🛡️✨The Nexialist #0165

is your job safe from ai? | strategy in the era of ai | creative work | defend your mind against social media | i just wanna lose my phone | truth windows | poor things | starry night

Mar 21, 2024

welcome to another batch of hyperlinking glue, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this finds brainspark finds you well. this week i’m back in amsterdam, and i’ve heard that i brought a bit of sun. i’m happy it’s already the spring equinox and i’ve successfully skipped two months of dutch winter. i am still landing, but i’m also happy to be back to my home, my bed, my boyfriends, my bike and all those things. i’ll leave you to it. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

2 year ago » 😶‍🌫️✨The Nexialist #0063 : This is Not America | Planetary Consciousness | Cultural Concept Frameworks: Immersive Experiences | MOTOMAMI | CRASH

2 years ago » 🧠✨The Nexialist #0012 : In Case of Amnesia, Waters of March, Window Swap, Lesbian Gaze, Dyke Camp, Campingdisco, Tesla Things (in Amsterdam), Chronosonder and more...

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☎️is your job safe from ai?

@aivideoschool Is your job safe from AI? If it's in Richard Scarry's "What do people do all day?" from 1968, you're safe. #aijobsecurity #aijobloss #richardscarry

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this video was shared by

Michell Zappa

from

Artificial Insights

. the person posting has a theory that if your job is in Richard Scarry's book "What do people do all day?" from 1968, you're safe. despite being a bit of joke, it’s pretty accurate. the comment section also gave a few giggles, along with the ending passive-aggressive question in the end: “are YOU a good helper?”

brainsparks: artisanal intelligence (tn#149), techworry (tn#33)

📊strategy in the era of ai

thank you,

Zoe Scaman

, for putting together this field guide. it is great to see how other people are using ai in their work. i catch myself sometimes wondering if i’m using it too much, or correctly. zoe breaks down which tools she uses in each phase of a strategy process and how, all while introducing new tools i was not aware of and inspiring me to boost my work and organize how i use it in my work. if you have been scared to use it or wondering different ways to use it, i recommend taking a look.

i think the best learning for me was to reframe how i see this collaboration with ai. sometimes i would wonder if i’m outsourcing too much of my work, but this process helped me see how it’s a collaboration where my role shifts to ask better questions, challenge clichés and focus on what is important. i think there is also an impulse we have to balance of not letting the ai make us lazy, rather the opposite.

brainsparks: centaur intelligence (tn#106), community building (tn#64)

👨🏻‍🎨creative work

another video from rita von hunty that rents a penthouse in my mind. while there is a huge (and important) debate if ai can make art, rita brings a much-necessary layer that precedes that: which social class produces art? and which social class legitimizes the discourse that produces art? and more than that, how does this top-down cultural production affect our imaginaries?

rita mentions the uk research on how the huge decline of working-class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society.

when we are thinking about people in the visual arts, actors and actresses, authors, we are thinking about the production of culture, imagery, signs, symbols, and meanings, of a group of people. and this production, increasingly, in history is being made less by the working class and more by the middle classes to small bourgeoisie and the ruling classes.
[…]
natasha carthew, an author who organized a festival working-class authors says that less and less people from this class writing. firstly, because the imaginary is colonized. these people don't think that they can write, they do not think that they have something to talk about, their lives are not worthy of being narrated. they don't see it on Netflix, they don't see on Amazon, they don't see it on TV, they don't see in the soap opera. but more than that, the material possibilities of this class of going to London to stay to take a course, enrolling in a course, taking an after-hours course, are being taken from this class as access to formal work is being taken from us…

i think it closely relates to last week’s article about the state of culture, where the ~~distraction~~ entertainment industry seems to have hijacked the arts and culture (tn#164).

brainsparks: cosplaying as poor (tn#62), the other vibe shift (tn#102), the state of the culture 2024 (tn#164), netocracy vs. consumtariat (tn#18)

🛡️defend your mind against social media

thank juan, for sharing this one. this past week i listened twice to

floatvibes

podcast “culture of attention déficit” and this video from freethink complements it very well. luke burgis, author of wanting: the power of mimetic desire in everyday life, talks about how social media has altered the nature of desire. there are two other parts to the video, but this one stood out for me.

Mimetic desire means that we're adopting another person's desire as our own, usually without even realizing that we're doing it. So, social media has given us millions of mimetic models that we now have to contend with. Some people have went from having 10 mimetic models to now having a million, and we haven't quite come to grips as a culture with what that means for our mental and emotional health.
[…]
All desire comes from us feeling like we lack something, and that can bring us into a dangerous, vicious cycle because there will always be another model to find. We have to choose our models wisely. We also have to know when the model is inflaming us with the desire for something that's gonna bring real fulfillment or whether it's going to bring a dopamine hit or allow us to fantasize about a life that we'll probably never have. And even if we did have, it would probably make us miserable.

brainsparks: culture of proximity (tn#6), content capital (tn#96), context collapse (tn#25), dopamine culture (tn#164)

📵i just wanna lose my phone

i have to say, even though i love kylie, this song hasn’t really gotten me. but the line “i just wanna lose my phone” did.

brainsparks: [this tech is] killing me (tn#113)

🪟truth windows

A traditional feature of strawbale houses is the truth window – a small section of a wall that is left unplastered on the interior, and a frame is used to show the walls are actually made from straw bales for insulation. Truth windows often take on the role of an altar, bringing gratitude for the sources of our materials and reminding us of the reasons for the choices we have made.

wow, this is such an unexpected feature, like a frame into how things work, how they’re built. it made me think of the current blackbox issue of ai, in which we’re not able to see its inner workings, so i’m all for calling “truth windows” for ai and other technologies. what would that look like?

via messy nessy chic

🫀poor things

last weekend juan and i went to watch poor things at the most beautiful cinema i’ve been, the tuschinski theatre, which is already quite an experience in itself. i was simultaneously mesmerized and uncomfortable with the movie, the settings, the costumes and most of all, the philosophical questions it poses. some of the brainsparks i had were about how societal expectations and judgment can make us (and especially women) languish, how we must stay curious and challenge societal expectations and how a better relationship with death helps us have a better life. i loved it.

brainsparks: galáktica (tn#159)

😱starry night

after being addicted to “somebody that i used to know” dance video, my youtube algorithm has learned that videos with beautiful choreographies in amazing locations are a thing and i’ve been shown this.

brainsparks: somebody that i used to know (tn#163)

see you next week, monsters 🫀✨

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