📜✨The Nexialist #0226

why ancient ruins are underground | nuevayol | racial admixture | shy girl | sola | erotic decisions | moral ambition | capability atrophy | fascism is here

May 22, 2025

welcome to your weekly (in)sanity check-point, the nexialistlucky

hey, you! i hope this message creeps into your mind like the above dance move is living rentfree in mine. this weekend, i was lucky to be in scotland with juan and our friend giacomo. we got to see edinburgh (so stunning, such a beautiful city with so much green and historical buildings), glasgow (and kylie minogue’s concert) and fort william, to enjoy some hiking, some sun and so many mountains and lakes. stunning! being in amsterdam’s flatness for so long, makes being around mountains quite an experience, they’re such an imposing and grandiose natural presences. also my legs were hurting in places i forgot existed. also, we were so blessed by the beautiful weather, and felt people were so sweet. so yes, i needed some of that. for this week’s nexialist we get the usual smorsgabord with some connecting dots, i hope you enjoy it! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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📜why ancient ruins are underground

we got to see edinburgh this weekend and it is full of historical buildings. even the iconic edinburgh castle has layers and layers of history below its majestic fortified walls, dating back to the bronze age or iron age. there is even a tour, the real mary king’s close (which we didn’t do) where you can visit the underground city.

the algorithm must have read my mind and showed me this video with nice animations answering a question i always have when visiting these places. how do cities get buried? is it done on purpose? and how many layers are there below?

There is no single reason why cities are built on top of each other. After the great fire of Rome in the first century most of the city had to be rebuilt. But instead of clearing away the rubble it was quicker and easier to simply flatten it out and build on top. This meant that new buildings were about a meter higher than the street. And so, to match the new height the streets were raised and resurfaced using rocks from the surrounding debris. With every fire and natural disaster that occurred, this process would repeat itself raising the city and leaving old ruins buried underground.

brainsparks: archeology of the future (tn#183)

🇵🇷nuevayol

i’m so excited i was able to get tickets to see bad bunny in 2026, and this is one of my favorite songs from the new album. for some reason it gives me chills, and i don’t even have the connection to the original song and its meaning. i went looking about the iconic reference for this snl presentation, lunch atop a skyscraper, and i had no idea it was a publicity stunt, and the identity of the photographer is still contested/unknown, as well as the identity of most workers.

Lunch atop a Skyscraper is a black-and-white photograph taken on September 20, 1932, of eleven ironworkers sitting on a steel beam of the RCA Building, 850 feet (260 meters) above the ground during the construction of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, New York City. It was a staged photograph arranged as a publicity stunt, part of a campaign promoting the skyscraper.

bad bunny’s new album, debí tirar mas fotos, is about memory. it’s not only a romantic invitation to nostalgia but he is also inviting us to move beyond that, leaning into our past and our history and not forgetting what has happened. the layers of rubble our society is built on top of.

you know i share plenty of content critiquing this hyper-nostalgic moment we live in, even though i see myself immersed in (and loving) it, however, last week’s post about a compost theory of culture (tn#225) reframed how i see this. yes, it stagnates culture, but it also shows we might be craving the (slower) speed of a time long gone more than anything.

brainsparks: DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (tn#208), old vs new music (tn#58), age of average (tn#115), most creative time ever (tn#183)

🇧🇷racial admixture

this research published on science is making headlines in brazil and it connects perfectly to this memory effort: “admixture’s impact on brazilian population evolution and health.” brazil is today the most miscegenated country in the world, and there hadn’t been such an extensive research to demonstrate that. they detected “>8 million previously unknown variants.” but it’s important to recognize such miscegenation was the result of the colonial invasions and processes.

genetically, brazil has 60% of european ancestry (predominant in the south/southest of brazil), 27% african ancestry (predominant in the northeast) and 13% of indigenous ancestry (predominant in the north and centerwest). brazilians also carry this history of violence on the genetic material:

In Brazil, 71% of male genetic heritage came from Europeans and 77% of female genetic heritage came from Africans or indigenous people, which research coordinator Tábita Hünemeier classifies as historical violence marked in our DNA.

something else i just learned is that admixture is a term with racist origins and should be avoided, as it is based on the assumption of purity.

…we argue that the concept of admixture as currently used assumes the existence of pure or unadmixed categories. These do not need to have actually existed but to be able to exist in principle. We argue that this is a problematic notion that accrues from the racialist origins of the term admixture, which, as a result, is based on assumptions about purity.

brainsparks: immigration in brazil (tn#151), reindigenisation x decolonisation (tn#140), the biophillia paradox (tn#122), ancestral future (tn#112), being black in brazil (tn#35), brazilianization of the world (tn#35), amazonize the world (tn#153), amplified roots: tecnobrega (tn#213), beat diaspora (tn#125)

🪭shy girl

talking about being immersed in nostalgia, this duo is releasing one hit after the other, serving cold-pressed nostalgia juice: 80s synthwave sounds with decadent rococo aesthetics, what is there not to love? if you check the comments, you see some people in their 50s loving it, so i do wonder if it hits the same euphoria for younger people.

brainsparks: scantily clad (tn#207), anti-superstar (tn#202), pink pony club (tn#198)

🌵sola

to bring some contrast, arca just released a couple tracks, sola and puta. and in my eyes she belongs to the scenius of artists that are looking to the present and future of music, without much of a nostalgic touch, so it is always inspiring to see that. it is also nice to hear what she has to say, like in this recent interview with zane lowe.

Well, speaking of challenge, I'd like to challenge that point of view that you just shared playfully, if anything, because I think each area like each focus of bringing a song into existence, which I wouldn't say is bringing something out from nothing. I don't think that that exists philosophically, nor in terms of process because we are all, you know, connected. The self is a collective, so to speak. Um, I strive to mediate my ego so as not to like stifle my growth. Sometimes I need to actually make stuff on my own to remember where I end and others begin in the studio. And then other times my growth will be um opening up and connecting with others and and collaboration.

brainsparks: chama (tn#190), maria lionza (tn#44), Яitual (tn#118), scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), witches and loneliness (tn#98)

✨erotic decisions

found this jem scrolling on substack (which has been filled with these).

Tamara

wrote such a beautiful and inspiring piece about that i needed to share it with you.

Life starts with erotic decisions.
Life doesn’t begin at birth. Nor at conception. Nor at some abstract marker of consciousness or legality. It begins, in earnest, at the moment of trembling recognition. When something stirs beneath reason. When you want something – or someone – without being able to explain why, and you choose to move toward it. That is the erotic decision. The moment that cracks open the script you have been given and offers you, terrifyingly, an alternative. Not necessarily better, certainly not safer…. but alive. And that is where life begins.

brainsparks: erotic intelligence (tn#1), the age of pleasure (tn#123), eroticism and self-care (tn#57)

🫀moral ambition

thank you, juan, for putting this on the car for us to listen during our trip. dutch author and historian, rutger bergman, co-founder of the school for moral ambition tells us about his book: ‘moral ambition: stop wasting your talent and start making a difference.’ you might remember his face/voice from his viral statement in davos last year, calling out phillantropy schemes and pointing to the real issue of inequality to tax evation. this interview is actually quite fun. i don’t think i’m exactly the audience for the book, but i do enjoy the concept and the reframing, to help high-achievers find purpose beyond our current kpis for success:

A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs. There’s an antidote to this waste of talent, and it’s called moral ambition.
Moral ambition is the will to be among the best, but with different measures of success. Not a fancy title, fat salary, or corner office, but a career dedicated to the best solutions to the world's biggest problems— whether that means tackling climate change, making pandemics history or fighting Big Tobacco.
In Moral Ambition, internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman reveals how our conventional definitions of success are harming us and the planet, and shows how we can shift the focus from personal gain to societal benefit. In the process, he explains, we will join a growing movement of pioneers who are already living out this ethos. They're the builders, the problem-solvers, the doers who have chosen a path less traveled. A guidebook to finding that path for ourselves, Moral Ambition reminds us that the real measure of success lies not in what we accumulate, but in what we contribute, and shows how we, too, can build a legacy that truly matters.

brainsparks: agentic sages (tn#225), hope canvas (tn#65), conscience and purpose (tn#49), the perfectionism trap (tn#38)

🦾capability atrophy

in the first year of the nexialist i talked about self-outsourcing age, and this term, capability atrophy helps explaing that. “As we outsource thinking, are we creating a generation unable to think for themselves?”

We call this capability atrophy, a quiet decay of skills driven by automation. The more we outsource our thinking, the less practice we get at doing it ourselves. The concept addresses how automated systems gradually erode human capabilities through disuse rather than design. Like muscles that weaken without exercise, cognitive abilities diminish when offloaded to AI. It’s particularly concerning because this atrophy happens slowly and almost imperceptibly – we don’t realize what we’ve lost until we suddenly need those skills again.

brainsparks: maximizing collective intelligence (tn#179), self-outsourcing age (tn#17), a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163), independence x autonomy (tn#67), ai is our ultimate test (tn#225), whisperverse (tn#194), neural media (tn#217), hyper-optimization (tn#210), neurorights (tn#132)

🫡fascism is here

once my friend

Douwe van der Werf

used a term that still sits with me today: we’re all collectively distracted. connecting this to outsourcing our thinking, i’ve been seeing a lot of posts from the us explaining why fascism is back. it didn’t happen out of the blue, the steps have been taken over the past few years. so we hear three experts in the theme and the reason why they’re leaving the united states.

Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.
In this Opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

brainsparks: headed to technofascism (tn#213), techno-fascism (tn#215), digital coup (tn#221), dictator questions (tn#218), technofeudalism (tn#143), technocracy incorporated (tn#213), 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)

see you next week, shy girls 🫀✨

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May 22

Yes, we are indeed collectively distracted while the ecosystem and the commons are being pillaged. We are now, besides 'consumers', also 'creators' and 'entrepreneurs' looking for likes and followers rather than truth, love and harmony. In this way, Aldous Huxley was right when he argued that we'd give our freedoms away for entertainment.

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