🏟️✨The Nexialist #0254

cultural vacuums | zeitgeist 2025 | subculture never died | trend reports 2026 | virtual zine library | stadiums as gardens | nutricionism

Dec 04, 2025

welcome to your weekly cyber-farofa, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well! we’ve entered 2025’s last month and the acceleration i’m feeling is real. i’d like to welcome the new subscribers, as there has been an impressive influx over the past month. there is quite some ground to cover, so i will leave you to it. enjoy this week’s nexialist 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🕳️cultural vacuums

Jasmine Bina shared this must-watch presentation on her substack (which has been my favorite timeline to navigate and discover) and it’s been living in my head. she’s a cultural futurist and the ceo of the concept bureau / exposure therapy and did such an inspiring and brainsparking talk at amazon about the age of potency: “how cultural vacuums and creative power are reshaping what brands stand for next.”

but what are cultural vacuums? they happen when our sources of meaning collapse beneath us, like giant sinkholes, they’re sudden, massive, destructive. they might feel hollow, but they’re never empty, they suck things down, such as distraction, noise and disorder, sometimes faster than the meaning can be replaced.

bina shared three cultural vacuums we have at the moment: work, trust and time, and mapped initiatives/projects/signals that people are building, showing us new possibilities of realities germinating underneath the chaos of culture. there have been so many signals i’ve shared here along the past months and years, so it’s satisfying to see how she found a way to strcuture this. below some notes i took for myself (i know, they are messy, so just watch her presentation):

work: when crypto can make someone rich overnight, lp1s (like ozempic) can exempt one from the hard work of dieting/exercising, and the tiktok-fication of everything can make anyone famous, work is decoupling from reward — and this is (was?) a core value in (western?) modernity.
people go on looking for meaning outside of work, partaking in different meaning-making activities: religiosity (god-gpt?), cosplay (or experimenting different “skins” or “cores” in their lives), community (or leaving it). it starts to look like play (freedom + safety + separateness = special rules emerge.) we are playing with meaning. generative force: play as meaning making
trust: we are missing a trust infrastructure both irl and internally. in the aftermath of the sharing economy and its enshittifcation. trust requires vulnerability and risks, and where are people exercising that? living funerals, rage rituals, disney adults. spaces that create distance from everyday norms. generative force: people are creating/visiting spaces where they are given the permission to connect deeply.
time: we are disconnected fro our past and future, living in an eternal now. temporal disintegration is when a series of acute experiences have made the comfort of our own pasts emotionally inaccessible. also people can’t see their future, so they don’t invest in it: spending money, not saving, there’s only now. there’s no shared rituals, no beginnings and ends. generative force: punctuating life with intense emotion.

brainsparks: rebranding trend research (tn#193), trends are bullsh*t. long live the trends (tn#190), namecore (tn#71), hoardiculture (tn#191), foresight as activism (tn#143), play-full future (tn#121), returning to church won’t save us from nihilism (tn#245), social health (tn#179), social and cultural infrastructure (tn#225), social infrastructure (tn#15), post-individualism (tn#196)

👀zeitgeist 2025

Daniel Parris asks (and answers with stats) an important question: what captures our attention in an algorithmic age? when we have fragmented cultural movements filtered through the kaleidoscopic prism of algorithmic personalization, it’s difficult to map what the zeitgeist looks like in 2025. here we see how collective culture has changed over the past 2 decades. i loved how he chose wikipedia as the steady place where people exercise their curiosity, and has been around for the whole period of analysis.

brainsparks: fracking eyeballs (tn#150), superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28), homo economicus = psychopath prototype (tn#248), a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163)

👨🏼‍🎤subculture never died

Patrick Kho shared this under this statement “I’m convinced that all the “subculture is dead” folks either (1) are 35-year-old brand strategists, (2) don’t leave the house, or (3) stay in nyc/la and never explore anything new.” it immediately reminded me of my last trip to brazil, exactly a year ago. i went to a few events/concerts with friends and made the comment to my friend Fabiano Carvalho: there is so much culture happening right here. i was happy to read he brought brazilian funk as an example (together with so many others). there’s

To illustrate: Brazilian funk, an electronic music subgenre, first played at parties in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro around forty years ago. Today, it’s sampled by artists like Cardi B and Travis Scott, and more often, it’s the backing-track-of-choice in widely-viewed TikTok anime edits featuring anti-hero characters like Sukuna from Jujutsu Kaisen. The garish trance-pop of Snow Strippers tells a similar story: Long before the duo’s singles like “Under Your Spell” and “Just Your Doll” started playing on every corner of the internet, they were mixing turntables in Clearwater (a city in Florida) and Detroit. A 2024 profile in The Face put it best, saying, “Snow Strippers … were born and raised in cities you’ve possibly never heard of. Now they’re the hottest new band in New York City.”

brainsparks: life after lifestyle (tn#91), gen z subcultures (tn#91), culture is not an industry (tn#203), cultural ice age (tn#243), hyper-optimization (tn#210), model collapse (tn#211)

📡trend reports 2026

talking about trends, you can already save this to your favorites: the compilation of all reports for 2026. there’s already more than 100, so go with caution and know how to filter. thank you again for the fantastic four: Iolanda Carvalho [Portugal], Ci En L. [Singapore], Gonzalo Gregori [China] and Amy Daroukakis [Everywhere].

brainsparks: hoardiculture (tn#191),hoardiculture, long live trends, trend reports 2025 matt

📓virtual zine library

thank you, fabio, for sharing this virtual zine library. to offset the trends reports, i’m sharing this huge collection of zines. it adds a little bit of friction with some vintage internet: no ai, hand-made, we need more of these collections!

brainsparks: make zines, not content (tn#245), releasing > posting (tn#210), content capital (tn#96), 4 c-words (tn#45), artistry + world building (tn#192), cultural production under capitalism (tn#93), the dead link dilemma (tn#248), digital garden (tn#227)

🏟️stadiums as gardens

@james_stew

James Stewart on Instagram: "🇹🇼🪴This old, abandoned stadium …

such a cool solarpunk solution that appeared in my feed this week: abandoned stadium turned into a community garden in taipei, revitalizing the part of the city which had been abandoned. instead of demolishing the stadium, taipei city used it as part of their push to create a garden city.

brainsparks: forest in the colosseum (tn#52), solarpunk and the end of capitalism (tn#40), can solarpunk save the world? (tn#97), designing an economy like an ecologist (tn#112)

🥗nutricionism

had this link saved and will leave it here, after talking about community gardens. you probably are also noticing the protein shakes, vitamin teas, collagen cappuccino (?) and other ultraprocessed wonders enriched with nutrients. and that needs to go. the concept of nutricionism sums this up very well.

Nutritionism is a paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet. In other words, it is the idea that the nutritional value of a food is the sum of all its individual nutrients, vitamins, and other components. Another aspect of the term is the implication that the only point of eating is to promote bodily health. The term is largely pejorative, implying that this way of viewing food is simplistic and harmful, and the term is usually used to label others’ views.

brainsparks: paradeiser (tn#251), pitanga aka surinam cherry (tn#109), history of popcorn (tn#137), tomato vs potato europe (tn#235), warmer climate, spiciers food (tn#145), snobbery vs. spicy (tn#193)

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