbike “an ostentatiously rugged e-bike accessorized for urban teens.” i had shared about the philosophy of bullshit (tn#150) before, so it’s interesting to see how they tie it with such technology.

The concept of “bullshit” (Frankfurt H (1986) On Bullshit. Raritan.) is a well-established philosophical tool for criticizing speech that lacks a serious relationship to truth conditions or evidence. While the concept has been employed primarily to evaluate discourse, we argue in this paper that bullshit is also relevant to the assessment of technology. We introduce the concept of technological bullshit as a means of critically reflecting on artifacts and their societal construction. As a case in point for the analysis of technological bullshit, we focus on a two-wheeler that has caused some recent controversy in the field of urban mobility: the fatbike. We illustrate the identification and analysis of technological bullshit by offering a case study on the pragmatics of fatbikes, i.e., how they are made, used, and talked about. Based on this, and some additional examples, we finally characterize different forms of technological bullshit and conclude with a note on how technological bullshit can be used as a form of critique.

brainsparks: philosophy of bullshit (tn#150), the basic laws of human stupidity (tn#62)

👠 ss26

i was wondering what charli was going to do after the hit of the brat era, and i’m actually enjoying her new tunes/concepts. she brings her iconic walk from the previous era, but the sound has completely shifted. the sarcasm remains, and i’m here for it.

Spring Summer ‘26
When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it
Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell
Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film

brainsparks: amusing ourselves to death (tn#208), brat (tn#177), apocalyptic pop (tn#57)

see you next week, folks 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this week’s nexialist might be a bit juicier than usual (or not). i noticed that during this time of the year, when spring is blooming, and birds are singing and birds are blooming, sexy topics show up more often (or i’m more inclined to read them.) now… enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

why ancient ruins are underground, nuevayol, racial admixture, erotic decisions, moral ambition, capability atrophy, fascism is here (tn#226), hit me hard and soft, on heteropessimism, zhuzh (tn#174), antigone in the amazon, sumaúma, natural capital, the biophilia paradox, that amsterdam photo, technologies of convenience (tn#122), randomizing your research, reading a scientific paper, mercurial, why do we dream? (tn#72), future of sex, sex in space, vintage flirt, amish Tech, planning toolbox | decolonizing foresight (tn#21)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🇺🇸 how porn became the american dream

i have to say i was sitting through this video and boiling because even if i agree with the title and the idea, they keep using women as the examples, while there are several men (not only bi/gay) who are making a lot of money in this industry, and men are the majority of consumers/payers and also the ones at the top. I could smell the misogynistic tone. also, the video is sponsored by the porn-quitting app from which the masturbation habits data of hundreds of users leaked due to basic security flaws, so i had my guard up.

but (spoiler alert), it’s also a criticism of the whole industry, including the invisible guys at the top, the promise of the creator economy, and, they don’t say it, but it clearly shows the current stage of cloud capitalism (tn#214). below is the final quote of the video, which, let’s be honest, is how the economy is working today. porn just makes it easier to see (and judge).

The thing the industry figured out somewhere around 2016 is that you don’t need to exploit anyone if you can get them to exploit themselves. You just need to build the infrastructure, take a cut of the door, and let the market do the rest. And those who become mainstream celebrities using as a gateway to something more create something to aspire to even though most will never make it.

brainsparks: the goonification os culture (tn#242), content is the new pornography (tn#253), sex and the internet (tn#253), race to the bottom of human dignity (tn#240), the perpetual infantilization of millennial women (tn#139), synthetic porn (tn#242), the porn conversation, how tech is reshaping male masturbation (tn#95), arousal quantified (tn#206), context collapse (tn#25), cultural vaccuums (tn#254), hollywood infected your brain (tn#215)

🌽 pornhub trends exposed

’s analyses of pornhub data have already become some sort of classic for me. this year, he even got extra exclusive data and shows us 5 trends that it exposes. it’s always nice to read his pieces because he’s clear about the process/methodology and limitations.

this year, he mentions the coldplay-to-cuckold pipeline (how current events/pop culture might trigger desires), how sfw categories are growing inside the platform, trans porn being a global hit while their rights are under attack, women as porn-consumers and the struggle to explain some things, like why are people looking for shrek and spongebob?

Pop culture shapes what we search for, what we search for shapes what gets produced, what gets produced shapes what we imagine, and what we imagine informs how we show up in the world. The ouroboros pleasures itself.

brainsparks: the state of shame (tn#275), pornhub’25 year in review (tn#255), arousal quantified (tn#206), pornhub’s year in review 2022 (tn#108), porhub’s 2023 year in review (tn#160), (masturbation) data is beautiful (tn#139)

🫦 pornografia auditiva

bia soull’s debut album, pornografia auditiva, is such a horny trip. while listening to it, i was blushing, clutching my pearls and being thankful for it. the production is delicious, the lyrics hypersexual, open-minded, inclusive (she’s bi) and in charge. as people today are having less sex, it’s easy to assign purpose/activism to her work: stay horny (tn#260).

brainsparks: stay horny (tn#260), social health (tn#179), the age of pleasure (tn#123), good sex explained (tn#115), erotic intelligence (tn#1), desire, i want to turn into you (tn#108), relationship anarchy (tn#6), love languages (tn#57)

🎙️ brazilian female rappers

i’m always so proud to see brazilian artists making it to the colors channel, but this time i was even more so. ajulliacosta is another rapper from brazil who is not only has amazing verses/tracks and is stunning, she even started an ngo to help solo-mothers in vulnerability. press play and enjoy this drum’n’bass sound. automatic translations are pretty good, as her diction is so sharp.

over the past years, brazil is having an incredible run with female rappers actually pulling the genre forward. i found this article by paolla churchill for remezcla: when male brazilian rappers went corporate, women took over the genre.

brainsparks: ugly boys (tn#177), i’m bad (tn#110)

🎞️ the most intellectual thirst trap

defines criterion closet the best way anyone could: the most intellectual thirst trap ever made. and she writes a love letter to it. and she is right.

in this stage of the literacy crisis, the act of being articulate is a limited resource. that we’re gooning for cinephilia can only be good, i guess. for now. but you smarties are on notice either way.

it brings again the discussion about taste and cultural capital. last week i talked about the end of taste as a currency (tn#277), but it was quite fashion-aesthetics-focused. cultural knowledge extends beyond that and the criterion closet is proof of that (along with other examples, like dua lipa’s book club (tn#217). there’s also a layer of memory: you can curate a moodboard and show all the references you want, but talking about it from the top of your head, authentically, is difficult to fake.

brainsparks: dua lipa’s questions (tn#217), triad of capital (tn#203), post-literate society (tn#260), the perils of hyper-literacy (tn#264), taste is the new intelligence (tn#235), the end of taste as a currency (tn#277)

🧦 draining color

years ago, i shared a viral graph that showed how the real world was becoming less colorful (tn#123). this week, i found this deep-dive by frank jacobs talking about “the ideology, economics, and psychology behind the modern world’s draining of color from homes, cars, and everyday objects.” the focus in on the united states but…if you think that in the 50s the world was quite colorful and the tv and was black, white and shades of grey, now the tables have turned as our screens show fractal-iridescent ai-slop while objetcs around us have turned greige "— a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.” it didn’t happen out of the blue, and this post is here to tell us how (and it seems to be changing).

The grayening has accelerated in the 21st century, but it has ideological roots in the 20th, and industrial ones in the 19th.
…
In that sense, grayscale is the muted lingua franca of global commerce: inoffensive because it says nothing at all. But the grayening is more than simply an accident of industrialization. In the early 20th century, it got a powerful philosophical boost from modernist design ideology.

brainsparks: unmasking minimalism (tn#241), how did the world get so ugly? (tn#247), the age of average (tn#115), moodboard effect (tn#66), namecore (tn#71), less colorful (tn#123), snobbery vs. spicy (tn#193), hyper-optimization (tn#210), colors of the year (tn#260)

🗺️ happy map

“In 2017, more than 10,000 people tracked experiences that made them happy as part of a research project. The researchers gathered more than 100,000 happy moments.” and alvin chang turned that into a happy map for pudding.cool. love the axis and the “islands” it forms, also reminding us to see happiness in the small and big things, in the immediate and long-term achievements. alvin also made visualizations i shared here before like “how sci-fi has changed” (tn#186) and the invisible epidemic (tn#202) about loneliness. i’m a fan.

brainsparks: global happiness (tn#166), wikicity (tn#274), worldwide sidewalk joy (tn#274), nearbywiki (tn#180), queering the map (tn#146), atlas obscura (tn#66)

🏘️ neighborism

“why “neighborism” is having a moment: after decades of social isolation, people are realizing proximity is a resource.” this article by sara radin for vox gave me hope. it seems like we’re not only in a loneliness hungover, but some of us are putting the effort to build something new and reconnect, and that’s so inspiring. again, it’s quite focused in the us, but i do think it happens in big cities around the world.

Call it neighborism: the growing practice of treating proximity as a resource. Increasingly, digital tools aren’t replacing local relationships — they’re helping activate them.

Sometimes it looks small: introducing yourself to the people on your floor, starting a group chat for your building or block, sharing babysitters, watering a neighbor’s plants. But it can also look overtly political.

In Minneapolis, community responses to ICE activity blurred the line between everyday care and organized resistance. As federal immigration enforcement ramped up this winter, residents organized patrols, filmed arrests, shared alerts, and trained one another to document potential abuses. What emerged was something bigger than “borrow a cup of sugar” friendliness. It was infrastructure: informal, fast-moving, and built on trust. And what happened there isn’t an outlier; it’s a large-scale example of a broader shift already underway.

brainsparks: why you are lonely (tn#93), post-naive internet era (tn#252), what tech takes (tn#266), invisible epidemic (tn#202), social health (tn#179), social infrastructure (tn#15), a frictionless life is boring as f*ck” (tn#163), curated coping mechanism (tn#224), artificial intimacy (tn#168), the comfortable life is killing you (tn#224), culture of proximity (tn#6)

🧊 epa

becky g’s new song is already a latino summer hit for me, and her shot breaking ice (get it?) is iconic (and valentina, the stunning superstar drag queen lip syncing in the beginning, was a nice surprise). becky g had a surprise appearance at karol g’s coachella concert, and when karol g was advised not to speak against ice, becky made sure to poke at them.

brainsparks: turista (tn#213), DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (tn#208)

see you next week, neighbors 🏘️✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. above is a pretty accurate representation of myself organizing this newsletter to send you every week (or something like that). today we get a holiday in the netherlands, so i’ll be quick with this intro and let you skip right to the filling. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

ai is our ultimate test, agentic sages, funkiest music, pop culture apocalypse, compost theory of culture, social and cultural infrastructure (tn#225), sponge cities, underground cathedral, how the dutch beat the ocean, eurovision in crisis, digital guillotine aka digitine (tn#173), play-full future, critic of technology, visual economy, evolutionary chimera, solastalgia (tn#121), eurovision “getting political”, namecore, youtuber brain, a messiah won’t save us (tn#71), figures of speech, internet’s lingua franca, appreciation or...?, language keepers, indigenous knowledge & AI, n’ko(tn#20)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🇬🇧 girl like me

recently, i shared how this might be the year joy broke through (tn#275), and pinkpantheress is one of these forces. this new video adds another layer to prove that. i was smiling with the colors, the movement, the y2k digital overlays and the way it’s like a series of gifs. something i didn’t know is that the presenter who introduces her is davina mccall and she hosts big brother.

also, i can’t explain it, but there’s something about the way pinkpantheress moves (not only dancing) that reads so gen z to me. will need to research if this is real or in my head.

brainsparks: the year joy broke through (tn#275), stateside (tn#223)

🐀 met gala: dark ages now

i didn’t really follow this year’s met gala, but social media became flooded with content. the best part were the analyses that followed.

fashion nerd sj (above) shows how very few celebs got this year’s theme, costume art, right (even if a lot of them were beautiful). in his view, fashion referencing other forms of art proves that fashion is not taken seriously as art. it became a taste game of “do you know the reference? iykyk.” who got it right in his opinion? who used the body as the medium (spoiler alert): cardi b, jeremy pope and kim kardashian.

wrote how the met gala is a sign we’re in the dark ages, and this has become encrusted in my mind. it’s so rich that i wanted to quote the whole thing here, so i’ll just leave you with the intro:

The Met Gala is a sign that we are now in the Dark Ages. I will say, the original Dark Ages didn’t exist in the way we use the phrase in spoken American English; that term was written long after the Middle Ages. Somebody said it was a dark age to us because so much of the knowledge they had no longer exists for us. It eventually got translated as “those people knew nothing as we do now.” That said, we’re experiencing the latter, widespread loss of knowledge.

brainsparks: the hyperreal self (tn#275), post-literate society (tn#260), the body is art (tn#192)

🧢 silicon valley fashion acquisition

writes about why silicon valley has decided fashion is its next acquisition and it’s quite an eye-opening piece. bezos and his wife headlining the met gala, amazon’s deal with victoria’s secret (tn#195) and the palantir’s merch drops (tn#276) are all part of the same movement (and there are several other examples).

The common thread across all of these examples is that fashion is being purchased not for what it makes but for what it means. Tech companies aren’t entering fashion because they want to design clothes or support cultural institutions out of genuine appreciation. They’re entering fashion because fashion is one of the most powerful existing systems for building aspiration, signaling identity, and generating the kind of cultural trust that tech companies have spent the last decade systematically eroding through data breaches, labor violations, and the general behavior of people who decided that moving fast and breaking things was a mission statement rather than a warning.

brainsparks: culture is not an industry (tn#203), cultural heritage as invisible infrastructure (tn#265), capitalists killed the internet (tn#212), post-naive internet era (tn#252)

⚰️ the end of taste as currency

is it only me or this time the trend cycle is sloshed faster than usual? from taste being the most sought-after skill/intelligence, to everyone talking about it (including tech bros), to corporate-appropriation-exploitation of taste as tastewashing? (tn#276). has such clarity in this realm and she says: taste as currency comes to an end. taste is no longer scarce and has become accessible/copied/repeated. we need to have a position about it, and something else: time.

A position is something you can defend without naming a single trending reference. It is what you would still argue for if everyone you follow stopped recommending it. It is what you find yourself returning to in private that does not fit the consensus. It is the thing in your work that holds when the references around it are stripped away.

but what replaces taste as the highest currency? i will let you go read the answer because it was a slap on my face that gave me some sort of peace.

brainsparks: research practice = creative identity (tn#271), tastewashing? (tn#276), taste is the new intelligence (tn#235), triad of capital (tn#203), methexis in darkness (tn#85), the banality of online recommendation culture (tn#198), knowledge curatorship(tn#14), online culture curators (tn#177), the moodboard effect (tn#66), the age of average (tn#115)

🇪🇺 eurovision’s soft power

this year, i haven’t been following eurovision as it has become a shitshow. thankfully, the netherlands withdrew as a boycott to israel’s participation, so it’s been easy to avoid it. so i was happy to see a nyt investigation published one day before the event: how israel turned eurovision’s stage into a soft power tool.

A New York Times investigation found a well-organized campaign by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government that embraced Eurovision as a soft power tool, and a secretive contest organizer that was ill-equipped to respond.

brainsparks: eurovision “getting political” (tn#71), eurovision in crisis (tn#173)

💍 lorewashing?

i was the only boy in my group of friends who didn’t get into the lord of the rings (movies or books), so i had no clue about this connection. thanks vox for this. there are a few examples of the “tech-right” using tolkien’s universe as their name or part of their narrative, or lore-dropping, as Vox producer benjamin stephen puts it. it reminded me of meaning drift (tn#249), but this feels even more perverse, as a corporation takes an author’s universe and distorts/empties it.

Peter Thiel and Alex Karp’s Palantir Technologies is one of the most powerful and mysterious tech companies in Silicon Valley. Its namesake is also one of the most powerful and mysterious magical objects in the lore of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy series The Lord of the Rings.

The palantiri of The Lord of the Rings are sort of like crystal balls or “seeing stones” that allow their users to communicate across vast distances, see events from afar, and sometimes even peer into the future. But just about everybody who tries to use a palantir in The Lord of the Rings is deceived by it, acting on the visions they’re receiving without the greater context or wisdom of what’s behind them. So why would the people behind Palantir want to name the company and build its culture around these powerful yet easily corruptible magical objects?

J.R.R. Tolkien was famously anti-tech and anti-government, expressing his fears of what would happen when those two forces combined through his fantasy works and his letters to friends, family, and colleagues. If he were alive in the age of Palantir, he might not be thrilled that a tech company with lucrative government contracts is name-checking his creations.

brainsparks: technocracy incorporated (tn#213), maga as fan-fiction (tn#262), more political music (tn#249), panopticon aesthetics (tn#218), cloud capitalism (tn#214), technofeudalism (tn#143), netocracy vs. consumtariat (tn#18), digital feudalism (tn#136), superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28), hyperindustry of the atificial imaginary (tn#118), fracking eyeballs (tn#150), parasite culture (tn#191)

🎱 chalk

just discovered antony sziemerek this week and need to explore his album, but i’ll be leaving this gift here for you. groovy sound, blasé spoken-word. a moustache. that’s my cup of tea.

Everyone. can face. a crisis.
But not everyone. can make. it home.

brainsparks: decoding birdsong (tn#196)

see you next week, crisis-facers 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey you! i hope this message finds you well! the way i’ve designed this newsletter has become such a ritual for me. for instance, every week while i do this time-machine collection, i’m obliged to look what i wrote every year, for the past 5 years, on this exact week of the previous years.

it has became a way to measure time: last year my parents were visiting; two years ago the south of brazil had a disastrous flood while madonna was breaking records in copacapana beach; three years ago rita lee passed away; four years ago i learned a new word and i already forgot (but another that i keep using); and five years ago i was going through the artist’s way with juan.

i could automate this, but i’ve decided it’s part of my ritual to do this brief looking-back moment. i know most readers just skip it, and it’s fine, but for me it’s become this little friction i kept in the process.

i just wanted to share that before today’s newsletter. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

media & machines, hyperpunditry, curated coping mechanism, the comfortable life is killing you, design fiction as strategy (tn#224), natural disaster?, music makes the people come together, localizing done right, reclaiming green and yellow (tn#172), RIP Rita Lee, the jester of rock, two ways of aging, what is the contemporary, octopus time, ecology of wanking (tn#120), a fly, interloper, fake authenticity, 1960s assumptions of Y2K (tn#70), synchronicity, nostalgia theory, analog travel, the future of reasoning, ideas to postpone the end of the world, imaginals vs. imagination (tn#19)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

✉️ future me

how come i didn’t know about this? we can send e-mails to our future selves? time-travel by e-mail? i mean, i kinda do it every week in the newsletter as i shared in the introduction, but i leave a lot of too boring/too juicy things out, maybe that’s where i’ll share those.

brainsparks: stamp placement love language (tn#269)

🛰️ landsat type

the amazonia brand (tn#273) introduced me to mother-earth-as-typographer concept. apparently, it became a thing and i’m loving it. nasa now lets you use different satellite imagery to write your name, or whatever you want really (i did not test it for profanity). i wrote nexialist above (the n is even from brazil).

it reminded me of moon ribas (tn#179), the cyborg who makes choreography duets with earth, where earth is the choreographer. what other roles can earth have?

brainsparks: amazonia brand (tn#273), cyborg art (tn#179), ask nature (tn#86)

👔 storm

this video/song gave me so many chills, so do yourself a favor and play it in full screen. romain gavras is the director, the same who made one of my favorite music videos ever, jamie xx’s gosh. i just love how in both videos there is this collective power shown through choreography and incredible shots.

storm is actually two songs, in the first part it feels more violent (got a death wish, it’s on my hit list, i’m on the blacklist, on the forbes list), while the second feels more hopeful. this contrast in attitude is quite touching, seeing these men dancing so beautifully… congrats to damien jalet. it brought me back to the blaze videos (tn#95) in which they explore more sensitive masculinities.

We stay united through the storm (Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey)

Lay all your love right on my door (Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey)

I never fall, I’m standing tall (Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey)

Go take the darkness out my heart (Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey)

romain gavras is also part of gener8ion, together with producer and composer ben surkin. i had shared another gener8ion video here too, neo-surf with 070 shake (tn#43). something interesting i just noticed is that both neo-surf and storm are set in 2034, so there seems to be some kind of worldbuilding, maybe they’re in the same universe?

brainsparks: neo-surf (tn#43), dreamer (tn#95)

🎥 flim trend report ‘26

i shared about flim.ai a long time ago, talking about the iconographic search tool (tn#25). now they’re all grown up and i just realized a few weeks ago they made a trend report mapping visual trends in 2025 and projecting 2026. such a cool format for a report: they tie it to their archive, interview directors/videographers, show moodboards in their platform; all in the effort to map the new visual aesthetics. enjoy!

brainsparks: iconographic search (tn#25)

👁️ curiosity is no solo act

i’m so glad i clicked in this (and other) articles shared by the mit press. curiosity is no solo act is an adaptation of perry zurn and dani s. basset’s book, curious minds: the power of connection. we go through a quick but meaningful journey of how curiosity has been seen through history: from an isolating “disease” or sin, to its useful aspect. to my surprise they go even further and bring queer and indigenous perspectives to their thread.

The Foucauldian assumption that networks of information precondition ways of thinking, doing, and being has an ancient, rich, and still robust precedent in Indigenous philosophy. Rooted in the wisdom that everything that exists is connected to everything else, Indigenous philosophy foregrounds the vast and complex system of relational networks. While Western philosophy, especially post-Enlightenment, has typically emphasized the individual nodes of knowers and knowns, Indigenous philosophy has consistently contributed to a thinking on the edge, or edgework. (It is not insignificant that the English language is 70 percent nouns, while Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Or that Western settlers conceptualize land as private property and commodity capital, while Indigenous peoples understand it as a connective tissue in a larger gift economy.) The difference in ethos between piecemeal and of a piece with could not be more pronounced.

brainsparks: the hypercurious mind (tn#272), fevers of curiosity (tn#16), mental gym (tn#156), experimental mindset (tn#220), hedgehog vs fox approach (tn#130), scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126)

🧢 tastewashing?

“palantir is making a french chore coat.” this nyt article came out in the cosmos newsletter, followed by the term “tastewashing” and i jumped in it. let’s remember palantir is a global surveillance empire (which has helped the trump administration track people for deportation) and peter thiel is part of the paypal mafia (tn#213). they’ve been dropping merch that sells out in minutes…

The French jacket, also known as bleu de travail (work blues) was created to outfit laborers in 19th-century France. The blue or indigo color helped conceal oil or dirt stains, and it may have inspired the term “blue-collar work.”

maybe it would be too obvious to make medieval outfits for technofeudalism (tn#143), so they just put 19th-century france in the moodboard. but yeah, it does feel like tastewashing.

Some critics see Palantir’s push into fashion as a way for the company to gain cultural capital and influence its public perception. Brendon Holder, a New York-based writer, sees Palantir’s chore coat as an attempt by the company to appeal to a “left-leaning, performative male type that would be in Prospect Park reading ‘Infinite Jest.’” (An unexpected customer base could wear the garment ironically, as was the case with Tucker Carlson’s merch.)

brainsparks: surveillance as a love language (tn#209), taste as the new intelligence (tn#235), technocracy incorporated (tn#213), triad of capital (tn#203), cloud capitalism (tn#214), netocracy vs. consumtariat (tn#18), technofeudalism (tn#143), digital feudalism (tn#136)

see you next week, timetravellers 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this weekend, the netherlands celebrated the king’s birthday, which is the closest one gets to carnaval in this country. i had time to deejay at a party and have a true blast, relax naked in one of my favorite spas for a friend’s bday (auguri, giacomo!) and walk around the city wearing that unflattering but uplifting shade of orange while having beer. it’s all about the balance, i guess. i write this to you in recovery mode, so i hope you enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

terms of centaur service, craft is rebellion, wine animals, thick imagination, fascinus (tn#223), floribunda, lines of desire. funk generation, agathokakological, the roots of anti-woke, camp gaucho, patagonian giants (tn#171), ancient sacred well, radio gaga, inherent vice (tn#119), sci-fi love, what is capitalism really?, dismantling AI capitalism, protopia dreams (tn#69), time rebels, synthetic media, netocracy vs. consumtariat, virtual economy (tn#18)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

⚖️ equilibrivm

anitta has released her latest album, equilibrivm, a couple of weeks ago. i just gave it the proper attention it deserves this week and i’m so happy, i got so many chills listening to it (and watching the videos: desgraça, meia-noite and the one above. there’s even a track by track comment on her youtube channel.

the reverence for african-brazilian religions, the orixás, all of the symbology, it is so beautiful to see. pop culture borrowing from religion and spirituality is not exactly a new thing (hello, madonna-ology (tn#211) and rosalia’s lux (tn#249). but it feels great to see such a well-known artist showing that part of her to the world, doing her research, as there’s great religious prejudice against non-christians in brazil, even more so against them.

also, the featured artists feel so correct, many of them i’ve brought here. the two songs in this video are two of my favorites: mandinga with marina sena, and nanã, as anitta reclaims the sample by os tincoãs, appropriated by polo&pan years ago (tn#20).

brainsparks: funk generation (tn#171), carranca (tn#238), luedji luna (tn#97), caju (tn#187), fetish, glamour & grammar (tn#75), syncretism (tn#44), appreciation or… (tn#20)

🥹 the year joy broke through

a few years ago i brought the adrienne maree brown’s concept of pleasure activism (tn#123) “the work we do to reclaim our whole, satisfiable selves from the impacts of oppression and supremacy.” so when i saw this title by joe muggs i was in. something is shifting in culture and i hope this is a good omen for what’s coming in other realms. of course, part of my brain also hopes this doesn’t add to our collective distraction from the current injustice, but if joy is what we need to bring change, then let’s do it.

And, it turned out, this was what people wanted – or maybe what they’d forgotten they wanted. The US Winter Olympics figure skaters, and above all Alyssa Liu – returning to the sport because she actually felt like it, looking how she chose to, skating up to the world’s cameras practically fizzing as if to say “that’s what I’m talking about!” – radiated joy not just in winning or achievement but in movement itself, in freedom. The Bad Bunny half-time show leaned even harder into it: joy as defiance, as something lived – dance, romance, food, home, migrant stories – all reframed as sites of power and pleasure, not just survival.

brainsparks: reality hunger (tn#201), pleasure activism (tn#123), bad bunny’s historical concert (tn#264), collectivity as a technology (tn#260), play-full future (tn#121), right to party (tn#7), foresight as activism (tn#146), stay horny (tn#260), eudaimonic vs hedonic (tn#123), the age of re-enchantment (tn#123)

🫥 evanescent

evanescent (adjective) | ev·​a·​nes·​cent ˌe-və-ˈne-sᵊnt

: tending to vanish like vapor

Evanescent didn’t appear in the English language out of thin air; it comes from a form of the Latin verb evanescere, which means “to fade away” or “to disappear.” (Evanescere is also the ultimate source of vanish.) Given the similarity in spelling and meaning between the two words, you might expect evaporate to trace back to evanescere as well, but its source is another steamy Latin root, evaporare. While today evanescent is used to describe things that last only a short time, the word could formerly also describe the incalculably small. That use is now archaic, meaning it has almost blown away on the breeze.

don’t ask me why but i never knew the meaning of this word, despite knowing the iconic band evanescence. the synchronicity is that i biked through the tulips fields with my friend last week, and i called the sort of black tulips ‘evanascence tulips’ which caught on. then this word appeared in my inbox. also, i really hope the presence of joy comes to stay and is not evanescent.

brainsparks: mono no aware (tn#212)

🌷 tulip mania

during the nft peak, this story came up a lot: the tulip mania or tulip fever, considered to be the first recorded speculative bubble, in 1637. as we now talk about the ai bubble forming, it’s nice to go back to the og (and at least more beautiful) bubble. at one point people were trading pieces of land for a single bulb. i was lucky to find this 2013 documentary about it, which also explains where tulips came from, how they happen to change colors and how they survive.

brainsparks: seedless fruit futureless tech,

🎰 the new attention economy

karl t. muth writes for the mozilla foundation about the speculation of everything with this fascinating boom of prediction markets: it’s expected to surpass U$300 billion in 2026. i confess this is something i’ve been out of the loop, just lurking when something big enough hit my feeds. but this article is also a crash course on what polymarket is (and other players), how it works, and its implications.

So Polymarket is fundamentally neither a pioneer nor a unique repository for these propositions: its innovation is evolutionary, not revolutionary. To date, most critiques of prediction markets have been puritanical assaults on gambling, Luddite anxiety that there might finally be a mainstream crypto use case, or abstract attacks on insider windfalls. While there may be valid ingredients hidden in the first and last of these three, none by itself offers an edible, let alone delicious argument. The actual problem of newly digitized betting on the future is that it interferes with, or even writes, the future itself.

muth argues this is the new attention economy:

Crucially, this investment of attention isn’t a one-time transaction; it is a live, continuous wager. Every additional second a viewer lingers is letting a micro-bet “ride” and hoping the current content will deliver a higher payoff than the nearly-infinite alternatives waiting just one swipe or click away. The longer the dwell, the higher the conviction in that wager. The viewers aren’t just passively consuming the next second of a video or song (or dating profile, the list goes on); they are actively re-staking bets on the belief that staying put is the winning wager.

brainsparks: whisperverse (tn#194), quantitative validation (tn#199), post-naive internet era (tn#252)

🤳 the hyperreal self

wow, shared this post about the hyperreal self and it’s echoing in my mind since i read it. she manages to bring so many ideas that have been floating around my nexialist mind and put it into words. i’ll just invite you to read this one:

What Baudrillard diagnosed in 1981, the slow murder of the real by its own copies, was, sadly, not a distant catastrophe but a neurological renovation.

We didn’t lose reality. We just became more interested in its reflection.

Baudrillard’s prophecy was not that reality would disappear, it’s still here, obstinately, but that it would dissolve into a hall of mirrors so convincing we would forget which reflection began the game. In “Simulacra and Simulation”, he mapped the slow death of the real, from faithful representation to distortion, from mask to counterfeit, until finally, images became more real than life itself.

Welcome to the hyperreal: Disneyland, Prada, the Coachella desert where the warehouse rave went to die and be reborn as a wellness retreat for rich nostalgia!

brainsparks: hypernormalization (tn#210), hypernormative (tn#200), normosis: the pathology of normality (tn#38), homo crustaceous (tn#233), stop renting your identity (tn#270), when images matter more than reality (tn#155), self-outsourcing age (tn#17), program or be programmed (tn#200), social media x cults (tn#74), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), deep doubt era (tn#193), context collapse (tn#25)

💔 cognitive insecurity

someone shared this and it stuck with me: instagram is training you to leave people who love you. our relationships (and minds) are now mediated by screens and algorithms, and we are taught to avoid friction. no wonder people are preferring to stay single.

Right now, love is something that is mediated by a third presence, i.e. your social media feed. The “relationship discourse” people talk about is pure governance. The algorithm calibrates and observes affective fluctuations like longing and feeds back content that stabilizes you in that state until it hardens into identity. You are entrained into the conclusions.

This is why cognitive security is a condition under which judgment, attachment, and reverence can exist together. A mind subjected to constant short-form penetration loses attention and coherence, and becomes porous.

A porous mind cannot sustain love, because love demands the capacity to hold ambiguity without converting it into accusation, to endure friction without outsourcing interpretation to strangers. The feed dissolves that capacity, and it trains you to experience discomfort as evidence (that it is not working) and patience as self-betrayal.

brainsparks: surveillance as a love language (tn#209), therapy speaking (tn#116), what tech takes (tn#266), friction-maxxing (tn#259), new love languages (tn#249), quantitative validation (tn#199)

😳 the state of shame

even if the data in this survey about shame is us-focused, it is interesting to see how the research was done, the topics people want more openly discussed vs. what they’re uncomfortable discussing, the gender and generational differences, the contradictions and how open they are for brands to get involved.

Gen Z is the most shame-burdened cohort across nearly every taboo measured – despite being the youngest surveyed and those deemed most “open.” But 40% of Gen Z hide parts of their lives from people close to them “often” or “very often” vs. 27% of Millennials, 22% of Gen X, and 11% of Boomers. The hypothesis is supported: the older you get, the less fucks you have to give.

brainsparks: arousal quantified (tn#206), pornhub’s year in review 2022 (tn#108), porhub’s 2023 year in review (tn#160), (masturbation) data is beautiful (tn#139), the porn conversation, how tech is reshaping male masturbation (tn#95)

🤬 ragebait me, pls

how raging became proof of life online. this post has also been sitting (not so well) with me. i enjoyed the early studies methodologies they use to get more nuanced responses. from entertainment value, to rage’s irony, to the rising culture of numbness, it’s not looking so good.

Ragebait, a specific type of content designed to intentionally manipulate human emotions, specifically inducing outrage for clicks, is no longer just another instrument in our digital toolbox. Ragebait is everything. Because we want it to be. The food content verging on pure disgust. The tear-jerker puppy video that turns out to be generative slop. Shameful casting decisions from shameful designers. Nicki MAGAj. It’s no secret that in our online culture, to polarise is to win: fandoms, cultural legibility and often, platform remuneration. As podcaster and reality TV star Gabby Windey so aptly captures – “Non-polarising? The most offensive of them all. Of course I want to be polarising? I don’t want to appeal to the masses, that’s too much pressure. They won’t like it here.”

brainsparks: race to the bottom of human dignity (tn#240), financialization of you (tn#47), productizing yourself (tn#68), humiliation rituals (tn#235), rituals of suffering (tn#59), schizo-fication of the online world (tn#217), amusing ourselves to death (tn#208)

see you next week, hyperreal ppl 🫥✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this godsent message finds you well. i’m not a saint but feeling blessed right now, after watching rosalía’s lux tour. honestly one of the best concerts i’ve been to, i felt so many feelings and the satisfaction of seeing an artist doing what they want, experimentally and authentically. just wow.

this week has been nicely busy with work, nice weather and hosting a lovely friend from brazil, so i’ll leave you to it. i’ll also deejay at prik this saturday evening for maxima latina, a pre-celebration of king’s day.

—Rodrigo Turra

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

necromemetics, ancient jungle cities, autoestima (tn#222), 5000 years of coexistence, from the north, brazil map, nutricide, ignoring graffiti, shitthropocene (tn#170), hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary, mechanomorphism, caroline polachek’s pure velocity, dehumanizing trans folks (tn#118), stresslaxation, productizing yourself (tn#68), sci-Fi playlist, self-outsourcing age, beyond human-centered design, cozy futurism, filters & fembots, art ft. tech (tn#17)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🔥 focu ‘ranni

i’m so happy to see another rosalía release with some new songs, lux (complete works). i was already getting chills with focu ‘ranni (which means great fire in sicilian.) another favorite was novia robot, about fembots and female objetification, and she sings in chinese and hebrew.

brainsparks: filters & fembots (tn#17), berghain (tn#249), motomami live (tn#99), artistry + worldbuilding (tn#192)

📿 confessions ii

watching madonna singing like a prayer with sabrina carpenter at coachella brought me so much joy last weekend (on my screen of course)! this happens 2 decades after she performed that same era at coachella. confessions on a dancefloor is my favorite madonna album, maybe because i was there when it came out, at the ripe age of 16. if you haven’t yet, listen to the twenty-years edition, you’ll thank me later.

now she’s announcing part 2, with a single already. i was so happy to see the photos were taken by rafael pavarotti, the brazilian photographer i mentioned here when he took the stunning beyoncé photos for the renaissance photos.

brainsparks: madonna-ology (tn#211), amazonize beyoncé (tn#76), the evolution of pop culture (tn#77)

📸 concert phone etiquette

i was looking for some footage of madonna at coachella and found this guy suggesting some concert phone etiquette, which are not tips and should be more like non-negotiable commandments. david’s part of goodnight sunrise, a canadian rock band, and i agree with his take as i have been annoyed quite a few times:

4 tips for concert phone etiquette:

1) turn down brightness
2) turn off flash
3) don’t block people’s views
4) don’t film constantly

brainsparks: trajectory for future festivals (tn#187), the right to party (tn#7), the new rules of gathering (tn#37)

🤳 the spectacle

has taking the perfect photo ruined tourism? dutch filmmaker “Yasmin van Dorp’s short film depicts beautiful destinations—and the crowds of cell-phone photographers who inundate them.” such a simple and cool way of letting us observe these moments, not much needs to be said.

brainparks: citizen tourist (tn#162), funambulism (tn#66), i’m not a robot (tn#201), spectacle (tn#270)

✨ worldwide sidewalk joy

what a beautiful/cute project! “Sidewalk Joy spots are free, curated public galleries, exchanges and displays. Installed in curb gardens, front yards or sides of buildings these projects were created to bring a bit of whimsy and inspiration to the community.”

i was surprised to see only 3 spots in the netherlands: one to exchange keychains, one for plants and one for art. perhaps i will need to be the one uploading all the cute public book exchange spots in town. (saw it at messynessychic)

brainsparks: nearbywiki (tn#180), queering the map (tn#146), atlas obscura (tn#66), biblioburro (tn#112), digital garden (tn#227)

🌃 wikicity

what if wikipedia was a city? in this visualization we get to see and spatially navigate the 100,000 most-viewed wikipedia articles as if it were. you can even fly over it and destroy (?) articles? (always saw it at messynessychic)

brainsparks: nearbywiki (tn#180), randomize your research, world radio

👔 psycho

why hadn’t i head of tshegue before? such a interesting sound, it was pulling me in with every change in the song and development in the video.

J’ai fait trois nuits blanches avec Maradona | I spent three sleepless nights with Maradona

Toute la nuit on a prié, Ave Maria | We prayed all night, Hail Mary

Je cherchais Dieu dans la sativa | I was searching for God in the sativa

Même dans la dérive, j’reste une diva | Even when I’m adrift, I remain a diva

brainsparks: therapy speaking (tn#116), schizo-fication of the online world (tn#217), homo economicus = psychopath prototype (tn#248)

🥹 perreo llorando

shaking your ass and crying at the same time? now you can do it with this song by tokischa.

brainsparks: streisand effect (tn#36), chama (tn#191)

see you next week, sad twerkers 🥹✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this week, i will let you skip right to the content as the nexialist is nicely busy (or as the dutch say, lekker bezig). enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

digital coup, vibe civilization, antimemetics (tn#221), good luck, babe! | anti-design, noise era, bit-core, exploiting time, berghain, scientist, achillean (tn#169), filtered through machines, the lazy report, degrow your mind, lackadaisical, worldwide sexual alliance (tn#117), playscape, independence x autonomy, inner development goals, awesome anthropocene goals, technowashing, indigenous + ETs (tn#67), languishing, gregarious, back to playing, fevers of curiosity (tn#16)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🇧🇷amazonia brand

this ecosystem brand for the brazilian amazon was the talk of the (global) town since it was released last week. the amazonian region is made up of 9 states (out of 27) and represents an immense part of the country and culture, yet, brazilians don’t go there (myself included). the brand was presented by embratur (our tourism board) and rai (integrated amazonian routes), in an effort to unify communications efforts. it’s quite beautiful how the used the shapes of the rivers within the amazon, making earth the typographer. that is how you mix of nature, technology (satellite view) and human creativity in one, and i think that’s why it resonated with so many people.

there are criticisms, of course, as josé kaeté said, and they’re super valid: this concept had been done before by local brands, so it is not new. the agency that made this — futurebrand — is located in são paulo, so the capital could’ve stayed in the region instead. even if the work was pro-bono, and if local artists invited.

brainsparks: amazonize the world (tn#153), rock doido (tn#241), what is post-branding (tn#178), cyborg art (tn#179), the fordian slip (tn#191), archeology of the future (tn#183)

🌿plant memory

this plant is called mimosa pudica (all the alternative names are the cutest, like sleepy grass, touch-me-not or shy plant), and the leaves fold when you touch them. and this is a defense mechanism. their impact on me was such that after being introduced to one when i was growing up, i kept trying to do that with other plants whenever we would go to a park.

this week, i learned that scientists were teaching these plants not to react to certain stimulus, like a 15cm drop, and they would still “remember” it a month later. there have been many studies, and i found an article at the conversation about it. so much we don’t know about:

Plants don’t have specialised cells to acquire immune memory. Instead, they rely on so-called “epigenetic” changes within their cells to store information about past attacks and prime their innate immune system. Once primed, plants can resist pests and diseases better – even if they were genetically susceptible to begin with.

Research over the past ten to 15 years has shown that repeated and prolonged exposure to pests or diseases can cause long-lasting epigenetic changes to plant DNA without altering the underlying sequence of the DNA. This enables plants to stay in a primed defence state.

brainsparks: seeing without eyes (tn#207), electrosense (tn#261), moon tree (tn#264)

🧠 gargling brain

neurologists from finland caught images of brains (metaphorically) gargling and doing their self-hygiene while volunteers slept and i can’t get over it. you can read how they monitored that here.

Two new studies by a team at the Nordic country’s University of Oulu have unveiled a new, fast-paced, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that’s precise enough to track the movement of water molecules in brain fluid. The team found that—while blood vessels dilate and the body’s blood pressure generally decreases during sleep—the rate of “vasomotor” pulses created by the brain’s blood vessel walls, as well as other pulses generated by the rhythms of your breath and blood flow, speed up.

brainsparks: sleep as status symbol (tn#55), types of rest (tn#55), liveware & malleability (tn#56), second brain, neurorights (tn#132), expand your perception (tn#178)

👁️ healing grid

i saw this on twitter and felt “healing grid” was such a hopeful metaphor, at first. then it got me thinking how this plays when we’re so many hours in front of a screen.

This is a healing grid by Japanese artist Ryota Kanai. If you stare at the center, the irregularities start to heal themselves because your brain strongly prefers to see regular patterns.

ryota kanai even responded how he loved his project from 20 years ago was on twitter. he shared a website full of these: uniformillusion.com

Uniformity Illusion: Peripheral stimuli seem to take on the identity of stimuli at the centre of the screen.

brainsparks: just an illusion (tn#120)

🪟 this music may contain hope

if you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and listen to raye’s new album. it’s so cool to see an independent artist doing so well, with such a cool and original sound. the album is cinematic, borrowing from theatre, jazz, musicals. i got chills several times as she told the story in song. also, how amazing that she reads all the names of the people involved at the end, as if the credits were rolling. what an amazing artist, really.

brainsparks: click, clack symphony (tn#270), artistry + worldbuilding (tn#192)

📲 doomshopping

in the beginning of ‘24, vogue business + archrival shared an article about how gen z broke the marketing funnel and it was all over my feeds — i thought i had shared it here, but apparently not. their investigation showed how the funnel became more of a continuum of inspiration, exploration, community and loyalty. now this week, i realized they published a part ii, published in nov’25. it dialogues with other posts i’ve shared here, like friction-maxxxing (tn#259) and what tech takes (tn#266). welcome to doomshopping:

Shopping via social media has made the purchasing journey seamless, but has removed much of its soul. Now, new research from Vogue Business and youth culture agency Archrival shows how Gen Z is gravitating toward shopping experiences that offer something deeper: discovery, serendipity, connection and emotional payoff.

brainsparks: the state of community (tn#196), doomprompting (tn#244), intention economy (tn#209), an apocalyptic meditation on doomscrolling (tn#145), self-outsourcing age (tn#17), whisperverse (tn#194), addictive intelligence (tn#186), dopamine culture (tn#164)

🤙 pinky up

my inner gen z is listening to the new katseye bop, pinky up. it’s such a mix of styles and references, a hyperpop club anthem: i think it sums up what chronically online globalized pop sounds like. the video references mona lisa and has a cameo of vivian wilson, elon musk’s estranged trans daughter. the track even has a socrates quote “the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” the fans are complaining in the comments and maybe i’m too old for this, but it seems it has to do with manon’s absense, one of the group members who is in a “temporary hiatus. pinky up!

brainsparks: gnarly (tn#239), the goonification of culture (tn#242)

📺 wor$t girl in america

slayyyter’s new album came out, wor$t girl in america, and it’s one of those that i love. i chose old technology because she’s mentioning “old tech:” tumblr, ipod and drugs… maybe the oldest technology?

brainsparks: types of nostalgic (tn#245), erotic electronic (tn#139), slut techno (tn#139), nostalgia theory (tn#19)

🪗 verve

lívia mattos is an award-winning accordionist from salvador, bahia. i like this way to use ai on a video: creating new imaginaries, not trying to look real, playing with the discomfort.

@prettylittlemarketer shared an interesting point about this dichotomy where people are pissed at brands for using ai, but enjoy other ai material from other people/creators (there’s an ai-generated fruit love island that is a huge hit online, for instance). “it’s not ai that they hate, but rather the intention behind it.” a person using ai to create something fun is different from a brand that has a budget and decides to optimize/save money instead of hiring artists.

brainsparks: dandelion (tn#22), wish-processing facility (tn#22)

🇻🇳 GIRL PHỐ

this vietnamese artist appeared on my youtube and i’m obsessed with the video and the song. it’s very y2k electro pop and the video chaotic. also supernice to listen to another language.

brainsparks: everyone is crazy (tn#215)

see you next week, gargly brains 🧠✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. since i’m back from brazil i’ve been noticing a brazilian shift on my daily breakfast (and how that cheers up my whole day), thanks to two new kitchen tools i brought home: the cutest ever cuscuzeira and a tapioqueira (a flour sifter). also, we got our first above 20 degrees weather with a blue sky. you’ve probably gotten it already, but i’m a metereopático (tn#168). i’ll leave you to it, enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

post-luxury status symbols, the concept of now, experimental mindset, competitive wellness, aparatchik (tn#220), artificial intimacy, risk-aversion, vicarious, risk zones in ethical operating systems, natural intelligence, metereopático (tn#168), hawthorn effect, digital esoterism, therapy speaking, allowed to f*** up (tn#116), funambulism, the moodboard effect, pareidolia, fade to grey (tn#66), emotional plurality, deletion death, architecture ft. music, social infrastructure, imagination as necessity (tn#15)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🛸 alô, alô, marciano

i know the artemis ii mission is around the moon and not mars, but all this space talk while earth is in chaos feels adequate. this videoclip was launched in 1980 and it remains so contemporary. another hit from one of brazil’s biggest voices, elis regina, written by rita lee, who i’ve shared here quite a few times. if you’re not brazilian, do yourself a favor and let your brain experience this, if you are, it’s an opportunity to sing along to this timeless tune. the lyrics is full of commentary of war and classism:

Hello, hello, Martian
This is Earth speaking
As usual, we’re at war
You can’t imagine the madness
Humanity is in a major frenzy because
It’s getting further and further down in high society
[Chorus]
Down, down, down
In high society

brainsparks: grok (tn#141), águas de março (tn#12), RIP Rita Lee, the jester of rock (tn#120), rita lee (tn#15), more rita lee (tn#26)

👽 craving aliens

i do feel like aliens are an evergreen theme, but it’s true, they’ve been having a moment: barack obama said aliens are real a few weeks ago which led to some commotion, and people are betting when the us will confirm extraterrestrial life on polymarket. philip teale shows many other examples in pop culture where the otherworldly is showing up: pluribus, bugonia, mickey 17, project hail mary. more importantly, there’s a vibe shift.

While aliens used to be viewed as aggressors and invaders, the idea of them as friends, even saviours, has been making its way into cultural storytelling. In times of climate turmoil, AI disruption and a geopolitical order that feels increasingly hostile, the classic tropes we’ve attached to aliens have started to seem almost quaint. The idea of them as a threat represents a simpler anxiety for a simpler time, when the real danger wasn’t humanity itself. This wave of pro-alien stories may signal a wider moment in popular culture: a yearning for an external force to undo the wreckage we’re doing to ourselves, here on Earth.

brainsparks: james webb telescope (tn#39), deep space (tn#78), sex is space (tn#21), how sci-fi has changed (tn#186), moon tree (tn#264)

👾 coinbase commercial breakdown

i hadn’t seen this coinbase commercial, “your day out”, before, and it’s quite mindblowing. in this video we hear from the director, oscar hudson, the process of making reality feel like pre-uncanny valley videogame. from video-game designers making the outfits, to a choreographer to create this npc-human movement, to the casting decisions, there are so many layers of craft, so many people involved, so many skills. it’s such a beautiful example of how we’re craving craft in this age of synthetic fatigue. more of this, please.

this is a shot that we called the reality run. And the idea of it is that it begins in the isometric kind of game world view that we’ve established early on and slowly sinks down and zooms in and becomes handheld. kind of as our character sprints down the street and the world around him kind of gradually becomes more and more human and textured and tactile and messy and there’s sparks and smoke and all kinds of things that don’t belong in in game world.

brainsparks: craft is rebellion (tn#223), craftivist manifesto (tn#178), laborer, craftsman, artist (tn#161), friction-maxxing (tn#259), reality hunger (tn#201), non-playable characters (tn#132), mechanomorphism (tn#118), research practice = creative identity (tn#271)

🤯 the hypercurious mind

“The hypercurious mind: ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information.” writing for aeon, always nice when two worlds/people you admire collide. of course, when i see that curiosity got in the hyper train, i had to click.

This attentional profile is what I call ‘hypercuriosity’, an impulsive motivational drive toward novel, uncertain or unresolved information that may be especially prominent in certain individuals with ADHD – though it likely exists as a broader dimension across the population – and that can override other priorities, even when doing so conflicts with longer-term goals or external demands.

Hypercuriosity offers a useful lens for understanding many puzzling aspects of ADHD.

i have no adhd diagnosis but i do have moments where my attention is everywhere or lost (or found?) in rabbit holes — hence my need to write here every week, so i can channel this somewhere. le cunff does a great job and describing what hypercuriosity is and isn’t — definitely not a superpower. but also, how can we value this trait?

Rather than focusing on how to regulate hypercuriosity, we might ask how to design environments that work with it.

brainsparks: the perils of hyper-literacy (tn#264), hyperstition (tn#262), hyper-optimization (tn#210), hypernormalization (tn#210), hypernormative (tn#200), hyperpunditry (tn#224), hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary (tn#118), experimental mindset (tn#220), mental gym (tn#156), the age of artificial creativity (tn#113), hedgehog vs fox approach (tn#130)

👅 silica gel packets

for the curious of us out there: turns out, yes, you need to know this. i tell you, everytime i touch these silica gel packets i question how it works, so it’s nice to see such a cute explanation: from its chemistry, to its +100 year history, to the fact they can be dried out in the over (!) and why you should not snack on them.

Inside each silica gel bead is a massive microscopic network of tunnels. This dramatically increases the surface area of each bead, with a single gram of silica offering over 700 square meters of surface area.

brainsparks: the truth about airplane mode (tn#135), cute aggression (tn#104)

🎈 in search of banksy

thank you, , for sharing this. i actually like that we don’t know who banksy is, so this whole obsession with figuring it out feels a bit pointless. but i’m still human and curious, so i read through the whole thing. wow, the investigation is a documentation of the artist’s long history, to all the “suspected” banksies, many of their works and how much money it generates/donates. quite impressive.

brainsparks: pixo (tn#156), grey city, reclaiming the concrete jungle (tn#7), the dystopia of são paulo (tn#83)

🦾 what do people want from ai

amy webb said a few weeks ago that the trend report is dead, and maybe this is what is replacing them? anthropic published a few weeks ago a new kind of researchL by using an ai interviewer, they could talk to 81 thousand people across 159 countries in 70 languages, collecting “rich, open-ended interviews at extraordinary scale.” the insights are rich indeed, full of nuance, and the novel method is quite impressive, and honestly, what got my attention the most. you can see the data, but also dive on each point support by quotes from the interviewees. such a great material, go read it.

Across interviews, hope and alarm didn’t divide people into camps, so much as coexist as tensions within each person.

brainsparks: risk zones in ethical operating systems (tn#168), critic of technology (tn#121), is your job safe from ai? (tn#165), strategy in the era of ai (tn#165), techworry (tn#33), writing with probabilistic machines (tn#255), children’s ai manifesto (tn#218), doomprompting (tn#244)

♥️ bounce house

i know i just shared a video by gelli haha in the last edition, but i have become obsessed with this one: put the video on fullscreen and get ready to get hypnotized and smily. it’s very willy wonka meets castelo rá-tim-bum meets 80s kids tv show. maybe the coolest think i’ve seen with a 360 camera.

brainsparks: klouds will carry me to sleep (tn#271), continent of play (tn#240), drops of joy (tn#16), play-full future (tn#121), imaginals vs imagination (tn#19), playscape (tn#67), why do we dream? (tn#72), mercurial (tn#72), top dog (tn#117)

see you next week, hypercurious 🎈✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well as the gif above, gleefully ignoring the world outside, even if just for these few minutes. this week i was inspired by the sky, we’ve had some sun and rain, and a beautiful rainbow in amsterdam. by coincidence, the sky and its bodies started appearing on my feed, so you get some of that. i’ll leave you to it, enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

algorithmic condition, cybernetics and philosophy, ghiblification, sonic weapon, audible enclaves, fish doorbell, shipwrecked treasures (tn#219), cowboy carter, what memories are made of, p*nis positivity (tn#167), naked education, good sex explained, the age of average, tanganmen (tn#115), zebras x unicorns, time for indigenous futurism, ecopoetry (tn#65), neural trips, knowledge curatorship, bibliotherapy, emotional intelligence, compersion, emotional responsibility (tn#14)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🌞 into the sun

on friday, robyn finally dropped her new album, sexistential and it’s always such a delicious moment. seeing an artist who knows their universe and has such a consistent yet innovative point of view in each album. go listen to it, have fun and stay horny. (chose this one to be aligned with the sky theme the universe sent my way)

brainsparks: stay horny (tn#260), robyn: from pop puppet to indie icon (tn#8), social health (tn#179), the age of pleasure (tn#123), good sex explained (tn#115), erotic intelligence (tn#1)

💭 klouds will carry me to sleep

i was reluctant about clicking on this video because, you know, what to expect? i’m glad i did because i had never heard of gelli and i’m now invested. it’s so cute, playful and interesting: the weird/zany sound, the outfits, the whole thing is just a caress to my inner futuristic (?) child — loved the name of the label: innovative leisure.

brainsparks: continent of play (tn#240), drops of joy (tn#16), play-full future (tn#121), imaginals vs imagination (tn#19), playscape (tn#67), why do we dream? (tn#72), mercurial (tn#72), top dog (tn#117), the lazy report (tn#117), the shape of dreams (tn#207), the most common dreams (tn#146), animal dreamworlds (tn#138), scientists going into your dreams (tn#13)

☁️ cloud forms

i was on the phone with my family this weekend when my mom reminded us of a story: when we moved to the south of brazil decades ago, a guy who was befriending our family asked why we looked up at the sky so much. none of us had noticed that up until that point and we couldn’t (and still can’t) answer. this happened after my sister asked us to go look at the moon and i had mentioned the beautiful rainbow.

i went looking for the names of the clouds after that: i remember sitting in that class, but somewhere else in my mind.

brainsparks: rose of the winds (tn#181), blue skies (tn#1)

🌥️ naming clouds

how did the clouds get their names? turns out metereology was a late bloomer as a science, and the pharmacist luke howard was the one coming up with these names according to the patterns in shapes, movements and behavior. i would love to get of first name bases with them.

Howard identified seven cloud types, but these have since been expanded to ten, cloud nine being the towering cumulonimbus thunder cloud, which is probably why being on cloud nine means to be on top of the world.

brainsparks: rose of the winds (tn#181), blue skies (tn#1), bugs like jewels (tn#234), birdie, what sound is this? (tn#234)

🌕 the moon’s origin story

still looking up at the sky: this hit my feed and got my attention (who doesn’t love to look at our stunning moon?). how did our moon get there? the giant impact hypothesis, which is the only one i knew of, always felt a bit off. in this video we learn about this and other hypotheses and how probable they are: co-accretion, fission, capture, synestia. it’s interesting to see how they go about analysing it.

Our moon is rather odd. It’s really large compared to the Earth, while most of the other moons in the solar system are relatively tiny. And our moon carries a weird amount of our system’s angular momentum.

brainsparks: moon tree (tn#264), new pyramid theory (tn#263)

👯pattern index

recently, i shared about max cooper’s work here and it sucked me in. he invites different artists to create the visuals, and shares about the process in the video description, both him and the invited artist. such a cool, simple and effective way to collaborate, in this case with katia schutz. pattern index is a track from his new upcoming visual album, feeling is structure.

I have always been obsessed with using technology to push visual boundaries and create beautiful things that completely overwhelm the senses. This piece kind of operates like my own brain… imagine having 100 browser tabs open at once, while 3 radios play, 10 reference books are open, and I’m doing karaoke in the background. - Katia Schutz

brainsparks: a sense of getting closer (tn#263), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126), the pleasure of patterns in art (tn#247), life as computation (tn#247), water-based intelligence (tn#238), biocomputing (tn#238)

🧑‍🎤research practice = creative identity

posted this piece and it spoke to me on so many levels (even if i’m not a creative director): your research is your creative practice. it’s easy to fall into the trap of sameness and simply collecting when doing research (visual or not), and zoë captures this so well. also, it’s such an inspiring piece because she’s being transparent about her own process. go read the whole thing:

Collecting is saving images because they are beautiful, because the mood is right, because they might be useful someday. It is passive. It lets the image speak without asking it any questions. A folder of thousands of saved images is evidence of a good eye, but it is not a research practice, it’s a database.

Research is when the act of looking starts producing ideas. You are making connections across unrelated fields, noticing patterns, and building a visual argument. You find a photograph in a 1970s Italian architecture magazine, and it changes how you think about negative space on a brief you’ve been stuck on for two weeks. You read a paragraph from a Susan Sontag essay on photography and suddenly the casting direction for a project you couldn’t articulate becomes clear. The research is not feeding the work, it is the work.

brainsparks: reworking, referencing, releasing (tn#125), content curation approaches (tn#54), hoardiculture (tn#191), the age of average (tn#115), moodboard effect (tn#66), the vanishing designer (tn#81), creative generalists (tn#264)

💡corpo gaslighting

and managed to make me feel outraged and inspired in the same post. we have normalized market “predictions” that don’t happen (hello metaverse!) and there is no accountability. the invitation is for us and other institutions to reconnect with our accountability muscles.

Predicting the future, or pledging to change it, has become a form of marketing in itself, or more precisely a performance. Many consultancies act out whatever they think will get applause or attention. For agencies, it’s whatever they have to do to get the next client. For publications, it’s whatever it takes to get the next reader. For politicians... you get it.

Today’s predictive performance is like professional wrestling kayfabe – they know it’s BS, and we suspend disbelief as they earnestly entertain us. The problem is just when we take their claims at face value. (Optimistically, they also know it’s nonsense, otherwise, Gartner’s credibility should be seriously reconsidered.)

brainsparks: consultancy horror story (tn#144), meta trends ‘26 (tn#263), self-destructing reality (tn#240), silicon valley’s wrong future (tn#243), unthinkable futures (tn#233), hypernormalization (tn#210), hypernormative (tn#200), foresight as activism (tn#143)

💡contagious radar ‘26

is it just me or this year’s contagious radar is more critical than usual? i love their materials, it’s always filled with great creative references and cases, but this time i noticed some bolder than usual approaches and i’m happy about it. here are the trends they point:

The Attention Sink / We explore how brands cut through and create an impression when surface-level engagement isn’t quite enough.

The Nostalgia Industrial Complex / When the past feels more attractive than the present, the commercial power of nostalgia is appealing. But is it really a strategy?

The Loneliness Disconnect / Outsourcing ‘connection’ to Big Tech has not gone well. The rise of AI companions is a symptom, not a solution. Find out how brands that bring people together are rebooting belonging.

Social as a Vice / Social media is being reframed as a vice product: when platforms start looking more like a liability than an opportunity, what does that mean for your media budget?

The Optimisation Obligation / When everything else in life feels relentlessly chaotic, your body becomes the one territory it’s possible to micromanage. But which brands are emerging as allies in our fascination for transformation?

The Death of Aspiration / Nearly half of Gen Z say planning for the future feels pointless. For brands that were built on the idea of ‘progress, eventually’, what happens when your audience stops believing in tomorrow?

brainsparks: the creative process (tn#87), creative manifesto (tn#184), the most creative time ever (tn#183), scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), creative work (tn#165), creative effectiveness (tn#28), permission to be creative (tn#23)

see you next week, cloudlets 🌥️✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. the gif above might or might not be the exact same position i find myself writing the newsletter this week. i’ve been back in amsterdam now for a week and though the sun has been appearing everyday and the city is stunning (as always) the temperatures are not yet so spring-like (for my brazilian blood). enough of small talk, i’ll let you read. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

children’s ai manifesto, panopticon aesthetics, dictator questions (tn#218), adoro DJs, global happiness, macguffin, money dysmorphia (tn#166), little DJ, ai’s ethical compass, art, not pornography | breastfeeding the elderly (tn#114), nostalgia ball, distributed mentoring and fanfiction, community building, exit to community (E2C), people x consumers (tn#64), scientists going into your dreams? | selfies of the future | naked truth, how to spot fake news (tn#13)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🤖the first robot movie

a long-lost film by the iconic french filmmaker georges méliès has been found recently: gugusse and the automaton, from 1897. it’s short and sweet, 45 seconds, but it reveals a lot, doesn’t it?

the magician winds up a pierrot automaton that seems to come to life, with some violence, which then makes the human fight back. it got me thinking how long humanity’s fetish and fascination with robots and automation seems to be. it also predicts clarke’s third law, in which “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic:" the automaton belongs to the magic realm. and third: the technology quickly dominates its creator, acting unexpectedly, which could be stretched to one of sci-fi’s biggest cautionary tropes. a message from long ago to be cautious with our technologies.

Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Short Circuit, RoboCop, Ghost in the Shell, The Iron Giant, WALL‑E, Ex Machina: there is a parallel history of cinema to be told entirely through its robots. That such a history must begin with the work of Georges Méliès may not come as a surprise, given that he invented so many of the techniques of science-fiction filmmaking. But until recently, we didn’t actually know that the cinema pioneer who “invented everything” ever put a robot onscreen.

brainsparks: the thinking machine (tn#186), how sci-fi has changed (tn#186), critic of technology (tn#121), predicting the past (tn#80), memories from the future (tn#48), ARTificial (tn#123), art ft tech (tn#17), fetish, glamour & grammar (tn#75)

🫀stop renting your identity

shared this piece by a few weeks ago and it made such an impact on me. i had to go find the whole piece, and it was so worth it. at a time when ai can do things for us, and we can easily project an image that distorts reality, how to stay true to our identity and not fall in the trap of performing, instead of being. discipline and intentionality is in the core. (read the whole thing!), but here is a reality check:

THE FOUR-LEVEL REALITY CHECK

Here’s how to audit whether your identity is real or rented:

Level 1 - Physical Reality: Does discipline drive you? Can you actually do the things your identity claims? If you call yourself an athlete, can you perform athletically? If you identify as creative, do you create things?

Level 2 - Internal Motivation: Do you engage in your identity’s behaviors when no one is watching? Do you write when there’s no audience? Exercise when there’s no selfie?

Level 3 - Stress Survival: Does your identity hold up under pressure? When you’re tired, broke, or criticized, do you still know who you are?

Level 4 - Independent Worth: Can you respect yourself without external validation? Would you still be proud of your work if no one ever saw it?

brainsparks: cultural vacuums (tn#254), when images matter more than reality (tn#155), self-outsourcing age (tn#17), whisperverse (tn#194), quantitative validation (tn#199), program or be programmed (tn#200), social media x cults (tn#74), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), deep doubt era (tn#193)

🌞spectacle

shared this and it stayed with me: i was trying to add more spectacle combinations in my head and also having a hard time understanding how life has become so intertwined with spectacle. and i love substack so much: someone commented how it looks like the depiction of the ancient egyptian god aten. i just love this visualization and i’ll try to use it for something else, i promise.

brainsparks: amusing ourselves to death (tn#208), the mathematics of polycules (tn#82), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126)

🪽free spirits

obsessed with ca7riel & paco amoroso’s eclectic sound in the new free spirits album: from bossa nova and drums to electronic and rock. they just don’t go small, right? it’s always a film, with a universe, a narrative, and the sarcasm that i love. burntout artists that rose to fame too quickly, going through the most advanced (?) therapeutic treatments to make their launch in time. competitive wellness (tn#220) meets burnout society.

brainsparks: papota (tn#216), how to feel better naked (tn#79), worldbuilding ft. design fiction (tn#135), bibliotherapy (tn#14), logotherapy (tn#135)

⚧️double standards of gender affirming care

a few months ago i saw a video that opened my eyes to the hypocrisy of gender affirming care: when cis-men get hair implants (or toupee’s — now called hair systems), get testosterone replacement or even penis fillers, it is not seen as gender-affirming care — but that’s exactly what it is. writes how “gender-affirming care is accepted for cis people. for trans people, the doors remain closed.” it is a necessary reframing.

Whether cis or trans, the underlying desire is remarkably similar: to look in the mirror and recognise yourself. So when toupees trend and breast reductions rise, we can read them as aesthetic phenomena or algorithmic curiosities. But beneath that, something more fundamental is happening. People are negotiating their relationship to gender, appearance and identity in real time.

brainsparks: queer health (tn#141), biology enables, culture restricts (tn#82), brazil elects two trans women (tn#90), fake alpha-male (tn#259), self-esteem crisis (tn#210), the new soft boys (tn#227), expert on love and fatherhood (tn#242), let ‘performative males’ be (tn#242), men in media (tn#28), fruity men (tn#182), on heteropessimism (tn#174), man-loving (tn#190), the disappearance of men (tn#175), the alpha male myth (tn#127), colonial masculinity (tn#127)

🐩 bitch: a history

with this whole circus smear campaign against chappell roan’s “rudeness” — coincidentally being a lesbian artist who puts boundaries, who broke up with management for being in the e-files, and who calls for fairer conditions for artists — this appeared in my e-mail:

Bitch: a history. “The word can morph from noun to verb to adjective, from dog to human, from female to male. What will it do next?” a shape-shifter word that has been around for more than 1,000 years and its oldest spelling “bicce” to define a female dog, to the medieval prostitute, to jo freeman’s bitch manifesto above and meredith brooks iconic song, a lot of change and reclaiming happened. i loved this reading: it also includes other terms like son of bitch, slut, and the more taboo one, cunt, which is having a moment.

Where bitch can signify a strong woman, it usually denotes a weak man. Women tend to be branded bitches for being assertive, unyielding or powerful; men are labelled bitches when they are perceived as powerless. In this sense, the insult operates in opposite directions. Calling a woman a bitch likens her to a man; calling a man a bitch likens him to a woman. It is typically an emasculating slur, suggesting a lack of courage, strength or toughness, and it may also imply effeminacy or queerness.

brainsparks: the perpetual infantilisation of millennial women (tn#139), slut techno (tn#139), living wage for artists (tn#246),

💾leak it

ok, so the london-based girlgroup just released this 90s banger and i’m loving it. echoing ca7riel & paco amoroso’s free spirit, they also go to the retreat, in this case, “a private retreat where they turn irrelevante into relevante. a comment on youtube noted how the concept is basically the group escaping khia asylum: a fandom term that “evolved to encapsulate all singers who had minor hits, but then fell off without leaving any cultural impact.”

brainsparks: angel of my dreams (tn#183)

👠click clack symphony

raye did not have to go this hard and yet she did. this is such a different sound, the way the song progresses makes you want to stay until the end and hear the story she’s telling. so good!

brainsparks: pan-genre blend (tn#75)

see you next week, bitches 🫀✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

hey,you! i hope this message finds you well. i’m writing this edition from the airport in the last moments of south america/brazil. it’s been two months of family, friends, nice weather, nice food, and reconnecting with myself. now it’s time to go back to another reality in amsterdam (i miss my bike!) today also marks 8 years together with juan, i couldn’t ask for a better life partner. love you! now, i’ll leave you all to it. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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

covid lessons, neural media, schizo-fication of the online world, anatomy of hype, dua lipa’s questions (tn#217), strategy in the era of ai, creative work, defend your mind against social media (tn#165), sad and pale paper, solipsism v nonduality, the stupidity of AI, the age of artificial creativity (tn#113), cultural concept, frameworks: immersive experiences, MOTOMAMI (tn#63), waters of march, lesbian gaze, dyke camp, campingdisco, chronosonder (tn#12)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🧋boba

no, it’s not a song about boba tea. in portuguese/spanish boba means fool / silly, and this cute song is about how one becomes when falling in love. i dedicate this one to my handsome juan. this song reminds me of one of their first hits, drinkee, from 9 years ago (!). the surf guitar vibes, the cadence, and the urge to dance are all there. always happy to see non-brazilian artists like sofi tukker singing in full portuguese.

brainsparks: bread (tn#188), cafuné (tn#3), hey homie (tn#183)

🎩 victorian flirting etiquete

since i’m on a romantic vibe, i thought of sharing this, found in messynessychic: the mystery of love, courtship and marriage explained by henry j wehman (so cool to be able to see it at the internet archive). hat flirtations, parasol flirtations, handkerchief flirtations, and other secret languages of love from victorian era… it’s interesting to see how even under repressed societies, humans find their ways of communicating. also, it got me thinking if it created some sort of paranoia (is he sending me a signal? is that a yes or a maybe?) today we have emojis and several new love languages (tn#249)

brainsparks: quantitative validation (tn#199), culture of proximity (tn#6), new rules of gathering (tn#37), social signals (tn#189), erotic decisions (tn#226), erotic intelligence (tn#1), the age of pleasure (tn#123), eroticism and self-care (tn#57)

💌 stamp placement love language

another gem shared by messynessychic is the secret love language of stamps. apparently, “gen z and millenials are going analog with letter writing, typewriter clubs and calligraphy to take a break from screens.” so for those of you who are moving in that direction, make sure to follow these instructions. these were also used in the victorian era.

brainsparks: surveillance as love language (tn#209), new love languages (tn#249), love languages (tn#57)

🤧 hanky code

fast forward to the 1970s and we arrive at gay flagging, or hanky code, an iconic part of lgbtq+ history which i might have mentioned but not given the proper attention. turns out the side and the color of the bandana worn by parts of the community signaled their sexual preferences at a time when being gay was illegal (still is in many places, so sad to see senegal doubling the penalty for being gay to 10 years). you can still find the complete guides online to make sure you’re sending the right message.

Flagging, also known as the “hanky code,” is a way to wordlessly tell other queer people your sexual preferences. In a nutshell, it involves wearing different colors of bandanas in your pockets — left or right, respectively, to signal top/dom or bottom/submissive roles — to indicate different kinks, fantasies, and other sexual interests to the world. The system originated in the ‘70s, a time when it was illegal in most places to have queer sex. Like leather bars and BDSM spaces, flagging is an iconic part of queer history that's alive and well to this day.

brainsparks: the queer code (tn#92), pajubá (tn#240), queering the future (tn#24), queering the map (tn#143), queer health (tn#141), same gender lyrics (tn#27), queer the future (tn#5), queer history of the piers (tn#176)

🍑 symbolic interactionism

while in my hanky code glory rabbit hole, i came across the term symbolic interactionism. “a sociological theory that develops from practical considerations and alludes to humans’ particular use of shared language to create common symbols and meanings, for use in both intra- and interpersonal communication.” from what i understand, all of those shared before are some manifestation of that. basically, part of our work in cultural intelligence is figuring out these symbolic interactions, even if they’re unconscious.

brainsparks: memes, emojis & the rosetta stone (tn#9), new words for new worlds (tn#111), rebranding trend research? (tn#193), cool people (tn#245), is cool dead? (tn#235), scene cool x internet cool (tn#239), does coolness still exist? (tn#30), anatomy of hype (tn#217), how to study culture (tn#232), counterculture x counter futures (tn#10), life after lifestyle (tn#91), gen z subcultures (tn#91), countercultureless society (tn#73), shifting values (tn#2)

🏳️‍🌈 gay semiotics

since i discovered hal fischer’s work, gay semiotics, i’ve been obsessed. it was used to illustrate the post about hanky code, so i thought i had to highlight it here. i admire hal’s effort to explain, through photo and text, like a manual, the codes of the san francisco gay/queer communities.

Since 1977—when the first exhibition of this series took place in San Francisco—Gay Semiotics has been recognized as a unique and pioneering analysis of a gay historical vernacular and as an irreverent appropriation of structuralist theory.

brainsparks: the yuppie handbook (tn#111),

🙊 putative

putative (adjective)

1: commonly accepted or supposed

2: assumed to exist or to have existed

There's no need to make assumptions about the root behind putative—we know it comes from a form of the Latin verb putare, which means "to consider" or "to think." Putative is a rather formal word that has been part of English since the 15th century. Like apparent, presumed, and ostensible, it leaves room for a smidgen of doubt: a putative ally will very probably be there for you, and a putative successor is very likely to be the next one in charge, but life offers no guarantees in either case.

this word was not part of my vocabulary so when i saw it in my inbox i thought it was something else. well, now i know it’s not some kind of bad word.

brainsparks: words&terms (tn#257)

👄 freak

yseult keeps raising the bar with her sound and aeshtetics. this is so 90s, so colorful, the outfits and choreo are so good. i’m hypnotized.

brainsparks: suic*de (tn#192), office aesthetics (tn#59), des mythos (tn#264), alibi (tn#180), f*ck me (tn#207)

🦂 it stings a little though

also, the french know how to make the coolest spoken word bangers that makes you feel cool just by listening to it. the animation by émilie tronche brings it to another level, the way they move makes me want to move with them. so smooth and so good!

brainsparks: chasing rejection (tn#261)

👄 big disgrace

finally haute&freddy’s debut album big disgrace is out and i’m here for it. all of the releases so far have been right up my alley, so i’m promoting it here without even listening to it. it is downloaded on my phone and i’ll make sure to listen during the flight.

brainsparks: scantily clad (tn#207), anti-superstar (tn#202)

see you next week, bobas 🫠✨

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

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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. 

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