🐺✨The Nexialist #0143

queering the map | pop the culture, iconography | how many wolves are inside you? | bellissima | technofeudalism | aperture for transformative foresight | foresight as activism | rest vs west

Oct 19, 2023

welcome to another weekly dose of brainsparking distraction and imagination stimulation, the nexialist

hello, world. i hope this e-mail finds you at least okay. these days, it has been disheartening to read the news: the innocent deaths, the terror and history repeating itself in all the wrong ways. it is also a reminder things are not okay in many different places. forgive me for not addressing this topic here, but i will leave my ultracrepidarian self (tn#140) aside this week, and let the specialists and people with the repertoire for that to bring you the best coverage. in a time of imagination crisis, i hope the nexialist at least helps with keeping creative neural paths connected. read until the end for some foresight content, queer stuff and pop moments. 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🏳️‍🌈queering the map

am i in my cartophile era? different maps have been making their way into the nexialist for the past few weeks. this one has been circulating on ~~twitter~~ x and it is heartbreaking. of course, it made me go look for the project: queering the map, a crowdsourced map, in which small pieces of queer history and intimate stories are pinned into real-world spots. there are sad stories, love stories, horny stories, violent stories.

Queering the Map, a digital atlas that invites L.G.B.T.Q. people to tag any point on earth with an anonymous message describing what the location means to them. — Just Made a Queer Memory? Drop a Pin. (NYT)

brainsparks: queer the future (tn#5), queer health (tn#141), the queer code (tn#92), same gender lyrics (tn#27)

🫦pop the culture, iconography

we need to celebrate troye sivan’s new album, something to give each other. it’s just great to have a gay pop artist reaching this level of production. also, if you’ve been following since his first album, it’s nice to see this more adult version of him. in his latest video, he appears in drag and wow, stunning!

The Australian singer is a hedonistic pop hero on an album that pulls together club nights, tender moments, last-call horniness, and eclectic samples with remarkable finesse. —Pitchfork

brainsparks: rush (tn#130), got me started (tn#141), polygendered music (tn#8)

📽️how many wolves are inside you?

wait, is this me in my first nexialist concert? i just loved polachek’s new song and this powerpoint ~~presentation~~ performance is just perfect, i will be practicing the moves for my next ~~presentation~~ performance. the corporate gays must be ecstatic. i just love the slides, there’s probably a lot of easter eggs, there is even an apology for eating the grapes in the fridge (?), a spiral from archaic consciousness to postintegral consciousness, and a slide about synesthesia being fake.

brainsparks: bunny is rider (tn#34), billions (tn#58)

🪩bellissima

this has been my absolutely favorite album this week (thank you, françois for sharing): E POI SIAMO FINITI NEL VORTICE is a perfect pop album (at least for me): the 80s vibes and the seamless referencing just feels so good!

☁️technofeudalism

It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies. (‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’ — The Guardian)

i had recently mentioned digital feudalism (tn#136), but now that the maverick greek economist yanis varoufakis is releasing a book called technofeudalism, i needed to include here. carole cadwallader seems shady throughout the text and i was reading for the drama, but also to get more of this concept. it connected me to eugênio bucci’s superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28).

brainsparks: hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary (tn#118), digital feudalism (tn#136), plantations, computers, industrial control (tn#125), netocracy vs. consumtariat (tn#18), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), self-fulfilling cyberpunk (tn#40)

📸aperture for transformative foresight

john a. sweeney shared an approach for transformative futures and foresight called aperture (thank you, patrick tanguay (sentiers) for sharing this.) i still need to look more closely at his content, but i highlight two parts below. the first, is a reminder of the origins of different approaches of futures and foresight, war and post-war:

“One approach to futures practice emerged from American wartime operational planning (Seefried, 2014, pp. 2–3). The dominant strand of scenarios work seen in business and military use today can be traced back to this work. A second approach emerged in Europe as a way to reconstruct societies rather than to win wars. This strand was associated with ideas about visioning and desirable futures. As scenarios practice emerged into the futures mainstream in the 1970s and after, this second strand — which had much stronger ideas within it about agency and the ability to change the future — all but disappeared for a generation from the literature and from practice” (Curry 2022).

the other part is how he proposes a more open way to combine different approaches and methodologies in foresight, in a toolbox manner (he uses the word recipe which i love, similar to card/board games).

brainsparks: worldbuilding ft. design fiction | foresight resources (tn#135), queer the future (tn#5), decolonize forsesight (tn#21), play-full future (#121), the future of futures (tn#53)

🔭foresight as activism

Instead of chasing cool, how can marketers work with existing communities, especially those overlooked in the margins of culture, who already have the ideas for the worlds they wish to see?
The nuance is radical: Market research and trend-fetichism is self-centering. From a place of privilege, brands fight to place themselves at the center of existing change. Instead, by collaborating with communities who are making (or struggling to make) progress, marketers can author preferred futures with and for them.

Matt Klein

puts it beautifully in this interview. i don’t have much to say and recommend reading it.

brainsparks: protopia futures (tn#27), time rebels (tn#18), ancestral future (tn#112), cypherpunk, solarpunk and the end of capitalism (tn#40), solarpunk and lunarpunk (tn#127)

🥊rest vs west

rest of world put together a list of 40 “emerging market pioneers are outmaneuvering Silicon Valley for global domination.” if you need to update your deck (or just detox your western reference list) with non-western cases, this list might help. grammarly is my favorite.

see you next week, dangs 🐺✨

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