🔬✨The Nexialist #0209

nikon’s small world | relational computing | intention economy | fear-driven capitalism | prophecies of the flood | surveillance as love language | google = east india company | new luxury pyramid

Jan 23, 2025

welcome to your weekly cyber-canapé tray, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you in good spirits (or at least not falling apart). this week, absurdity keeps furthering and it’s difficult to make sense of it. so hold my hand and let’s take a healthy dose of distraction (or not, because the topics here are pretty inseparable from what’s going on in politics and culture. i hope you get some brainsparks and at least a little breath. make that cup of tea/coffee and let’s nexialize (?) 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🔬nikon’s small world

rabbit hole warning! this year, nikon small world is celebrating 50 years of images captured by the light microscope. it’s always so fascinating to see the beauty and complexity of life seen through the microscope, and i was having a hard time leaving their website. you can navigate through all the winners since 1975 here. even more fascinating is their video competition, small world in motion, and you can see the videos here. the one above is 2024’s third place, by chris romaine: “Leaf of a cannabis plant. The bulbous glands are trichomes. The bubbles inside are cannabinoid vesicles.”

brainsparks: deep space (tn#78)

🤖relational computing

i always thought of the uncanny valley as a purely aesthetic phenomenom: videogame characters (or abba’s holograms tn#201) that have something slightly off about how real they look. dylan hendricks opened my mind to something i’m already experiencing, the expansion of that other manifestations: text, videos, etc. was it made by ai? and in the (probably near) future, if that call from your friend is really them or an ai.

It’s not especially provocative to observe that we’re now deep in the Uncanny Valley as a society, caught uncomfortably in the liminal space between not just technological paradigms, but also geopolitical regimes, demographic cliffs, and geological eras.

in “A Journey Through the Uncanny Valley: Our Relational Futures with AI,” dylan hendricks introduces relational computing in this context and the brainsparks kept coming. if today there is still a technical barrier in relating with computers, with ai and voice/text-based systems, that barrier is lowered.

In the age of relational computing, it will be more important to have clarity about what you want to accomplish than technical expertise in the specific tools for accomplishing it. Humans will still need to leverage their experience and acquired skill sets to identify useful solutions to well-defined problems (and this specifically will become a more valuable skill than ever). But in the age of relational computing, those who can articulate a clarity of vision will find a bustling ecosystem of AI bots waiting to support them in translating their high-level goals into tasks, plans, deliverables, and workstreams. Some tasks that take months or years to undertake today will still take months or years to accomplish in the future. But other month-long tasks will suddenly be achievable in a week. Or a day. Or a matter of seconds.

via Sentiers (n.339)

brainsparks: deep doubt era (tn#193), synthetic media (tn#18), i’m not a robot (tn#201)

🌐intention economy

we are all well aware of the attention economy, but now with the rise of agentic ai (where ai can schedule tasks, for instance) we seem to be shifting to an intention economy “where AI moves from capturing attention to influencing decisions — and potentially selling those decisions to the highest bidder.” my two cents: ai and algorithms already have been influencing how we shop and think for the last decade, this just pushed it to the next level.

Research from the University of Cambridge warns that AI assistants may steer preferences, from which hotels are booked to which political candidates are endorsed, raising urgent ethical concerns around privacy and autonomy. As Dr. Jonnie Penn cautions: "Without regulation, this will be a gold rush for those who target and sell human intentions."

brainsparks: program or be programmed (tn#200), fracking eye balls (tn#150), self-outsourcing era (tn#17), whisperverse (tn#194), strategy in the era of ai (tn#165)

🔥fear-driven capitalism

this interview with sociologist Hartmut Rosa is quick but quite full of brainsparks. he talks about trumpism, democracy, ai, autonomy, capitalism and inequality. i had to mention it here with a simple quote that connects perfectly to this nexialist:

We are turning ourselves from actors into agents of algorithms.

(the google translate plug-in seems to translate it very well)

brainsparks: capitalism 2.0 (tn#179), dismantling ai capitalism (tn#69), solarpunk and the end of capitalism (tn#40)

🌊prophecies of the flood

Ethan Mollick helps understand all the statements that artificial general intelligent is coming very soon (or is already here). can we trust the statements from these companies (that need to feed the hype to raise capital?) are we heading there? in his view, we cannot dismiss these statements, as indeed, we are moving fast.

What concerns me most isn't whether the labs are right about this timeline - it's that we're not adequately preparing for what even current levels of AI can do, let alone the chance that they might be correct. While AI researchers are focused on alignment, ensuring AI systems act ethically and responsibly, far fewer voices are trying to envision and articulate what a world awash in artificial intelligence might actually look like. This isn't just about the technology itself; it's about how we choose to shape and deploy it. These aren't questions that AI developers alone can or should answer.

brainspark: ai: hype or the real deal (tn#149)

🥰surveillance as love language

thank you, Tássia Frossard for sharing this with me: on the grid | how surveillance became a love language by zoë hitzig. how did we get from a company being cancelled in the 90s (marketplace) for selling personal data, to the normalization and even some kind of numb romantization of surveillance? (also, guilty… i use my timeline from google quite a lot when i need to remember a place i’ve been to but forgot its name)

Where we once guarded our control over personal information, we now give up control not just freely but even tenderly, monitoring and being monitored by loved ones through social media platforms like BeReal and location-sharing apps. It’s a strange form of Stockholm syndrome for the surveillance age — we love, and love with, the tools of our captors. Resigned to the Big Tech companies recording our every move, we’ve invited friends, family, and partners to join them in watching us. We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy.

this text is worth reading the whole thing because it does show how we are simply used to it, without thinking about its consequences within our relationships with others and with ourselves.

Our surveillance Stockholm syndrome is not only making us more submissive to Big Tech; it’s also changing how we relate to each other. It creates snags in relationships, to be sure — location-sharing apps, for example, expose white lies, stoke FOMO, and enable unwanted or unwarranted deductions about who’s sleeping with whom. But there may be deeper relational losses, too, that come from the moral attitude that says it’s wrong to have secrets, and that it’s wrong to have regions of our lives that are not translated into data. By replacing opportunities for genuine reflection and connection with runnels of information, our appropriation of digital surveillance may diminish our autonomy, erode trust, and undermine the meaning of our relationships with others and with ourselves.

brainsparks: quantitative validation (tn#199), discrimanator (tn#26), cozy tech (tn#122), digiphrenia (tn#191), back to the future: identity (tn#34), context collapse (tn#25), channel drift (tn#60), new words for new worlds (tn#111), content capital (tn#96)

🚢google = east india company

Ted Gioia has the ability to blow my mind with this kind of statements: “Google Is Now the East India Company of the Internet. Long ago, another company tried to control global connectivity—it had an unhappy ending.” he proceeds to compare the journey of both companies and their capitalist/colonial practices. east india company at one point had more than a larger fleet than most navies, and more than double the amount of combatants under its command than the royal british navy.

There are only two businesses that call their clients users—drug dealers and Internet businesses. The East India Company is a role model for both.

brainsparks: parasite culture, fordian slip (tn#191), technofeudalism (tn#143), netocracy vs consumtariat (tn#18), self-fulfilling cyberpunk (tn#127), the tyranny of the algorithm (tn#158)

🛕new luxury pyramid

edmond lau shared this on his linkedin and it seems so accurate (via the protein newsletter). the concept of luxury is always dislocating because people aspire and reach it, so they need to find ways of differentiating themselves from the masses. from not gonna make it to ultra high-end, the signifiers are getting more and more unexpected.

The New Luxury Pyramid: In the time of the 'Oat Milk Elite', status signifiers can be difficult to decode. What once might have been a universal signal of wealth like a Rolex or a Chanel Bag, now can under certain circumstances instead ironically communicate the lack thereof. These days, it seems like we prefer signs that are harder to fake. Taking a photo with a Birkin? Easy. Maintaining your yuppie deluxe lifestyle with two kids and a mortgage? A little harder. Think caseless iPhones, 10.30am fitness classes, not having roommates.

brainsparks: cosplaying as poor (tn#62), the other vibe shift (tn#102)

⌨so much data

i didn’t know about these artists from spain, balma and ouineta. loving to hear a song in catalán, and the images are superfun and sarcastic. the lyrics are about the fetish of ai and automation, and how we are willing to throw all our data for the sake of convenience.

I work all day and I don't get hurt.
I think every day and I don't get blood.
I think I'm almost immortal
and my attitude is surreal.
I'm as smart as Hawking.
Prove me right when I talk.
Prove me right when I command.
Prove me right when: ah - ah.
[…]
Data, so much data.
I can't do it all, with so much data.
Data, I want you to give me more data.
Data, so much data.
What do you want me to do for you?

brainspark: it’s algorithm baby (tn#33)

😈160bpm

myss keta’s new album came out and i’ve been obsessed. the name of the album is . (punto). i’m her unnoficial ambassador so i must post this here, please do press play and enjoy the randomness and sarcasm.

brainsparks: adoro (tn#29)

see you next week, brainsparkies 🫀✨

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