🗡️✨The Nexialist #0103

escalation in brazil | revival as loss of identity + mass man | hessdalen lights | scientific headlines 2022 | 2023 resolutions and predictions | kill bill | give it up

welcome to another week of my cyber-wanderings and wonderings, The Nexialist

hello, folks! i hope this e-mail finds you well. this week we’ve had a lot happening: from a nice family trip with Juan to Rome (which included lots of pasta and pizza eating, wine drinking, sightseeing, first-time scooter-riding and pretending i could speak Italian 🤌🏼), to the terrorist invasion in Brasilia, to the 31st birthday of Andrea (happy birthday!), i found some time and energy to put this Nexialist together for you. get ready for some inspiration for your week. i hope you enjoy reading and clicking through it as much as i did making it 🫀

1 year ago » 🐜✨The Nexialist #0053 : MRI Scan | The Sound of Purgatory | Renegade | The Future of Futures | Prediction Consensus | The Gay Science | Positive Thinking vs. Happiness | Burnout and Stress Cycles

2 years ago » 🧠✨The Nexialist #0002 : Content Diet | Music and Time | Musical Therapy | Generational Gaps | Running Up That Hill | Dutch Poetry | Algorithmic Gem | Urban Birdie | Shifting Values | A World of Values | Changing Skills

🇧🇷escalation in brazil

Populism Updates @PopulismUpdates

Bolsonaro supporters cheering the arrival of the military right before getting arrested by them

as the meme would say, disappointed but not surprised 🤷 this was my feeling this weekend when the anti-democratic terrorist acts started in Brasilia. and, of course, it put me in a frustrated mood. my first thought: wow, they couldn’t even be creative and had to copy the same thing that happened in the US. pathetic.

Ryan Broderick from Garbage Day proves me wrong in his newsletter: “it wasn't a replay of January 6th, it was an escalation.” it is worth the read:

Trump supporters dream of bringing America back to a vague fictitious past, some combination of the Reaganite 80s and a 1950s America that only existed in magazine ads. Bolsominions are much more specific. They want to bring back a military dictatorship and they’re not afraid to say it.

🧠revival as loss of identity + mass man

Benjamin Carlson @bfcarlson

In 1977, media prophet Marshall McLuhan discussed CIA and FBI surveillance, and then turned it into one of the most mind-bending riffs on identity in the digital age I've ever heard.

Marshall McLuhan has the power to blow our minds. maybe it’s just me because i studied advertising and remember being amazed since then. however, when I clicked play on this video, i was not ready for his mind-bending thoughts on surveillance, identity and nostalgia. and this is from 1977 and is so true still today 🤯 here is the transcription:

we now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance. no matter what part of the world they’re in, we can put them under surveillance. this has become one of the main occupations of mankind, just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings-on and invading privacy. in fact, just ignoring it. everybody has become porous. they got the light and the messages go right through us.

by the way, at this moment, we are on the air and on the air we don’t have a physical body. when you’re on the telephone or on the radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. you’re just an image on the air. when you don’t have a physical body you’re a discarnate being. you have a very different relation to the world around you. and this, i think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. it has deprived people of their private identity (…). everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. it’s called being mass man.

by the way, one of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia. and so revivals, on all hands, in every phase of life today, revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything we live by. the revival tells us who we are or were.

i pictured in my mind ourselves being disintegrated and dematerialized, even if we are still individuals, and how this combines with the bolsominions acting as a mass man, guided by a nonsense nostalgia. it also made me think how the moment of peak nostalgia (TN#19) we live in might be directly connected to the imagination crisis we are facing (TN#15), confirming the need for more futures literacy initiatives (?)

⚡️hessdalen lights

this song led me through a rabbit hole, and i wanted to share it with you. a few weeks ago, an ad hit me on Instagram from Lois Jeans and i was immediately obsessed with the soundtrack. then the hunt to find it started, and it took me a couple of days to find it. the track was too short for shazam, and the lyrics did not sound clear to me. someone kindly pointed me the way: hessdalen lights by women in chains. the track was uploaded 8 years ago, in a channel only with this video, and less than 200 views. how come such a good song hasn’t been discovered?? and wtf are hessdalen lights anyway?

The Hessdalen lights are unidentified lights observed in a 12-kilometre-long (7.5 mi) stretch of the Hessdalen valley in rural central Norway. The Hessdalen lights are of unknown origin. They appear both by day and by night, and seem to float through and above the valley. They are usually bright white, yellow or red and can appear above and below the horizon. The duration of the phenomenon may be a few seconds to well over an hour. Sometimes the lights move with enormous speed; at other times they seem to sway slowly back and forth. On yet other occasions, they hover in mid‑air.

don’t ask me why, but i was just so obsessed with this and it has become one of my favorite songs. i hope you like it. i added it to my 👨‍🎤you upload yourself to San Junipero and go party at The Quagmire🤘playlist.

🔬scientific headlines 2022

i clicked on this expecting a purely uplifting post full of scientific breakthroughs of 2022. i was naïve. even if they were there, i was surprised at the number of headlines about the global emergency. i recommend going there to navigate through the whole infographic.

🔭2023 resolutions and predictions

RADAR’s 2023 predictions resolutions are looking so good 😍😍 thank you, Danilo Novais, for sharing them with me. it was so nice to see many of the themes i have shared here in the nexialist weaved in such a neat way, proposing these resolutions. play, hopepunk, anti-ambition, third places, accountability - _washing, grief, community care > self-care, plural identity… it is an inspiring treat for 2023. they also let us navigate in their miro board. check it out.

🗡️kill bill

SZA’s new album SOS has been a blessing and this new video is everything. so cinematic, nostalgic and sexy. the last scene is to die for.

📿give it up

this song appeared in my feed and i fell in love. dream-artsy-pop, there’s no way not to love it. MOTHERMARY is an American duo of twins, the last children of many from a Mormon family. you got to enjoy the blasphemy of it.

MOTHERMARY makes retro-futuristic Art Pop. Named after the mother of Christ, the ultimate symbol of religious hypocrisy and the impossible expectations placed on women, the bicoastal project is the brainchild of identical twins Elyse & Larena, who grew up in a Mormon family in Missoula, Montana, the youngest of nearly a dozen children. “It was our world… our paradigm,” Larena says about those days. “We were brainwashed.”

see you next week, nexialovers 🫀

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🔌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. 

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