👤✨The Nexialist #0081

Renaissance | What Will Replace Religion? | Distributed Trust | How Did Consciousness Evolve? | The Earthquake That Changed History | Masters of Crowds | Three Waves of Media | The Vanishing Designer

Aug 04, 2022

Welcome to another peak at the byte-sized microcurves of my brain (?) The Nexialist

Hello, world! I guess you have heard about Renaissance. Not the art movement, but Beyoncé’s masterpiece of an album. I haven’t been obsessed with an album like that for a while and I hope you too. If not, give it a listen, from start to finish and let me know what you think. I will keep the intro short and sweet because this Nexialist is quite long (and it’s warm outside, so I have to go.) Enjoy!

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🙏🏻What Will Replace Religion?

If I would recommend one thing to watch from this Nexialist, it is this video. Jamie Wheal is the author of "Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind," and he explains what his book is about. He argues there is a Collapse in Meaning and ends the video in a hopeful and inspiring note on ways to move forward:

Meaning 1.0: Organized Religion. For the first time in history, the “nones” (none of the above), a.k.a. spiritual but not religious, are the largest and fastest-growing “religious” movement, at least in North America. Many people do not feel represented by those institutions anymore.
Meaning 2.0: Modern Liberalism. Academia, news media, businesses and corporate titans and leadership, perhaps even medicine. These institutions are also going trhough a trust crisis.

“Fundamentalism and nihilism are filling that vacuum, with consequences that affect us all.” He shows how this could be causing the rise of what he calls Rapture Ideologies, which do not only manifest in extremist religions but also in politics, Big Tech and even traditional business. They share a similar structure:

1- The world as we know it is screwed;
2- There’s an inflection point coming soon;
3- As soon as we get to that point, me and mine are going to score the golden tickets to the other side;
4- Let’s get there as fast as possible, don't worry about the collateral damage of the world we are living behind;

He then suggests a new approach. “How do we create liberating structures so that a lot of people all around the world, can experiment, innovate and adapt their own approaches to finding and restoring meaning without it coming tops-down?”

Meaning 3.0: A blend of traditional religion (salvation) and modern liberalism (inclusion). “From Meaning 1.0, we need healing, inspiration, and connection. From the modern liberal side, we want this to be open-source. We want anybody anywhere to have access to this, it needs to be scalable, really cheap or outright free. And then the third is it has to be anti-fragile… If you want to do things that everybody has access to, that are effective, start with evolutionary drivers like breathing, sexuality, embodiment, substances, and music. Our nervous systems and our bodies can actually be profoundly potent tools to discharge trauma and to prompt peak states and inspiration.”

🫂Distributed Trust

Matt Klein’s Zine has been 🔥 lately, and this post connects directly with the previous video. He shows how we are going through a shift, an Evolution of Trust, going from Institutional Trust, to Influencer Trust, to the emerging Distributed Trust:

Distributed Trust is the latest evolution (Many-to-Many). Bygone are the days of listening to a single source. Now, people pool their collective intelligence together, creating a communal answer. Faceless no less. They rigorously cross-reference experiences, diligently research efficacy, and unpack claims en masse within vetted, supportive communities. All together now.

The other shift we are living is from a Top-Down Influence to a Lateral Influence, which leads to the power of community, a topic that comes up quite a lot around here.

Read: Distributed Trust: The Future of Crowds & Honesty by Matt Klein, Zine

🧠How Did Consciousness Evolve?

This was quite an exciting read which I had been postponing for some weeks. Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, two leading voices in evolutionary consciousness science, are the authors of “Picturing the Mind,” exploring questions like “What is consciousness, and who (or what) is conscious — humans, nonhumans, nonliving beings? Which varieties of consciousness do we recognize?” They do this through the views of poets, philosophers, psychologists, and biologists and include Anna Zeligowski’s cute illustrations.

They describe their research journey to identify an evolutionary transition marker of consciousness. They call it unlimited associative learning (UAL), which is a list consensus list of 8 characteristics. Basically, “If an animal shows unlimited associative learning (that is, practically unrestricted learning), it means that all the capacities of consciousness are in place.” After consciousness, they show how this leads to suffering and also to imagination.

Driven by learning, consciousness and cognition evolved further. In some lineages, selection for increased learning capacity led to the gradual evolution of imaginative, dreaming animals. They did not just learn about aspects of their world; they also learned about how events unfolded in time. They recalled past events— they could recall when and where a particular event happened, and they planned ahead by recombining aspects of their recollections and evaluating the planned, imagined event. These animals, which inhabit the third floor in Dennett’s generate-and-test tower, could imagine different scenarios and choose between them.

Read: How Did Consciousness Evolve? An Illustrated Guide by: Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka | The Reader - MIT Press

🇵🇹The Earthquake That Changed History

I had forgotten about this historical event until I visited Lisbon a few years ago and was reminded how part of the Brazilian gold was used to pay England for post-earthquake aid. At the time of the tragedy (1755), Lisbon was the capital of a worldwide colonial empire, and it was destroyed by an earthquake followed by a tsunami and then a huge fire.

“News of the disaster in such an important city like Lisbon spread quickly. It was the first ever “worldwide” mediatic catastrophe that drew the attention of every gazette and newspaper and travelers all over europe. The news reached all the great minds of the time many who were starting to look at the world in a new way many we now associate with the age of enlightenment philosophically…. Instead science was emerging as a better way to explain the world and the way it worked.

It is fascinating to remember how, despite the destruction, natural disasters like these can also rupture old ways of thinking and accelerate immense shifts in society.

📺Masters of Crowds: The Rise of Mass Social Engineering

Now, this article caused a lot of brain sparks. From the origin of the term Social Engineering, to the noble (naive and sometimes twisted) intentions of mass manipulation.

“Writing in 1976, civil engineer and author Samuel C. Florman pined for the “Golden Age of Engineering” — a period he defined as 1850 to 1950. During this Golden Age, especially in the early 1900s, engineers aspired to be “benefactors to mankind.” Flush with pride over massive successes — canals, bridges, dams, and public infrastructures — engineers came to believe that their profession would lead to democratically distributed prosperity for all of mankind.”

At first, it was used as a way to Americanize immigrants, then became a tool to optimize industrial productivity, and then it turned into a wider communication tool with mass media arising used to shape opinions and behaviors. The article focuses on the 1920s until the 1790s, but we know this can be even more pervasive with today’s mass media hegemony.

Social engineers of this period came in three varieties. There were social reformers — Social Gospel Christian activists and early sociologists — who sought to reform society. There were management theorists, who were studying ways to manage workers in industrial capitalism. And later, there were public relations specialists, who mixed the language of social reform with the elitism of management and took to new mass media to shape society as a whole.

Read: Masters of Crowds: The Rise of Mass Social Engineering by Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson | The Reader - MIT Press

📱Three Waves of Media

Fantastic infographic from the Visual Capitalist capturing the Three Waves of Media, listing the characteristics and problems of each of them. Their page has more details about each phase. Even though I studied advertising, I was not familiar with this terminology, and I think it helps frame the history of communication and what is coming as we move forward.

Wave zero: Proto-Media (50,000+ years) Humans could only spread their message through human activity. Speech, oral tradition, and manually written text were most common mediums to pass on a message.
Wave One: Analog and Early Digital Media (1430-2004) The invention of the printing press, and later the radio, television, and computer unlock powerful forms of one-way and cheap communication to the masses.
Wave Two: Connected Media (2004-current) The birth of Web 2.0 and social media enables participation and content creation for everyone. One tweet, blog post, or TikTok video by anyone can go viral, reaching the whole world.
Wave Three: Data Media (2010-current): For the first time ever, a significant quantity of data is becoming “open source” and available to anyone. There have been massive advancements in how to store and verify data, and even the ownership of information can now be tracked on the blockchain. Both media and the population are becoming more data literate, and they are also becoming aware of the societal drawbacks stemming from Connected Media.

👤The Vanishing Designer

Amina Kadribasic sent me this article a few weeks ago, and it spoke to my heart, even though I’m not a designer. Chuánqí Sun writes what feels like a manifesto about autonomy in the age of hyper-productivity and being a mere executor/number. It also reminded me of the Moodboard Effect.

“Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony.”

Sun has a beautiful call to action for designers, and I would say for anyone who feels their work is being standardized and put into boxes, which is hindering innovation and risk-taking:

To myself, to other designers, to our discipline, to this young and ever-shifting industry, in defiance of standardization of the design process, in defense of design as a humanly art and craft, I urge you to design with courage, as a human, with idiosyncrasies. It is also your responsibility to educate and influence people around you. We can, then, also expand and diversify the designers we look up and have as references. Our industry needs new faces, new voices. Be the designer you aspired to be for yourself and for others. Tell them, or even better, show them the difference between a good design and a great one. If you don’t know how, start with this list:
Make a bold decision (that is controversial).
Make a mistake (as a result of a bold decision).
Challenge “conventional wisdom”.
Challenge authority (that preaches conventional wisdom).
Challenge hierarchy (that perpetuates conventional wisdom).
Ignore the committee (and the need to converge).
Decide who your clients are (and aren’t).
Ignore clients that aren’t (especially those who pay the most).
Cultivate clients if none exists (instead of compromising your design).
Be a generalist (and ignore your job title).
Be a specialist (who specializes in being a generalist).
Design things from scratch (and build them yourself from scratch).
Design things that no one wants (yet). Design freely (and think freely).

Read: The Vanishing Designer by Chuánqí Sun | DOC

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