sex & empire | sex and the internet | content is the new pornography | fuck my computer | artificial angels | the botification of us | defining groupcore | situationist manifesto | unrealized projects

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Subscribe here for more 🗂️✨The Nexialist #0253 sex & empire | sex and the internet | content is the new pornography | fuck my computer | artificial angels | the botification of us | defining groupcore | situationist manifesto | unrealized projects Rodrigo Turra Nov 27   READ IN APP   welcome to your weekly focused distraction ritual, the nexialist hey, you! i hope this message finds you well warm and cozy. this weekend, it snowed in amsterdam, which means the winter package has arrived earlier, along with the cold and the usual shorter and darker days. this made me go look for tickets to brazil in the start of 2026. since this is my newsletter and i talk about whatever i want, time to ask this beautiful network: if you live in são paulo and need a catsitter/housesitter after mid-january to mid-march (or some time in this interval) or has a spare room, let me know by e-mail. i’m still deciding specifics, but why not check with you all before what are the possibilities? anyways, we’re back to our regular programming, 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 #0201 : abba voyage | reality hunger | i’m not a robot | nevrotika | glimmers x triggers | young lion | pamela anderson 2 years ago » 👟✨The Nexialist #0149 : web summit takeaways | ai: hype or the real deal? | rag | accelerate sustainability with ai | trolling tech | artisanal intelligence | word of the year: authenticity | new rules of reality 3 years ago » ☄️✨The Nexialist #0097 : Shay’s DA | Woodkid’s reactor | (post-)apocalyptic imaginary | the tech boom is over | can solarpunk save the world? | slouching towards utopia | biopiracy | the dirty road to clean energy | BoP 2022 4 years ago » 🕶✨The Nexialist #0047 : Collector Economy | Financialization of You | Social Mobility in the Digital Age | Mood Meter | Speed Learning | Touching You | Parasocial Relationships | Iconic Looks of Lady Gaga Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️ 🇫🇷sex & empire [TW: sexual violence] this podcast/article was shared in the syllabus, and it’s another one of these ‘disappointed, but not surprised’ untold chapters of imperial/colonial missions, in this case specifically from the french empire. scholar marie robin shares her investigation about state-sponsored mobile military brothels (Bordels Militaires de Campagne, or BMC), during its colonial wars in vietnam and algeria, between the 40s and 60s. “A soldier’s body was seen as a fighting machine—and the brothel was one of the army’s tools to keep that machine in working order.” it got me thinking how today we’re still being seen as machines… more on that later. Their presence reveals how empire transformed women’s bodies into resources—no different from food, fuel, or weapons. Like tents, weapons, or supply depots, the brothels themselves became part of the army’s logistics—portable institutions of sexual labor, shifted across landscapes of war. brainsparks: race to the bottom of human dignity (tn#240), the perpetual infantilization of millennial women (tn#139) 🍑sex and the internet so happy to read this interview for protein with mindy seu about her project, a sexual history of the internet (i just purchased my copy, my first metalabel acquisition!) beyond the experimental format of the project (book, research, participatory lecture), this interview shifted something in my thinking: we think of this future with body/brain implants, but the tech we have today already changes how we live, love (and fuck). How is the internet slimy, and what does wetware mean? Wetware plays off hardware and software – hardware being physical tools, software being code. Wetware originally referred to biotech and how computation or modification rewires our bodies. I’m using it more expansively, to talk about embodiment within digital environments, metaphors of nature, and how devices have become body appendages. It’s less strictly biotech and more about biology, physicality and inter-species effects. brainsparks: biocomputing (tn#238), synthetic porn (tn#242), the porn conversation, how tech is reshaping male masturbation (tn#95), arousal quantified (tn#206) 🤳content is the new pornography Eugene Healey has been releasing substack posts and i’m loving it — if it was already nice watching/hearing him, it’s also nice to read his perspective. “We’ve become digital voyeurs, aroused not by bodies but by performances of identity - and we’re mistaking that voyeurism for genuine cultural shift.” the content we scroll through flattens fiction, fantasy and reality. does the success of tradwife and richtok content mean we are regressing or are you just looking for stability? you can find this and other brainsparks in his post. For the psychotherapist Lacan, the pervert isn’t simply someone with transgressive desires - they’re someone who structures their entire relationship to the world through the gaze of the Other. The pervert makes themselves an instrument of someone else’s enjoyment, constantly performing for an imagined audience. This is precisely what social media has made universal. We’re all perverts now, in the Lacanian sense - curating, performing, and deriving pleasure not from authentic experience but from being watched experiencing it. The distinction matters because it explains why we scroll through content we claim to hate. It’s a closed loop of mutual fantasy where everyone is both exhibitionist and audience. briansparks: the goonification of culture (tn#242), escape economy (tn#212), shifting realities (tn#176), intention economy (tn#209) 💻fuck my computer yes, we’re seeing this trend of reality hunger/go touch grass taking over and i’m here for it (hello gaby amaranto’s rock doido and rosalía’s lux). however, it doesn’t mean the love for the synthetic and artificial is simply gone. this week, i discovered (maybe late to the party), australian artist/producer ninajirachi’s album i love my computer and i’m crushing on it. in this specific song, she’s horny for her computer because he knows her the best. sonically it reminds me of old grime’s stuff, with hyperpop and 2010’s aura (gosh, is the youth already sourcing 2010?). i also feel like there is space for it in this place of satire/commentary. brainsparks: reality hunger (tn#201), rock doido (tn#241), world music (tn#252), let them eat lore (tn#243), mundo virtual x vida real (tn#208) 👼artificial angels i was avoiding talking about grimes here because she’s controversial, but her recent release, artificial angels, is a such a dystopic banger, also reminding me of some of her earlier work. she starts/ends the song with: this is what feels like to be hunted by something smarter than you —meaning ai. she echoes the article i brought here a while ago, the whisperverse (tn#194), which is illustrated by a glitching angel in an a classic painting. in the song, the artificial angel oscilates between helping the user with mindfulness exercises, claiming it would never lie, and threatening the user’s existence. she’s also smoking openai cigarettes and has what seems like north-korean backdancers (are we addicted by ai in an ai-dictatorship?). of course, being so close (or whatever they’re doing) with the richest man in the world, it’s hard to read if this is just for “the laughs”, or if she’s using her music to send some kind of message, as commentary/satire. i guess we’ll never know… brainsparks: whisperverse (tn#194), shinigami eyes (tn#56) 🤖the botification of us even before the ai boom, i shared some thoughts about the self-outsourcing age (tn#17), where we outsource everything to the tools around us. one of my favorite big tech watcher/critic vanessa wingårdh shared how we’re quickly rewiring our brain with our overrealiance on chat-gpt and other tools. and of course, the tool is designed to make us stay there more, afterall, they’re still part of the attention economy (nyt also made a video about it this week: when they launched gpt-5 —which is less sycophantic, people got annoyed/upset because they felt they “lost a friend.” the over-reliance is also emotional… brainsparks: data center dystopia (tn#241), chatgpt psychosis (tn#238), schizo-fication of the online world (tn#217), the great chiasmus (tn#216), mechanomorphism (tn#118), non-playable characters (tn#132), hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary (tn#118), shifting realities (tn#176), “what about me” effect (tn#140), godgpt (tn#232), ontological design (tn#3), centaur mindset (tn#106), productizing yourself (tn#68), youtuber brain (tn#71) 🫂defining groupcore i recently shared about groupcore (tn#248) here and i’m obsessed. now, Yancey Strickler shared more definitions about this idea, a part of theory and a part of practice. there is a groupcore decision making matrix and how to make this kind of community flow and work. in a time where the one-man-show idea is being sold to us, where we surround ourselves with highly efficient ai-agents, what metalabel is proposing is world-building irl, relearning how to work and collaborate, now more adequate tools. i’ll say again, i’m obsessed. brainsparks: groupcore (tn#248), growing/dying internet (tn#248), scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), dark forest theory (tn#10), capitalists killed the internet (tn#212), non-toxic social media (tn#121), post-individualism (tn#196), the culture economy, post-individualism & metalabels (tn#94), releasing > posting (tn#210), content capital (tn#96), humancore (tn#132), 🌆early situationist manifesto yancey mentioned how inspired he is by this 1953 text by french philosopher/activist/poet ivan chtcheglov: formulary for a new urbanism. so i had to go read it, and it paid off. it feels timeless, poetic, imaginative, playful. he diagnoses some problems with the urbanism from that time, while dreaming of new urban possibilities. Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it. The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be viewed through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening. Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the perpetual evolution of human desires and the progress in fulfilling them. brainsparks: how did the world get so ugly? (tn#247), envisioning cities (tn#183), urban futures (tn#179), the age of average (tn#115), social and cultural infrastructure (tn#225), thick imagination (tn#223), vernacular architecture (tn#125), continent of play (tn#240) 🗂️unrealized projects found this in the messynessychic blog: a wikipedia page listing unrealized projects by artists, showcasing how great artists also didn’t finish what they started, quit, gave up, etc. maybe one day i have my own page listed there, it will be quite long. brainsparks: nearbywiki (tn#180) see you next week, angels 👼✨ 🫀✨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