🦦✨The Nexialist #0157

the mother | off with her tits | ask me to stay | ai-powered stingray model | fairly trained | public digital infrastructure | a social network taxonomy

Jan 25, 2024

welcome to another weekly batch of cyber-reveries, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message ~~in a bottle~~ finds you well. today is a holiday here in são paulo, its 470th birthday celebration. i’ve been enjoying my time with grandma, reconnecting with friends, visiting places i missed and eating the comfort foods i like. it is such a privilege to be able to do this for some weeks. i do miss amsterdam, my boyfriends, my siblings and my bike, but i can’t complain at all.

this week in the nexiaist we go from fashion and pop culture to ai and decentralization. i hope you enjoy and share it. thank you for reading! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🤖the mother

@runwaymood The story behind the dress "The Mother" by Schiaparelli Desinger Daniel Roseberry which is part of the new SS24 Couture Collection #Schiaparelli #SS24 #Couture #Runwaymood #FashionWeek #SchiaparelliCouture #TheMother #DanielRoseberry

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schiaparelli / daniel roseberry has been killing it in every collection. with the spring/summer’24 haute couture collection, it hasn’t been different, and this dress, called the mother, hasn’t left my mind. is cyberpunk-chic a thing? growing up, i was fascinated with these circuit boards, i would ask my parents to take pieces of abandoned electronics, and i was collecting them at one point.

the whole collection is sort of a dialogue between the past and the future. hannah’s look is all in old pre-iphone technologies, which i gre up with. it’s old world techniques with new world technological elements. so we have even the fan that cools down computers, you have the old flip phone here, you have a calculator, you have a CD and all of the microchips, the motherboards from 20 years ago. so we cal this look “the mother” actually. — daniel roseberry

in the lgbtqia+ community, mother has become (or has been for a long time) a “a term of respect for powerful, confident femininity [and] this respect does sometimes extend to cishet women who are also queer icons”. so it is quite camp to see a dress having that name.

there is also a strangeness to it. in my head “the mother” would connect to mother nature or mary, “mother of god” and this dress personifies technology as this beautiful hypnotizing woman, another mother entity that has actually been the most present one in our lives than the other two (nature and religion). perfect outfit for a character in neil gaiman’s american gods.

brainsparks: surreal matador (tn#27), nature disconnection (tn#137)

🍐off with her tits

talking about mother, my canadian mother is mothering with her new releases. she has always been in the synth-pop category in my head, so it is so exciting to see her going in this more dark, new order, kind of sound. in deciphering the lyrics, she is telling the tale of a girl who has big boobs and doesn’t want them, she wants to be flat. quite a counter-cultural tale, i would say.

brainsparks: mistress violet (tn#31), black eye (tn#144)

🇧🇷ask me to stay

now, the brazilian mother is back with another hit, and this has been playing everyday in my head. i just love this nostalgic era of international music being adapted to portuguese with completely different lyrics and local rhythms. “ask me to stay, i won’t fight anymore” sings the chorus, a lover begging for forgiveness while packing their bag to leave. we love a toxic ballad.

brainsparks: pabllo vittar (tn#4), polygendered brazilian music (tn#8)

🦾ai-powered stingray model

the board of innovation has announced the death of the double-diamond design process, which has been for years part of my way of working (and it is super helpful). of course, anything that says: death of something (especially if that is something i like and use), i will angryly click on it. well, their strategy to lure me in worked 🪝

they explain why the double diamond is losing relevance: it is almost 20 years old, it is a slow process, focuses on desirability (not feasability/viability), and reinforces human biases and shortcomings. then, they introduce the stingray model, which i love the idea, the reasoning, the visual aid and how timely it is.

i have been using ai in workshops, and envisioning has been working on ai-powered workshop tool, so i know it is handy for a lot of tasks, so it is neat to see it organized in this way, especially the way it visually translates the ai collaboration. while there are parts of their pitch that feel like an overpromise, i would love to see it in action. for now i will use it to adapt my way of working and see how that goes.

brainsparks: centaur mindset (tn#106), ai for degrowth (tn#99)

⚖️fairly trained

As much of the potential legislation around AI requires reviews of models, groups have begun offering certification programs to AI companies to show how their work doesn’t violate copyright.
Bloomberg reported Fairly Trained — founded by former Stability AI vice president for audio Ed Newton-Rex — adds a label to companies that prove they asked for permission to use copyrighted training data. Newton-Rex started Fairly Trained after he quit Stability AI in November, citing generative AI was “exploiting creators.”

wired’s headline reads “this tech exec quit his job to fight generative ai’s original sin” which, of course, caught my eyes. this statement that ai has an original sin is just so enticing. it is also charged with the idea that maybe this will never be solved, even if the idea behind the fairly trained certificate is necessary.

read: AI models that don’t violate copyright are getting a new certification label

brainsparks: synthetic data (tn#155), ai: hype or the real deal? (tn#149)

🌐public digital infrastructure

while we see some countries privatizing everything (in brazil, if feels like that is the case) it should serve as a wake up call to see this effort to create a public digital infrastructure in europe. thank you,

New_ Public

for this post.

One key development in recent years has been the growing insight that Europe must move away from the dominant Silicon Valley tools and towards European Public Digital Infrastructures.
Currently, private companies shape the majority of user-facing communication technologies, aligning them with the financial interests of shareholders and venture capital. Developing digital solutions and building infrastructures that prioritize values like openness, equality, and democratic control calls for a shift in funding. This can help make sure that the services we use and rely on can be held accountable to the public.

🦦a social network taxonomy

reading through

New_ Public

this showed up. ethan zuckerman shares a classification system for social networks which i loved, not because one of them is an otter, but because it is organized in a way i had never thought of, “governance: who has the power to make decisions about what’s allowed on a network, and what are the consequences for breaking those rules.”

The Big Room: Centrally owned, single set of rules (e.g. Facebook)
Group-Hosting / “Many Room” Social Networks: Centrally owned, multiple rule sets (e.g. Reddit)
The Fediverse: Decentralized ownership, central rules (more or less). (e.g. Mastodon)
Very Small Online Platforms: Decentralized ownership, decentralized rules

brainsparks: netocracy vs. consumtariat (tn#18), power to the peasants, digital feudalism (tn#136), technofeudalism (tn#143)

see you next week, otters 🦦✨

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