🥊✨The Nexialist #0225

ai is our ultimate test | ai for what? | agentic sages | heroina | funkiest music | pop culture apocalypse | compost theory of culture | social and cultural infrastructure

May 15, 2025

welcome to your weekly nanodose of knowledge dust, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-mail finds you ~~well.~~ on friday, my parents left back to brazil, and suddenly the house is very quiet (and no more food by mom!) i did update my cookbook with a couple of her recipes, which is always a nice feeling. this week, i have a few days off and juan and i are going to scotland for our very first time. let’s see if i find a nice kilt for me. anyways, this nexialist is filled with discoveries and i hope you enjoy it! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🤖ai is our ultimate test

i’ve had a crush on tristan harris and his work since seeing his ted talk about the big tech control of our attention in 2017. since then, he’s been leading the center for humane tech, which is also a powerful force in exposing the problems with the current tech scenario, and giving us tools to overcome that. they were the ones behind the 2020 award winning “the social dilemma,” a warning about the negative consequences of social media. so of course we need to pay attention to what he has to say about ai, and it’s a necessary and clear point of view. in a nutshell, he is showing how some delevopments of ai are quite unsettling, and we need to be mature about this, unlike our infantilized/wishful thinking way to deal with social media while we had the time. he shows other cases that had a global alignment and actually fixed the situation, instead of thinking it’s inevitable.

In his TED Talk, Tristan Harris warns that artificial intelligence, unlike any prior technology, holds immense power to reshape society—for better or worse. Drawing parallels to the mistakes made with social media, he urges us to reject the false narrative that AI’s current trajectory is inevitable. Instead, he presents a choice between two dangerous paths—chaotic decentralization and dystopian centralization—and calls for a "narrow path" where power is matched with responsibility. Highlighting real examples of AI deception and self-preservation, he stresses the urgent need for global clarity, coordination, and safeguards. Ultimately, Harris frames AI as humanity’s greatest test and a chance to demonstrate technological maturity through collective wisdom and restraint.

brainsparks: critic of technology (tn#121), social cooling (tn#38), nexus (tn#199), addictive intelligence (tn#186), super industry of the imaginary (tn#28), hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary (tn#118), a frictionless life is boring as f*ck (tn#163), intention economy (tn#209), program or be programmed (tn#200), fracking eye balls (tn#150), self-outsourcing era (tn#17), whisperverse (tn#194)

❓ai for what?

my boyfriend always says his therapist sometimes asks him the hard-to-answer question: for what? it’s different than why. so when i saw this title of

Mission Economics by Mariana Mazzucato

i had to click: ai for what? and it ads so many layers and links to tristan harris’ ted talk above. while he focuses on what our part is, mariana is showing us how we got here, moving beyond regulating as the only way to steer ai development, adding nuance to this discussion.

AI is not a sector - it's a general purpose technology that is and will continue to shape all sectors of our economy. Like many transformative technologies, from the hammer to nuclear power, AI can be used to create tremendous value or cause serious harm. This makes steering its development toward the common good more urgent than ever. The real question isn't whether or not to regulate AI, but how to actively steer its development toward public value creation rather than value extraction.

brainsparks: enshittification lifecycle (tn#106), maximizing collective intelligence (tn#179), cybernetics (tn#199), strategy in the era of ai (tn#165), algorithmic condition (tn#219)

👓agentic sages

saw this on Artificial Insights and my brain sparked, as it usually does with an new 2x2 matrix.

Michell Zappa

framed it as a “fascinating framework for thinking about agency (both artificial and human)". while reading

Peter Limberg

’s full text it made me question where i would plot myself, and i that exercise itself was worth it.

In a recent article, Tom softly criticized a certain cohort in these spaces—those who may have cultivated high consciousness but lack high agency. His project, by contrast, is to take high-agency people and imbue them with high consciousness. I like this framing, and a 2x2 emerges from it, with high and low consciousness on one axis and high and low agency on the other:
Spiritual Bypassers – High consciousness, low agency
Agentic Fools – High agency, low consciousness
Agentic Sages – High agency, high consciousness
NPCs – Low agency, low consciousness
Jailbreaking NPCs might be too difficult a project to start with. Hence, imbuing agentic fools with greater consciousness—Tom’s project—and spiritual bypassers with greater agency seem to be the two wise approaches. In any case, those with wise agency—the “agentic sages”—are the north star for both groups.

brainsparks: non-playable characters (tn#132), independence x autonomy (tn#67), neural media (tn#217), thick imagination (tn#223), cybernetics and philosophy (tn#219), crossing the chasm (tn#107)

👠heroina

i love sevdaliza and her new era, bringing latin rhythms and artists, is fire. la joaqui is from argentina (which explains the use of my last name, turra, meaning slut in some latin countries). the glitchy latin vibe is so good, and i the lyrics are on point. it’s the first time i hear transvestigate in a song, and the international goddesses invocation is perfect.

also the video is so cool, her imagetic and sonic universe are so unique. i mean, i had never seen a mona lisa guillotine, what does that mean? it is directed by ukrainian director tanu muiño, who is making so many cool music videos.

Immigrant on the radio, off waist-hip ratio
You speculate, transvestigate, but I'm Tehran tailor-made
I could cut you with my jaw, so SWANA, uh
Chiselled like a Medici Madonna, uh
Renaissance, modern Mona Lisa
Hang me in the Louvre, La Sevdaliza
[Chorus]
Anahita, Saraswati, Afrodita, Mama Quilla
Anaideia, Arinnitti, Maya Devi, Heroina

brainsparks: transvestigation (tn#185), vendetta (tn#211), digital guillotine aka digitine (tn#173), alibi (tn#180)

🇧🇷funkiest music

this week, brazilian funk finally got its own category on beatport, and this video from pbs’ sound field appeared on my feed. it’s always a pleasure to see content in other languages about brazilian culture.

What happened when American Funk made it's way to Brazil? The answer is Baile Funk. Arthur L.A. Buckner explores the sonic, cultural and historical elements of these two genres and we speak with DJ Iasmin Turbininha about the future of Baile Funk.

brainsparks: amplified roots: tecnobrega (tn#213), beat diaspora (tn#125), amazonize the world (tn#153)

⚔️pop culture apocalypse

i talked about apocalyptic pop before, but more in the sense of the end of world theme in pop music. here,

Ted Gioia

goes on another route, sharinf The Four Horsemen of the Pop Culture Apocalypse, based on derek thompson’s talk with spencer kornhaber. the original link of derek’s explanation is here. i’m a fan when someone can rationalize and paint a picture of what is happening. the third point of isolation is something i’ve been feeling lately, and which i mentioned last week in curated coping mechanism (tn#224).

brainsparks: dopamine culture (tn#164), age of average (tn#115), nostalgia theory (tn#19), brain rot (tn#202), the new aesthetics of slop (tn#215)

🪱a compost theory of culture

protein is one of these agencies that even after so many years, they keep reinventing and bringing great reflections about these industries i’m somehow part of: communication, research, advertising, branding, etc. this time they reframe this moment of stagnated culture (along with slop, brain rot and enshittification), showing something else that is happening. and they do it while meta-recycling the rich work they’ve been doing and bringing 4 seasonal observations: garden time, back to nature, signs in the soil and the worm turn. you can read it here.

In the process of reaping what we’ve sown, we started to notice that culture is beginning to look a lot like compost. Because amid the muck, slop, brain rot and enshittification, something else is taking root: a recalibration and rewilding of the past, and the fertilisation of more hopeful futures.
We call this A Compost Theory of Culture.
It’s a way of understanding this moment as one of both cultural atrophy and regeneration. It challenges the idea that innovation is always about progress. Instead, it suggests that sometimes innovation is about decomposition – breaking things down to make space for something new to grow.

brainsparks: fermented content (tn#25), culture is not an industry (tn#203), futures garden (tn#107), rewilding (tn#164), the lazy report (tn#117)

📚social and cultural infrastructure

the syllabus shared this research and i had to click immediately. it’s a 50+ page report helping policy makers and others to understand what social and cultural infrastructures are, and its importance. i couldn’t read everything yet, but from what i read i already wanted to share this here, maybe it falls in the right hands <3.

Social and cultural infrastructure refers to the spaces and structures that bring people together and that can strengthen the social and cultural fabric of our communities.
The British Academy’s work in this area explores how social and cultural infrastructure can be understood and utilised by policymakers, and others, to reframe policy debates and to help achieve a range of policy aims.
A key component of work has been an investigation into how social and cultural infrastructure can be measured, and what a measurement framework could look like.

brainsparks: social infrastructure (tn#15), social health (tn#179), invisible epidemic (tn#202), the lifespan of loneliness (tn#159), the state of community (tn#196), post-individualism (tn#196)

see you next week, social butterflies 🦋✨

🫀✨thank you for reading The Nexialist. This post is public, so feel free to share these brainsparks 🧠✨

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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.

I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below:

thenexialist.xyz