🧢✨The Nexialist #0091

life after lifestyle | gen z subcultures | woman life freedom | sunset | in de nacht | sowieso overhoop | el fruto | domino dancing

Oct 20, 2022

welcome to your weekly virtual patchwork of content, the nexialist!

hallo, allemaal! i hope this e-mail finds you ~~well~~. this week i’m happy to announce that i have successfully finished my A2 dutch course. it means that i’m still a beginner but i know some basic things and i’m excited about it. i honestly thought i couldn’t learn a language after 30 but now i think i can. reminded me of the neuroplasticity vs liveware conversation. so yes, to celebrate, there’s some dutch music.

i was also thinking, is there an opposite to doomscrolling? maybe boonscrolling? this is what i try to do here every week. even if you don’t read everything (which i don’t expect you to), at least scrolling through can feel nice and cozy. so enjoy, and let our brains cuddle virtually.

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🧢life after lifestyle

thank you, thomas klaffke, for sharing this mindblowing analysis by toby shorin.

“the era of lifestyle brands has passed. the world is organizing around a new model: profitable cultural belief systems that produce ‘types of guy.’ as leaders and community members, we have no choice but to understand and adapt to this new landscape."

in this video, he reads his article, so you can listen to it like a podcast. you can notice it’s an article he’s been writing for many years and it took me a good couple of hours to read it. i’m always impressed with some people’s ability to read and translate the world like that. here are some parts that made my brain spark. i feel like i migh have learned more in this piece than in a whole semester in university.

Lifestyle was defined by three elements — brands, culture, and supply chain. The way these components were tied together by technology in the 2010s resulted in a particular organization of culture.

This brings us to subculture. This era was not just one of rapid commerce and blitzscaling brands. The subtext for this brand apocalypse was the way in which subcultures were rapidly proliferating, the way in which people were identifying and sorting themselves into these cultures using the internet.

This is peak Lifestyle. Easier than ever to launch a brand. More goods than ever. Software-enabled, integrated supply chain driven business models. An explosion of online social media cultures. These elements have become omnipresent, splashed across our lives like the patterned splotches of a magic eye book. Stare long enough, and you begin to see the whole: an economy where culture is made in service of brands. To be even more literal: cultural production has become a service industry for the supply chain.
The cultural production service economy (CPSE) isn’t about a single company, nor is it a strategy. It is an entire arrangement of culture, production, and finance, it is the way things are right now. It would be more accurate to say that the CPSE is a configuration of the entire social order. What Dena Yago terms the “vibe economy,” in a mouthwateringly short but brilliant series of insights, is another illustration of this “social order” based way of seeing.

The Lifestyle era was not about creating culture; it was about attaching brands onto existing cultural contexts. It was not about shaping people; it was about sorting consumer demographics into niche categories. The new order we are entering into reverses this. For some organizations, culture has become the product itself, and products have become secondary, auxiliary, to the production of culture.

🤳gen z subcultures

“in a new study by Horizon Media, 91% of 18–25-year-olds say there's no such thing as 'mainstream' pop culture.” this report feels like a rabbit hole of subcultures with really cool visualizations of the sphere of influence for each subculture. it’s worth taking a look.

the five categories and emerging subcultures are:

gaming: streetwear X gamers, gamer girls
entertainment: horror healers, poetic connectors
education: adult-ing hackers, scientific edutainers
fashion: maximalists, real-Time Fashionistas, up-thrifters
beauty: cursed cosplayers, beauty ASMR-tists, cover boys

🧕woman life freedom

sevdaliza is always so good and this makes me admire her even more. the lyrics are so powerful, and the AI visuals by @aiplague are incredibly touching. here is her message she sent attached to the video:

I wrote a song for oppressed women around the world. I stand proud as an Iranian woman and I am supporting the fight of my sisters who shed their blood, hair, hearts and brains to give us all the hope, that one day, we will be free. At a young age I became aware of the systematic means of forcing women into obedience through violence and intimidation. To persuade women that their minds, bodies, and freedom do not belong to them. Our humanity demands we stand up against the oppression of women. Now. And forever. We must continue to speak up and fight institutions that condone oppression, violence and murder. We must face the people that deny the dignity and respect for all of us women. We are so tired of being told how to be, what to be. Sevdaliza

🌆sunset

next monday i’ll finally see caroline polachek live in amsterdam and i’m super excited. i just love hearing the latin influence with this track, she’s always on point.

🏍in de nacht

thank you sasha for sharing this. talking about gamer girl aesthetics, this is right in that alley (along with some motomami). so nice to find dutch music that feels just right.

🤷sowieso overhoop

maan is one of the most famous pop singers in the netherlands and she recently released a new album, leven. this song is so much fun to listen to. i still don’t get all the lyrics, “anyway messed up” shows up on my translator.

🍎el fruto

i’m currently doing a desk research about latin cultures, and i always discover new music when doing this. rubio is from chile and i’ve been in love with the music and aesthetics. worth taking a deep dive.

🂋domino dancing

this song touches my nostalgia so deeply. i clearly remember my father listening and the song playing on the radio when i was a kid. i had never noticed the deep latin reference and i had never seen the video.

Rolling Stone magazine calls the video "probably the most homoerotic pop video ever made", citing the slow-motion shots of the boys wrestling on the beach:
As such, the video exemplified the mainstream exploitation of gay sex in the Eighties, most evident in Calvin Klein ads and feature films like Top Gun. Unfortunately, Domino Dancing was every bit as dishonest, titillating the straight world with images it could never acknowledge, then doubling the repression by keeping openly gay expression closeted.
— Jim Farber, Rolling Stone (Wikipedia)

👋See you next week, brainsparkies!

🫀If anything made your brain tingle, click like, and please share it with your friends. It helps The Nexialist to reach more curious minds.

🥰If someone amazing sent it to you, tell them you love them, and you can subscribe at thenexialist.substack.com.

❓If you want to know what a Nexialist is, click here.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated, you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

Share The Nexialist

🔌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:

thenexialist.xyz

The Nexialist