🧲✨The Nexialist #0058
🧲✨The Nexialist #0058
Weird Stuff | Brazilian Modernism and NFTs | Crypto as Ritual and Religion | History and Surprises | 3 Steps to The Future | Meta Trending Trends | Old vs New Music | Billions
Welcome to this weird corner where links might not always make sense, The Nexialist
Thank you everyone for all the love sent after last week’s Valentine’s edition. It was my record getting ♥️ around here. Keep them coming, please! Also, I had a good week, since I landed two very nice projects to work on #WEEERK! This means I’ll be quite busy the next few weeks, meaning that the next Nexialists might come a bit short, but still made with love and brain juice.
Also, add your sparks to the discussion. A Brainspark Thread is where you can share connections your brain made while reading or links that made new neural connections in your week:
👽Weird Stuff
For some reason, this quote from Ezra Croft really stayed with me, because I agree with it so much.
🖼Week of 22 and NFTs
One hundred years ago, happened in São Paulo The Modern Art Week. “Historically, the Week marked the start of Brazilian Modernism; though a number of individual Brazilian artists were doing modernist work before the week, it coalesced and defined the movement and introduced it to Brazilian society at large.” Of course, looking back we see how it was a white, male-dominated, and São Paulo-focused event, nonetheless, it would change the course of Brazilian art history.
Lidia Zuin wrote a great thought piece, comparing that movement to the emergence of NFTs: “While modernist artists wanted to disrupt conservatism and the traditional aesthetic of art, NFTs are causing a new change in the art industry.” It’s worth the read.
In this scenario, what we are seeing is a return to the idea of ownership and the certification of images in a digital environment. It seems strange, especially when we understand that blockchain was first proposed by a cultural and political movement that prioritized access to information, not ownership. This was the same discourse that got in fashion during the past decade, when the sharing economy defended that accessing was more relevant than owning something, thus supporting the business model of platforms such as Uber, AirBnB and similar. But now we are talking about the ownership of digital objects, not physical ones.
Read: A century after the Brazilian Modern Art Week, NFTs target the future of the art market - Lidia Zuin
📿Crypto as Ritual and Religion
I found this text on Monika Bielskyte’s LinkedIn and of course, I had to click. Evgeny Morozov interviews Inês Faria on Crypto as Ritual and Religion. “Inês Faria is a researcher at the CSG-SOCIUS/ISEG, University of Lisbon. Since 2016 she has been developing research about the uses of blockchain technology as part of the project Finance Beyond Fact and Fiction. Below, one of the many parallels she finds:
Technical mastery has long been part of religious or spiritual awe, as well as a means to create or strengthen power relations – we can see this, for instance, in the prows of Trobrianders’ canoes explored by Alfred Gell, or even in the architectural and decorative features of some churches. Bitcoin and all the aura surrounding its creation had this same characteristic, creating a strong appeal to novelty, to change, to technological prowess, and to its power to heal social, economic, and political ailments. An appeal that often attracted people coming from different (and often conflicting) economic and political positioning.
This enhanced the romantic view of the technology, making it very appealing – as a tool, as a medium for radical change, or as a vehicle for speculation and rapid money-making. We played a bit with this appeal, and the idea of re-enchantment, while thinking that this is really driven by various factors: the post-crisis situation, of course; but also, as other authors have also observed, the need for something that allows for a redemption of financial institutions and financialized gambling practices.
Read: Inês Faria on Crypto as Ritual and Religion
🎁History and Surprises
“History is the study of surprises.” — Edward T. O’Donnell, Ph.D, History Professor
"This line captures the world in which we live, we’re living history, surprise after surprise after surprise. And just when we think, we’ve had all the big surprises for a while, along comes another one. If the first two decades of the 21st century have taught us anything, it’s that uncertainty is chronic; instability is permanent; disruption is common; and we can neither predict nor govern events. There will be no ‘new normal’; there will only be a continuous series of ‘not normal’ episodes, defying prediction and unforeseen by most of us until they happen.” — Entrepreneurship 2.0 by Jim Collins and Bill Lazier
Another citation Brené Brown made in her podcast Unlocking Us that stayed with me.
📈Three Steps to The Future
Every year, Benedict Evans launches a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year he focuses on Web3 and the Metaverse, with quite a critical view, in 94 slides quite easy to understand. He also takes a trip down the past, which is always good to do when imagining the future.
The most exciting themes in technology today are transformative visions for 2025 or 2030: crypto, web3, VR, metaverse… and then everything else. Meanwhile, hundreds of start-ups take ideas from the last decade and deploy them over and over in one industry after another. And trying to keep up, the old economy faces waves of disruption from ideas we first talked about in the 1990s.
🔭Meta Trending Trends
I always love to see Matt Klein’s Meta Trending Trends, where he “synthesizes 500+ trends from 40+ reports, ranking the 14 most frequently reported cultural trends for 2022.” This year, he mentions how his excitement about doing is waning and shows how this exercise should be just the start, for us to look further into the weird and underlooked trends.
Rather than treating these Meta Trends as an accurate forecast, we must now also use them as filters to seek out what’s NOT discussed.
The edges are the sharpest, and the fringes are the future. To see what’s coming, we must respect the bizarre and validate the weird. These reports don’t. In the nicest way, one who perceives a Meta Trend as an emergent opportunity is late to the party. Meta is table stakes. (But, they’re also contextual by brand / vertical — these are not one-size-fits-all territories.)
[Thank you Iolanda for sending it in the Brainspark Thread!]
🎵Old vs New Music
This information came to me as a surprise from Ted Gioia’s Newsletter.
The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.
Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago. And the mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted to older music—the current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.
I think it explains a lot about how artists are redoing old songs, reusing samples. The same goes for movies, I guess. Also, the secondhand clothing market is set to be twice the size of fast fashion by 2030. Seems like there’s something there.
Read: Ted Gioia Newsletter, The Honest Broker
🍇Billions
Talking about old music and samples and having weird art at home… I think Caroline Polachek is one of the few artists that are able to make new music with novel (and weird) sounds.
Read: Caroline Polachek contemplates the overabundance of the world on “Billions” | Beats Per Minute
👄How Long
Just to finish today’s Nexialist a bit musically, another Swedish artist for you.
Any links you would like to share after reading (or even non-related links?) Please, share below:
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