👟✨The Nexialist #0216

sinking boat | becoming post-tragic | salve-se | papota | the great chiasmus | jump | double dutch | new york stoops

Mar 13, 2025

welcome to your weekly brain-pumping newsletter, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds and distracts you, like the moving chest above. this week, i bring to you some apocalyptic pop and new terms to understand and potentially overcome this vibe shift. i’ll keep the intro short as there will be enough for you to read below, so i hope you enjoy it! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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⚓️sinking boat

i might be making this up, but i feel like we’re seeing more manifestations of what i call apocalyptic pop: either through the lyrics, the images in their videos, or their whole persona/era, the end-of-world theme is becoming more present in music. of course the theme isn’t new, but this year i already share here in the nexialist some of these: mia’s marigold (tn#206), jain’s everyone is crazy (tn#215) and even gaga’s abracadabra (tn#211) could be put in that category (the scene described in the first verse does seem to belong in the bible’s revelations).

well, the algorithm pushed me this gem by infinity song— i’d shared their hater’s anthem (tn#159) before. like an apocalyptic quartet they deliver pessimism, sarcasm and dissociation masterfully, but with a vibe. and it’s just so cool that they are siblings. i don’t know about you, but the way they’re standing together is very abba and i love the contrast.

Why should I worry about rocking a sinking boat
It's all going down and we're majoring on the minor notes
See it from afar like the prophets in the days of old
See it in the stars our conclusion has been foretold

brainsparks: hater’s anthem (tn#159), dissociation music (tn#82), marigold (tn#206), everyone is crazy (tn#215), abracadabra (tn#211)

🐦‍🔥becoming post-tragic

my friend

Douwe van der Werf

published this great and inspiring question, while introducing a new concept for me: should we strive to become post-tragic? as humans we have great adaptability to complexity, but we’re also drawn to the end of times narrative. how can we move beyond cynism and not fall into pessimism?

The different perspectives on tragedy listed below can be seen as developmental stages in our relationship with reality and our personal maturity:
Pre-tragic perspectives see the looming disasters of the world and focus on “being positive and doing what you can” to prevent or minimise damage by proactively building a better future—against all odds and no matter what. The full predicament might not be seen in this perspective.
Tragic perspectives move through the full palette of looming disasters, concluding that ‘the end’ is inevitable, that nothing can be done, and that life has now become hopeless and meaningless. The full predicament is now known, but it is rejected.
Post-tragic perspectives acknowledge compounding disasters and their likely outcomes while also recognising them as inextricable parts of our lifetime. The predicament is fully acknowledged and embraced.

brainsparks: time rebels (tn#18), climate storytelling toolkit (tn#131), awesome anthropocene goals (tn#76), protopia futures (tn#27), storytelling periodic table (tn#22), lo-tek: a new mythology of technology (tn#43), permacrisis (tn#94), ideas to postpone the end of the world (tn#19)

🙃salve-se

one of my favorite brazilian musicians, céu, recommended bebé and i’ve been immersed in it. such a beautiful album, mixing rap, hiphop, funk, r&b, pop, indie… i got chills listening to it! the album is called salve-se (save yourself) and the reference to the hanged man tarot card on the cover drew me in.

brainsparks: pixelated love (tn#6)

💪🏼papota

absurd times invoke absurd narratives, and this is a lighthearted version of the current absurdity. ca7riel & paco amoroso went viral for their tiny desk performance and since then i’ve become fans of yet another argentinian musical act. in this short film they go meta, falling in a spiral of impostor syndrome after their tiny desk concert, finding an eccentric manager that manipulates them for success (with the help of chadGPT, their own AI): they need to gym, do steroids (to have great #tetas) fight, basically become someone else. i was laughing with the lyrics:

if you want to be someone
you can’t be you
gotta be someone other than you-ooh-ooh
and if you wanna be you
you won’t be anybody
you’ll just be you

somehow they could be in the same whimsical cyberpunk universe as hbo’s fantasmas (tn#185)

brainsparks: fantasmas (tn#185), bigorexia, body shaming stories (tn#79), gay body culture goes mainstream (tn#190)

🧠the great chiasmus

the great chiasmus by marie dollé was shared by

Thomas Klaffke

, on the rabbit holes #109. this idea of “decorporification” has been a lot in my mind: how we spend so much time in our screens and in the thinking world, that we forget to be present in our bodies and take good care of it. thomas wrote about that in “forgotten bodies in a headspace world” and it hits close to home.

The body is no longer a temple; it’s a startup chasing optimization, hacking itself for efficiency.

a couple of weeks ago i talked about the factory planet to laboratory planet (tn#214), and this texts brings similar analogies to our bodies: from temples, to startups. i had forgotten what a chiasmus was, but marie reminds us. the digital/technological/synthetic and concrete/natural are merging so hard, they are becoming one another.

This is not merely a technological breakthrough. It is a metaphysical chiasmus—that rhetorical figure of crossing, where two realities reverse and intertwine.
Francisco Varela, Chilean biologist and philosopher, foresaw it: without a body, there is no true cognition. The machine dreams of flesh, while the human dreams of circuits.

this is not something that happened over night, as she describes the first fracture happening with the invention of writing. but now it’s reaching a different level. but it’s not all lost: the texts does end on a positive note, and it’s quite inspiring, so go read it and subscribe.

brainsparks: self-outsourcing age (tn#17), centaur mindset (tn#106), cyborg art (tn#169) ARTificial (tn#123), a bestiary of the anthropocene (tn#211), nexus (tn#199), inner development goals (tn#67)

👟jump

mura masa has been releasing such good videos, and this one is no different. they are showing people jumping double dutch, and it’s pure joy.

quite timely with the text above. it got me thinking how in this age of decorporification, things that bring us to the present and the natural/concrete world become activism: sports, games, dance, hobbies, cooking, meditation, etc.

SHOWDEM IS A NON-PROFIT ORGANISATION BASED IN NEW YORK CITY. THEIR MISSION IS TO SPREAD JOY THROUGH MOVEMENT, WITH A FOCUS ON COMMUNITY AND LIFTING THE SPIRITS AND BODIES OF THOSE AROUND THEM. THEY MEET UP REGULARLY TO JUMP DOUBLE DUTCH, AND INVITE THOSE AROUND THEM IN THE CITY TO PARTICIPATE IN THEIR SESSIONS AND EXPERIENCE THE MOVEMENT. WE MET UP WITH THEM TO DOCUMENT AND SHARE IN THEIR PRACTICE.

brainsparks: drugs (tn#130), how mura masa makes internet beats (tn#8), allowed to f*** up (tn#116), the right to party (tn#7).

🪢double dutch

while watching this, i wondered why the jumping rope is called double dutch. i had heard the term before, but this comes before the music producer dubbel dutch, who made some of my favorite songs of bad gyal, or the cannabis breed that goes by the same name. growing up in brazil i don’t remember seeing the kids doing double dutch, but we did jump with just one rope. and to me, still to this day, i just can’t wrap my head around the physics of having two ropes, it looks so complicated.

It is thought to have originated from Dutch immigrants to New York City, but quickly became a coming of age tradition for Black girls.

brainsparks: play-full future (tn#121), parallel play (tn#198), game theory (tn#121), back to playing (tn#16)

🚪new york stoops

i clicked on this one because i had a guess: the dutch influenced these stoops in new york, as i see a lot of those in some parts of amsterdam. and i was right. they were used as part of their hydropunk (tn#196) architecture, or solutions to avoid flooding. in new york, they have become places to hangout (they even have stoop sales, never heard of them. but then i remembered seeing on king’s day some families doing their sales here in amsterdam too.)

brainsparks: third places (tn#90), how the dutch beat the ocean (tn#173), hydropunk (tn#196), urbanity (tn#199)

see you next week,

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William Terra

Mar 13

Funny, i was thinking about the apocalyptic pop some time ago, but it goes beyond the pop too. Here's a recent James blake one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sglbIVO9IQQ

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1 reply by Rodrigo Turra