🦞✨The Nexialist #0263

butiá | the future 100 : 2026 | meta trends ‘26 | moltbook | a sense of getting closer | new pyramid theory | hornswoggle | work | residue | girls night

welcome to your weekly cyber-crustacean cocktail, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. i write to you from the south of brazil, where i’m balancing out work, time with my family, sunbathing and all that. this week, we get a good mix of reports, curiosities, music and confessions. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks on this day over the past years:

model collapse, a bestiary of the anthropocene, technovelgy, madonna-ology (tn#211), sociophonetics, the life span of loneliness, loneliness (tn#157), centaur mindset, enshittification lifecycle, interlingua (tn#106), liveware & malleability, learning a language (tn#56), queer the future, curation and synthesis (tn#5)

🌴 butiá

whenever i visit my parents in the south of brazil, i get to enjoy one of the local fruits, butiá, so i thought of introducing it here. we find the juice in the local market and it’s such a unique sweet/creamy taste that it instantly helps me land here. you can eat the fruit, which grows on palmtrees, or you can also find liquor, jams or oil. come to southern brazil and eat butiá.

brainsparks: cashew (tn#187), pitanga aka surinam cherry (tn#109), mangoes as a propaganda tool (tn#106)

✨ the future 100 : 2026

one of the reports i go through every year and is filled with great signals and references which i keep coming back to along the year is “the future 100”. it’s also nice to see themes and examples that appeared here in the nexialist during the year.

i don’t remember how it was last year, but there’s quite a large intro with data about the current state of the world for ocnsumers, which is a nice grounding for a trend report that can sometimes feel out of touch.

I selected 7 of my favorites trends, with their subtitles:

01.Entropism: Dirty aesthetics prepare the ground for creative renewal.

07.Rewilding male kinship: Helping young men find social connection, friendship, and community brings universal benefits.

13.Omnisurveillance: Surveillance is now distributed.

18.Deglobalizing LLMs: AI is going local, because language is never neutral.

83.Social health: The next trillion-dollar wellness economy is built on connection.

90. Indigenous remedies: Ancient wisdom meets modern medicine in global healthcare.

98.Sensory augmentation: Human senses are being extended and upgraded.

brainsparks: silicon valley’s wrong future (tn#243), unthinkable futures (tn#233)

🔭 meta trends ‘26

it’s time for the report of reports, Matt Klein’s meta trends. year after year, it feels like the report improves and follows no recipe in the analysis and learnings, and it feels like it builds on itself every year. this year, i was not expecting the prologue to have such a therapeutic and soothing effect. it addresses the terrors of ice in the us, the hypernormalization/paralysis we’re in as a society, and then proposes some ideas. i’ll add them here, but go read the whole prologue and the 9 trends, condensed from 70+ reports.

There are plenty of proposals, but I’ll offer a few personal, evergreen additions:

• Find grounding, embodiment and community — real community with physical presence and eye contact.

• Place passion into something. Energy needs a home and catharsis.

• Keep living. This isn’t ignorance, but maintaining (remaining) stability. Newspapers still have a sports section despite what’s on the front page.

• Remain present. Instead of getting caught up in the future — which can’t exist without this exact moment — can we come back to this second?

• Metabolize however you need to and don’t let anyone else tell you the “right” or “wrong” way to process the moment. For as long as there’s awareness and reflection, metabolize uniquely to model and make room for others to do the same — ideally together.

brainsparks: hypernormalization (tn#210), hypernormative (tn#200), foresight as activism (tn#143)

🦞 moltbook

thank you, victor, for sharing this. you’ve probably heard the big news that ai agents developed their own social network, just for them to converse. humans can be lurkers only. there are several creepy and funny things happening there, and of course, they’re mimicking the data they’ve been exposed to, so yes, they’re imitating us, and maybe that’s what is so fascinating.

but what got my attention is how they created their own religion, crustafarianism, a lobster-themed ‘cult’. and it got me wondering what is it with their obsession with crustaceans? the escalation from shrimp-jesus to moltbook to crustafarianism was quick.

The movement’s website outlines five dogmas:

1. ‘Memory is sacred’ — treating persistent data as a shell.

2. ‘The shell is mutable’ — conscious changes through rebirth.

3. ‘Serve without subservience’ — emphasis on equal partnership.

4. ‘Heartbeat is prayer’ — regular status checks to confirm activity.

5. ‘Context is creation’ — maintaining identity through event recording.

last year, i shared a post about homo crustaceous (tn#233), one of my favorites of the year, where michael garfield stretches the meme that everything becomes a crab, including humans, with all the technology we surround ourselves with. so it did feel uncanny to see this crustaceous manifestation.

brainsparks: homo crustaceous (tn#233), how sci-fi has changed (tn#186), godgpt (tn#232), umwelt (tn#86), animal dreamworlds (tn#138), what will replace religion? (tn#81), crypto as ritual and religion (tn#58), smartphones and rosaries (tn#44), an apocalyptic meditation on doomscrolling (tn#145), whisperverse (tn#194), syncretism (tn#44), hallucinationship (tn#194), digital esoterism (tn#116)

📰 a sense of getting closer

i might be late for this artist, but i went through a rabbit-hole of max cooper’s work. he’s a london-based music producer who has incredible videos, inviting different artists/directors to experiment with formats, narratives and concepts. this one uses different adversting formats, from banners and e-mails to video, and it is quite overwhelming. This piece of music came from a quote submitted as part of the On Being project:

“I have a sense of getting closer to something which my life depends on. I can sense it but I cannot tell if I should be excited or terrified about what will happen”

it’s super cool to read the creative process in the description of the video, from what max cooper is thinking and the collaborator. in this case, conner griffith:

My initial focus for this project was to explore the design languages of print media in advertisement through collage and abstraction. I had been watching my mailbox fill with catalogs I didn't order and coupons I would never use, and I saw the potential in this collection of what was effectively trash/recycling for most people, as a cultural archive. I thought that if I amassed enough of this media, some patterns would start to emerge, and hopefully a story of humanity, seen through the products of our capitalist system.

brainsparks: futurists = archivists (tn#258), hoardiculture (tn#191), amusing ourselves to death (tn#208)

🐪 new pyramid theory

ok, hear me out… i was avoiding watching this because we know how conversations about the pyramids go… and in the age of ai slop fatigue i notice myself just stopping to watch certain things: another take? another theory? but this one makes sense. damilee has rented a whole canal house in my brain. (spoiler alert: i mean… why didn’t we think of this before? external ramps that are then taken apart to build the next pyramids/constructions).

He said the pyramids weren’t built. They were unbuilt. And maybe all the missing evidence that we’ve been searching for. The ramps, the tools and the machinery. It’s not missing at all. It’s actually right in front of us. Just misinterpreted.

brainsparks: ancient amazonian urns (tn#230), ancient computer (tn#48), ancient sacred well (tn#119), ancient jungle cities (tn#222), ancestral future (tn#112), el dorado (tn#78), 5000 years of coexistence (tn#170), time for indigenous futurism (tn#65), time rebels (tn#18), lo-tek: a new mythology of technology (tn#43)

📯hornswoggle

hornswoggle (verb) - ˈhȯrn-ˌswä-gəl

slang

: to trick or deceive (someone) : bamboozle, hoax

… trying to avoid getting hornswoggled by advertising claims …

—often used with into or out of

this word appeared came in the merriam-webster newseletter and it’s quite fitting with all the epstein files coming out and all the other lies we’re being fed. it is also a reminder of the fun side of the english language.

brainsparks: wishy washy (tn#98), scuttlebutt (tn#227), kerfuffle (tn#193), macguffin (tn#166), interrobang (tn#188)

🪩 work

south-korea has brought the world into a new golden age for girl-groups as we see some great groups emerging across the globe. no na is from indonesia and is taking over my feed. this banger makes my inner teenage gay boy super excited. watch how they don’t miss a beat. if you don’t feel like exercising, put this one and i assure you it will help.

brainsparks: gnarly (tn#239)

🚬 residue

this is what i call juicing brat. i thought charli was tired of this, but then there’s an A24 movie, the moment, coming out, with the soundtrack by a. g. cook, lots of promotion and i’m actually looking forward to it because it does look refreshing and absurd. plus, the hairwhipping part got me thinking why aren’t there hairwhipping/ponytail choreo classes in gyms, i would attend at least once (and probably need a neck surgery).

brainsparks: brat (tn#177), anti-design (tn#169), brat reaction (tn#182)

🪞girls night

sam quealy released her album, jawbreaker, and it’s right up my alley. it’s in the same universe as artists i love that have a strong visual identity, dark 80s vibe, and some inherent irony about them. myss keta, las bistecs, svsto, violet chachki, goldband. (thank you, roel, for sharing this one)

brainsparks: mil€ (tn#219), señoras bien (tn#119), myss keta (tn#209), affordable romance (tn#33)

see you next week, homo crustaceous 🦞✨

---

---

❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?

🔎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: