🎲✨The Nexialist #0121

play-full future | game theory | universe | love invention | critic of technology | visual economy | decoding community | non-toxic social media | evolutionary chimera | future in sync | solastalgia

May 18, 2023

welcome to another week of playful sensemaking from the unrandom, the nexialist

hello, you! i hope this e-mail finds you chill. this week i’ll keep the intro short, as you’ll see a bunch of reports, some great new music, the power of play and games (and love), some content about community and futures thinking (all the stuff i love). it’s the usual, except not exactly (?). enjoy and don’t forget to share the love 🫀

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🎲a more play-full future

it feels timely to share this report after last week’s homage to rita lee (tn#120), the ~~queen~~ jester of rock in brazil. there is some kind of magnetism around this topic, as it keeps coming back in my life and in the nexialist. this is the second report released by RADAR “a decentralized collective of 300+ members who have set out to accelerate better futures — in multiplayer mode.” the format is delicious, and flows from the history of play to where we are and what play means, what is keeping us from playing, ending with 5 archetypes, as a way to embody our playful selves.

Yet, wherever enemies of play show up, so do tales of tricksters, jesters, and sacred fools seeking to upend the status quo through playful anarchy. In mythical settings, these archetypes are, arguably, the hardest to pin down. As boundary crossers and subversive figures, they’re welcomed entertainers, until they’re not. After all, there’s immense power — one might call it dangerous power — in using play as a tool for rebellion.

it is such a great report, filled with signals and connecting the dots. when you have time, go get lost in this report:

[Play] underpins many of our most endearing human qualities: Serendipitous discovery, creative exploration, intrinsic inefficiency: they all come back to play. In his seminal work, Man, Play and Games, 20th-century French scholar Roger Caillois attributes this “occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money” to many of our most important and consequential human qualities. Influenced by Caillois’s work, anthropologist Victor Turner makes an even more compelling argument for our purposes, describing play as an “anti-structure” that allows us to explore and express the ambiguities, contradictions, and uncertainties inherent in liminal spaces. It’s these free and flowing in-between moments — these, yes, wastes of everything — that allow for serendipity, for creative leaps, for silly-turned-serious a-ha’s. And when it comes down to it, isn’t that much of what makes humanity special?

🎰game theory tactics

this had been saved a few weeks ago and now it’s the perfect time to share it with you. as someone who grew up playing a lot (not so much sports though, unfortunately), it makes so much sense that games are like parallel realities where we practice real-world dynamics. therefore, game theory has a lot to teach us on how to make decisions and deal with our work and relationships.

John von Neumann wrote a very important book called the "Theory of Games" with a guy named Oskar Morgenstern. and in there, he laid out game theory. game theory is: “the study of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty over time." it was originally developed in economics in order to try and understand economic behavior, like why people buy certain things or why they're willing to work for certain wages. but later on, it was expanded and applied to a variety of different situations, including biology, international relations, and even interpersonal relations like friendship and parenting and family relations.”

🛶the universe

i cannot wait for róisín’s new album. after coocool’s ode to silliness (tn#111), we get this groovy summer vibe full of carefully crafted randomness. i’m loving the bizarre cover arts and the fun she’s bringing to the sounds and lyrics. who else could spin off “row your boat”?

💖love invention

now, this whole album has been an obsession for me since it was released last week: the love invention. it’s a multilayered, rich, indie-synth-pop perfection, not only with colorful visuals but multicolored sounds. no exaggeration, but for my taste, it’s a masterpiece. also, it’s so good to have songs longer than 3 or 4 minutes, no? we can delight ourselves in each song. (another one of my favorites is gatto gelato).

📱critic of technology

ironically, while scrolling twitter, a 1997 video of neil postman made me stop. if you also did not know who he was: a cultural critic, media theorist, and professor of media ecology. he is the author of books like Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992) and The Disappearance of Childhood (1982). in this video, he said something that could have been said today and i would have believed it

“in the culture we live in, technological innovation does not need to be justified, does not need to be explained. it is an end in itself because most of us believe that technological innovation and human progress are exactly the same thing, which of course, is not so.
it’s obvious that one correctly labels me as a critic of technology, of course. but i’m not a luddite. but i do what i do and i say what i say because most of my fellow countrymen and women are desperately in love with technology. and i think this is a mistake. and so i think that culture needs people who point out that their love is misplaced. because you know, when you're desperately in love with someone it’s almost impossible to see what their failings are. isn’t that usually the case? you need someone who has a little distance from it… you need someone who says look: technology is as much problematic for a culture as it is glorious. and we have to give some attention to the problematic part of it. and i’ll end by saying, believe it or not, i’m quite optimistic about this”

👁️visual economy

canva released the visual economy report recently. it looks so good (as it should) and even if it clearly is a material made to sell canva to companies, it has some interesting insights. it gives us data that show that having coherent aesthetics is important for teams and consumers, as it shows credibility and ends with some tips. it made me want to explore the tool’s potential. as i’m not a trained designer, i think i could benefit more from their platform. let’s see…

📡decoding community

zoe scaman, community expert (i don’t even know if she calls herself that, but that’s how i see her), and founder of bodacious put together 2 reports about decoding community (coincidently, it’s in canva). this one is the free version, and there is a paid version with extra content (with more case studies), but for me, this is already a master class. she lays out the drivers shaping this current community behaviours and manifestations, explains what communities actually are, and brings general types of communities, along with signals and questions brands should ask themselves before doing community strategies. here is a cheat sheet to trigger you to click and read all the material zoe created:

societal shifts: a era of volatility and uncertainty, distrust in the status quo, increasing social division, the loneliness epidemic, a new world of work
cultural cues: the decline of big social, the rise of cozy web, the reign of the creators, co-operatives evolved
technological tides: new niche platforms, the democratization of creator tools, new monitizations methods and models
business realities: the death of dtc, the new privacy paradigm, zebra vs unicorns, the resurgence of loyalty
community: a peer-to-peer network brought together through shared interests, reciprocal relationships and mutual value creation.
some big types of communities: subculture devotees, interest enthusiasts, genre geeks, progressive patrons, generative fandoms, dedicated DAOs, neo-activists

🤳non-toxic social media

Instagram (@undefined)

this came quite synchronously with the report above, about communities, where these cozy social networks are a central part of it. “A new wave of Gen Z platforms promise an inoffensive internet. But at what point can a safe haven become an echo chamber?” i think it’s a great question coming from jasmine li, just like neil postman would have liked.

Mostly early- or growth-stage startups, these actively non-toxic social platforms are seemingly non-capitalist, with no obvious ads or requests for money. Instead running on venture capital, it means they don’t appear to have the grow-or-die mentality of startups of yore. But once (or if) these apps get big enough, they’ll then have to toe the line between function and monetisation — a main cause of the toxicity of Web 2.0. As long as the end goal — capital — is the same it’s hard to see how non-toxic socials can deviate from the big bad apps as they grow.

🦁evolutionary chimera

this edward o. wilson quote appeared to me twice this week in different contexts (usually a clear sign that i need to use this piece of fabric in this week’s quilt.)

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. It is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” —Edward O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth

then, in this post from big think i learned something new:

PAPEN, P – A – P – E – N, stands for paleontology, anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology and neural biology. These are the branches of science that need information on the origin of humans, and the deep history of pre-human existence is needed to explain the origins of creativity in modern human beings, and the ways and the reasons our emotions exist and rule us, leading to the way that I have tried to put it in saying that modern humanity is distinguished by paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions like banks and religions, and god-like technology. We’re a mixed up and, in many ways, still archaic species in transition. We are what I like to call a chimera of evolution. We walk around and exist in this fairly newly made civilization that we created, a compound of different traits, of different origins and different degrees of forward evolution.

🌀a future in sync

this is the first report from RADAR focusing on “a future in sync.” it is so good: the content, the format, the narrative, the methodology. as you can see my nexialist brain was very pleased with the amount of detail and brainsparking signals in this beautifully crafted report. (also, so proud to see gust as one of the expert contributors). here are some points to tease you:

drivers: loss, misalignment, impermanence, atomization, system overload
how it feels: post-narrative discomfort, fatigue, paralysis, hunkering down, nihilism

after that they show some more actionable thoughts and cases:

We love a good portal to a new universe as much as the next decentralized community — and the multiverse is certainly one answer to this mess — but we've got a few more tangible suggestions.

New Structures, New Stories, and New Behaviors are the keys to unlocking a Future in Sync. But new doesn’t always mean novel: In certain pockets, the ancient meets the emergent to light our path forward; in others, it’s about rethinking and reconstructing to reset our pace; and elsewhere, it’s about stepping outside of time entirely and allowing ourselves get swept away in playful whimsy, awe, and catharsis into a more wild, emotionally-rooted form of synchrony.

🫠solastalgia

a new word (of many) that appeared in the RADAR report, and we might here more.

Solastalgia is a relatively new concept for understanding the links between human and ecosystem health, specifically, the cumulative impacts of climatic and environmental change on mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Given the speed and scale of climate change alongside biodiversity loss, pollution, deforestation, unbridled resource extraction, and other environmental challenges, more and more people will experience solastalgia.

see you next week, chimeras 🫀

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