🙃✨The Nexialist #0210

raging against various elements | hyper-optimization | releasing > posting | hypernormalization | self-esteem crisis | toolkit for utopian thinking | eco-development | willy chavarria

Jan 30, 2025

welcome to your weekly brain-jolt in shape of a newsletter, the nexialist

hey, you! I hope this message finds you in the best of spirits possible (even if that is a legion of ghouls, welcome all of you.)

this friday, i’ll be speaking at the

Futures Friends

here in amsterdam and i’m so excited (thank you,
Els Dragt
, for the invitation). wish me luck as i’ll be sharing 3 signals, in 3 slides, in 3 minutes.

also, i’ve been wondering this week how is it possible that in this planetary alignment/parade, it seems that things are so unaligned… that is not what we were promised. or was it? i’ll not go into that, neither in the deepseek launch that shook the ai world (for that, go to

Artificial Insights

, as
Michell Zappa
explained it all.) but i promise some other fresh things to read and stimulate your brain and heart. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🤬raging against various elements

last week, i got to see connor schumacher’s raging agains various elements (thank you, juan, for the invitation!) and it made me dance in my seat. and cry. and embrace the rage we feel. and admire even more the artists who dedicate their life and craft to live/irl performances. everything today seems so recorded/edited and made for screens, so the feeling of seeing something live is quite powerful.

the level of artistry they bring to the stage is exactly what we need in times like this. the techno-jazz choreography, the cadence of the moves, the gender diversity of the cast, the ode to club-culture, the breaking of the 4th-wall, the exploration of mental health, the importance of community… i mean, they punched a whole through the zeitgeist.

they were able to condense the spirit of our time while showing a deeply personal story about grief, loss and the solace of chosen-family: the chemistry of the group made us feel part of the performance. i do know connor and most of the dancers in the piece, so it did bring an extra layer of relatability (and admiration).

also, the stage itself made such an stimulating experience turn inwards: the audience-facing huge mirror full of distortions hypnotized us while inviting us for self-reflection and the moving suspended curtain is present the whole time, as if saying: i’m showing you what is underneath all that grief and rage.

The new techno-jazz musical by Connor Schumacher. It's loud, it's raw, and it's everything you need to feel when you've been knocked down by life’s hardest blows. For seven years, grief, love, pain, and death have been dancing together. Now, it’s time to rage for life. A raw, unfiltered story.

i mean, i’m no art/dance critic, but i needed to express how it made me feel and here is my space to do it. with this i need to say: support your local artists, go see your friends’ art and friends of friends’. the tour is still going through the netherlands, so if you can, go experience their art.

brainsparks: euterpians (tn#197), architecture of the invisible (tn#193), somebody that i used to know (tn#163), artistry & worldbuilding (tn#192), body is art (tn#192), duelo (tn#188), artist imperfection (tn#38)

⏭hyper-optimization

Matt Klein

shared this report about hyper-optimization (with a referral code to download the manifesto) and it has rented an entire canal house in my mind. it’s impressive how oas (office of applied strategy) is able to sum up so many phenomena i’ve brought here in the nexialist (check brainsparks below) and build upon that.

Hyper-optimization: Creative Stagnation Amidst Cultural Abundance
Culture has become so optimized for consumption that creativity itself has ironically become more scarce than ever, a luxury good more than the lifeblood of culture today.

what happens when culture is reduced to (ultraprocessed) content and made for algorithmic optimization? oas warns us about cultural singularity:

Culture today is so self-aware, self-mimetic, and self-referential that it can endlessly spawn near-infinite variations of itself at dizzying speeds. Artificial intelligence will turn this into a cultural singularity, in which AI-generated content is both a predictive signal and training data to generate more AI-generated content in an infinite loop, at which point we will lose control of the speed of culture itself.

i only had access to the manifesto, which is already full of brainsparks, but they close it with a more propositive teaser to six counter-forces to hyper-optimization: emicness, metabolism, entropy, self-destruction, pluralism and de-growth. i can’t wait to read more about it.

brainsparks: life after lifestyle (tn#91), enshittifcation lifecycle (tn#106), context collapse (tn#25), culture is not an industry (tn#203), super industry of the imaginary (tn#28), hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary (tn#118), a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163), the moodboard effect (tn#81), the vanishing designer (tn#81), the age of average (tn#115), technologies of convenience (tn#122), revival as loss of identity (tn#103), calling artists ‘creators’ (tn#208)

📮releasing > posting

Metalabel

has been getting my attention lately, and now

Yancey Strickler

is releasing the 2025 creative playbook which now i’m thinking can also be seen as a counter-force to hyper-optimization. in this post they show how “an artist on Metalabel sold out an entire collection of NYC garbage — literal trash from the streets of NYC packaged in glass cubes for $100 each — in under an hour. No viral TikTok. No paid ads. Just by following a different way of releasing creative work.” metalabel invites us to adopt a “release” mindset and strategy, which breathes life back into our creative output.

The internet wants you to post. Post faster, post more, post everything you're thinking. Like a toddler demanding snacks, the feed is never satisfied. When all we do is post, there is no satisfaction. The feed is anti-satisfaction. The feed is perpetual hunger and anxiety for more.
But there's another way: RELEASE.

brainsparks: post-individualism (tn#196), content capital (tn#96), 4 c-words (tn#45),

🙃hypernormalization

foushy

A post shared by @foushy

Hypernormalization—a state where everyone knows the system is broken, but we all pretend it’s working anyway.

this is another video that reached my eyeballs and brain by rahaf harfoush, welcoming us to the hypernormalization club. the term was coined by by Alexei Yurchak in his 2006 book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, in which he describes the paradox of life in the soviet union in the 70s-80s when everyone knew the system was failing and people couldn’t imagine any alternative to the status quo, “so politians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.”

rahaf also mentions the 2016 adam curtis’ documentary (now in my watchlist) called hypernormalisation, in which he argues “that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.”

brainsparks: hypernormative (tn#200), normosis: the pathology of normality (tn#38)

♂self-esteem crisis

this weekend we met up with a friend who told how frustrating it is to see her teenage son falling for masculinist and right wing discourse. the next day i read this article by leo rogers for psyche ideas: the ‘masculinity crisis’ is actually a crisis of self-esteem (via

Creative Destruction

’s rabbit hole #103).

i have to say i usually attributed the “masculinity crisis” to men’s realization that the privilege they were promised is not quite there in reality (except if you’re rich and white), but here i saw another idea that has more to do with inequality (at least in my perception): the frustration at the fallacy of meritocracy—and since under patriarchy they need to be the providers and protectors, it leaves them feeling like failures (another argument why feminism benefits everyone). what is weird to me, is that these men are still idealizing the very people who perpetuate the meritocracy discourse, and directing their anger towards women and other minorities. the level of brainswashing.

There is a widespread consensus that something’s going on with men and manhood: either men are frustrated and confused by the loss of privilege (according to the Left-liberal story) or being stifled by feminised social norms and prevented from being real men (on the alt-Right explanation).
My contention is that the competition for self-esteem, and the widespread lack of it that results, is to blame for much of what we attribute to the crisis in masculinity. Men are frustrated because they feel like failures, and they feel like failures because – given the way our society distributes self-esteem – almost everybody has to feel like a failure. Men are increasingly angry and disengaged from mainstream society not merely because they don’t know what manhood means in the absence of privilege, nor because a liberal elite is propagating behavioural norms that suppress their masculine nature. Rather, being angry and disengaged is the natural human response to a society that makes one feel impotent and inferior, and affords a sense of control to very few. (This raises the question of why women might respond differently to the self-esteem crisis; I suggest that the interplay between patriarchal norms and the competition for self-esteem might mean women experience the same frustration, but respond differently.)

brainsparks: the other vibe shift (tn#102), parasite culture (tn#191), men in media (tn#28), fruity men (tn#182), on heteropessimism (tn#174), man-loving (tn#190), the disappearance of men (tn#175), the alpha male myth (tn#127), colonial masculinity (tn#127)

🧰toolkit for utopian thinking

this post that was seen in two of my favorites newsletter:

Sentiers

n341 and

Creative Destruction

rabbit hole #103. and it’s worth it. caitlin rajan argues “we need the toolkit of utopian thinking, now more than ever.” and while i love

Monika Bielskyte

’s protopia rationale that moves beyond the utopia/dystopia dychotomy, this toolkit comes in quite handy and rajan’s arguments are worth the read.

utopianism has a bad rep, it could be equated to today’s delulu for some as it denotes lack of realism. it also has a dark past, as utopianism has historically been employed in regimes like in nazi germany. but here she reclaims its roots and uses afrofuturism as an example of utopia as a political and imagionative skill. below, one of my favorite references:

[Fátima] Vieira argues that utopian thinking is composed of four modes. First: ‘prospective thinking’, whereby this utopian ‘horizon’ is defined; crucially, this horizon is one that never comes to pass but sets imaginative and desirable heights, which invigorates the act of utopian thinking. Second: critical thinking, which demands an interrogation of the present. So, far from the accusations that utopian thinking is unrealistic, in fact it involves confronting reality frankly. Third: holistic thinking, which says that society works as a whole of composite paths, so any and all incremental actions must be aware of the interconnected society upon which they have consequences. And finally: creative thinking, which keeps alive the ‘What if?’ possibilities of the future, just as our foray into our own imagination allowed us to do.

brainsparks: climate storytelling toolkit (tn#131), awesome anthropocene goals (tn#67), can solarpunk save the world? (tn#97), slouching towards utopia (tn#197), protopia dreams (tn#69), imagination as necessity (tn#15), polyfuturism (tn#158), time for indigenous futurism (tn#65)

🍃eco-development

again, another idea of utopia caught my eye and i just couldn’t ignore it: The Lost Option of Sustainable Developmentalism. in this article shared in the syllabus, baptiste albertone argues for the revival of radical yet overlooked ideas by latin american structuralists in the 70s such as Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado, and Osvaldo Sunkel.

they critiqued how development theories initially centered on industrialization and were failing to actually incorporate environmental concerns. also, even mainstream environmentalist movements (such as neo-Malthusianism) were ignoring the economic disparities between developed and developing nations.

in the second part i learned a lot of new terms: peripheral alienation and the contradictions of mimetic development:

Mimetic development refers to the tendency of peripheral economies to imitate the industrialized models of wealthier nations.
Sachs and others argued for endogenous development, meaning development strategies tailored to local needs rather than imposed by external economic structures.
Dependency on industrialized nations perpetuated economic and technological underdevelopment in the Global South.

and in the third chapter: planning a sustainable utopia.

Eco-development was envisioned as a tool for planning sustainable, equitable development.
It emphasized participatory planning, where communities define their own development pathways instead of following external models.
Sachs proposed a shift from instrumental rationality (pure economic growth) to substantive rationality (development driven by social and ecological needs).

brainsparks: amazonize the world (tn#153), indigenous thinking for troubled times (tn#32), ancestral future (tn#112), freudian slip (tn#191)

🇲🇽willy chavarria

thank you, hanier ferrer, for sharing this. in this collection, willy chavarria brought big names like j balvin, indya moore, honey dijon and paloma elsesser to his paris debut. i love how he brings the diversity to church, mixing religious symbols, with streetwear and latin/immigrant references with a super diverse cast. i didn’t know willy chavarria and his work, and his style is not only beautiful and edgy, but he is also in the craft of mixing fashion and activism (watch this if you want to become a fan like me).

brainsparks: craftivist manifesto (tn#178)

see you next week, hyper-humans 🫀✨

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