☄️✨The Nexialist #0097

Shay’s DA | Woodkid’s reactor | (post-)apocalyptic imaginary | the tech boom is over | can solarpunk save the world? | slouching towards utopia | biopiracy | the dirty road to clean energy | BoP 2022

Dec 01, 2022

welcome to another of my weekly attempt to captured and make sense of ideas i find, The Nexialist

hello, folks! and welcome to december! today’s nexialist got a bit longer than usual as i bring you some dystopia, apocalypse, utopia, mixing music, videos, lectures and articles. i got a little bit carried away as this week’s theme kept showing up wherever i looked. that usually makes me feel like i’m channeling what i’m supposed to. so… enough with the intro. enjoy and i hope you get as many brain sparks as me🫀

🦾Shay’s DA

Shay is a belgian rapper and makes some delicious bops. this video appeared on my twitter a few weeks ago and i’ve been listening to it daily. the video is a clear homage to Luc Besson’s dystopia of The Fifth Element (1997) and i’m obsessed. also, i feel seen as the nods to the brazilians are there: anita’s iconic dance move and singing “tudo bem?” out of the blue make me love it even more.

⚙️Woodkid’s reactor

woodkid is known for his cinematic songs and videos, and this time it’s no different. it deserves your full screen and full attention as kids sing among a monstrous machine and lava (?). it gave me chills.

☄️(post-)apocalyptic imaginary

i hope you enjoyed today’s entertainment foreplay before diving into this 45mins seminar that blew my mind. the video was shared by the syllabus a couple of weeks ago and with this title, i had to press play. first, i was excited to learn about CAPAS: “The Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University, which focuses on the effects of catastrophes and end-time scenarios on societies, individuals and environments.”

Teresa Heffernan takes us by the hand to connect historical views of the apocalypse to more current versions of that, usually involving technology. she starts with a few questions, two of which got my attention: where do science and fiction meet and how did they get so entangled? what gets lost when fiction is marketed as science? as someone who has heard and repeated the sci-fi sci-fact discourse, i was happy to get a slap on my face by Teresa. she explains how we got here, showing the rich-american-white-cis-male dominance in these fields (the names are mostly familiar to us, elon musk, jeff bezos, ray kurzweil) and how their interests

immortality, holy water, demons, miracles, gods, the end of the world and the raising of the dead… what has this apocalyptic rhetoric got to do with science? not very much. with tech moguls, engineers and entrepreneurs, philosophers and salesmen at the helm, these predictions about the future backed by a great deal of power and money are mostly ripped from the pages of fiction. since the 2000s, fiction and science have become increasingly entangled…

i recommend watching the whole thing if you work with trends, tech, communication and writing. i’ll just leave something i had never heard of: Ursula’s Franklin’s three phases of technology. Teresa shares that and invites us to think about where we are concerning AI.

physicist Ursula Franklin, in her 1989 Massey lectures, the real world of technology, outline three phases of technology just as computers were becoming ubiquitous. in the first phase, she argues, the technology is greeted with enthusiasm, hope and excitement. It promises liberation and it is often sold with the help of fiction. in the second phase, corporate monopolies take over, and an infrastructure is imposed that forecloses alternative technologies. the third phase pushes for unlimited growth and global industrial restructuring. in this phase, the technology that has once promised freedom turns sour.

👨🏻‍💻the tech boom is over: culture reset

“First, tech companies were pandemic winners. When consumers were stuck at home on Zoom meetings, Peloton rides, and watching Netflix, tech companies’ stock went up. They got huge infusions of cash and used it to expand — a lot, and sometimes in increasingly risky verticals. But as the economy worsens and inflation rises, while pandemic restrictions ease, investors are looking for safer bets, and tech companies are coming back to Earth. Hence the belt-tightening.”

talking about dystopia and tech dominance, i recently heard this today, explained episode about this culture reset, as they call this wave of layoffs happening in silicon valley. i was like 🤷 but of course, it’s not like they suddenly lost their place. “they are much less valuable, but they’re still the most valuable companies in the world. so comparatively, they’re still the big dogs.” but what’s important is that minds that were once working for them can now find jobs in other places, for the better or for the worse.

read: Silicon Valley layoffs aren’t just a cost-cutting measure. They’re a culture reset. | Vox’s Today Explained

🌞can solarpunk save the world?

this text by Stacey Balken popped up in a couple of newsletters that i love (the syllabus and sentiers), so i just had to read it. if cyberpunk usually channels a dystopic future run by corporations (and the inherent scarcity of capitalism), solarpunk mostly envisions more of a utopic future run by abundance, solidarity and green technologies. this whole text is just a jewel to read, so please indulge yourself:

Following philosopher George Bataille’s injunction (in his 1949 The Accursed Share), and steering toward a more collectivist understanding of planetary life, a “solidarity-oriented solarity” also “require[s] stories that move away from solitary, individual heroes to multispecies stories that are grown over time, stories that are intertwined with other beings and celebrate not individual feats but the mutual creation of new ecosystems … solarity means asserting that we matter only by relation.” Consequently, solarpunk imaginaries routinely reject the figure of the traditional hero or antihero. Call him Anthropos, this conventional martyr figure generally follows the trajectory of “individual moral adventure” imagined by popular American novelists like John Updike. Solarpunk offers something quite different: possible worlds framed by a properly relational, if transcorporeal, solarity. Solarpunk as a genre, then, lets us imagine something beyond the dreams of petrocapitalism, solar capitalism, and more. Solarpunk imagines an energy commons where all peoples and all species share; where, per philosopher Oxana Timofeeva, the “sun [shall be understood as] neither a master, nor a slave … [but] a comrade.”

read: Can Solarpunk Save the World? - Public Books

🌈slouching towards utopia

Amsterdam: What Our Cities Might Look Like in 2100, created by AI. Also mentioned at Creative Destruction

it’s always such a nice feeling when i see the topics i’m preparing for the nexialist are popping up in other newsletters, and this week Thomas Klaffke’s Creative Destruction was very much in sync. he mentions Nathan’s Baschez reviews of Slouching Towards Utopia by J.Bradford DeLong. go there to read this and the other “perspective-shifting ideas”

“Slouching Towards Utopia explains why the rate of progress shot dramatically upward 152 years ago (an oddly specific number, I know, but DeLong claims human history changed dramatically around the year 1870), and then began to slow down and enter uncertain territory around 2010. He calls this span of time from 1870 to 2010 “the long twentieth century.”
“Three big forces came online around 1870 to produce incredible growth that reshaped the world and created the anthropocene.
They are:
Industrial research labs
The modern corporation
Globalization
Without organized research programs, innovation came accidentally and inefficiently. Without corporations to deploy the new technology at scale, inventions remained a curiosity or a proof of concept. And without global trade and communication, they would only have local impact.”

🌿biopiracy

“Over the last decades, companies and institutions have claimed natural compounds and substances as their own. And hijacked the knowledge of how to use them. They have profited – some think to the tune of billions of dollars. Who's paying the price? Welcome to the world of biopiracy.

i had never heard this term before and it’s always great naming things that are happening as they are. this DW piece is quite eye opening as it shows how normalized it has been over the past centuries that companies steal knowledge from nature and indigenous communities, while making billions and damaging these communities.

🚘the dirty road to clean energy

Rest of World is such a great source about technology beyond silicon valley. this time they made a piece about the complexity of green transition, in this case, electric vehicles. “The dirty road to clean energy: how China’s electric vehicle boom is ravaging the environment” is an in-depth look at extractivism happening under the cover of clean energy.

🫀Business of Purpose 2022 Recap

‘Tis the time of the year of recaps and reports and i am here for it. BoP sent this week a recap of their newsletter and it has some great case studies and tools such as regenerative marketing and new business frameworks & tools.

🌊Bom Mesmo é Estar Debaixo D'Água

Luedji Luna’s music is just so mesmerizing. if you haven’t heard, just press play. she’s from Bahia in Brazil and sings this sweet jazz/blues that is just so perfect for her voice and timbre. the title of the album translates as something like “what’s actually good is to be underwater.”

thank you, and i’ll see you next week, you solarpunks🌞

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