world music | tower of babel | fictional encyclopedism + pataphysics | ai will help us… leave social media | post-naive internet era | not needing to be seen | dark sky zoo

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Subscribe here for more 🛜✨The Nexialist #0252 world music | tower of babel | fictional encyclopedism + pataphysics | ai will help us… leave social media | post-naive internet era | not needing to be seen | dark sky zoo Rodrigo Turra Nov 20   READ IN APP   welcome to your weekly un-cursing newsletter-as-ritual, the nexialist hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this week, i’m a bit under the weather: amsterdam has been wet and temperatures are getting closer to zero degrees. i don’t have much to say in the introduction, so i’ll leave you to it. enjoy! 🫀 ✨ —Rodrigo Turra 🙏🏻the nexialist is a free newsletter, but consider going paid (or a one-time contribution) if you find this content useful for your life, soul or work. or invite me for a collab. read more at the bottom of this e-mail ✨ Upgrade to paid 1 year ago » 🦤✨The Nexialist #0200 : dendrochronology | more-than-human aesthetics | ecomodernism | program or be programmed | hypernormative | technologies for liberation | chromakopia 2 years ago » 👜✨The Nexialist #0148 : record-breaking renewables | deactivated power plant | portuguese time capsule: lena d’agua | saudade de você | oral 3 years ago » 🎪✨The Nexialist #0096 : Anne Imhof’s YOUTH | infoxication | content capital | bread and circus | sportswashing | rainbow flag as the enemy | the law of the instrument 4 years 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 Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️ 🌐world music rosalía’s latest album, lux, was released during my vienna visit and became my soundtrack while walking around. i have to say, the timing was perfect, as vienna is the world’s capital of classical music. since then, social media has been taken by analyses of her work/art and i’m living for it. rosalía is building a universe that invites listeners to step in, slow down, investigate, look for translations (of its 13+ languages), decipher meanings/symbols/references, all of that while invoking classical music and orchestral sounds into the pop world. that’s how you do it (this live presentation at the tonight show gave me chills). this analysis by Remi Carlioz is full of brainsparks and worth the read, because it extrapolates lux to expose our current soundscape/music industry: he calls out the simplistic “latin pop” categorization and how lux implodes the “filing cabinet” the industry offers. he defines lux for its grand architectural quality, defying pop’s requests to simply be content. there’s also the decentralized nature of it: different languages sung (including different spanish accents), different spiritualities, different cities/countries mentioned, different rhythms. and for these things (and many others) he wonders: Has Rosalía finally invented World Music? Not only cultures in dialogue but cultures as architecture. The grafting itself became the structure. You can’t extract the Catholic from the Islamic from the Jewish anymore. Imbrication isn’t the method, it’s what remains when separation becomes architecturally impossible. That’s what this album feels like. Confluence. All three Abrahamic traditions built into a single structure that refuses to be taken apart. brainsparks: berghain (tn#249), artistry + world building (tn#192), culture is not an industry (tn#203), triad of capital (tn#203), motomami (tn#63), let them eat lore (tn#243), reality hunger (tn#201), pan-genre blend (tn#75), syncretism (tn#44) 🗼tower of babel while visiting vienna i also got to see bruegel’s tower of babel in person: it was impressive, the level of details that you can just sit in front of the painting and still not pick up on all of its details: how small the city behind is, how the tower seems to be simultaneously falling apart and being built, how everyone is busy. little did i know this myth and this painting would also be conjured these days. a tweet by aoc, which praises nyc’s multiculturalism, got conservatives (and bots) using the tower of babel as an undesired symbol of chaos, forgetting god’s wrath came exactly from the people’s arrogance/prepotency of thinking they could reach heaven. a few days later Remi Carlioz used it perfectly in his lux piece: Walter Benjamin, in his 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator,” describes translation as tentative, messianic work: the work of re-gathering what Babel scattered. Not returning to a unity where everyone spoke the same language, but gathering the scattered fragments into constellation where they illuminate each other without collapsing into sameness. This is crucial: Benjamin isn’t mourning Babel. He’s saying the multiplicity of languages carries something the one language couldn’t. Each language touches truth differently. Translation’s task isn’t to erase these differences but to make their relationships visible. brainsparks: godgpt (tn#232), 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), invisible epidemic (tn#202), (post-)apocalyptic imaginary (tn#97), digital esoterism (tn#116) 📕fictional encyclopedism + pataphysics the syllabus shared this lecture at yale university and i needed to watch it. pierpaolo antonello takes us on a historical trip through the fantastic worlds of fictional encyclopedism. a while ago, i posted about codex seraphinianus (tn#34) and it’s one of the works he explores, along with leo lionni’s la botanica parallela and many others. recently, i shared a bestiary of the anthropocene (tn#211), which plays with this idea so well. it’s great to learn the term fictional encyclopedism and see how the human need to categorize the world around us AND imagining/fabricating fantasy, walk hand in hand. another term he mentioned: “Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects described by their virtuality to the lineaments. [...] Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one.” “Pataphysics [is] the science of the particular despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general” brainsparks: encyclopedia — circle of knowledge (tn#177), a bestiary of the anthropocene (tn#211), codex seraphinianus (tn#34), tentacular thinking (tn#34), art, science, futures studies (tn#210), centaur mindset (tn#106) 🤖ai will help us… leave social media Dimas Henkes gave us a crispy take on how ai will help us… leave social media, and i’m here for it, because it’s true. there is an undeniable fatigue in having to wonder if everything we’re seeing is real or synthetic, eyes rolling at cute but manipulated pet videos, grumbling at ai-generated stuff i didn’t ask for.. you know the drill. we already see signs of a social media exodus, and a shift towards touching grass, and human-made as luxury/desirable. his piece is full of references and signals, and it’s an easy-read. brainsparks: growing/dying internet (tn#248), dark forest theory (tn#10), non-toxic social media (tn#121), doomprompting (tn#244), hyperindustry of the atificial imaginary (tn#118), digital plastic (tn#236), synthetic media (tn#18), the new aesthetics of slop (tn#215), enshittification lifecycle (tn#106), synthetic porn (tn#242) 🛜post-naive internet era i know, it’s difficult to imagine a different internet from the one we have today. severin matusek, nick houde and paloma moniz show us more hopeful options with this post for the mozilla foundation: welcome to the post-naive internet era. they mapped initiatives from platforms, media, hubs and catalysts, showing how they offer more realistic and practical solutions, instead of idealistic ones. it does feel like a light at the end of the tunnel. But there’s new reason to hope. The grand idealism of the free and open internet might be over for now, but in its place falls a more practical mindset. Just like Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs are entering their “Hard Tech” era, the people building web alternatives are also entering their Post-Naive Era: building digital infrastructure based on a different set of values, structures and ideologies to serve their communities, and establish new conditions for how things operate, are produced and circulated. brainspark: groupcore (tn#248), make zines, not content (tn#245), releasing > posting (tn#210), content capital (tn#96), 4 c-words (tn#45), cultural production under capitalism (tn#93), public digital infrastructure (tn#157), digital garden (tn#227), capitalists killed the internet (tn#212), cloud capitalism (tn#214), technofeudalism (tn#143), netocracy vs. consumtariat (tn#18), digital feudalism (tn#136), superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28), fracking eyeballs (tn#150), parasite culture (tn#191) 🫥not needing to be seen “The New Cool Is Not Needing To Be Seen.” this post by the The Mercer Edition has been making the rounds and i like its idea: being cool in the age of surveillance and over-sharing. i might not be the main audience for it, as the pandemic + a facial paralysis years ago allowed forced me to recalibrate my digital presence, but still a necessary take. let’s vanish? Mystery is powerful because it creates anticipation. How would you feel if someone shared a birthday surprise gift before the surprise even happened? It is like giving someone a gift without wrapping it. Where is the fun in that. Oversharing destroys the boundary that separates your public self from the private self you actually live with. brainsparks: surveillance as love language (tn#209), panopticon aesthetics (tn#218), decadence (tn#242), cool people (tn#245), is cool dead? (tn#235), scene cool x internet cool (tn#239), does coolness still exist? (tn#30), anatomy of hype (tn#217), how to study culture (tn#232), counterculture x counter futures (tn#10), life after lifestyle (tn#91), gen z subcultures (tn#91), countercultureless society (tn#73) 🌚dark sky zoo i had never thought about this, but 24/7 lights have become normal for most of us city dwellers — and wildlife, of course. now the historic city zoo of amsterdam, artis, has become the first location in a european capital city to earn dark sky certification, restoring darkness in a light-flooded city. in a world taken by lights and screens, this piece of news was quite surprising, going against the grain. The initiative addresses a crisis that’s both pervasive and overlooked. The Netherlands ranks among the most light-polluted countries globally, with artificial lighting in urban areas increasing by 5 to 10 percent annually. According to DarkSky International, “In the United States and Europe, 99% of the public can’t experience a natural night.” This relentless illumination disrupts biological rhythms, disorients wildlife and affects human health, too. brainsparks: nature disconnection (tn#137), sleep as status symbol (tn#55), dark solarpunk (tn#40) see you next week, trumans 🫀✨ 🫀✨thank you for reading The Nexialist. This post is public, so feel free to share these brainsparks 🧠✨ Share ❓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: thenexialist.xyz You're currently a free subscriber to The Nexialist. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid   Share     Like Comment Restack   © 2025 Rodrigo Turra Amsterdam Unsubscribe