🪲✨The Nexialist #0069

MY BABY | Sci-Fi Love | What is Capitalism Really? | Dismantling AI Capitalism | Protopia Dreams | Businesses as Heroes? | Identity Recovery: Katú Mirim

Welcome to yet another glitchy trip in the depths of the internet ft. my brain…

Protopia Dreams

This week a special Thank you to my friend Gustavo from Temporality Lab who almost did a take-over with the links he sent my way in his LinkedIn curatorship (he finds the best content there!) Since I had a week full of work and other responsibilities, I'll cut to the chase and share what I call a quicky Nexialist. Also, welcome to all new brain-travelers.

❤️‍🔥MY BABY

I’ll start this week with my friend Mats’ tip: MY BABY’s new album, sake sake sake (look at this beautiful cover!). MY BABY is a Dutch-Kiwi band based in Amsterdam and I am obsessed with this album. A mix of rock, synth-pop and lots of other easter eggs. One of those albums that is cool to listen to from beginning to end. But if you ask, my favorite songs: a dream i dream, don’t fight it and it’s a setup.

🦿Sci-Fi Love

I cannot use another expression other than POP PERFECTION to define Tove Lo’s new single and video. First, because I don’t think I have seen a lesbian sci-fi story. Second, the set design, makeup, choreography and outfits are just out of this world. Third: the dose of drama is perfect.

Something I had never thought about in these metallic sci-fi’s that hit me while watching this. Is this obsession with mirrored/shiny metals in certain techno-futurism metals a way to symbolize our narcissism as a society? 😱

⚙️What is Capitalism Really?

I will just quote the whole post from Thomas Klaffke on LinkedIn. I would recommend reading the whole thread he’s talking about:

What is capitalism really?

Great thread by Jason Hickel sheds some light on what capitalism really is. So what is distinctive about capitalism?

- enclosure and artificial scarcity (e.g. via privatization of commons)
- perpetual expansion (ever-increasing production and consumption)
- precluding democratic decision-making (what to produce, for what purposes, for who's benefit, under what conditions are made in the narrow interests of the capitalist class - not workers)

"In sum, the tendency to equate capitalism with "markets and trade" naturalizes a system that is not natural, and prevents us from having a clear-eyed view of how it operates and how we might want to do things differently."

🤖Dismantling AI Capitalism

This article by Pieter Verdegem came up in the latest The Syllabus and I could not leave it out, for the synchronicity with this week’s topics:

This article discusses the political economy of AI capitalism. It considers AI as a General Purpose Technology (GPT) and argues we need to investigate the power concentration of Big Tech. AI capitalism is characterised by the commodification of data, data extraction and a concentration in hiring of AI talent and compute capacity. This is behind Big Tech’s unstoppable drive for growth, which leads to monopolisation and enclosure under the winner takes all principle. If we consider AI as a GPT—technologies that alter society’s economic and social structures—we need to come up with alternatives in terms of ownership and governance. The commons is proposed as an alternative for thinking about how to organise AI development and how to distribute the value that can be derived from it. Using the commons framework is also a way of giving society a more prominent role in the debate about what we expect from AI and how we should approach it.

🏝Protopia Dreams

If you’ve been for a while you know I love Monika Bielkyte’s work at Protopia Futures. I had not seen yet this beautiful manifesto/video made in collaboration with Reuben Wu, whose work is so hypnotizing. Put on the full screen and enjoy the beauty and the poetic slaps on our face.

PROTOPIA FUTURES collaboration with Reuben Wu, 2021. Words+voice by Monika Bielskyte, graphics by Nicolas Kadima, music by Daniel B. Produced for SKYANYCOLOUR by Rod Chong & Errolson Hugh.

🦸Businesses as Heroes?

Piotr Drozd shared an honest and inspiring text (+this diagram I will use on presentations) on his LinkedIn (thank you Gust, again!).

With TIME recently splashing ‘Earth’s future rests in the hands of big business’ on its cover*, and 76% of the global public thinking that business has a ‘great deal of responsibility’**, on par with governments, it seems apt to remind ourselves of one simple fact — unilateral action is unfit for tackling the world's toughest problems.

🫀Identity Recovery: Katu Mirim

While COLORSxSTUDIOS keeps using their platform for these amazing editorials, I’ll keep bringing them here. They interviewed Katú Mirim, an incredible queer indigenous artists, activist from São Paulo. Katú is also the founder of Visibilidade Indígena, a platform amplifying the voices of indigenous artists and LGBTQ+ indigenous people, as well as Tibirá, an online collective.

MY NAME IS KATÚ MIRIM AND I COME FROM SÃO PAULO. I’M AN INDIGENOUS ACTIVIST AND A LESBIAN. I WAS ADOPTED WHEN I WAS ONLY ELEVEN-MONTHS-OLD, AND I ONLY DISCOVERED I CAME FROM AN INDIGENOUS BACKGROUND—I AM DESCENDED FROM THE BORORO PEOPLE FROM THE STATE OF MATO GROSSO—WHEN I WAS AROUND 13. SINCE THEN, I HAVE BEEN IN IDENTITY RECOVERY.

COLORS: IF YOU COULD SEND ONE MESSAGE TO THE WORLD RIGHT NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

KM: WE NEED TO DECOLONIZE: DECOLONIZE SPACES, DECOLONIZE THE MIND, DECOLONIZE THE SOUL. WE NEED TO KNOW EACH OTHER DEEPLY. FOR THAT TO HAPPEN, BRAZIL NEEDS TO DECOLONIZE ITSELF AND REMEMBER ITS ROOTS. WE NEED TO START FROM SCRATCH TO HAVE A BEAUTIFUL FUTURE: A TOTALLY ORIGINAL INDIGENOUS FUTURE.

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🔌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: