🕊️✨The Nexialist #0111
the yuppie handbook | deinfluencers | new words for new worlds | a blurry jpeg of the web | enabling state | frodrick | an ode to silliness | marxist love disco ensemble
welcome to another not-so-random weekly lovingly listicle, the nexialist
hello, everyone! i hope this bunch of 0s and 1s finds you not having a mental breakdown well. as the time to return to amsterdam approaches, i’m feeling all kinds of emotions. mostly i’m feeling happy that i’ve been able to enjoy my time here with friends and family, with great weather. next time i write to you, it’ll be from mokum. enough said… read until the end for some mindblowing analogy and coo-coo music. enjoy!🫀
1 year ago » 👂✨The Nexialist #0061 : The Art of Listening | How to Speak So That People Want to Listen | The Entertainment Value Curve | Disambiguation | Everything is Everything | Visualizing and Communicating Complexity | Sightseeing
2 years ago » 🧠✨The Nexialist #0010 : How Pandemics End | Decolonizing our Temporality | Bullet Journals | Bye Dissatisfaction | Counterculture x Counter-futures | Dark Forest Theory | What is Influence and more...
📕the yuppie handbook
messy nessy chic’s newsletter featured “the yuppie handbook: the state-of-the-art manual for young urban professionals published in 1984.” as last week i told you about the “vacation watch aka relax not rolex” this comes as synchronicity. i was familiar with this handbook as it was mentioned in last year’s documentary the andy warhol diary. in the documentary, they interview one of the handbook’s creators, showing a different perspective: this material was also used by LGBTQ+ people in order to conform and fit in. what i feel about this material is contradictory, as i love seeing this kind of manual aesthetic with things neatly organized, at the same time as it puts people in a box and tells them what to do, how to act and also what to buy (notice the number of brands mentioned, i couldn’t help but think of heavily tagged influencer’s instagram posts. in the age of meta-irony i keep questioning if they were being funny or not, and i guess i have to force myself to be ok with not knowing.
🙅deinfluencers
in maria clara villas’ newsletter galáxia, she brought up the age of deinfluencers, initially a movement where influencers are telling people what not to buy as a way to reduce overconsumption. on paper, it’s quite a fitting product of our times (climate emergency, economic downturn, and influencer saturation), but of course, the movement has already been distorted as influencers tell people to buy this instead of that (also quite fitting with our times).
But it is easy to see why deinfluencing has been called influencing by another name. “Deinfluencing is still influencing,” says Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. “Creators are using their power to sway the purchasing decisions of a broader population. They’ve just adapted the trend to resonate with consumers during an economic downturn.”
Karen Wu, AKA @cakedbybabyk, says: “It’s definitely ironic because you’re still influencing people by telling people what to do.” In a recent video, she urged people not to buy a lipstick, comparing the feeling of it to having chicken grease on your lips.
read: The rise of the de influencer | Dazed
🌐new words for new worlds
i mentioned before that i cannot find a website i was obsessed with: a forum-style place where people would type a situation/thing and ask for people to create neologisms and many times, they came up with amazing new words. here, matt klein brings up the need to create new words for the mixed reality we live in. i was truly impressed with the list of words he brought. it’s worth the read.
We’re grasping for language to describe a phenomena which did not exist until very, very recently.
Maybe what we need are new words for new worlds.
read: New Words for New Worlds - by Matt Klein - ZINE
😶🌫️a blurry jpeg of the web
sentier’s newsletter reminded me of a text in my read-later list. ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web by Ted Chiang already got my attention with its powerful analogy for what chatgtp can be seen as. just a new perspective to help us understand what this technology is bringing to the table.
What I’ve described sounds a lot like ChatGPT, or most any other large language model. Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry jpeg, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.
read: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web by Ted Chiang
🧠enabling state
recently on twitter i got to see this fragment of Peter Hupe’s The Politics of the Public Encounter - What Happens When Citizens Meet the State?. honestly it is not the type of book i usually read (and maybe i should), but this image got me as it neatly organizes the role of governments and citizens in different models of state, from nightwatch, to welfare, to the enabling state.
🪩marxist love disco ensemble
also, this album is not what i usually listen to, but it was love at first synthesizer. press play and enjoy. this description from bandcamp is everything.
Sounding simultaneously from the past, the present, and the future, the debut album 'MLDE' by Marxist Love Disco Ensemble seeks to eradicate both the trite from disco and the sobriety from political music. Half poetic, half tongue-in-cheek, this stunning compact eight-track album is influenced by Eastern European and Mediterranean 70s disco records. In the words of band member Paolo, ''it was written in response to hearing 'I love America' by Patrick Juvet. The song prompted the question: why does disco, a genre originally created by oppressed minorities, eventually become synonymous with Western capitalist excess?" MLDE seeks to break this connection.
Merging disco, post-disco 80s pop, and boogie into the fold, 'MLDE' was recorded using only analogue instruments, giving it warmth and space. Recorded on cassette, ½ inch tape, this gives moments of lo-fi abstraction between the beats of an aggressive, tight drum kit. Instruments used for this recording range from saxophone, trumpet, harpsichord, guitar, and rare analogue synthesisers. The bass sound is shaped by early 80s boogie records, whilst the influence of artists such as Hamlet Minassian can be heard in some of MLDE's more driving-disco outings, such as 'Hues of Red'. In the tradition of Soviet vocal group records, which the band has studied, some songs are sung by a vocal quartet in homage to this tradition.
🕊️an ode to silliness
i’m so in love with róisín’s new song. the lyrics are an ode to being playful and silly, and as it merges with the song’s groove, it connects it directly to the erotic. again, erotic intelligence comes to mind. i’ve admired her work and her coo-coo vibes for some time, and this feels like pure authenticity. also, the generative AI album cover is everything.
🐸frodrick
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this story has been going viral and i just love how wholesome it is. i mean, we can say it’s silly, but it’s also a story about collaboration, crowdsourcing, and a playful example of prototyping and 3D printing. could this fun “model” be used to find other solutions?
see you next week, frods! 🐸
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