🦪✨The Nexialist #0124
the future is ancestral | connecting the amazon(?) | carbon colonialism | lana’s beauty in sadness | concatenate | profumo | bad company | i like u
welcome to another week of cyber-IRL-concatenations, the nexialist
hello, folks! i hope this e-mail finds you well. i write to you from sunny amsterdam, with teary eyes (from allergies) and a bit sleepy (from allergy tablets). last week i had the honor to participate in thomas klaffke’s newsletter, and i condensed some references i shared here about amazonizing the world (click and show some love🫀 ). thank you, thomas for the space! and welcome aboard everyone who joined since last week. i hope you have a great time here. read until the end for some ambivalence, long text and fun (and maybe even tacky) music…
1 year ago » 🎉✨The Nexialist #0074 : Which Planet Are You On? | HER MIND, PT.1 | Amazonize The World | TheHomo Mammals | Contextomy | The Divergent Association Task | Social Media x Cults | (Own)ership | Mugler + Funk Carioca
2 years ago » 🎂✨The Nexialist #0023 : Sixth Sense: Echolocation | Interoception | ASMArt | Bob Ross in Data | Permission to be Creative | Plastic Visualization | Is Bolsonaro Finished? | The Edge of Democracy | Brazilianness
🌳the future is ancestral
well, to start kicking off from the amazonizing the world text, i’ve come across alok’s project: the future is ancestral, which of course reminds of ailton krenak’s book, ancestral future (tn#112)
for context, i would say alok is one of the most mainstream brazilian DJs of my generation. he is launching this project by releasing tracks with indigenous people such as the rapper owerá, amplifying their voices and messages in music, performances and an upcoming documentary, which i’m quite curious about. the tracks are beautiful and there is something powerful (and also uncontional) to see them perform with new york skyscrapers around. alok also part of the ancestors of the future fund, with the UN, which helps to bring technology, training and food security to indigenous communities in the effort of conservation.
“antes do brasil da coroa, existe o brasil do cocar”
(before of the brazil of the crown, there is the brazil of the cockade)
🛰️connecting the amazon (?)
“Elon Musk brought internet to Brazil’s Amazon, and criminals love it.” it is so frustrating to read this. while illegal miners make their work more efficient with starlink’s satellite internet, the promised land of education is clearly not a priority.
“Super excited to be in Brazil for launch of Starlink for 19,000 unconnected schools in rural areas & environmental monitoring of Amazon,” Musk tweeted at the time.
That project with the Brazilian government, however, hasn’t advanced. SpaceX and the communications ministry haven’t signed any contract, and only three terminals were installed in Amazon schools for a 12-month trial period, the ministry’s press office said in an emailed response to questions.
is this what they call technowashing (tn#67)? it’s a very real reminder to critically think about futures (desirable, preferable, etc. but also non-desirable) and technology adoption. i know it’s easier said than done, but here you can see the clear neglect.
🌎carbon colonialism
the syllabus shared this book this week, and it is the first time i heard the term carbon colonialism:
Carbon colonialism explores the murky practices of outsourcing a country's environmental impact, where emissions and waste are exported from rich countries to poorer ones; a world in which corporations and countries are allowed to maintain a clean, green image while landfills in the world's poorest countries continue to expand, and droughts and floods intensify under the auspices of globalisation, deregulation and economic growth.
Taking a wide-ranging, culturally engaged approach to the topic, the book shows how this is not only a technical problem, but a problem of cultural and political systems and structures - from nationalism to economic logic - deeply embedded in our society.
🥔future numbness
ted gioia brings quite a statement about alvin toffler’s future shock, fifty years later. “In 1970, Alvin Toffler Predicted the Rise of Future Shock—But the Exact Opposite Happened.”
“The future invades our lives,” he claims on page one. Our bodies and minds can’t cope with this. Future shock is a “real sickness,” he insists. “It is the disease of change.”
[…]
Toffler worried about all kinds of change, but technological change was the main focus of his musings. When the New York Times reviewed his book, it announced in the opening sentence that “Technology is both hero and villain of Future Shock.”
i can’t help but imagine what alvin toffler would think about the future (or futures), looking from today.
As I look back on Future Shock with the benefit of 50 years of hindsight, I see this everywhere in his book. Things turned out the exact opposite of what Toffler anticipated. Instead of Future Shock, he should have written a book called Future Numbness or Future Couch Potato. That would have hit the mark with a bullseye.
this connects perfectly to the idea of having a more critical at how technologies can be applied, since they can be neutral ambivalent.
👄lana’s beauty in sadness
i wish everyone understood portuguese to follow lucas liedke (and his float vibes ft. andré alves. this week, he made such a beautiful analysis of lana del rey, whose work i love so much. i took the liberty to translate the whole thing and add it here, because it has such a rich, deep and necessary perspective:
The year was 2014 and the singer Lana del Rey gave an interview that would mark her life forever. “I wish I was dead already.”
The confession was quite controversial, considered inappropriate for mass culture, which is, as we know, much more about life drive than death drive. (good for us)
But the reason for her venting off was her tiredness for being massacred by the critics and the sacrifices she made to try to adapt to the cultural industry of the time and be consecrated as a new pop diva.
But Lana was weird, and flirting with tragic philosophies, she asked questions like this: "Will you still love me when I shine from words but not from beauty?"
This thought is so interesting, because it proposes a twist of the imaginary power of beauty for the symbolic effect of words. It's about the word that can be beautiful and painful at the same time, because it reveals layers of subjectivity. She goes beyond the surface and gets into topics that can be difficult and deep. As a psychoanalyst, we know this place well, right? It is from this place that the subject of analysis emerges. Someone who is capable of self-contemplation, self-reflection and looking into the most hidden corners of your mind and heart.
Lana del Rey went against the 21st century social norm that says, "be happy at any cost." in a time of such anabolic egos, she managed to vent her vulnerability, which displeased many feminists, and led to her being called, or even "accused" of hysteria, which is a diagnosis that is not even up to us to open here.
Lucky for us, Lana threw herself into the abyss to prove she was stronger than the abyss itself. She fought her demons and survived so she could narrate her drama and create her own mythology. She got out of the hypermediatic spin of social networks and moved away from this demand of trying to please everyone. She could dedicate herself to writing, poetry, and the elaboration of her desires and fantasies. Showing even a whole new generation that suffering from romantic love is not a sign of melancholy. And that true melancholy, as Freud already said, is losing the capacity to love, when all libido is trapped in one's own Self.
Lana's artistic career changed the direction and face of music because she broke free from the conventional structure of pop:
"In my opinion the most influential artist in pop" - Taylor Swift
"She created us, man. She did" - Billie Eilish
And she showed that living solely on the pulse of life is to enter an alienating and manic trance. Yes, it's hard to listen to the pain of the other and our own. But if we, as subjects and society, knew how to deal better with sadness, emptiness and death, maybe we would suffer less from depression.
Because the worst suffering is the one that is censored, that cannot surface, because there is no space or representation for it. And as she says, in the end, even in the summer, there will have to be a little sadness.
⛓️concatenate
Concatenate is a formal word that means “to link together in a series or chain.”
// Most household garbage bags are concatenated on rolls and connected at their perforated edges for easy tearing.
a word we also have in portuguese, which explains what i (try to) do here in the nexialist. i also think i never heard it being used for the blockchain, but it’s exactly what that is.
🦪profumo
M¥SS KETA diving into disco with a song about the scent of the sea. it’s all you needed for the upcoming weekend. still one of my favorite musical acts: italian, faceless, blasé, and sultry with fun lyrics… i can’t wait for new music and a tour.
🏎️bad company
now, these synthesizers are everything, especially paired with the distorted vhs filter. it seems like purple disco machine has figured out the nostalgia formula in a way that doesn’t make me sick of it (at least not just yet).
👁️i like u
another album i can’t wait for. loving the make-up and the euro-dance vibes.
see you next week, concatenators 🫀
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I never quite got the "I can't wait for the release of x" mentality though. Because when you step back, you realize you're injecting judgement purely based on marketing hype in the absence of any measurable quality.