🧑🎤✨The Nexialist #0073
Conformity x Dissent | Countercultureless Society | The Ownership Economy | To Be Cringe is To Be Free | TikTok Killed The Radio Star | Made With AI | Imaginology | FINIMONDO | Taste so Good
Welcome to your weekly dose of disobedient content, The Nexialist
First, I would like to thank for all the coffees sent at Buy me a Coffee. I must say I was quite surprised with all the love. I appreciate it! Second, welcome to all the new subscribers. If you’re ever confused about anything here: great, embrace it because sometimes it will happen. Now, let’s get to some brainsparking reading/watching/listening. Enjoy!
1 year ago » The Nexialist #0022: Dandelion | Wish-Processing Facility | 4-day Week | It’s All Coming Back | Post-Pandemic Socializers | The Ultimate Gaslighting | Bubblegum Misogyny | The Tail End | Storytelling Periodic Table
🧠Conformity x Dissent
Todd Rose is the author of Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions and in this short video (worth watching) he talks about cultural norms and how those can become collective illusions. I would quote the whole video here, so just watch. Something that stood out for me was the role of the artists in our society, a kind of joker who is allowed (not always and not everywhere) to point at the cracks of our societies:
“Artists throughout history, have played a role in purposely challenging norms. We see them as a little weird and a little disconnected from society, because they're supposed to be. And that creates a 'permission structure' that allows them to hold a mirror up to us and say, "Is this really you?" "Is this what you believe?" Sometimes, you come back and say, "Absolutely it is." And you're offended that they even asked. But a lot of times, it's the first crack in the norm that eventually breaks. And as people start to talk about the artist and about the art, rather than the norm itself, it reveals the opportunity for people to reveal to each other, what they actually value, and the norm can disintegrate, and a new norm can emerge.
👁Countercultureless Society
Surprisingly, this week I got a newsletter in my inbox: a collection of 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture. Ted Gioia, writer of Music: A Subversive History shared it in his newsletter The Honest Broker. After giving a short definition he proceeds to share some tweets that show some signs of that (i.e. movie franchises repeatedly making the same movie)
These are the key indicators that you might be living in a society without a counterculture:
.A sense of sameness pervades the creative world
.The dominant themes feel static and repetitive, not dynamic and impactful
.Imitation of the conventional is rewarded
.Movies, music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having little influence
.Alternative voices exist—in fact, they are everywhere—but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible
.Every year the same stories are retold, and this sameness is considered a plus
.Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible
.Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago
I don’t know about you, but I could think of examples for every one of these indicators. It reminded me of an amazing article I shared on The Nexialist #0010 by Caroline Busta: The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram.
“To be truly countercultural in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.”
🧑💻The Ownership Economy
Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but it is the first time I hear Web3 being referred to as the Ownership Economy in this report by Variant.
If the last generation of software was built upon a foundation of user-generated content, the next generation of software will be user-owned, with digital ownership leveraged as a building block to enable novel user experiences. At its core, the ownership economy not only offers a powerful new tool for builders to leverage market incentives to jumpstart new networks—it also holds the potential to create positive social change through the wider distribution of wealth-building assets.
It made me think how a few years ago the conversation was different: Access is more important than Ownership (not buying a song/film but streaming it; not buying a car, but using car-sharing, etc). Isn’t it interesting how we first went through this movement of the sharing economy IRL, and now in the more virtual world we are moving towards ownership of digital assets and the platforms we use? Of course, it’s a different kind of ownership, but it’s nice to see the pendulum spiraling (hopefully) up.
Reminded me of an article from 2016 by @flyingzumwalt: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently.
😬To Be Cringe is To Be Free
I loved Serena Smith’s article for Dazed. In defense of being cringe: “We have entered an era of unapologetic, ‘exuberant’ bad taste – and it feels liberating.” Yes, we’re still talking about cringe. And just like with the last resurgence of fanny packs, we are now embracing it (ironically or not) and it’s becoming a lifestyle.
It certainly appears as though cringe is – dare I say it – actually ‘in’ right now. And it’s about time too: even research affirms that being vulnerable can make you more likeable and multiple studies have shown that we really are our own harshest critics. Plus, despite eroding my already limited social skills, the pandemic has also taught me that life is just too short. I try to remember that there was a time when I would have traded my first born child just to go to a club again, and now that I’m free to go out, I shouldn’t waste my time fretting about how my arms look while I’m dancing.
🤳TikTok Killed The Radio Star
Two of my favorite content creators got together to make this video— Vox’s Earworm (Estelle Caswell) and Pudding.cool (Matt Daniels). It is mindblowing to follow how they managed and monitored all this data: TikTok is like a universe of its own. Even more fascinating is how TikTok is disrupting the music industry. “It turns out, this is way more than a story about algorithms or going viral. It’s a story about the longstanding tug-of-war between artists, platforms, and music industry giants.”
“It’s no secret that TikTok is a virality machine. Songs get turned into sounds that can be used in any video, and if they gain enough traction they can catapult a musician into the pop culture stratosphere. But we wanted to know exactly what happens between a song going viral and an artist becoming a bonafide success. So in the fall of 2021, we partnered with data analysis website The Pudding figure it out.
Along the way, we discovered that using data to concretely answer this question is quite a challenge. Our process included creating dozens of custom data sets, careful fact-checking, and conversations with both hit songwriters and music industry executives to match data with real experiences.
After seven months of spreadsheets, data deep-dives, and interviews, we were able to follow the numbers to track what happens to artists after they go viral — and how the music industry has shapeshifted around TikTok. It turns out the app is completely revolutionizing the way record labels work, and giving artists more leverage than ever.”
🤖Made With AI
If you have been here for a while, you know about my fascination with Dall-E, this AI that creates any image from a text prompt, or text-to-image generator as they call it. This video explains how this has been developed, how it works (there is an incredible level of complexity behind this magic… training data, deep learning, latent space, generation and output) and also the negative implications of that: bias and copyright being two big ones. It’s just mind-blowing 🤯
“It really is just sort of an infinitely complex mirror held up to our society and what we deemed worthy enough to, you know, put on the internet in the first place and how we think about what we do put up.”
Of course, now there is some more buzz as Google announced their own tool called Imagen, which is said to outperform Dall-E AND there are also decentralized versions of it, like Midjourney.
Read: The dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images - MIT Technology Review
💭Imaginology
Why we need a new kind of education: Imagination Studies is a beautiful article written by Stephen T Asma, author of The Evolution of Imagination. I will leave the introduction below to tease you to go read it (it’s a long read):
A chasm divides our view of human knowledge and human nature. According to the logic of the chasm, facts are the province of experimental science, while values are the domain of religion and art; the body (and brain) is the machinery studied by scientists, while the mind is a quasi-mystical reality to be understood by direct subjective experience; reason is the faculty that produces knowledge, while emotion generates art; STEM is one kind of education, and the liberal arts are wholly other.
These are no longer productive ways to organise knowledge in the 21st century.
Within the logic of the chasm, one way of thinking tends to be viewed as more capable of producing meaning: the scientific mind. But the literal, logical, scientific mind is the outlier – the weird, exceptional mode of cognition. It is not, I would argue, the dominant paradigm of human sense-making activity and yet it remains the exemplar of cognition itself and finds pride of place in our educational systems.
Clearly, I have to bring a part about AI because it mentions exactly the previous reference and how we have our advantages.
“An AI can be taught to identify and manipulate images, patterns or sentences, and then recombine them in random and novel ways, which is why we now have apps that ‘compose’ paintings, songs and even poetry. But our imaginations are more than combinatory mashup machines. Our mashups are always motivated. They are purposive and teleological because our emotional lives are at stake. Unlike AI, we always have skin in the game.”
In the last part of the article, he points out “five directions of future research: develop more precise categories; harness the possibilities of consciousness-altering drugs; understand constraints and limits on the imagination; develop better ways of assessing imagination; and develop better tolerance for provisional ambiguity.”
Read: Why we need a new kind of education: Imagination Studies | Aeon Essays
😷FINIMONDO
Last week M¥SS KETA dropped her new album, Club Topperia, and as her unofficial ambassador, I have to share it with you. Sixteen songs mixing different electronic styles, from italo disco to euro-dance, house, and some more experimental/spoken word pieces.
“M¥SS KETA IS THE ANGEL THAT WEARS SUNGLASSES, ALWAYS VEILED. HER HIDDEN IDENTITY IS THE BEST WAY TO SAY THE TRUTH, BECAUSE ‘NOT HAVING A FACE ALLOWS TO HAVE A BIT OF M¥SS IN EACH OF US’.”
🏳️🌈Taste So Good
Pride Month is here and with that the fabulous moment of the year comes to music, films, TV, advertising (BEWARE PINK WASHING!). This video came out while I was writing this Nexialist and I just had to include it just because. I am impressed at how many stars are involved AND I actually enjoyed the song. Are you ready?
Queer-owned cannabis beverage company Cann and the place to find it, Weedmaps, debut a new song and music video amplifying LGBTQ+ inclusivity in the cannabis market and Cann's new line of lite drinks.
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