🎪✨The Nexialist #0096Anne Imhof's YOUTH | infoxication | content capital | bread and circus | sportswashing | rainbow flag as the enemy | the law of the instrument
welcome to another week of my cyber-patchwork, The Nexialist hello, everyone! i hope this e-mail finds you 1 year ago » 🛠✨The Nexialist #0046 : Tentacular Thinking | Tools for A System Thinker | Find True Belonging | Art, Science, Futures Studies | Mystic Truths | Trusting your Destiny | No Filter | Masculinity 🐎youththis week my friend Raquel and i decided to go to one of my favorite museums in Amsterdam, the Stedelijk museum, to see the exhibition by german artist Anne Imhof. YOUTH was supposed to be shown in Moscow, but it was canceled due to the war. i was quite impressed with what i saw and heard. the way it was designed brought us into an immersive experience, with lockers and other industrial elements, and made us feel the themes, sometimes even before we could confirm what they were trying to show. also, it was super cool; it felt like we were in some kind of movie or music video. the videos they created were excellent, as well as the music (there was even collaboration with Arca, who usually appears here). i was quite touched on how they worked with tensions that are pulsating in the zeitgeist and the youth, such as individualism x loneliness, freedom x pre-established routes, digital x IRL, and the emptiness despite the sea of stimuli. i took one of the introductions to share with you. if you’re around Amsterdam, i highly recommend it.
read: Anne Imhof Took a Risk Embracing Emptiness In Her New Work. It Pays Off Powerfully | ArtNet 🧠infoxicationthis week a term resurfaced in my inbox: infoxication. the e-mail came from coolbox and made me quite thoughtful: is the nexialist part of this infoxication movement? short answer: yes. and we all are.
also, the truth is that a lot of the time, this platform helps me organize my thoughts and create narratives with what i see around me, just like i’m doing at this exact moment. so please, remember to do that for yourself as well, on paper, online, or just in your mind. you’re also a nexialist 🤯 the discussion is not new, of course, and has been around for centuries. in fact, there's a lot about it. it was one of those Wikipedia pages that led me into a rabbit hole.
👨🏻💻content capitalwow. this short but powerful piece by Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker was quite brain sparking: how the internet turned us into content machines. it starts defining “content” as “digital material that may circulate solely for the purpose of circulating.”
it immediately made me think of the super industry of the imaginary (TN#28). another powerful term i learned here is to define the internet as a “living system.”
read: how the internet turned us into content machines | the new yorker 🥖bread and circusit made me think about how the term “bread and circuses” work when our lives are inseparable from this constant content production/distraction dynamic.
and that, of course, immediately brought me to one of the best albums in Brazilian history and the manifesto of the Tropicalia movement, Tropicalia ou Panis et Circensis (1968). in the song with the album title, they sing: but the people in the dining room are busy with being born and dying. i guess today’s update would be: but the avatars in the living room are busy scrolling down their feeds (?) ⚽️sportswashingThe Syllabus shared the open-access article Sportswashing: Media headline or analytic concept? by Michael Skey. greenwashing, pinkwashing, techwashing… now sportswashing. capitalism and its forces cannot leave anything alone and love to use whatever is in its reach to maintain its power and cover up its failures. again, bread and circus.
🌈rainbow flag as the enemyBrazilian journalist at World Cup says regional flag mistaken for LGBTQ symbol. you can see the supercute flag above, and it belongs to the northeastern state of Pernambuco. it was even elected the most beautiful Brazilian flag on twitter a couple of years ago. so… this Brazilian journalist was mistreated for having this flag, and i don’t know which other word to use other than pathetic. in their mission to show authority and control, they seem more like clumsy evil robots. i usually avoid showing my frustration and annoyiance here, but i have to. this happens in less than a week after ClubQ massacre, showing how we cannot normalize anti LGBTQ+ rhetoric 🤦 it made me think of…. 🔨the law of the instrument
I didn’t know it had a name, and now i do. if you see diversity and change as enemies, anything different from “normality” will be a target. i’m also quite guilty of doing that but in a more harmless level: i love trello and notion and many times i think they will solve a problem. many times they do though. see you next week, youngsters 🫀🫀If anything made your brain tingle, click like, and please share it with your friends. It helps The Nexialist to reach more curious minds.🥰If someone amazing sent it to you, tell them you love them, and you can subscribe at thenexialist.substack.com.❓If you want to know what a Nexialist is, click here.💌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: |
🎪✨The Nexialist #0096
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