🎟️✨The Nexialist #0151

cop28 smokescreen | insterstitium | sloshing time | immigration in brazil | gag city | ai homework | 2024 trend reports | one on one

Dec 14, 2023

welcome to another week of interstitiary content curation, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-mail finds your soul (or at least your mind). i’ll cut to the chase and let you explore the content because it is filled with brainsparks and discoveries. from the ~~flop28?~~ cop28, to a new bodypart that helps us reframe the world, to a new metaphor for time, to immigration in brazil, to a bunch of trend reports and other things. they might feel random but there is something connecting them. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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😶‍🌫️cop28 smokescreen

Even the creation of the UNFCCC itself was not devoid of fossil fuel influence. That came out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit which was held in Brazil, and the president of that meeting was a former Canadian tar sands oil guy. The very first meeting where we started to talk about global governments committing to emissions reductions was presided over by an oil guy. I think that it’s much more in your face than it’s been, but I find it a little bit troubling to see how outraged and surprised people are. This process has been co-opted by the industry since the beginning. Same with the IPCC—there’s a bunch of oil guys that are authors of those reports.

oh well, surprise, surprise. the internet was scrambling with the fact that cop28 was “held in the UAE, which is a petrostate, and the COP president Sultan Al Jaber is the CEO of Adnoc, which, by some metrics, has some of the most aggressive fossil fuel growth plans in the world.” this interview with amy westervelt is quite eye-opening: the history of emission reduction is closely tied to the oil industry. is cop28 the ultimate greenwashing, or is the oil industry pivoting? is the event completely broken? it’s worth reading to get some insights.

it made me think of the slave trade. it took centuries for slavery to be phased out (and even now, we know there are millions of people living in some kind of modern slavery and forced labor, and we still have serious impacts in our current society for that regime, so i wonder what it will take to make this change.

brainsparks: amazonize the world (tn#74), code red for humanity (tn#32), AI, climate justice & labor rights (tn#133), time for indigenous futurism (tn#65)

👤insterstitium

We now have a shared language, or at least a word, for this system — or this organ, or this infrastructure (depending on whom you ask) — that’s been revealed as a fluid-filled superhighway spanning the entire body. It’s called: the interstitium. It’s such a new word that my autocorrect feature keeps wanting me to change it to “interstitial.”
Here’s just a glimpse of what’s becoming known about it. The structure of the interstitium is fractal; it exhibits the same pattern at various scales. It’s unified. While scientists had seen glimpses of this mesh-like network before, they had not realized that it connected the entire body — just underneath the skin, and wrapping around organs, arteries, capillaries, veins, head to toes. It’s juicy. It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does. The fluid isn’t blood, it’s a clear and “pre-lymphatic” substance, carrying within it nutrients, information, and new kinds of cells that are only just being discovered. It’s also a conduit for cancer spread. Turns out that cancer cells moving through the interstitium’s channels are fast.

thank you

Thomas Klaffke

for sharing this article by jennifer brandel, which made my brain into fireworks, my heart beat faster and my face smile. jennifer shares the recent discovery/recognition (at least in western medicine) of a new juicy fractal “organ” that actually holds everything together in our bodies.

while reading it, i couldn’t help but think of what i do here in the nexialist and also what i do for work, trying to sew together different areas, different ideas. she calls this type of work interstitionary (yes!), and shared the same feeling of not being easy to describe what she does on linkedin or at a dinner party, which is pretty much how i feel. it made me think of dark matter, third places (tn#90), winnicott’s transitional spaces (tn#78) and the hidden network of everything (tn#126) and how we still need more people like this, articulators, bridges and more recognition. when we say we don’t know what the jobs of the future will be, with the rise of ai, i think this interstitionary mindset will help us figure out.

The interstitium’s existence — this golden metaphor rooted in our own biology — has finally given me words for the role I play, and what I’ve been noticing others doing everywhere, but couldn’t articulate. And if anthropomorphizing a body part is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Just as scientists can now see the interstitium everywhere they look, I see these people everywhere who are bridging, connecting and serving as conduits, keeping systems in communication, operable, healthy. Most of these people I see doing this interstitionary work are women. None of them get paid (or paid enough) for the tremendous value they generate in the world. Their kind of genius would never win a MacArthur fellowship, as their expertise is in the magic of how they do, not just what they do. Their impact transcends any one area, and has been essentially hidden from how we organize, track, measure and reward people in our economy and society.

brainsparks: how tech changes the way we speak (tn#136), nature disconnection (tn#137)

🌊sloshing time

aspenagln

A post shared by @aspenagln

thank you, gust for sharing this. bayo akomolafe exploded my mind with this short talk and it hasn’t left it ever since. also, the timing of receiving this on the same week i read about interstitium, reminding us we are connected to each other. this imagery of time, not as a neat line or even a spiral, but a sloshing movement, messy and organic. it is such a clear diagnostic.

this whole idea that we are isolated independent selves is what i call white stability. and white stability is a feature of white modernity. right, whiteness is not white people. whiteness is the arrangement of bodies in a power structure. it captured white people just as much as it captured everyone else.
what it does not allow us to see is how our bodies are coterminous with each other. how we’re constantly thinking along with microbes and furniture and ancestrality. that we don’t live in a single timeline that proceeds from the past, to the present, to the future. that, in the words of my people, time is sloshing. it’s not even cyclical. the past is yet to come. this is what trauma really is. it’s time travel. it’s a way of saying our bodies are not done with.
the myth of progress, that we’re just walking to the future, is white modernity. sometimes the past lingers, sometimes the past is ghostly, and zora neale hurston would say, that ghosts hate new things. perpetuity and the continuity of the new, the phallic distance of wanting to arrive at a seemingly fugitive future is what white modernity produces. it flattens the world to make it convenient for isolated bodies to walk. and then it tells us that we’re all alone.” —bayo akomolafe

brainsparks: the future is ancestral (tn#124), cosmophobia (tn#135), time rebels (tn#18), octopus time (tn#120), tech critic (tn#121)

🇧🇷immigration in brazil

it is so impressive to see the immigration movements to brazil, as a way to understand the melting pot that my country is. first the portuguese invasion, and in a lifetime the amount of enslaved people, forcibly brought from african countries, outnumber the portuguese, which is true for centuries. then after 200 years there is a new european wave, especially from italians (brazil is still the country with most italians outside of italy). also, there is a middle-eastern and asian flow after that. then, more recently, there is a large flow of immigrants from neighboring countries like venezuela. we don’t have these records, but i imagine it would be a shock to see the numbers of the genocide of originary people during that period.

brainsparks: beat diaspora (tn#125), the brazilianization of the world, being black in brazil (tn#35)

🎟️gag city

thirteen years after launching pink friday, nicki minaj’s debut studio album, pink Friday 2 is out. i still haven’t listened to the whole thing, but i loved the campaign her fans brought on x: fans are using text-to-image ai to create a pink universe called gag city, which then brands were taking their chance (there is a timeline here). i’m just impressed by the potential of this kind of collective worldbuilding. if only the artists had control over this, and people who had some kind of artistic skill, now any fan with access to the internet can play and imagine places and worlds.

brainsparks: worldbuilding ft design fiction (tn#135)

📄ai homework

i remember in school not understanding why calculators were not allowed in some tests, and now i do (also, calculators were not ~~making shit up~~ hallucinating). should ai be forbidden in schools? would it be fair to forbid it for students while teachers are also using it? there are so many questions about this, so it is interesting to see how opinions diverge. and the truth is, it’s a video about students/teachers/homework, but it’s about all of us and how we relate to this. more than even, we need to improve our media literacy and not let is hijack our minds and learning processes.

brainspark: low tech zones (tn#135), centaur mindset (tn#106), amish tech (tn#21), self-outsourcing age (tn#17)

📊2024 trend reports

yay! thank you iolanda, amy, ci en and gonzalo for the yearly compilation of reports. there are more than 100 reports to be looked at, but don’t worry, there are some very specific and other more broad ones. i will deep dive as the weeks move forward.

🪩one on one

two projects that i bring me joy doing something together: the knocks and sofi tukker. the disco vibes and the portuguese lyrics just make it super danceable.

see you next week, interstitiaries 🫀✨

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