🦀✨The Nexialist #0233

80 year cycles | unthinkable futures | the technium | social change map | homo crustaceous | balenciaga covered eyes

welcome to your weekly inbox cleanse, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this week, there is not much to say, as i’m just getting prepared to escape to our yearly trip to paradise in iltaly. i’ll keep the intro short, because the rest of the newsletter got a bit longer than usual. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

1 year ago » 🤡✨The Nexialist #0181 : time of monsters | clown in mainstream | rose of the winds | she’s gone, dance on | sxo

2 years ago » 🧜‍♂️✨The Nexialist #0129 : merpeople | sereia | latin blood | blue mind theory | water slide | dirty words: community

3 years ago » 🍩✨The Nexialist #0078 : Deep Space | Everything, Everywhere, All at Once | Transitional Space | Meta Morphism | Sophistry | El Dorado | Data as The New Soil, not Oil

4 years ago » 🥚✨The Nexialist #0028 : Lil Nas X's Digital Fluency | Social Constructs | Men in the Media | Relearning Fertilization | Spiral Sperm | Super Industry of the Imaginary | Creative Effectiveness | Mafiosa

☄️80 year cycles

futurist peter leyden shares with how “we are living through the collapse of the old world, and the quiet construction of a new one.” for context, peter leyden and his co-writer peter schwartz, wrote a famous wired issue in the 90s called ‘the long-boom’ looking into the past and future technologies and their impact, from 1980s to 2020s. now, peter is looking to the next decades, and points to ai, clean energy and bioengineering as the techs that will push us in the next cycle. he talks about that in his newsletter and book ‘the great progression: 2025 to 2025.’

it’s quite fascinating and neat how leyden shows these bursts of innovation cycles that last ~25 years repeating every ~80 years: post-wwii (1945-1978), the gilded age (1865-1890), united states founding era - ending of the age of enlightenment (1787-1812). i haven’t read his book and i understand 15 minutes is not enough time to add nuance, but some things he shares did not sit well with me. i also do understand it’s a more techno-optimist perspective, but i can’t help but to contest some things.

the first thing is how the us/western-centric focus, still replicating colonial beliefs. the ways to measure progress are mostly in financial and economic terms, forgetting (maybe in his books/articles he shares that) that this progress came at the immeasurable cost of massacre of indigenous people, forced slavery and nature’s destruction and extraction. to build any new system, this needs to be acknowledged and not minimized/swept under the rug.

The Enlightenment is essentially a fundamental system change from a feudal society, kind of dominated by the Catholic Church and all that kind of stuff, into essentially what we would now consider the modern world. And they invented six huge things that we still are working within today. Now the reason I'm kind of saying that is that had world historic implications. That was a building of a civilization that we essentially invented. We humans but we Western Europe in basically a space of 120 years. The forward motion of innovation essentially from the west was coming with those crazy ass Americans who had this wide open continent to spread it to. And that is what America's role has been vis-a-vis the West in every one of those epochs.

the third thing is how techno-saviour this argument is, even repeating oversimplifying and misleading statements, arguing clean energy is a miracle because “we don’t have to dig” anything. let’s remember lithium batteries and solar panels depend on natural resources to be built, and ai is quite energy intensive.

This is the first time we have an energy source that is a technology. 100% a technology, not a commodity. We don't have to dig it up as coal. We don't have to tap into it as oil. Why is that important? Because once it's a technology, you can consistently drive down the cost. And there's a kind of a rule of thumb in manufacturing which if you double the number of producing solar panels, you will come up with about 20% of a drop in cost. And this is the point, it's going to keep getting cheaper. And the same thing flipping around the same thing with electric cars. People think, well, electric cars are still expensive and whatever. You're not thinking this through because battery technology is the same thing. That's in lithium batteries. We're now getting whole another generations of batteries like solid state batteries that essentially will be a next generation. But the point is the forward motion of costs coming down on clean energies is just beginning. And when that happens, you're going to have what? Abundant clean energy.

brainsparks: innovation cycles (tn#54), three elements of innovation (tn#75), critic of technology (tn#121), green colonialism (tn#145), the dirty road to clean energy (tn#97), cosmophobia (tn#135), the fordian slip (tn#191)

🤯unthinkable futures

thank you,

Michell Zappa

, for sharing this. apparently this was one of the favorite talks at the future days 2025, a few months ago in lisbon —and i can see why, it’s a must-watch. simon höher, from dark matter labs argues that the most radical futures are genuinely unthinkable. he explores many different cases and stories that move beyond western ideas, bringing questions, learnings and inspiration of new systems/possibilities. he also brings the term age of consequences, as this polycrisis moment we’re in resulted from past decisions. he invites us to think beyond binaries, as helpful as they can be, and to notice glitches in the system and understand how to design with them. in his words: what got us here won’t get us out of here. so we need to move beyond frameworks, linearity and silver-bullet thinking, even beyond imagination, to built new realities and communities. simon’s talk is full of brainsparks and left me exhilerated. below are the titles of 5 lenses to help with this exercise, and during his talk he brings real-world examples:

Sensing the invisible: rebuilding the sensing layer

Imagining the unthinkable: hosting benevolent parasites

Coordinating the ungovernable: aiming for the autonomous & aligned

Testing the Unplannable: creating unabling conditions

Learning the Unknowable: designing doubts

brainsparks: parasite culture (tn#191), thick imagination (tn#223), time for indigenous futurism (tn#65), polyfuturism (tn#158), protopia futures (tn#27), mono-capital to polycapital (tn#214), queering the future (tn#24), decolonizing foresight (tn#21)

🤖the technium

this was shared in the

Artificial Insights

community and i’m passing it on. kelly kelly co-founded wired magazine in 93 and since then has been a relevant and active voice in futures studies and emerging technology talks. now, i don’t agree with everything he says, nonetheless his experience, opinions, and analogies add much needed nuance to the polarizing tech conversations we have today.

Ray Suarez speaks with writer Kevin Kelly about our relationship with technology and its transformative role in our lives. Kelly explores ‘The Technium’ - the vast, interdependent technological ecosystem and our social approach to new technologies from a pan-historical perspective. Wisdom Keepers seeks to revisit the perspectives that help us make sense of who we are and where we are going, particularly in these turbulent times.

brainsparks: unsolicited advice (tn#70), amish tech (tn#21), scenius aka community genius (tn#31), vectors of intelligence (tn#194)

🗺️social change map

i saw a video by alyssa on instagram sharing this social change map by

Deepa Iyer

and it’s quite powerful. in this moment when we see systems collapsing, activism does not only mean ‘going to protests.’ so this tool shows other (not all) possibilities that are as important as that when participating in social change movements.

The social change ecosystem framework, developed by Deepa Iyer in 2017, is a tool to clarify values, identify roles, and support organizations, campaigns, and networks committed to solidarity, justice, and equity. It identifies ten roles that people and organizations often show up in (such as weaver, builder, and storyteller) when they are responding to crises, participating in social change movements, or organizing collectively to advance a campaign or a cause related to equity, justice, and solidarity. The framework has become a tool used by people and organizations, particularly during a time of unprecedented challenges, to find ways to engage in social change efforts more effectively, collaboratively, and sustainably.

brainsparks: foresight as activism (tn#143), zebras x unicorns (tn#65)

🦀homo crustaceous

this link came in my e-mail and i just had to click. this read is fun, strange at moments, insightful, and even scary in others. it’s a genius excerpt from michael garfield’s forthcoming book, How to Live in the Future. garfield stretches the meme that everything becomes crab, including us. well, at least metaphorically. the post is filled with beautiful imagery and memes, so it was right up my alley (or beach). from mapping our obsession with crabs in folklore and sci-fi, to the etymology and evolution, to our current philosophical crab-like behaviors, you’re in for a treat (a yummy crab-cake?)

Most modern humans live far from the ‘human climate niche’ in which our flesh could live unaugmented. Even in temperate regions, tools are required for survival. We need artificial skins in the form of clothing, thermally stable shelters, refrigeration to keep our foods from spoiling, and trade networks to sustain the movement of materials that all those products depend on. The way we live has led some theorists to argue that the human being is more colonial than individual: like corals inseparable from their reef, we are constantly being woven into the infrastructures we’ve made.

This scaffold is the shell (our ‘shelter’). It shields us from existential risks, including hail and asteroids.

brainsparks: how sci-fi has changed (tn#186), umwelt (tn#86), animal dreamworlds (tn#138)

👁️balenciaga covered eyes

to close today’s nexialist, i’m brining you one of the new songs by swedish pop artist, agnes. i don’t understand why people are not obsessed with this, the production is stunning, her voice is great, the fashion is incredible…

brainsparks: spiritual disco (tn#43), schiaparelli (tn#27)

see you next week, crabbialists 🦀✨

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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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