🎞️✨The Nexialist #0206

2024 in 4 minutes | year in search 2024 | tech that died | luigi mangione and class consciousness | arousal quantified | 15 times to use ai, and 5 not to | marigold | deus ex machina

Jan 02, 2025

welcome to your weekly microbatch of mini-eurekas, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-mail finds you well. i write to you back from amsterdam. i just had the most beautiful reveillon yet in this city, with beautiful company and fireworks (despite the cold wind). i’ll keep this intro short, as the newsletter got longer than expected for the first one in the year. may we all have a brainsparking year! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🎞️2024 in 4 minutes

at this point it has become a nexialist tradition to start the year with vox’s year lookback video, which always makes my eyes teary.

2024 saw over 60 elections worldwide, many of which were marked with controversy. It was undoubtedly a divisive year both within and along borders. The war in Ukraine is now in its third year. Syrian rebels toppled the Assad regime after years of fighting. South Korea erupted into chaos after the prime minister declared martial law and was subsequently impeached. In the United States, President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed VP Kamala Harris, who ultimately lost to Donald Trump.
Despite the tumultuous, seemingly never-ending wave of current events people still found escape and unity in the Olympics, Brat summer, and a rambunctious pygmy hippo.
2024 had much of the world voting for change. Onward, to 2025 where we will find out what it means.

one thing that i cannot ignore is why is the reduction from 6-7 to 4 minutes (compared to the past 4 years). were people not watching until the end, did not enough things happened last year or…?

i did miss some things:
- no mention to ai was made, and it was quite a big year. perhaps because i just finished yuval harari’s nexus, i expected at least one headline or two.
-madonna’s record breaking concert in copacabana (tn#172) should have been mentioned (i’m biased, but still, it was quite a big deal, no?)
- it also bothers me how en passant the mention to the genocide in gaza was: a couple of images and that’s it. i mean, thousands of children died and netanyahu is officially considered a war criminal. this was one of the biggest problems this year. isn’t that worth being remembered?

in brazil, we learn that when content from newspapers were censored during our toughest years of military dictatorship, journalists would add a (bad) cake recipe or a poem instead, as a way to tell the population they were being censored. maybe this is some kind of equivalent?

brainsparks: 2023, in 7 minutes (tn#154), 2022, in 7 minute (tn#102), A Look Back at 2021 (tn#52), What a year (tn#1)

🔎year in search 2024

google’s year in search is also one of my favorites. this one even features an orchestral version of charli xcx’s 360 which gave the chills and chappell roan’s pink pony club with nicky reardon’s quote that is spot on: “it takes 10 years to be an overnight success”. it’s also amazing to see rebeca andrade (tn#185) there.

since i’m on my year in review critic persona: they do mention ai (a positive case, of breast cancer diagnosis, not one of this year’s ai flops), but also no mention to madonna or to the gaza genocide (not that i would expect that from google, BUT i doubt people were not searching about that.)

brainsparks: year in search 2021 (tn#48), year in search 2023 (tn#102)

🪦tech that died in 2024

i had never seen this series by cnet, which seems they do every year. which techs died this year? some of them i didn’t even know were still active (i mean, icq?), some of them i didn’t even know existed (fossil smartwatch?). but it’s interesting to see what stays and what goes.

brainsparks: seedless fruit: futureless tech (tn#198)

🔫luigi mangione and class consciousness

a few weeks ago i tried to articulate what was on my mind about the luigi mangione story, and now i found someone who put into words (and added layers i hadn’t yet on my mind):

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick

from

The Trend Report™

wrote about what luigi mangione says about a collective psyche, and i’m here for it.

It is this glimpse into one corner of the (American) working world’s reality that tells you exactly how and why Luigi Mangione stormed the capital of our hearts and minds, 3D-printed gun in hand, Monopoly money on his back, bullets offering a three-word manifesto: he introduced us all to the modern guillotine. This has earned him colloquial sainthood, inspiring wanted signs for CEOs to appear, why graffiti for more dead CEOs are emerging, why people want to pay his legal fees and why public opinion is in his favor: it’s the experience we’ve all had with American healthcare forcing us to pay to be alive but also a symbol of larger (economic) systems beyond health, of injustices allowed to linger for decade upon decade upon decade.

brainsparks: luigi mangione (tn#203), the other vibe shift (tn#102), parasite culture (tn#191)

💦arousal quantified

Matt Klein

’s yearly analysis on pornhub’s year in review is one of my favorites in the whole year. i enjoy reading it not only becaue of the trends (which are fascinating), but also the care matt puts into reading the data and explaining the thought process behind it. it’s also undeniable how tech and media shape our desires, and this report keeps revealing that.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, writes,
“People have no incentive to tell the truth on surveys. The more impersonal the conditions, the more honest people will be. An internet survey is better than a phone survey, which is better than an in-person survey.”
Stephens-Davidowitz goes on to propose that Google searches are “the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.”
I think we can take this idea one step farther.
The Pornhub search bar, the largest porn platform in the world, and the 7th most viewed website in the world — more frequented than Amazon.com — is an even more intimate alter of human truth.

brainsparks: pornhub’s year in review 2022 (tn#108), porhub’s 2023 year in review (tn#160), (masturbation) data is beautiful (tn#139), the porn conversation, how tech is reshaping male masturbation (tn#95), pleasure activism (tn#123),

🧠15 times to use ai, and 5 not to

Ethan Mollick

wrote this post on 15 times to use ai, and 5 not to, and i think it’s such a helpful and healthy way to explore ai uses, we need more of these for different areas. I think some general questions that we need to ask ourselves before using ai is: is this taking away from my learning, how much accuracy do i need and can i fact check it myself?

brainsparks: self-outsourcing age (tn#17), prompt techniques (tn#126), prompt techniques (tn#122)

💪🏼marigold

the new track of mia is quite a hopeful tune to start the year. but it also got me thinking about this discourse of waiting for a miracle to happen, exempting ourselves from the solution, similar to messianic idea (spoiler alert: a messiah won’t save us (tn#71)). i do think it’s great the gaza (i’m also shocked mia is turning 50 this year… what??)

When times are difficult
We're gonna need a miracle
When things are critical
We're gonna need a miracle
The world's in trouble
Cover it in Marigolds
Cities in rubble
We all need a miracle

brainsparks: a messiah won’t save us (tn#71)

🤖deus ex machina

in são paulo i had the pleasure to attend zig festival, where most of the acts were trans women. jup do bairro and urias were both there, and they teased this song which features one of the most prominent political leaders in brazil (and the world, i would dare say), erika hilton. it’s so powerful to see trans women who fight to change not only their narrative, but of the minorities around them. you can check out the lyric here.

Deus ex machina - "god from the machine" is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. Its function is generally to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation, to surprise the audience, to bring the tale to a happy ending or act as a comedic device.

brainsparks: political aesthetic change (tn#48), brazil elects two trans women (tn#90), queer the future (tn#5)

see you next week, marigolds 🫀✨

🫀✨thank you for reading The Nexialist. This post is public, so feel free to share these brainsparks 🧠✨

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist.

I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below:

thenexialist.xyz

The Nexialist