🍋‍🟩✨The Nexialist #0198

seedless fruit: futureless tech | social-emotional learning | notebooklm | parallel play | the banality of online recommendation culture | são paulo | bon voyage | pink pony club

Nov 07, 2024

welcome to your weekly fresh batch of internet bits, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-mail finds you well despite the US election results. i’m not even living in the US, but i know it impacts mainly my home country, where politics often mirror what’s happening there. let this week’s nexialist be a bit of a distraction and a hug full of brainsparks. i’ll keep the intro short as there is quite some text today. enjoy 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🍋‍🟩seedless fruit: futureless tech

indexvotos

A post shared by @indexvotos

a nexialist reader sent me this (thank you, bruna!) and it took over my mind. this is a research by @maria___alvina, and it’s a lot of food for thought. i don’t usually do this, but this is in portuguese, so i’ve translated the whole thing below.

seedless fruit: futurelss technology. what a seedless fruit has to do with chat gpt, tiktok and the difficulty to imagine the future.
By looking at plants as an inspiration to think about new forms of society, biologist Stefano Mancuso analyzes the phenomenon of seedless fruits. He states that the plant universe has a very advanced organization, which he calls the 'nation of plants.' In the laws of this nation, each part of a plant has a main function, but, because it is a decentralized system, there are no borders or hierarchies, so that the parts also act and influence the whole.
The seed is the part of the plant responsible for the future. A single seed contains a mysterious infinity of futures as a seed can generate a new tree that will generate many seeds, which will generate many trees and so on.
Mancuso calls the seeds ‘time travel capsules’. This is because the seed is made up of an embryo protected by many layers, which make it capable of surviving in extreme conditions for enormous amounts of time.
In the book The Incredible Journey of Plants, he describes the most absurd conditions in which some seeds survived and managed to propagate the species. Some crossed oceans through the stomachs of birds, which ate the seed on one continent and defecated it on another, already perfectly fertilized. Some took root around the first steam locomotives, and in addition to traveling the world along with the train, they also received the heat and nourishing moisture of the steam; not to mention the success in dispersing the seeds, which flew with the force of the winds from the chimneys and the movement of the train.
However, a very efficient but equally dangerous form of seed dispersal was the collaboration with human beings, who after a long period of industrialization and urbanization began to pay little attention to nature in their daily lives in large cities, except when it becomes an obstacle, as is the case with fruit seeds.
Fruit comes from a decentralized society where it is multidisciplinary, but in a hyper-specialized human society, its only function is to be food, and so, what does a seed do in our food? Mancuso says that by associating with man, the plant signed a pact with the devil.
“Deprived of the ability to produce seeds, a plant is no longer a living being; it becomes a simple means of production in the hands of the food industry, which decides how, when and where to reproduce it. [...] By producing daughter plants that are genetically identical to the mother plant, genetic diversity disappears, and only a few individuals are propagated millions of times." Nation of Plants - Stefano Mancuso
Just as Mancuso does at other times in his books, we can draw a parallel between plants and technology. Technological evolution has reached such a high speed that the only way to keep up with the hurricane of transformations, without overloading our senses, was to change the way we communicate, making language more visual, superficial and fragmented.
Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says in the book The Brain in the Digital World, that the result of years of chopped and accelerated information is a brain with difficulty concentrating, reading and interpreting, in addition to a serious literacy problem.
Sped-up audio messages, shorter songs, Instagram carousels with objective phrases and captivating images (self-criticism), restaurant recommendation videos that are narrated by a voice with the same intonation sung in children's content, e-mails written with chatgpt, quick cuts of images, voice effects, tiktoks and reels with 8 simultaneous sensory stimuli, shocking transitions, moral lessons in 1 minute.
Besides, of course, the films to "watch with your brain turned off", which don't have an open ending, you don't need to think too much, and if possible, you can check the feed from time to time. A self-premonition that became the rule for how to relate to art and build meanings in the digital world: in a shallow, simplified, digested, easy to understand way.
Language being driven by lubricated meanings that must slide without causing friction, but, because they do not cause friction, they do not cause disruption; they do not break with old ideas, making it difficult to create new ideas.
Little by little, the way of thinking becomes like fruit without seeds: genetically identical and reproduced in the laboratory by people and tools to which we do not have access and, therefore, we do not know how they work nor can we make changes; besides, of course, we cannot plant new fruit trees ourselves with our own hands.
Continuing with the analogy, the seed in the fruit can be seen as the disagreement, the idea that is difficult to interpret or the unexplained element in a work of art, be it a painting, book or film. It's like a question that, instead of generating an answer, generates new questions and, just like the seed in the fruit, it can be frustrating because it doesn't meet the initial intention (eating the fruit or having the question answered). However, it does something much greater: it generates new futures.

in name of convenience (not dealing with seeds while eating) and efficiency (no seed = more fruit to eat), we sacrifice other aspects: memorability, transformation, interaction and futures possibilities, just to name a few.

i’ve mentioned here in the nexialist how a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163), elodie marteau’s frictional systems trend in media & entertainment (tn#190) and these are just a couple ideas on what we lose when things are seamless. i still need to read

Thomas Klaffke

’s Reframing The Tech Narrative: From Convenience to Enrichment, but you can see where these signals are taking us, right? such a great analogy!

brainsparks: a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163), trends are bullsh*t. long live the trends (tn#190), chemical colonization (tn#144), futures literacy (tn#101), imagination as a necessity (tn#15), ask nature (tn#86)

🫶social-emotional learning

this past week i feel like i might have found a little treasure. explore SEL is a toolkit by harvard with several visual tools and frameworks for teachers/students focusing on social-emotional learning. it even compares each tool’s aspects cognitive, emotional, social, values, perspectives, identity.

Explore SEL is designed as a navigator for the field of social and emotional learning. We provide information and tools that summarize and connect the major frameworks and skills in the field to support transparency and informed decision-making.

brainsparks: emotional plurality (tn#15), emotional intelligence (tn#14), social health (tn#179)

📘notebooklm

since we’re in the education world, i need to include this here.

Michell Zappa

shared this in the

Artificial Insights

group a couple of weeks ago and i can’t stop thinking about it: a demo on how to use notebooklm for planning classes. it’s been more than a year that notebooklm was released and i admit i was not paying much attention due to the information overload around ai launches, but this is quite exciting. i’m still digesting on how to use it for the nexialist, but maybe there is something coming up?

brainsparks: genAI in education (tn#179), ai homework (tn#151)

🎲parallel play

miriam_tinny

A post shared by @miriam_tinny

let’s ignore each other in the same room is the title of this nyt article by sophie vershbow. the article is from 2021, but this video by miriam hit me recently, and i had to forward it to juan, my boyfriend. he has asked me before if we could just do our own thing in the same room, without screens, for instance reading a book.

The term parallel play usually refers to young children playing independently alongside one another, but it can also be a valuable way to think about adult relationships. Mildred Parten, a sociologist, first identified the concept in her 1929 dissertation as one of six categories of group play in early childhood. […]
For adults, what makes parallel play different than two people ignoring each other in the same room is a secure foundation underpinning their relationship, explained Dr. Amir Levine, a psychiatrist and co-author of “Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — And Keep — Love.” “Parallel play is one of the hallmarks of secure relationships, but it has to be done right,” Dr. Levine said. “It’s all about availability. If you know that the other person is available and that, if you need them, they will pay attention to you, then you feel secure.”

parallel playing needs to be downloaded in my vocab and shared activities because it is actually something i enjoy doing but had no words for it before. if you feel the same, maybe share this article (or the nexialist) with your SO/friend.

brainsparks: play-full future, game theory (tn#121), back to playing (tn#16)

🥸the banality of online recommendation culture

this article by kyle chayka for the new yorker hit close to home: “the banality of online recommendation culture: a recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations.” the quote below stayed with me:

In a recent essay, “Taste is Eating Silicon Valley,” the entrepreneur Anu Atluru attracted attention for her argument that taste was the new dominant commodity in an era of generative artificial intelligence, when knowing how to prompt a machine threatens to supersede human knowledge or skill. “In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste,” Atluru wrote.

well, i was not sure if the nexialist is a recommendation newsletter (i’m not telling you to buy things, at least not that i know of), but it is in a way, because i am sharing things i believe are worth spending your time and attention on. it is also my own way of having the discipline to learn some insights by sharing something i learned.

in the end of the article, a new nuance to gatekeeping is introduced, where it is actually praised. a desire not to recommend (article by ruby justice thelot). just like the seeds in a fruit, gatekeeping adds a layer friction and effort to get to know something new, so in the end it pays off. i guess i’ll stop with the nexialist?? just kidding :P i think i make it hard enough as it is (i mean, if you’re reading until this point, you’re a minority).

brainsparks: knowledge curatorship(tn#14), online culture curators (tn#177), reworking, referencing, releasing (tn#125), deinfluencers (tn#111)

🇧🇷são paulo

needless to say i’ve been obsessed with the new the weeknd song featuring anitta and this dirty funk carioca sample. i mean, who doesn’t love a creepy baby bump with a mouth singing??

são paulo is my birthplace and home town for most of my life, and even if the title is more about where/when the song was launched than the song itself, i still love it. last weekend i played this at my dj gig at nyx in amsterdam and people were dancing their asses off.

apparently, in the weeknd’s trilogy, this is his rebirth and anitta is pregnant with the ~~antichrist~~ abel tesfaye, as he’ll start using his own name instead of the weeknd. i think it’s genious. also, super proud of anitta!

brainsparks: chama (tn#191)

🗡️bon voyage

i’m loving this era/project of allie x, girl with no face. bon voyage has been on my repeating playlist (also the version in portuguese). also, lady of sorrows, her new song, is exactly my type of hit. i love the visual mashup of the damsel x knight.

brainsparks: girl with no face (tn#162), mistress violet (tn#31), weird world (tn#161)

🦄pink pony club

yes, we are a big fan of chappell roan and we are obsessed with her participation at snl (we = i’m a gemini, so i’m at least two 🤭). i mean, how she commands the stage, her voice, her outfits, the frankenstein wig. people are even singing back which i don’t remember seeing in this show.

i don’t think i talked about her presentation at this year’s vma’s but i’m still obsessed. she also goes in this knight universe like allie above. of course my first thought was joan of arc. turns out, according to kinky history’s author esmée louise explained, the historical reference there is most likely julie d’aubigny: the queer cross dressing sword-fighting opera singer from the 17th century who once burned down a nunnery in order to save her lover (another woman). this is dyke-conic!

brainsparks: lesbian gaze, dyke camp (tn#24), good luck babe (tn#169), drag kings (tn#82)

see you next week, pink ponies 🦄✨

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