🎧✨The Nexialist #0208

hostage to trumpism | cranking the dopamine machine | amusing ourselves to death | artists ‘creators’ | ghosts in the machine | chartmetric year | AI+ | mundo virtual x vida real |DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

Jan 16, 2025

welcome to your weekly cybernetic smorgasbord, the nexialist

hey you, i hope this message finds you ~~well~~ wondering about the future. as this edition is quite long i’ll leave the introduction short and sweet. get ready for some critical posts about our digital economies, big tech, the music industry —and some nice music in the end. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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💰hostage to trumpism?

ann telnaes, “a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Washington Post has resigned after its editorial page editor rejected a cartoon she created to mock media and tech titans abasing themselves before President-elect Donald Trump.”

it’s quite worrying to see this kind of brazen censorship to a cartoon, in an era where memes circulate freely and full of meaning. i was thinking how before memes were such a democratic piece of content, we had cartoonists to translate these complex dynamics in one image. memes, however, have mostly become victims to brain rot.

Along with Bezos, Telnaes depicted Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman shown bringing Trump sacks of cash. Los Angeles Times owner and billionaire medical innovator Patrick Soon-Shiong was shown bearing a tube of lipstick.
Also lying prostrate was Mickey Mouse — the avatar of the Walt Disney Co. Last month, Disney settled a Trump defamation suit against ABC News by agreeing to pay $15 million to an as-yet non-existent Trump foundation and $1 million toward his legal fees.

there is something quite scary, almost belonging to a tecnofeudalist plot of fiction: trump is so inconsequent and unpredictable, that they need to speak his language$ (and step on eggshells) in order for their business, fortune and power to survive. what a moment.

brainsparks: naked truth (tn#13), meme manifesto (tn#177), technofeudalism (tn#143)

💥cranking the dopamine machine

Clarote & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / User/Chimera / CC-BY 4.0

this thought piece by

Alberto Romero

’s has been on my mind since i read it: “How Meta Plans To Crank the Dopamine Machine With Infinite AI-Generated Content.” the fact that it was published days before meta’s idgaf announcement is even more timely and surgical.

Once this strategy becomes the norm, Meta will quietly abandon the pretense of care, just like they disbanded the responsible team once AI ethics lost its appeal to the public.

if sci-fi taught us about machines that kills us (hello dune’s thinking machines), we are witnessing a different kind of invasion which we did not prepare for: ai as a weapon of mass distraction (beyond it’s positive applications). he frames tvs (aka idiot box) as the prototype of our ai-powered phones.

So what’s Meta’s goal? Make money. Next question. What’s Meta’s instrumental goal? To keep you more engaged. To sell more ads. Connor Hayes said the new batch of generative AI content creators intends to make Facebook and Instagram “more entertaining and engaging.” More? This declarations compel me to repeat here something I wrote in October 2023 that will only grow in relevance over time: the most important skill you need in the 21st century is learning to be bored. Or, as David Foster Wallace put it, learning to feed “the part of ourselves that likes quiet.”

brainsparks: nexus (tn#199), superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28), hyperindustry of the atificial imaginary (tn#118), fracking eyeballs (tn#150)

📺amusing ourselves to death

in the post above there was a comment by

Patrick Jordan Anderson

which gave me chills: the foreword to the 20th anniversary edition of neil postman’s amusing ourselves to death. the book is from 1985, so this is from 2005 and it couldn’t be more contemporary:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

brainsparks: program or be programmed (tn#200), critic of technology (tn#121), social media x cults (tn#74), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), deep doubt era (tn#193)

⚙️calling artists ‘creators’

Declan McGlynn

has a point: By Calling Artists ‘Creators’, We’re Feeding the Big Tech Beast, and it fits perfectly in today’s nexialist. i brought a post in 2021 about the 4 dirty c-words of the internet (tn#45), about how content (along with community, culture and creator) have been emptied of its meaning to become industry words, used to sell ads. now in 2024 it gets more tangible where we are.

There’s been a conscious effort to re-brand music as content by big tech, triggered by the growth of new music-makers during the pandemic. This sinister pivot is intended to devalue music, to both introduce apathy to the next generation of music makers – or ‘creators’ – to undermine existing music remuneration systems and to knock music off its pedestal and reduce it to ‘data’ that’s fair game for training in the age of AI.

brainspark: tiktok killed the radio star (tn#73), content capital (tn#96), 4 c-words (tn#45), old vs new music (tn#58), culture is not an industry (tn#203)

🎧the ghosts in the machine

welcome to the enshittification (tn#106) of spotify (or at least it’s playlist and discovery appeal). liz pelly is the author of ‘mood machine: the rise of spotify and the costs of the perfect playlist’ and it’s perfect how her work found me after reading the article above. i had heard about this before, but now it’s resurfacing: ghost mystery viral artists (even with bios that make them look real, another layer of the dopamine machine cranking), spotify’s plot against musicians, as the writer points out. the article narrates how spotify got here, from industry disruptor to creating a simulacra of music in name of profits. “Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery—and who was going to get excited about “discovering” a bunch of stock music?”

The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.

brainsparks: enshittification lifecycle (tn#106), online culture curators (tn#177), banality of online recommendation culture (tn#198)

🎶chartmetric year in music ‘24

quite an insightful report on the music industry, with more of a global approach, showing different platforms and giving more focus to the artists and their fans. the rise of french pop and german hiphop? you can find it there. i’ll let you navigate it and learn how the music industry has moved this year.

🤖AI+ ArtReview

NOWNESS and ArtReview released a global study exploring AI’s impact on the future of art, film and wider culture. though it is a more optimistic outlook, it brings quite critical tensions:
-ai is already being used in different moments of the creative process, enhancing human creativity
-the perspectives are polarized
-perceptions vary from place to place
-there is a debate on authenticity (using ai is ok, pure ai stuff is not, for instance)
-the biggest concert is disinformation.

it’s worth taking a look as there are diverse quotes from specialists, artists and case studies (though i did miss perspectives from latam). on a slide they bring resistant reactions from people when other technologies emerged, and now we can’t live without them.

i think it’s also always important to remember the interests of the corporations and big tech, as they were the ones making the investments and they will want to see their roi (vide spotify ;)

brainsparks: gen-gen (tn#183), art predicts (tn#1)

🌎mundo virtual x vida real

thank you, françois, for sharing this argentinian artist, fransia. he sent me this delicious synthpop 80s track which made me dig for more. she has an album from 2021 called mundo virtual and a more recent release from 2023, vida real. the first these are themes of our times (and of the nexialist), so already the titles made me stay and listen again and again.

brainsparks: virtual economy (tn#18), imaginal disk (tn#188)

💃DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

i got chills, teary eyes and the will to live (and shake my ass) while listening to bad bunny’s new album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (i should have taken more photos). the sound is amazing, mixing samples, audios with reggaeton and other latin rhythms. the short film released with it puts together so many topics of the zeitgeist: the loneliness of the main character, the comeback of physical media (taking more photos), the disappearance of community (he misses the sounds of the neighborhood), poking criticism at the american colonization and modernity (cashless society, for instance), and the desire of a simpler life closer to nature. remember, ai could not create something like this (but it was probably used in the process).

brainsparks: reality hunger (tn#201), a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163), post-individualism (tn#196)

see you next week, conchos 🐸✨

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