📵✨The Nexialist #0221

digital coup | crisis | mr. robot | pugnacious | vibe civilization | antimemetics | linguist tech support | OK Go

Apr 17, 2025

welcome to your weekly cyber-sip of fermented content, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well (enough to at least browse through). i got very sick last weekend, some kind of flu or even covid, so i had a lot of time to rest and recover. this week, things seem to be getting better and work seems to be picking up. today, i’m excited to teach an online class for a small group at the denver ad school, a similar one from what i brought to the rotterdam business school. the title: “how to be a nexialist: forescasting, cultural insights, content curatorship and other skills for the 21st century. wish me luck and i wish you a good read! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🏢digital coup

recently, i shared wired’s tech support: dictators (tn#218), with professor and authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and she was clear: what the u.s. is going through right now is a digital coup. last week, carole cadwalladr corageously confirmed that, as she invites us to name what is happening so we can fight back. she starts by retelling how her last ted talk in 2019 about facebook’s role in brexit —and the threat to democracy. this lead to a violent lawsuit against her that put turned her life upside down. well, she is back, despite all that, to warn us.

she frames the current global political and technological situation as a coup, not in the traditional military sense, but through digital manipulation, data harvesting, and technocratic consolidation of power. this coup is being executed quietly, through infrastructure that permeates every part of our lives — technology platforms, AI, and surveillance capitalism. she emphasizes how data is the weapon of choice, how tech elites enable authoritarianism aka broligarchy, how culture is now run by ai and leaves us with some acts of digital self-defense. it’s worth the watch, and please share:

fight back with digital disobedience:
-don’t accept cookies blindly.
-use encrypted apps like Signal.
-withhold your real name online.
-teach your children privacy as a right.
these are not just choices — they’re acts of digital self-defense.

brainsparks: technofascism (tn#215), dictator questions (tn#218), neurorights (tn#132), technofeudalism (tn#143), technocracy incorporated (tn#213), surveillance as a love language (tn#209), panopticon aesthetics (tn#218), quantitative validation (tn#199), cozy tech (tn#122), hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary (tn#118), digital feudalism (tn#136), plantations, computers, industrial control (tn#125), netocracy vs. consumtariat (tn#18), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), self-fulfilling cyberpunk (tn#40)

🌇crisis

a few weeks ago i shared another song by spanish artist svsto (carla parmenter), and how much i’m loving this project. last friday the whole album was released, under the more-than-perfect title: crisis. the themes are clearly of our zeitgeist: gender bending (the alpha female in the first track), the housing crisis (mil€), industrial urbanization (viva el cemento!), even a love letter to a car, night-driving and the AP7, “a spanish autopista” —all of that done in an apathic and monotonone nonchalance.

brainsparks: mil€ (tn#219), señoras bien (tn#119), myss keta (tn#209)

🤖mr. robot

recently i remembered i had never finished mr robot, so i picked it up again from the beginning and i’m starting the last season now. i’m loving it so much. the show was first released in 2015, 10 years ago, and ended in 2019, and i’m disturbed with the time-bending feeling i’m having while watching it (i mean, they were using alexa and trump was in politics already). some many of the themes are so contemporary: loneliness, mental health, privacy, gender bending, tech dependency, the us-china arm wrestling, corruption, technofeudalism… i could go on. if you’re looking for something to watch, the timing is now.

brainsparks: love death + robots (tn#17)

👊pugnacious

pugnacious
adjective | pug-NAY-shus
Someone described as pugnacious shows a readiness or desire to fight or argue.
Pugnacious individuals are often looking for a fight. While unpleasant, at least their fists are packing an etymological punch. Pugnacious comes from the Latin verb pugnare (meaning "to fight"), which in turn comes from the Latin word for "fist," pugnus. Another Latin word related to pugnus is pugil, meaning "boxer." Pugil is the source of our word pugilist, which means "fighter" and is used especially of professional boxers. Pugnare has also given us impugn ("to assail by words or arguments"), oppugn ("to fight against"), and repugnant (which is now used primarily in the sense of "exciting distaste or aversion," but which has also meant "characterized by contradictory opposition" and "hostile").

i had never heard of this word before, and i’ll be adding it to my vocab. the explanation makes it easier to remember as we use a similar word to fist in portuguese (punho).

brainsparks: non-violent communication (tn#14)

😎vibe civilization

a few months ago we learned about vibe coding, a new modality of coding where one can instruct an ai tool to code by prompt, and tweak it from there. so suddenly people who had no idea how to code are getting a grasp of it, and building their own solutions. then i heard about vibe marketing, which now is even more possible, not only for the strategy part, but also the creative output. this meme was going around and it made me feel like in an episode of black mirror (which i’m loving btw).

brainspark: strategy in the era of ai (tn#165), is your job safe from ai? (tn#165), model collapse (tn#211), ARTificial (tn#123), wtf is an office job? (tn#94), virtual economy (tn#18)

📵antimemetics

we’re very obsessed with the ideas that spread, but this book you can preorder goes against the grain: “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. Why do some ideas spread like wildfire, while others resist being seen — despite their importance?A new book by Nadia Asparouhova explores the emerging phenomenon of antimemetics.” just the term itself got me thinking. imagine a client asking for an antimeme for their campaign.

brainsparks: releasing > posting (tn#210), counterculture x counter-futures (tn#10)

💬linguist tech support

again, my algorithm is showing me all of wired’s tech support and it’s completely up my alley, watching people who are obsessed with what they do and teach us about it. i have a soft spot for etymology and gareth roberts is so excited that i had to stay the whole video with him. he starts already with an amazing one:

Take the word gossip. A godsib was originally someone who had a godfather or godmother relationship with you. They were related to you by those means. They would be people you might confide in, you might share social, personal information in. And so from there, we get the word gossip as a person who shares gossip. From there, we get the verb gossip. And this would have been in the Old English period that god and sib would have come together to form the word gossip.

brainsparks: new words for new worlds (tn#111),

🦾OK Go

these guys have been making these zany and extremely elaborate videos for a while. remember the threadmill one?, it’s from 2009. feeling old yet? well, this one is quite impressive, with human-sized robot-controlled kaleidoscopes, full of colors and reflections and with their usual feel-good vibe. thanks juan, for sharing.

brainsparks: book fight (tn#11), parkour bots (tn#33), so you think we can dance (tn#1)

see you next week, antimemes 🫀✨

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I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist.

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