🥚✨The Nexialist #0028
Lil Nas X's Digital Fluency | Social Constructs | Men in the Media | Relearning Fertilization | Spiral Sperm | Super Industry of the Imaginary | Creative Effectiveness | Mafiosa and more...
Welcome again, to my weekly list of random things that made my brain feel alive
I think someone shared The Nexialist in a group and I got a peak of new readers, so thank you to whoever did that! Welcome to all the new sexy brains and I hope you find something inspiring 🥰 This week I’m going direct to the point since there’s a lot to cover.
🧠Digital Fluency
Rex Woodbury, who writes one of my favorite newsletters, makes a brilliant and exciting analysis of Lil Nas X's success trajectory and attributes that to (not only) the icon’s Digital Fluency. He broke “Mariah Carey’s record for the most consecutive weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.” “Lil Nas X is one of the first digitally-native superstars. He’s seven months younger than Google. When Facebook launched, he was four. When the iPhone came out, he was eight. He came of age online, fluent in digital culture.” I recommend reading it if you are interested in cultural change and pop culture, but I’ll leave a couple of quotes below:
Over the last decade in Silicon Valley, “growth hacking” has become a popular term. It refers to analytical, innovative, often unconventional ways to rapidly grow a startup. Lil Nas X took growth hacking and applied it to fame. When one thing meets another, Gen Zs often use the 🤝 emoji. Lil Nas X said: growth hacking 🤝 music. He took a playbook of scrappy, savvy, brilliant marketing tactics and applied them to a slow-moving legacy industry.
This is the internet at its best: connecting people and giving them community. This is the creator economy at its best. The lyrics speak to Lil Nas X as a digital native: he grew up online, stanning his favorite creators and finding belonging on the internet.
What’s remarkable about Lil Nas X is how he used technology to his benefit, plotting and then executing his own rise. Now, he has a legion of his own fans who look up to him and run Lil Nas X stan accounts. It’s his turn to inspire the next generation.
Read: Lil Nas X Is Gen Z's Defining Icon - Digital Native
👄Social Constructs
I wish I had access to a class like this when I was growing up, and we need to take a moment to celebrate that this is accessible on Youtube. Abigail manages to use AR, VR, platypus and metaphysics to explain social constructs and why do people sometimes have such strong feelings about them. Grab a cup of tea and enjoy!
💪🏼Men in the Media
Talking about social constructs, this Modern Masculinity series on The Guardian explores that with necessary and relevant topics (hello circumcision). In this episode, Amrani investigates the representation of men in the media. It’s great to see that the same movement led by women to create awareness and change on female representation is now approaching masculinity. A bit late, I must say, but I appreciate it.
So, we did a big research in 10 countries and we realised many things. One was that men were performing who they are – not being who they are. They are performing what is expected for them to be. They then start following a path towards what we define a successful man is in a way that is quite narrow and sometimes materialistic.'Not just living in style but the style.' And they have an emotional gap and that emotional gap … they tend to fill it sometimes with an addiction. That could be something soft, like drinking or it can go further like, with drugs and then it can be something more acceptable as being a workaholic… until if you keep that for too long, you get anxiety, depression, and then you get the mental health issues. We wanted to put this under the spotlight of society that men were suffering. - Fernando Desouches from the New Macho
🥚Relearning Fertilization
Another video that I would have liked to see when I was growing up. I feel like I’ve been lied to my whole life. Here, they demystifying the passive nature of the eggs during the fertilization process, “this fairy tale where you have the knight in shining armor going to save the damsel in distress.” So here you have to opportunity to relearn this story:
The story inherently carries a lot of gender bias, and what’s worse is that it’s not entirely true. The sperm can’t make the journey on its own, and the real story of fertilization involves two reproductive systems working together. While sperm have tails that seem like they’re meant for swimming, they can’t propel themselves all the way to the egg — they need the female reproductive tract to help move them forward. And the egg doesn’t just wait around for the sperm to reach it — it has an active role in selecting which sperm will be the best one to fertilize it.
🌀Spiral Sperm
This immediately reminded me that for 350 years we were fooled: sperm spin in kind of a spiral movement, they don’t swim. You can see the animation here.
🤯Super Industry of the Imaginary
You know when you see something you cannot unsee? This podcast did the same to my ears (and brain). The title seemed quite obvious when I saw my friends sharing (thank you, Fabiano!) but I didn’t know what was coming: "People work for free for social media, says Eugêncio Bucci.” Eugênio Bucci, professor at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo, just released his book (in Portuguese, so I’m translating): The Super Industry of the Imaginary: How capital transformed the gaze into labor and appropriate itself of everything visible.
He argues that “what moves the Big Tech, beyond personal data collection, is the extractivism of their users’ gaze. Instead of user, by the way, he prefers the term worker. By posting a photo or scrolling through a social network feed, he says, people are working — without knowing it and without getting paid.” Basically, Eugênio says that, if in capitalism value is attributed using the image and the imaginary, we are creating value for this super industry the whole time (and that includes children). Now that’s a twist on the Attention Economy…
The most valuable companies in the history of capitalism are today's global monopoly conglomerates. They are so valuable because they extract the gaze, channeling it as work, they have the map of the unconscious circuits of each one's desire and they found an inexhaustible and free workforce.
— Eugenio Bucci
💡Creative Effectiveness
Rafael Thumé, Advisory Manager at Contagious Brazil, brought from Cannes Lions 2020 this framework to measure creative effectiveness. I would not encourage you to rate your creativity like that, but it is interesting to see how creative campaigns can be rated. The Creative Effectiveness Ladder was created by James Hurman and Peter Field and you can check out the original post (Use the Google Translate plugin to get more in-depth.)
“They identified that the perception of creative success happens in a subjective way, varying a lot between companies, teams and professionals. Without a clear consensus, there is also no universal language for discussing creative effectiveness or measuring it. This creates a ripple effect, where the focus obsessively shifts to return on investment (ROI) metrics, excluding creativity from the business success indicators. It is an artificial tension, strengthened by the pressure for short-term results. To reverse this equation, Hurman and Field sought inspiration in some classification models established in the market, trying to understand how creative performance can be parameterized within complex organizations and worked in consensus, without ignoring business metrics.”
💃Mafiosa
Spain-based Argentinian Nathy Peluso is hypnotizing (again) in this video. I always love her presence, her dancing and her attitude.
🚨Emergency Disco
Now I know how to say Emergency in Dutch: Noodgeval. The video is a bit intense but I love this band so much that I have to share it.
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