⚜️✨The Nexialist #0219

algorithmic condition | cybernetics and philosophy | ghiblification | childlike things | sonic weapon | audible enclaves | mil€ | fish doorbell | shipwrecked treasures | fool’s gold

Apr 03, 2025

Welcome to your weekly timeless cyber-capsule, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well and at least one of today’s ideas makes a download into your brain. in true nexialist fashion, this week we get a mix of long reads with musical numbers, sound-bending technologies and deep-sea treasures. i’ll cut the intro short so you can enjoy what’s to come. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🤖algorithmic condition

Synthetic media and computational capitalism: towards a critical theory of artifcial intelligence. this paper by David M. Berry was shared in the syllabus and it’s full of brainsparks and new concepts helping us make sense of our cultural merging with technology: algorithmic condition, post-consciousness, inversion, automimetric production and constellational analysis. i’m still letting the first ones sink in, but it has already officially reframed my understanding of how these systems are shifting culture.

This paper develops a critical theory of artifcial intelligence, within a historical constellation where computational systems increasingly generate cultural content that destabilises traditional distinctions between human and machine production. Through this analysis, I introduce the concept of the algorithmic condition, a cultural moment when machine-generated work not only becomes indistinguishable from human creation but actively reshapes our understanding of ideas of authenticity. This transformation, I argue, moves beyond false consciousness towards what I call post-consciousness, where the boundaries between individual and synthetic consciousness become porous.
Drawing on critical theory and extending recent work on computational ideology, I develop three key theoretical contributions, frst, the concept of the Inversion to describe a new computational turn in algorithmic society; second, automimetric production as a framework for understanding emerging practices of automated value creation; and third, constellational analysis as a methodological approach for mapping the complex interplay of technical systems, cultural forms and political economic structures. Through these contributions, I argue that we need new critical methods capable of addressing both the technical specifcity of AI systems and their role in restructuring forms of life under computational capitalism. The paper concludes by suggesting that critical refexivity is needed to engage with the algorithmic condition without being subsumed by it and that it represents a growing challenge for contemporary critical theory

brainsparks: the great chiasmus (tn#216), self-outsourcing age (tn#17), centaur mindset (tn#106), cyborg art (tn#169) ARTificial (tn#123), synthetic media (tn#18), new words for new worlds (tn#111), ontological design (tn#3), i am not a robot (tn#201), hyper-optimization (tn#210), plantations, computers and industrial control (tn#125), authentic artificiality (tn#130), artificial intimacy (tn#168), deep doubt era (tn#193), program or be programmed (tn#200), whisperverse (tn#194)

🌐cybernetics and philosophy

i don’t know how this ended up on my screen, but i’ve been trying to wrap my head around this text by Stu Watson: Cybernetics and The Evolution of Philosophy. i love this vintage-futuristic quality the cyber prefix has to it, but i had no clue about the origins of cybernetics as a discipline to develop a new interdisciplinary language to promote interactions of different sciences, which were sinking into hyper-specificity (quite a nexialist term if you ask me). stu takes on a critical and more hopeful journey of this yet to be seen global village.

What, in 1966, would Heidegger have understood “cybernetics” to entail? In contemporary parlance the prefix “cyber” has come to denote things generally involving the interface between human beings and advanced forms of technology, though even this terminology has become a relic of the early days of the internet, as in words like “cyberspace” which today feels like a rather dated name for the online world, or in the seemingly-ironically-named “cybertruck.”
For him the term would undoubtedly refer back to the work undertaken from 1946 to 1953 at a series of conferences held in New York City and sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation. Though the Macy Foundation was and is primarily concerned with advancing the medical sciences, the set of conferences that would come to be associated with the birth of cybernetics, known at the time by the unwieldy title of “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and social systems,” brought together academics and practitioners from a wide array of fields. This included physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, and sociologists, and the stated goal of the series of conferences was extraordinarily ambitious, aiming to develop a new language that would enable cross-disciplinary communication between the disparate fields of science then emerging. This need arose out of a sense the organizers held that deepening specialization in the hard and social scientific fields was leading to the development of hyper-specific jargon that was making interdisciplinary communication increasingly difficult.

brainsparks: linear opposites or closely related? (tn#126), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126), interstitium (tn#151), capitalists killed the internet (tn#212)

👁️ghiblification

this whole thing with the ghibli style images going viral last week has caused a lot of commotion (guilty!) and simplistic conclusions, and this text by

kyla scanlon

brings so many critical layers on how context is dominating, what she calls a context economy. (thank you,

Thomas Klaffke

for recommending it on Creative Destruction). it’s worth the read:

But what is happening now isn't just automation replacing routine tasks. We really do have a restructuring of how value is created and distributed. Unlike previous technological revolutions that primarily transformed physical production, AI transforms meaning-making itself, changing how we create and distribute value. The Ghibli AI trend is a perfect microcosm:
1.The raw content (images) is easily reproducible and has minimal intrinsic value
2. The context (who shares it, how it's framed, which platforms amplify it) creates the actual economic and social value
3. The creators of the original style (Studio Ghibli) receive some value through "increased interest" while platforms capture the economic benefits.
a. Studio Ghibli itself saw a surge in interest but captured almost none of the economic value from the trend
b. Platform companies (Twitter) monetized the increased engagement
c. AI developers gained valuable training data from millions of uploaded images
d. Individual users "spent" their social capital by participating in the trend
This pattern of value distribution - where content creators receive attention but platforms capture revenue - is clearly the dominant economic model of our digital age.
But notice how the context (the viral tweets, the platform hype, the novelty of AI filter) drove the phenomenon more than the intrinsic value of the images themselves. Once again, context overshadowed content.

brainsparks: the new aesthetic of ai slop (tn#215), context collapse (tn#25), ai: engines for the imagination? (tn#85)

🧸childlike things

most likely i will keep sharing fka twigs’ releases here. she’s been getting some hate from her fans for working with north west, the nepobaby of usa celeb culture (daughter of kim kardashian and kanye west). it’s hard to admit this was one of my favorite songs from the album because it’s playful. but noticing in this video, it appears twigs is sending a message: artists need to subject themselves to these industry games. she portrays herself as some sort of puppet/jester, and north (who is 11 years old) as the main act, a multi-hyphenate artist.

brainsparks: eusexua (tn#191), children’s ai manifesto (tn#218), play-full future (tn#121)

🔊sonic weapon

this happened last week and i’m still thinking about it. serbia is being accused of using an illegal military-grade sonic weapon to disperse peaceful protestors (and denying it). the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) and does some kind of soundwave bending, using “sound waves to incapacitate, disorient or harm individuals by harnessing acoustic energy, causing both physical and psychological effects, such as dizziness, disorientation or severe headaches.” i think what surprised me is how many weapons like these we have no clue that exist.

brainsparks: sonic healing (tn#11)

👂audible enclaves

talking about sonic weapons, this came up in the futurism newsletter: "audible enclaves," where only you can hear a sound without disturbing anyone else in open space — no headphones required.” i have seen this in sci-fi, such as in the peripheral or dune: prophecy, so it’s another case of sci-fi, sci-fact, like in the technovelgy repository.

brainsparks: technovelgy (tn#211)

💶mil€

svsto is exactly my kind of sound/artist/project. well produced, sarcastic with some kind of social/political commentary, and the electro-trash just makes it better. in this song she is talking about the housing crisis. “MIL€ is a song to make you dance angry, to ruin any moment of escapism you might have had at the club and remind you that you are precarious.”
(i heard the three tracks they released, loved all of them, and it reminded me of one of my spanish favorites: las bistecs. turns out carla parmenter is half of las bistecs.

Antes todo esto era campo / Before this was all countryside
Ahora es propiedad de los bancos / Now you are the property of the banks
Antes todo esto era campo / Before this was all countryside
Ahora son tejados con amianto /Now they are roofed with asbestos

brainsparks: señoras bien (tn#119), myss keta (tn#209)

🐠fish doorbell

this is one of the cutest things i’ve seen from the netherlands (and the website is also lovely): the fish doorbeel, the first one of its kind. a positive and unexpected use of tech.

Every spring, thousands of fish swim through the Oudegracht in Utrecht, searching for a place upstream to lay their eggs. But the Weerdsluis is often closed. You can help the fish continue their journey! If you see a fish, press the doorbell. This alerts the lock operator to open the lock.

brainsparks: hydropunk (tn#196), how the dutch beat the ocean (tn#173)

🏴‍☠️shipwrecked treasures

since we’re underwater… this unboxing of shipwrecked treasures from v&a is a gem. curator sophie morris explains the history and details of these treasures with so much fun and excitement. most of them are centuries old, but i loved to see a more contemporary treasure, made by jeweller ruth tomlinson, called time-capsule and using elements from different points in history. she even created some rings to throw in the thames attached to a stone for future treasure hunters (or people that do mudlarking).

i don’t know what happened to my youtube algorithm lately, it started showing me those antiques roadshow videos of people finding out they own valuable treasures.

⚜️fool’s gold

talking about jewellry, marina sena’s new video, ouro de tolo, comes together with her new album, coisas naturais (natural things). it’s filled with delicious songs. marina is one of my faves from brazil.

brainsparks: inherent vice (tn#119), numa ilha (tn#207)

see you next week, treasures 🫀✨

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