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👖✨The Nexialist #0237

spider divination | greatest historical discoveries ‘24-25 | camera obscura | the moving image | whiplash culture | the discourse is broken | beyond fashion’s anti-woke era

Rodrigo Turra

Aug 7

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welcome to your weekly cyber-woven tea cloth, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-mail finds your eyeballs in a good moment. last week, we celebrated lgbtq+ pride in amsterdam and i’m still recovering (it rained and i might have had a few too many). i’m ectstatic that i could roam around the city, after all, i’m not wearing an ankle monitor and i’m not under house arrest. btw, i just learned recently about the word anklet — like a bracelet but for you ankle. i guess that’s it for today’s intro! i hope you enjoy 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🕷️spider divination

last week, i brought rare tarot cards to share with you, and the word ‘divination’ echoed with me, for its connection with the divine (i had never paid attention to it, i guess). this week, this aeon post appeared in my inbox and i had to click. i was so hooked on david zeitlyn’s anthropological accounts of how he was initiated as a spider diviner in the 80s, in a small cameroonian village, somié. the spider archetype and symbology fall in the place of weaving fate across different cultures, so it’s interesting to see that documented in another culture. david has been learning this for 40 years, and through analysing the mechanism of this divination process (from calibrating the spiders or crabs, cutting leaves as cards, sticks, and what their positions means, even for different spider diviners) he shows how we can think about decision processes. it’s also interesting to realize this shift in divination from nature (starts & spiders) to objects, and now, to technology.

In many forms of divination, randomness is important. Examples include bibliomancy (opening a holy text and picking a verse at random), tarot and other sorts of cartomancy (shuffling the cards and picking some at random), Yijing and Ifá (throwing coins or chains; picking up odd or even numbers of sticks or nuts), or African basket divination in which objects placed in a basket are repeatedly tossed in the air (those that settle on top are then interpreted to answer a question). The point of this randomness is that the diviner cannot influence the result, so the message from beyond can be heard without the risk of human manipulation and interference.
But I didn’t study tarot cards, astrology or Ifá. I learned to read the messages left by spiders. So, how do Mambila diviners in Somié generate meaning from ambiguous signs? How do they help people think through uncertainty, negotiate meaning and make decisions? And what might we learn if we took such practices seriously, not as curiosities, but as alternative systems of knowledge in their own right? In a world increasingly marked by uncertainty, divinatory practices can teach us how to decide, act and move forward.

brainsparks: tarot through the ages (tn#236), digital esoterism (tn#116), randomized life (tn#72), godgpt (tn#232), bugs like jewels (tn#234), homo-crustaceous (tn#233)

📜greatest historical discoveries ‘24-25

dr. david miano makes these videos about his favorite historical discoveries every year or so and i’m so happy he does (and that the algorithm showed this to me). it is so exciting to learn about our past and rewrite history all through new technologies. from machine learning analysis in existing archeological materials to find new dead languages, to using new methods of x-ray to read an unrolled charred scroll from pompeii. i was sad not to see any discoveries from the amazon, but then the videos from 2024 and 2023 had a lot of those.

my favorites were: a matrilineal society found in china; ice-core geochemical analysis showing lead pollution from ancient roman industries; signs of centralization and conscious de-centralization of mesopotamia challenging linear models of urban growth; and the quote from euripides in the charred scroll in pompeii: “ineptitude arises in prosperity.”

brainsparks: ancient amazonian root urns (tn#230), archeology of the future (tn#183), 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), history of surprises (tn#58), out-of-place artifact (tn#126)

🌈camera obscura

for centuries before we had photography, we had the camera obscura to fascinate us, an ephemeral magic-like technology that manipulated light into darkness, through an aperture. i first heard about this when passing through reddit: images from the outside unintetionally amplified on the wall through a beam of light. while it has never happened to me, i had to read this piece by julie park: Watching the World in a Dark Room: The Early Modern Camera Obscura. it’s a historical view on this technology, how it influenced science, art and imagination, and a reminder that new technologies don’t come out of the blue.

The camera obscura, a device known as the photographic camera’s predecessor, was originally the size of a room. As an artist’s aid for rendering perspective, a scientific model for understanding optics, and a source of popular entertainment, it furnished observers with all kinds of information during the early modern period. In the context of pursuing knowledge about the natural world — whether in studying the sun, the light it emits, or the very organ for seeing, the eye — alchemists, astronomers, and mathematicians turned rooms in their homes into camera obscuras for revealing what was previously invisible.

brainsparks: lighting class (tn#192), agathokakological (tn#171)

📺the moving image

once in a while we get reminded of reality’s malleability, and this peter b. kaufman does that just in the introduction of this text. so reading it felt like ~~breaking~~ peaking through the fourth wall (and wondering how the fourth wall is breaking us). he’s focusing on the US, but it should have global interest: how does “the most consequential medium of our time” does not have tools, systems and rulebooks to be cited, dissected and challenged like print?

“Reality,” Berger and Luckmann would explain, “is socially constructed,” by which they meant that you know what you know because you’ve learned it and reinforced it from the people and the messages circulating in the society around you. They drew on Marx and Nietzsche and Durkheim, but few people had stated this truth so clearly before. “[N]o human thought,” they wrote, “is immune to the ideologizing influence of its social context.”

what got me hooked was the groundlaying work: the influence screens have on the perception of reality. if in the 60s one television would be found in more them 90% of american households, now the average is 17 connected screens (tvs, desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile phones and game systems), projected to rise to 20 by the end of 2025. and the political, mediatic and technological aparatus seem to be so intertwined, becoming one.

The real project of this administration is to sever the public from reality itself — to plunge Americans into a TV-led and TV-fed collective psychosis.

brainsparks: the death of a fantastic machine (tn#231), when images matter more than reality (tn#155), deep doubt era (tn#193), fracking eyeballs (tn#150), super industry of the imaginary (tn#28), personal machines and portable worlds (tn#132), how reality got storified (tn#126), nexus (tn#199), self-fulfilling cyberpunk (tn#127)

💥whiplash culture

eugbrandstrat

A post shared by @eugbrandstrat

sometimes i like to bring things in the newsletter just to have them transcribed, to learn it and frame it inside my mind’s triplex. and this is the case here: i love Eugene Healey, and i appreciate his perspective on brands and culture.

Whiplash is the emotion that defines how our culture feels right now and brands are making it worse. […] This semiotic breakdown is the new normal. Meaning is in free fall when our context switches so violately with every scroll. We’re left in a culture where no one can make sense of anything, everyone has to process contradictory signals simultaneously. Luxury and suffering, irony and sincerity, progress and regression, all fighting for these same little piece of cognitive real estate. […]
But as brands, I think it's important to recognise how we play into this context and ask ourselves, do you want to feed this culture? With everything else that's happening, is this the pathway you want to take to relevance? Brands are the face of capital. Their primary responsibility is to make money. But how they do so matters, do you want to contribute further to contextual collapse for a headline? Or do you want to give people hope escape, community, a sense to this world, that is more than just cynicism and cruelty?

brainsparks: context collapse (tn#25), an apocalyptic meditation on doomscrolling (tn#135), schizo-fication of the online world (tn#217), channel drift (tn#60), quantitative validation (tn#199), dopamine culture (tn#164)

👖the discourse is broken

here i am talking about people talking people talking about the eugenics-coded sydney sweeney american eagle campaign. ANU places it in the regressive nostalgia trend, which is spot on. maybe the rage bait was not part of the strategy (new term for me, but exactly what has been annoying me)—the strategy did seem to be aimed at men, not its target customers… everything is a mess.

but i did enjoy charlie warzel’s piece for the atlantic, the discourse is broken. it describes the script to what happens when a campaing like this goes online, people want to give their opinions, about opinions, about opinions, many times devoid of dialogue, meanwhile the machine is working, and realities created/reinforced (spoiler alert, below is charlie’s closing paragraph)

Perhaps the impulse to label these predictable culture-war moments as discourse reflects a need to make all the anger and fighting mean something. Discourse suggests a process that feels productive, maybe even democratic. But there’s nothing productive about the end result of our information environment. What we’re consuming isn’t discourse; it’s algorithmic grist for the mills that power the platforms we’ve uploaded our conversations onto. The grist is made of all of our very real political and cultural anxieties, ground down until they start to feel meaningless. The only thing that matters is that the machine keeps running. The wheel keeps turning, leaving everybody feeling like they’ve won and lost at the same time.

brainsparks: on heteropessimism (tn#174), the perpetual infantilization of millennial women (tn#139)

🛑beyond fashion’s anti-woke era

MØRNING shared this, written by letty cole, also using the genes on jeans campaing as a starting point, while renting a canal house in my head. letty writes so well, so go read the whole text, but i loved this representation of the famous fashion pendulum, oscillating politically.

“Modernity is constantly in the process of becoming”, wrote the late philosopher Marshall Berman. “But in the midst of this becoming, it keeps revisiting the same fundamental dilemmas, the same basic structures of power, desire, and inequality.” In just two sentences, Berman describes precisely why fads and fashions have been stuck on loop for the last sixty years. As the ‘modern’ neoliberal order attempts to find the answers, we’re all destined to keep riding the same pendulum swings between differing ideas of an ideal world.
I’m loath to suggest that everything we wear is political (as Lee McQueen famously said in a 1997 interview, ‘fashion is not to be taken too seriously’). But there’s no denying it: the fashion industry is a merchant of ideas just as much as a merchant of clothes. It’s a process of revival and recontextualisation that sees ideas repeated and reimaged for every generation, one that’s become familiar to the point of memeification, from trend analysis tropes like the hemline index and the lipstick theory, to the much-discoursed nostalgia loops, cringe cycles and ’recession indicators’ that dot our feeds today.

brainsparks: 80 years cycle (tn#233), the roots of anti-woke (tn#171), žižek vs woke-ism (tn#141), innovation cycles (tn#54), fashion neurosis (tn#207), techno-fascism (tn#215), technocracy incorporated (tn#213), headed for technofascism (tn#213)

see you next week, diviners 🕷️✨

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👖✨The Nexialist #0237

👖✨The Nexialist #0237

spider divination | greatest historical discoveries ‘24-25 | camera obscura | the moving image | whiplash culture | the discourse is broken | beyond fashion’s anti-woke era

🕷️spider divination

📜greatest historical discoveries ‘24-25

🌈camera obscura

📺the moving image

💥whiplash culture

👖the discourse is broken