Episode 247 — August 13th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/247

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.”

— Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1986)

💎⚾ Crystallized insights from the baseball diamond

It’s an old adage that’s drilled into the head of every young baseball player: “Never make the first or third out at third base.” That is, if you’re standing on second base and deciding whether to steal third – or if you just hit a double and are thinking about legging it out to third base – only do so if there’s one out in the inning (and not zero or two). It’s an oddly specific strategic rule of thumb, but its accuracy is generally borne out by the data.

Though the rule is easy to remember and easy to follow, the trouble comes when a kid asks their coach why it’s true. Most likely, after some fumbling around with rules and partial explanations, the exasperated coach will just have to ask the kid to trust them.

The actual explanation is interesting in its own systems-y way; we’ll mention it at the end of this episode.^[1]1 The upshot is that it takes several minutes to explain and even more time to digest; requires balancing risk and reward probabilities at various game states; and demands an intuitive feeling for the game that your average six-year-old just won’t have. And when you’re hustling hard toward second base, helmet flying off, you typically don’t have the luxury of time to piece together the optimal strategy.

As a result, it’s much easier for everyone to just memorize the one-line catchphrase. This is the advantage of mental shortcuts, or heuristics: they let you compress a hard-to-calculate insight into a clear and easily applied rule. We use these shortcuts every day, from matching our belts to our shoes to not dishwashing our cast-iron pans. We could rediscover everything from first principles or sift through piles of data, but we typically find that the shortcut is good enough and our time is better spent elsewhere.

Of course, the downside of just knowing the rule – without the full logic chain that produced it – is that your reasoning is brittle and not able to adapt to altered situations. Normally you shouldn’t steal third with two outs, but what if there’s a runner on first as well? What if you’d be the tying run? What if the current batter hits a lot of grounders? Armed with our adage alone, you’d have no idea what to do. You couldn’t possibly memorize a special version of the rule for every conceivable situation; at a certain point the scale tips and it’s more efficient to know the game well enough that you can reason through things from the ground up. This is the advantage of intuition and experience: they help you handle novel situations that no heuristic could possibly cover.

The other drawback of relying on shortcuts is that sometimes the underlying logic or facts shift and the shortcut gets “stale”... or sometimes we realize that the conventional wisdom has always been wrong. With modern dishwashers, it’s actually okay (or perhaps better) to not pre-wash your dishes. The old advice about booking flights on Tuesdays no longer applies thanks to airlines’ evolving pricing algorithms. And baseball diehards know that lineup construction has changed due to analytics and new rules: you now want to put your best batter second instead of third or cleanup.

And yet, despite all the flaws of mental shortcuts, we keep turning to them. These crystallized nuggets of advice provide a clear, memorable punch of knowledge that’s still close enough to the complex truth. Perhaps more importantly, they’re easy to transmit – so we end up picking up a lot of them from our parents, teachers, and coaches. That’s the beauty of (lossy) compression, just as it’s easier to email a ZIP file than a giant document or transport a boxed-up air mattress than the unwieldy, inflated version.

Still, we have to revisit these rules periodically and know when to build out our own mental machinery instead of relying on received guidance. Sometimes, it’s helpful to be like that persistent kid who’s always asking their coach “why”: you’ll come away with a more flexible strategic mind, and you might just overturn the conventional wisdom while you’re at it.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🎓 Physics PhDs are leaving the US at record rates

New data shows that nearly 30% of graduates of American physics PhD programs left the country in 2025, the highest rate in 30 years; what’s more, 12% of US citizen graduates departed, a significant increase from 9% the previous year and 5% the year before that. Similar recent studies on brain drain have found that physics and astronomy programs in the US have seen sharp declines in enrollment, and that young biomedical researchers have been leaving the US at increased rates as well. Policy changes are a likely factor – such as restrictions on student visa length, deep cuts to science funding, and rumored $100k fees that may be coming to the OPT visa that many PhD grads use.

🚏🩶 Cars and houses are becoming increasingly gray and beige

American cars are becoming increasingly monochrome: the share of new cars in grayscale colors rose from 60% in 2004 to 80% in 2023, as production of purple cars dropped by 93% and gold by 97%. Observers have noted similar patterns in houses from San Francisco to DC, where gray, white, black, or beige façades are taking over neighborhoods formerly dominated by colorful Victorians. (Small wonder, then, that the top paint colors from Sherwin-Williams include “Crushed Ice,” “Agreeable Gray,” and “Universal Khaki” – the last being its 2026 “color of the year.”) Designers think one psychological reason for the shift to neutrals is “cocooning,” where customers seek safety in purchases: they’d rather have a bland color than a bright one they might regret later. And in a world with ultra-expensive cars and houses, people may also prefer inoffensive colors to avoid risking their items’ resale values.

🚏🌋 Energy IPOs are booming amid the AI datacenter buildout

Semiconductor and memory stocks have cooled down in recent months, so the “picks and shovels” strategy of investing in AI infrastructure has shifted to companies providing power to datacenters, such as those building geothermal or nuclear plants or those making transformers and other electrical distribution equipment. The first half of 2026 saw energy firms raise a record $12.6 billion in IPOs. However, many of these now-public companies are still building experimental technology that’s not commercially viable, and they may be overvalued, as many new energy stocks have seen swift valuation drops shortly after going public.

🚏🧀 An Italian cheese wheel bank is threatened by climate change

One bank in northern Italy stores nearly half a million wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (worth over 300 million euros) in a giant vault. Dairy farmers give this cheese as collateral for loans they take out; they often need cash advances because the cheese wheels take years to age. But the famous cheese bank is under threat as heat waves across Europe are forcing it to spend ever more on cooling systems and insulation, not to mention that hotter temperatures make cows eat less and thus produce less milk.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Fighting Fire With Fire: Scalable Oral Exams With an ElevenLabs Voice AI Agent (Panos Ipeirotis) — To combat the ease of cheating in any take-home exam, an NYU prof deployed AI voice agents to conduct oral exams at scale utilizing a “Council of LLMs” to triangulate grades. While students found the format stressful and preferred written tests, they conceded it was a more accurate measure of understanding. But will this format accidentally select for oral charisma rather than deep knowledge?

• BRICS in 2025 (Phenomenal World) — Argues that you can get a glimpse of the post-American future by looking at BRICS, the loosely aligned grouping of developing economies consisting of Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and Egypt. They’re reorienting to an economy built around green energy, electrification, high-tech manufacturing (from EVs to robots to AI), dedollarization, and diverse trade partnerships. As the US moves back toward fossil fuels and protectionism, you can increasingly see the two worlds pulling apart.

• Is Switzerland Tired of Prosperity? (The Guardian) — De Weck argues Switzerland’s looming referendum to cap population/immigration is self-sabotage: openness, not control, built its prosperity. He invokes Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks framing that prosperity breeds complacency, eroding the pragmatism that built it, and notes that Nestlé, Swatch, and Novartis, the most “Swiss” of institutions, were themselves built by immigrants.

• Preliminary Theory of the In-Group Contrarian (Outsider Theory) — Applies philosopher René Girard’s mimetic theory (where we desire what we see our group members desiring) to social media, exploring how many platforms see the rise of an “In-Group Contrarian,” who shares the values of their broader group but objects to certain actions. The group may love to pile on the contrarian, but they can rarely expel them, because “hatred of the [contrarian] can become one of the main things that binds the in-group together.”

🧩🕹️ Systemic tools and toys

Games, gadgets, demos, and other nifty interactives to stretch your systems-thinking capacity.

By 2080, the climate in New York City will feel like that of modern-day central Arkansas; Bay Area residents will feel like they’ve moved to deep SoCal. That’s what a fun interactive map from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science shows: pick anywhere in the world and you’ll see what current-day location matches its projected 2080 climate, assuming we don’t get emissions under control.

It’s interesting to click around and see which areas will be affected the most or the least. For instance, you’ll see huge “movements” in eastern North America and central Europe, but hardly any around coastal South America or South Africa. Try to find surprising shifts – we won’t spoil the result, but try clicking on Miami, Shanghai, or the Yucatán Peninsula. For an extra shock, try clicking anywhere in the Amazon basin, Singapore, or the Persian Gulf.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 246 — August 6th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/246

Contributors to this issue: Dart Lindsley, Ade Oshineye, Jasen Robillard, Boris Smus, Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, MK

Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“We know they lie, they know we know they lie, they don’t care. We say we care, but we do nothing. And nothing ever changes. It’s normal.”

— Adam Curtis, Hypernormalization

👉👈 I know you know I know

Look at that chart. The numbers are baaaaaddd. We all know it. But no one says so. It’s not ignorance. It’s a failure of our shared reality. We all know the project is in trouble... but until someone (or, perhaps, the right someone) says it aloud, the status quo is frozen.

If I know something, it’s individual knowledge. If everyone knows, it’s mutual knowledge. If we all know we know, it’s common knowledge. These layers of knowing seem academic, but our social lives depend on our deep and often intuitive knowledge of them. (Here’s a useful video on these topics.)

When something becomes common knowledge, such as through a public announcement, it changes what people can safely assume. It can create a Schelling point, where we not only can make a decision, but can generally expect people to reliably do the same thing, such as exiting a building when an alarm goes off.

Mutual knowledge can still be valuable. If we all know the goal we’re pursuing, then we can row in the same direction. Yet it is also the realm of kayfabe, where we all act as if something is true even though we know it’s not. That’s our bad chart example. Kayfabe isn’t exactly a lie. It’s more a coordinated agreement about which truths are allowed to have power.

When the shared fiction becomes common knowledge, its nature can change. Sometimes that’s a positive. Imaginative play is fun because we’re all buying into the “lie” that the couch is a submarine or the floor is lava. In organizational settings, though, it can drift toward an open secret. Everyone knows that (nearly) everyone knows... but they lack permission or power to change it.

Systems built on open secrets can look stable... but only because everyone is avoiding conflict to keep the machinery moving. At small scales, this can be functional. We all know that some processes are low value but not worth the effort to change. The trouble begins when the shared fiction prevents the group from updating its knowledge or actions as circumstances change. People begin optimizing for what wins them success in the game rather than what creates success in reality.

This can become costly, even more than a falsehood. A falsehood can be corrected. An open secret recruits everyone to its maintenance. And the more people who are involved in the maintenance, the harder it becomes to be the person who speaks up.

When coordinating people, it’s not enough to think about what you know or even what we know. We need to understand what’s common knowledge—and notice when that shared understanding gives us room to act. Which facts in your world are merely known? Once something becomes sayable, the group gains more choices about what to do next.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏😈 Japan made “cruelly hot day” an official weather category

The Japan Meteorological Agency uses memorable terms for warm days to encourage residents to protect themselves: days above 25° C are “summer days” (natsubi), 30° C days are “midsummer days” (manatsubi), and 35° C days are “extremely hot days” (mōshobi). But with temperatures above 40° C (104° F) becoming common in Japan—the country topped 40° C on nine days last year – the JMA has introduced a new word for days above 40° C: “cruelly hot day” (kokushobi). The term is already coming in handy as Japan suffers under another heat wave: the country reported five straight kokushobi in July, and nearly 11,000 people were hospitalized due to heat-related illnesses in a single week.

🚏📝 An AI-proctored entrance exam had so much cheating that 58k students have to retake it

This May and June, nearly 160,000 students took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico’s largest and arguably most prestigious university. This year’s exam was administered remotely (the first time ever) and required students to install “lockdown” software on their computers that would prevent them from visiting other sites or apps along with an AI system that monitored test-takers’ faces via their webcams. Despite these safeguards, top scores were far more common than usual: 16.3% of students scored 100+ on the 120-question test (vs. 3.5% in 2021-2025), and 5.5% got 110+ (vs. 0.9% in 2021-2025). The rise in high scores led to widespread allegations of cheating; AI researcher Raúl Rojas suggested that “almost half of the students” were cheating. So, UNAM is requiring everyone who “passed” the original test – a full 58,000 students – to retake the exam in person.

🚏🌀 We may experience the strongest El Niño ever recorded

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a recurring meteorological event driven by complex feedback loops originating from weaker trade winds across the Pacific that leads to varying patterns of droughts, flooding, and extreme temperatures in different parts of the globe. The strength of an El Niño event, which tends to happen every few years, is often measured by Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies. The strongest ENSOs ever recorded hit SST anomalies of +2.75° C, but weather models predict that this year’s event (which is just heating up) will peak at +3.6° C, blowing past the record; one meteorologist wrote that it could “perhaps be the strongest in 500 to 1,000 years.”

🚏🐷 LinkedIn added a “seems like AI slop” button

A few years ago, LinkedIn introduced buttons to let users draft or edit posts with AI. The AI slop epidemic has apparently gone bad enough, though, because the social network is dumping that feature and instead rolling out a new button that lets users report posts as potential AI slop. LinkedIn also says it’s introducing classifiers (trained, in part, on these button presses) to automatically identify and downrank potential AI-generated content.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Damming the Big Ocean (NY Review of Books) [Archived] — A review of a political economy book on chokepoints’ role in economic warfare. It argues that the US’s “economic arsenal” of tariffs, sanctions, embargoes, export controls, etc., originally used to combat the USSR and later terrorists, has been refashioned into crude weapons against economic rivals like China. The problem is that the US has lost its leadership in free trade and globalization as erstwhile allies have turned elsewhere, “leaving [the US] more isolated and in control of a shrinking share of the global economy—reliant on undependable policy tools to preserve its edge.”

• Beware Software Brain (The Verge) — Coins the term “software brain”: the tech-industry delusion that messy human reality can be reduced to structured data and executable rules, and that AI can then automate it. Editor-in-chief Nilay Patel argues the AI backlash isn’t a marketing problem, but rather downstream of the lived experience of being flattened into a record in someone else’s database.

• ENSO Essentials (Columbia Climate School) — Examines the complex climatic systems that give rise to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and its inverse, La Niña: the ‘default’ state of the Pacific Ocean includes a positive feedback loop between the ocean and atmosphere (a “coupled system”), while El Niño and La Niña are also positive feedback loops, but they temporarily disrupt the original loop. So the system can be thought of as transitioning among three different positive feedback states.

• The Inner Robot (Matt Mason) — By examining the human ulnar grasp, one of many complex manipulations our hands are capable of, the author observes that we seem to have two distinct modes of operation. The first is “in our heads,” where we are operating deliberately and in complete control, good for planning and learning but weak at performing tasks. The second is our “inner robot,” an autopilot run by the subconscious that excels at repetitive, often physical tasks like object manipulation.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: repugnant transactions.

A shop down the street sells medication 24/7. A customer arrives late at night to buy medicine for their sick child. The catch: the shopkeeper is selling prescription medications without requiring a prescription. On one level, this sale is compassionate and practical.

But it’s also the sort of sale that authorities restrict. And for good reason: The medicine could be counterfeit. The buyer could misuse it (intentionally or through misdiagnosis). The restrictions protect in aggregate even if many particular cases can be justified.

Repugnant transactions are transactions wanted by the parties involved but restricted by a third party. There are many reasons for such restrictions, including mitigating externalities, enforcing moral norms, and preserving political power. Whatever the reason, those directly involved don’t have the final say. Such transactions will often move underground, giving rise to a repugnant market.

There is a mirror version, where two parties may dislike an activity but a third party forces it upon them. We might call these conscripted transactions. A doctor and a patient may both think an annual exam to renew a medication the patient has been safely using for years a waste of time, but if insurance requires it, they’ll do it. It’s the same pattern of third-party involvement, in the opposite direction.

If your goal is to disrupt a space that seems oddly ripe for it, understanding what transactions might be repugnant or conscripted will help highlight if the problem is a lack of product-market fit… or if it’s the shape of the market. When the market seems to be underinvesting or overinvesting in certain types of transactions, look for a third party to see if there might be an external reason why.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 245 — July 30th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/245

Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“For our house is our corner of the world.”

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)

💸📍 No cheaper way out

It’s time for a nice relaxing weekend at your vacation home. You settle into your remote sanctuary, watch the sunset over the water, feeling grateful for such an immense privilege... and then reflect on how an AirBnb would cost a fraction of the vacation home’s mortgage and upkeep.

But that’s not how it actually goes.

While a vacation home can become a burden, we think of owning and renting differently. The house you own is a home with memories. It is what economic sociologist Lucien Karpik calls a singularity. Not in the black-hole sense. And not in the AI sense. A singularity, in his sense, is a good whose value is tied to its particular, hard-to-reproduce characteristics. A rental may be cheaper, but it’s not the porch where your son took his first steps. It doesn’t have that mark on the wall where your daughter crashed her tricycle.

Singularities are one of the many sources behind price inelasticity. Price elasticity tells you how much demand responds to price, but not why some goods resist that pressure... or what might cause that to change.

For singularities, price inelasticity is fairly substitution-proof. The existence of AirBnbs may reduce the demand for vacation homes generally, but it doesn’t affect personal demand for the place your grandparents built before you were born. Luxury goods can also generate inelasticity. For these and other status items, inaccessibility (including price) is part of the point.

Other scenarios aren’t so sticky, and demand can change quickly if a viable alternative appears. A necessity like healthcare or education is subject to price inelasticity because the human capacity that provides it is limited. On the other hand, few people kept horses once cars and tractors became available. Other less-sticky sources of price inelasticity are system constraints (like insurance networks, accreditation rules, licensing), switching costs, and urgency.

Sometimes sticky and non-sticky cases overlap. “A doctor” may be a necessity, but “my doctor” adds history and trust. And we sure want our doctors to have those credentials.

This variety of factors is why Baumol’s cost disease lands as a crisis when it comes to healthcare or education, and as the price of luxury when it comes to fine dining or a live show. In the first category, prices are stuck but we would switch given a viable alternative. In the second, our willingness to pay is driven by what we find personally meaningful.

These two paths look similar on the balance sheet, but they feel very different when you’re paying the bill.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🧯 More than half of England is in drought conditions amid “climate whiplash”

The UK is currently struggling under its fourth heatwave of the year; July 2026 has been the country’s second-warmest month on record. Relatedly, most of central, eastern, and southern England, as well as northern Wales and eastern Scotland, are in a state of drought or extreme water scarcity. This comes just a few months after a very wet British winter where much of England saw twice as much rainfall as usual in February — this “climate whiplash” has led to dozens of wildfires across the country, as a wet winter drives the growth of vegetation that becomes a tinderbox in a dry summer. Scientists note that this pattern is consistent with a warming atmosphere, which can hold more moisture: it’s like a big “sponge” that absorbs a lot of water from the ground (leading to droughts) but then releases large amounts at once (leading to floods).

🚏🎰 Americans lose more to sportsbooks than they spend at the movies

Last year, Americans placed $166 billion in bets on sporting events, which is more than double what they spent on movie tickets ($8.9 billion), recorded music ($11.5 billion, a record figure), live music ($18.5 billion), books ($14.6 billion), and museums ($16.4 billion) combined. Economists believe the $166 billion figure may still be an undercount, as it excludes betting at tribal casinos (which could tack on another $5 to $10 billion) and on prediction markets (which could add $50 to $100 billion). Added up, it means that the average American adult bets almost $1000 a year on sports, though the market is dominated by big spenders, with 5% of bettors taking 95% of the losses.

🚏🔋 Indian car companies are making more energy-efficient EVs than BYD or Tesla

Chinese EV maker BYD is frequently in the news for its rapid growth and cheap electric cars, but Indian automakers have been doing quite well under the radar. Two of the largest Indian car manufacturers, Tata Motors and Mahindra, topped a recent leaderboard for EV energy efficiency, measured as the number of watt-hours needed to travel one kilometer across a company’s entire battery-electric fleet. They beat out Tesla (3rd), BYD (4th), and a slew of legacy manufacturers. Electric cars account for under 5% of new car sales in India, a far cry from the global average of 25%, but the country is reportedly working on new emission standards that may boost EV sales in the 2030s.

🚏🎙️ Arizona State is launching a bachelor’s degree in being an influencer

ASU’s journalism school has started a new BA in Content Creation, which will prepare students to become “an influencer and strategic storyteller.” The curriculum includes courses on videography, editing, podcasting, on-camera presence, personal branding, audience analytics, and social media strategy, and the program’s capstone project will require students to create a social media account and grow their follower count.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• How Funerals Keep Africa Poor (David Oks) — Uses Africa’s ruinously lavish funerals, which can cost more than a year’s salary, as a lens into the political economy of kinship networks. These tribal groups are a sort of “mutual aid society that you’re born into and can’t leave”: productive and high-earning members are expected to financially support the less productive. If anyone gets too wealthy, they may leave the network, which threatens everyone else, so these societies have developed intentional wealth-destroying traditions like fancy funerals or the Pacific Northwest’s famous potlatches to ensure that nobody accumulates too much surplus. However, this stifles ambition and innovation and makes economic growth all but impossible.

• Engineering Management After the Cost of Code Collapsed (Karim Jedda) — Argues that many of our foundational assumptions about business hierarchy, KPIs, and management need to be revisited now that code is nearly free to produce. A general pattern is that “when generation is abundant, verification is the constraint.” On the engineering side, it means that we can get great benefits from investing in machine-checkable correctness such as automated tests; for management, our old roles as information routers and presentation makers are obsolete and the job boils down to spending all day on decision-making and accountability, because that’s the part that LLMs can never do.

• Intellectuals Are F*cking Idiots (Mark Manson) — Argues that smart people keep failing in public because they’re rewarded for elegant models, not for matching reality, and they forget the map isn’t the territory. Blue Zones with people living to 100+ are due to dodgy birth records, Ehrlich’s population doom never came, and Pol Pot killed the professor who lectured him. The real dividing line isn’t intelligence but whether you update your views when the evidence changes and hold your opinions lightly.

• Supermarket Economics (Phenomenal World) — A deep-dive into the financials of supermarkets and grocery stores, including the history of and rationale for mega-mergers; the K-shaped bifurcation in the industry (with Whole Foods and Sprouts at the high end and Walmart and dollar stores at the bottom end); why grocery delivery and e-commerce haven’t panned out yet; and how the countercyclical nature of grocery stores makes them popular investments with very good return on equity.

🔮📬 Postcard from the future: Progress from Nihilism

A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing our world.

// What might be the consequences of AI-accelerated engineers becoming the norm?

// September 2107

// A group of teenagers gather around a wizened lady in her rocking chair

“Grandma, can you tell us a story about the ‘American Troubled Times’?”

“Ah, yes. You’ve gotten to that part of your history class! I always wondered if you were going to ask.”

She gestures to the sprawling complex, housing several multi-generational families amidst vegetable gardens, solar arrays, local compute nodes, utility relays, and transit docking stations while a cargo airship drifts overhead.

“This space and environment is the result of many hard fought battles in the face of massive waves of change and trauma. Nod if you’ve heard these terms in your lessons: Warsaw Riots of ‘37, the Helium crunch of ‘42, Smokey Mountain Inferno of ‘29, Excel riots, Looting of Project Rainier, the MSCI bankruptcy, the Panama Canal dry out, Bankruptcy of Social Security? Each of these would have been considered a major world event in the second half of the twentieth century, but they all happened within 15 years of each other.

“So what were we, as a generation, supposed to think and believe in the face of such massive change? The short answer is that for a while, many of us embraced nihilism. Not in the form of Moral Nihilism where nothing is objectively right or wrong, and that moral truths do not exist, but instead a nihilism about the truths and beliefs of the 20th century.

“Many ‘Gods’ died in that period. Beliefs, Governments, Schools, Companies. And in some cases, the people who led those things died as well. Many of those who held to those belief structures too tightly were unable to surf the waves of chaos and uncertainty in the years that followed and drowned.

“Those of us who embraced the chaos and shed ourselves of attachments to the old ways were able to survive, and in time, thrive. We built new structures of governance and finance, trying to not repeat the mistakes of the past, but knowing that we would make new mistakes. Which led to this…

“I hope you can continue that change.”

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 244 — July 23rd, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/244

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Erika Rice Scherpelz, MK, Boris Smus

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“Poets are not to blame for how things are.”

— Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

🧑‍✈️🔗 How trouble travels

You’re flying from NYC to Cabo, connecting in Dallas. The flight gets delayed four hours because of mechanical issues. That’s okay, you’re still going to Cabo. Wait, the gate just changed and there’s a new plane. Fortunately, you make it to the gate on time and you finally board.

Hurrah!

Except… not. By the time you’ve boarded the plane, the pilots have surpassed their duty time limitations. Now you have to wait for a new crew to come, leading to even more delays. They finally arrive and the plane finally gets going… just moments before a 15-minute thunderstorm throws the takeoff schedule into chaos for the next three hours. (And good luck if you missed your connection in Dallas by even five minutes, which may force you to wait several hours for the next flight to Cabo.)

Aviation runs on such tight margins that the schedule has no room for error. This leads to the system becoming very brittle. In general, tightly allocated resources, be they time, supplies, or anything else, can lead to cascading failures. Cascading failures aren’t simply when one failure comes after another, but specifically when the interconnectivity between parts of a system causes one failure to trigger the next.

The more tightly a system is put together, the more prone it is to cascading failures. A physical manifestation is dominoes. Put them close enough, and the “failure” to stand up propagates, often to impressive ends. Put them sufficiently far apart, though, and the isolation prevents individual failures from propagating through the whole system.

As the domino example shows, the mechanics of a cascade need not be negative. The generalization, where a tightly coupled system makes it easier for state to propagate through the system, can be used to positive effect if you want to spread something. The sociological concept of a tipping point is broader and is often used in positive contexts, such as the increasing popularity of a product.

But in the sadly frequent case where you truly are talking about cascading failures, what can we do? A common technique is to introduce slack: extra time, extra resources, or extra capacity that can be used to cover the gap when something goes wrong — and something always goes wrong. Too much slack is inefficient, but too little slack can be even worse.

The broader principle is that coupling can be a source of value or a source of risk. By understanding how much our system is coupled and where we have opportunities to increase or decrease that coupling, we can adjust — though not control — our resilience to cascading state changes.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🗳️ More Congresspeople are leaving their seats than in any year since 2000

So far, 11 members of the US Senate and 59 members of the House of Representatives have not filed to run in this November’s federal elections. This total of 70 members not running is by far the most since 2000. More Republicans than Democrats are stepping down: 7R-4D in the Senate and 36R-23D in the House. Note that many Representatives are aiming for higher office (Senate and governor), but a full 27 Representatives aren’t running for anything else — the most retirements since 2012.

🚏🛢️ Tech giants are moving data out of the Gulf along oil pipelines

Most of the internet cables connecting the Gulf states to the rest of the world run underwater through the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Red Sea. The war in the Middle East has put these cables at risk, so cloud giants like Google and Amazon have been turning to a backup: fiber-optic cables that take a land-based route from Iraq to Turkey and onward to Europe. These cables run alongside oil and gas pipelines, so they can piggyback on the existing right-of-way and security infrastructure. (However, even if the fiber routes are taken care of, data centers in the region remain at risk, as Iran has already bombed AWS data centers and caused outages.)

🚏☕ Seattle’s job market is shifting from tech back to frontline/service work

Washington State suffered the second-most tech layoffs (11,000+) of any state from May 2025 to April 2026, only trailing California. A new report looked at job postings in the Seattle area and found that the Emerald City has shifted sharply away from its ‘traditional’ driver of big tech jobs and toward frontline and service workers such as truck drivers (+ 231% in the last 30 days), security guards (+146%), and baristas (+30%). Meanwhile, openings for software engineers fell 56% and those for product managers were down 19%. The growth still outweighs the declines, as the region’s overall unemployment rate dropped from 5.7% to 5.0%. However, economists warn that some of the service-sector hiring boom may have been transient due to the soccer World Cup.

🚏⚡️ Autonomous micro-drones can shoot down mosquitoes from the air

Large combat drones have made waves in the Ukraine war, but micro-drones have been finding uses in an unusual domain: pest control. One startup has created a new gadget that uses a “phased array sonar base station” with hundreds of microphones to map a small area down to tiny scales and identify mosquitoes by their “unique wingbeat signature.” Then, a computer sends remote commands to a 40-gram aerial drone that kills identified mosquitoes up to 8 meters (26 ft) away.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Underrated Ways to Change the World (Adam Mastroianni) — Argues that you don’t need the soul-crushing wealth of “earning to give” or the saintly sacrifice of scrubbing orphanage toilets to improve society. Meaningful progress often comes from overlooked, low-status middle paths. Mastroianni champions “first followers” who validate whistleblowers to expose massive frauds, social “switchboarders” who forge a scenius among isolated idealists, and everyday amateur researchers who use their total freedom to solve overlooked problems. The piece is an inspiring defense of the unglamorous maintainers — rather than the founders or billionaires — who actually keep civilization running.

• Who’s Afraid of Frontier Models? (Stratechery) — Ben Thompson argues that the cost structure of serving AI models, where marginal costs for inference are high, requires us to analyze the LLM industry more like conventional commodity manufacturing than like zero-marginal-cost tech businesses. The upshot is that American frontier LLM labs shouldn’t be too worried about Chinese open-weight models undercutting them, because it’s unlikely that the latter will be able to achieve a substantial edge on marginal cost. Still, he argues that the US should spur the development of homegrown open-weight models by removing restrictions on distilling (which is a big part of how they can be trained so cheaply).

• The Vibecession Hasn’t Gone Away (Matt Darling) — Shows data suggesting that the gap between actual economic conditions and self-reported consumer sentiment (the “vibecession”) has only increased since 2021, rather than being a temporary COVID trend. The gap is visible across all income classes, and in fact it’s slightly higher among wealthier Americans. The author draws on Polish economist Michał Kalecki to theorize that the dissatisfaction we’re seeing comes from how low unemployment drove up wages among lower earners, which increased costs for services like health care and food delivery. This may tell an uncomfortable story about the political ramifications of workers gaining bargaining power.

• Movin’ On Up: How Costly New Homes Create Affordable Old Homes (California YIMBY) — Examines two mechanisms whereby building new market-rate (or even luxury) homes ends up increasing the supply of affordable homes. “Filtering” is a slower method whereby new houses gradually depreciate and become available for lower-income buyers. A quicker mechanism is “moving chains,” where wealthier people immediately move into pricey new homes, freeing up their old homes for the less wealthy, and so on down the food chain.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: terminus post quem and terminus ante quem.

Suppose you’re rummaging through a desk drawer and find a nice photo of you and your friends, but you don’t remember when it was taken. Fortunately, you can use context from the photo itself and its surroundings to help you date it.

For instance, if your friend is holding an iPhone 15 in the photo, you know it can’t have been taken any earlier than the iPhone 15’s release date — this gives you what’s known in archaeology as the terminus post quem, which is Latin for “time after which.” That is, it’s the ‘early bound’ on when the photo was taken.

Meanwhile, if you found the photo buried underneath tickets to a baseball game from a certain date, you can assume it was taken on or before that day — this is the terminus ante quem, or “time before which.” However, this dating is less secure: it relies on the assumption that the relative ordering of objects reflects the order in which they were placed. In other words, you assume that nobody has shuffled things around and that you didn’t (for some reason) bury the photo deep in the drawer when you initially dropped it there.

Our photo example was a basic one, but this pair of concepts is extremely important in archaeology, where you’re constantly faced with layers of buried artifacts that don’t advertise their origins and where even a few decades’ swing in the date of an artifact can completely change the narrative you’re constructing. And you’d be surprised how often these concepts can help you sleuth in your daily life: when was this undated corporate strategy doc written (and thus, did it account for market shift X or reorg Y)? What year did Grandpa graduate from college again? Or even, how long have these leftovers been sitting in the fridge?

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 243 — July 16th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/243

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Ade Oshineye, Erika Rice Scherpelz, MK

Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism… that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

🥗🎁 The beauty of paying it forward

When invited to a potluck, how does everyone figure out what to bring? For example, you might bring your specialty homemade lasagna while someone else shows up with a bag salad and another person provides the wine or a stack of plates. The host obviously provides the space, and if everyone is lucky, that much rarer gift of actually remembering everyone’s name (and introducing everyone to each other).

It’s clear that everything at that table has a value, in cost, attention, and effort, and it’s plain to everyone seated at said table. However, it would be pretty strange if someone went through and priced every part of it. Still, *something* is in effect because the unfortunate freeloader who arrives empty-handed three times running will get noticed (and maybe gently admonished or even conveniently omitted from the next event’s invite list). That said, the system only works because nobody converts all of it into explicit units of exchange and value. For the moment we do, the whole thing falls apart and ends up no longer being a party.

Anthropologists call the above dynamic *a gift economy*, where value circulates through the ordinary machinery of mutual aid: hospitality, reputation, and everyday care. Gifts are able to build trust precisely because they keep moving from one hand to the next without the need for expensive, inefficient coordination and negotiation. Consider how a mentee could repay the mentor who changed their life for the better years ago: to cut them a check would be gauche so instead, they repay their mentor by helping someone else down the road without ever calling it (or thinking of it as) repayment.

Despite this, gifts obviously still create obligations; they just aren’t the clean, legible obligation of debt and value exchange. While a debt demands speedy repayment and closure, a gift wants to live on and on.

That imbalance is the point and the consensual forcing function. It powers an open loop that keeps people coming back to the table, to keep the party going.

Of course, it’s not all conviviality and revelry: the open loop of paying it forward can cast long shadows. Over time, generosity can curdle into unspoken expectations that fall unevenly (usually on whoever, due to either social pressures or individual differences, finds it hardest to say no). One benefit of accounting is to prevent exactly this: a ledger makes obligations legible and legible obligations can be fairly shared.

As a result, we might be tempted to run the potluck like a balance sheet. And for a while, this balance sheet party might even work. But when everything is reduced to balances and debts, the community loses the very thing it was for. Accounting makes a system more legible, but also less alive.

The trick isn’t choosing between the ledger and the revel. It’s understanding each one’s comparative advantages and tradeoffs. Ledgers close loops while communities keep them open: knowing that, what might we be tallying right now that would circulate more freely as a gift?

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🥬 The US stopped monitoring the “explosive diarrhea” bug last year

Cyclosporiasis, better known as explosive diarrhea, has been sweeping across the USA, with over 7,000 cases reported so far across nearly every state. Sharp-eyed observers noticed that the US’s Centers for Disease Control used to monitor cyclospora, the parasite that causes the illness, but stopped monitoring it last year, along with listeria, shigella, and other bugs.

🚏🇨🇺 Solar-powered tricycles are taking over Cuba amidst a fuel crisis

Cuba has been virtually unable to get oil or gasoline since the US threatened tariffs on any country that sent it oil; just a single oil tanker has arrived in Cuba since January. Public transportation has been shut down and residents are suffering under prolonged blackouts. An unlikely savior has emerged: cheap electric tricycles from China, which blanket the island country’s streets and are being used for everything from package deliveries to taxi services to trash pickup. (Indeed, they’ve largely supplanted Cuba’s iconic vintage cars.) Some enterprising drivers are even installing solar panels on awnings atop their tricycles to recharge on the go.

🚏🧓 The US is facing a looming workforce shortage as Boomers retire

From 2024 to 2032 (when the last Baby Boomers will likely have retired), 18 million Americans are projected to leave the workforce, while fewer than 14 million will join — which one firm is calling “the largest labor shortage the country has ever seen.” Major contributors include the aforementioned retirements, declining immigration and birth rates, and a mismatch in what college grads are studying — for instance, the country is producing too few healthcare grads and too many business/finance grads. The shortage is uneven across states: 40 states currently have fewer workers than open jobs (South Dakota has the fewest, with 41 workers for every 100 openings), and just 10 have more workers than open jobs (California has 153 workers for every 100 openings).

🚏🧑‍🏭 Factories are offering flexible schedules to overcome worker shortages

In the depths of COVID, the American manufacturer GE Appliances was struggling to get workers to come into its plant in Georgia, so they turned to a temp staffing firm that could plug in flexible workers for a few hours at a time. It worked, even though manufacturing’s typical culture is one of a static workforce that puts in 40 hours every single week: the plant recently got a $180 million expansion, adding 600 new jobs. Years later, the plant is still embracing flexible staffing; a pool of 900 workers can pick arbitrary 4-hour shifts via an app. This unconventional “Uber for manufacturing” approach has been a hit among employees and has improved retention: workers who would’ve otherwise retired can now shift to part-time work. Besides GE, manufacturers like Stanley Black & Decker and Georgia-Pacific have also started adopting this model.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Personal Business (Are.na) — McLuhan absolutism strikes again: the funding source determines the product. VC-backed software optimizes for scale and dominance, which structurally produces the extractive, impersonal outcomes we associate with Big Tech. The Are.na cofounder’s advice is to find something that is “genuinely fun and interesting and you know you could be interested in it forever,” set modest scaling goals, focus on community, and bootstrap.

• On Compositionality (Jules Hedges) — An excerpt from the author’s interesting PhD thesis on ‘compositional game theory.’ Here, the author argues that systems with emergent behavior (like those of biology and economics) are the opposite of compositional systems (like computer programs or well-structured bureaucracies), where the whole is exactly equal to the sum of its parts. While emergent behavior is cool (especially to us systems thinkers), it makes a system much harder to reason about, and thus compositionality “is so powerful that it is worth going to extreme lengths to achieve it.” In programming, for instance, we achieve the desired modularity by minimizing the use of global state or “goto” statements.

• Authentic Food? Take It With a Grain of Salt (PCC Community Markets) — Observes that every “authentically Italian” tomato (from the Americas), “emblematically Irish” potato (native to South America), “quintessentially British” fish and chips (fried fish brought by Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition), and “traditional” taco al pastor (Lebanese shawarma technique, via 19th-century immigrants to Mexico) is an artifact of migration and cultural collision, making authentic cuisine less a heritage to protect and more a myth that collapses on contact with history.

• How Ukraine Built a War Fighting State (Austin Vernon) — Describes how the small, scrappy country has held its own against Russia through a combination of savvy military reorganizations that let the best units and generals rise to the top; heavy investment in drone manufacturing; and exclusive access to unjammable Starlink internet, which lets operators remote-control drones and see real-time video feeds, even in areas where radio links are weak. One interesting organizational technique was building a ‘marketplace’ where units can buy equipment and supplies; the ‘currency’ was “video-confirmed kills” of enemies. This lets the most effective units get more resources and thus get even stronger.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: stag hunt.

The team agrees that if we build a generic search system, it could replace a whole pile of one-off hacks. It will be a lot of work, but it will make a whole category of backlog items nearly free. Work starts, then slows. We keep adding one-offs: a tag-specific search, an author filter. They only take a week each. The search system is never built.

This is the Stag Hunt dynamic. If they cooperate, two hunters can catch a stag, which feeds them well. Alone, each could bag a hare. It is not a gap between good and bad (like in a Prisoner’s Dilemma). It is the gap between good and better. Cooperation is stable as long as there is sufficient trust that each of us will do our part. If not, the rational decision is to get the hare.

In organizations, failures of cooperation are often stag-hunt-style small, everyday failures of confidence. When we go after hares, we may feel like we are making the best decision, not seeing how short-term optimization weakens longer-term commitment.

This can become an organizational climate, a shared sense that the organization is bad at commitment. Repetition reinforces the underlying pattern. If we consistently contribute to ambitious goals, the organization gets more ambitious. If we consistently hedge, small goals within our personal control become the rational choice.

In bigger systems, such as international relations, this shows up as a lack of ambition or an inability to believe that big things are possible through cooperation. In smaller systems, such as teams without psychological safety, this dynamic shows up as a belief that everything is a Prisoner’s Dilemma. However, successful systems succeed by convincing the participants to focus on growing the pie rather than merely increasing their slice.

One of the reasons we are writing about the Stag Hunt lens is to expose our audience to the rich catalog of empowering tools provided by Game Theory. These tools give us the freedom to reframe an unhelpful payoff matrix into one that empowers us.

For example, the transition from Prisoner’s Dilemma to Stag Hunt shows that by building trust and commitment we can turn a zero sum or negative sum situation into a positive sum situation. We can do this by making commitment visible: naming the larger goal, clarifying what each of us is depending on, and making the cost of ‘playing small’ legible before the temptation of the easy hare appears.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 242 — July 9th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/242

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Erika Rice Scherpelz

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, MK, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“True education is a kind of never ending story — a matter of continual beginnings, of habitual fresh starts, of persistent newness.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

📝 Editor’s note: Our last issue was delayed due to publishing issues. We apologize for the delay!

🐒🦍 When everything is at scale

Note: Today’s piece dives deep on code, but that’s mainly because code is further ahead in this disruption than many other domains. The pattern of “what happens to our understanding when the decisions were made without human supervision?” will apply more and more broadly as more areas become subject to massive AI disruption.

AI is writing more of our code… so what happens when no human holds the whole system in their head? When no one remembers why the retry logic backs off that way, or what — if anything — that defensive ‘if’ still guards. We fear we’ll be maintaining code we no longer understand.

It’s a real concern. It is also, mostly, a eulogy for something we never really had at scale.

Folks who have spent time in a large scale production code base — especially an older one — know that many critical subsystems were already black boxes. The person who made the original decision left long ago. The undocumented constraint already changed. When the debt was built up by humans, we held hope that someone would remember the when and why of it, but that was usually more dream than reality.

So what actually changes now? Our intuitions do have some truth. Managing a large scale code base has changed. AI does not magically abolish the difficulty of maintaining a large code base, nor does it make it uniformly worse. It redistributes the challenge — some of it easier now, some of it worse.

To take another example, self-driving cars are, on average, safer than the humans they replace. But when they fail, they fail strangely such as stopping dead in an empty intersection or mistaking a truck for sky. A human’s bad code smells bad in familiar ways: out-of-date comments, misleading variable names. AI generated code loses those smells. So when things fail, it often feels weird: how can code that looks so good be so wrong?

Some things get better. Documentation, decision logs, and tooling can get better because they get cheaper. Chat transcripts have the potential to capture a lot of the intent that was traditionally lost. But we should remember the limits of these tools: the effort it took before might have been hiding a deeper problem of making sure artifacts provide actual value.

The solution was never to understand everything. As we figure out how to move forward, we will reach for the familiar tools that let us change systems we don’t understand: CI/CD, documentation, automated testing, observability and monitoring, etc.

While it’s true that some of this will require novel responses, we’ll also find that the systems that had the best practices in place before will be the ones best able to absorb the change. We might now need to treat our weekend project like something written by a team of twenty, but fortunately we have their experience to learn from.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🐍 Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

Amazon’s venerable Mechanical Turk marketplace, where companies can pay freelance workers a few cents to do manual tasks like data entry or filling out forms, seems to be winding down, as Amazon has announced that it’ll stop accepting new customers for the service. LLMs can now do many of those basic tasks, and ironically, a 2023 report found that more than a third of MTurk workers were using AI to automate the supposedly human work they were doing. (Many ‘turkers’ have moved on to other freelancing sites, so some demand for this kind of work still exists; ‘requesters’ have also apparently moved on due to rampant “bots and fraud.”)

🚏🏗️ China is storing surplus wind power by stacking concrete blocks up to 40 stories

Storing excess wind power for when the breeze isn’t blowing requires some sort of battery — but lithium-ion batteries are expensive and degrade over time. Pumping water uphill to convert chemical energy to potential energy, and then releasing the water to harvest the energy, is much cheaper but requires a body of water. So, a grid operator in China found an even lower-tech solution: use surplus wind power to drive cranes that lift 35-ton concrete blocks up a 148m (486ft) tower, then drop the blocks to spin a generator whenever the grid needs electricity. The new tower is expected to have a 35-year lifespan and should enjoy 80% round-trip efficiency with no chemical degradation (or water evaporation).

🚏🏭 The US now invests more in fossil fuel energy than China does

For decades, China invested more in fossil fuel energy generation than the US did, but a combination of recent policy changes and Iran-war-related shortages has led China to cut investment, while the datacenter boom and political shifts have led the US to quintuple its annual investments in fossil fuel generation over the last few years. And so, the US has suddenly overtaken China in fossil fuel investments after decades of sitting comfortably behind. In related news, every region of the world, bar one, reduced its carbon intensity of energy (how much CO2 is emitted for a given amount of energy generated) in 2025, meaning their energy mix became greener… the lone exception being North America, which saw a substantial increase.

🚏🗽 NYC apartment construction hit a 60-year high

The United States continues to struggle with housing shortages — nationwide apartment construction recently hit a 15-year low — but New York City has been building apartments at a record pace: it added 38,682 units to its housing stock last year, the largest gain since 1965. The boom “shows no sign of slowing down,” either, with over 16,000 units proposed in the first quarter of 2026 alone. But the Big Apple’s metro area is still 400,000 homes short of meeting demand, according to Zillow, and the city’s median rent has skyrocketed since COVID.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Theory-Free Takeoff (Learning From Examples) — Argues that technological progress doesn’t necessarily require scientific breakthroughs: you can iteratively improve a technology (within a finite search space) without understanding the core mechanisms at play. Humans have been doing this kind of “theory-free search” for thousands of years, and recent improvements in frontier AI — where LLMs’ utility progresses faster than our understanding — are just the latest example.

• The Rise and Fall of Rad Power Bikes (Geekwire) — Argues that the collapse of North America’s largest electric bicycle brand was a casualty of too much growth too fast, showing that massive funding rounds can be a death sentence for hardware businesses with thin margins, not a sign of health. What’s more, like many businesses that boomed during COVID, Rad mistook a temporary spike in demand during the pandemic for a permanent, secular shift in the market.

• The Thermodynamics of Capital (Monthly Review) — Argues that, despite the common imagery of AI as a pristine digital product freed from the dirty physical world, it’s subject to the same “political economy of entropy” as any other technology: it consumes low-entropy inputs (water, power, and minerals), processes them in the material world (in the form of data centers), and outputs high-entropy waste (such as noise pollution, CO2 emissions, and e-waste). This “dissipative” model of using an entropy gradient to do work is common to many complex adaptive systems, like a living cell or a hurricane.

• California Is Chasing Wealth That Has Feet (Progress and Poverty) — Argues that the Golden State’s potential wealth tax on billionaires is likely to fail for the simple reason that it’s trivially easy for hyper-wealthy people to move out of state. Taxing land value would be better because California actually has eight times more money in its land than in the pockets of all its billionaires combined, and land (obviously) can’t get up and move. (The root problem is California’s Prop 13, which limits how much property tax the state can collect, forcing it to rely on high income taxes and now wealth taxes.)

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: accountability.

Well, your account was disabled. The email doesn’t say why. The appeal button leads to a form. You find and follow the phone tree and finally get to a person, just to be told, with utmost sympathy, that there’s nothing they can do. A decision was made, but you have no way to understand or remedy it. It feels like no one is accountable.

What is accountability? Often it gets reduced to a vague concept of responsibility. But we can be more specific. In his recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV offers a usefully concrete definition. Accountability means identifying who must “account” for a decision: justify it, monitor it, and when needed, answer challenges and remedy the harm. This moves accountability from a vague virtue to a set of observable properties, each of which can fail independently.

And yet, these are not all equal. No amount of justification, monitoring, and challenging makes a system accountable if there isn’t room for remedy. This can happen in any system but especially prevalent when human judgment is removed from the system, be it through “the algorithm,” “the policy,” or a committee. It doesn’t take negative intent to lose accountability. The process which adds more consistency is great until it makes a technically right but obviously wrong decision.

What we can do is always ask ourselves where the accountability lies. Who can justify, monitor, challenge, and remedy? And if you can’t tell the answer, it may be time for something to change.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 241 — July 2, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/241

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Dart Lindsley, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

— James Baldwin (1962)

🎯🚘 Point, don’t steer

Given a task to build a treehouse, would you rather have dozens of pages of detailed schematics or a simple one pager outlining what someone should feel when they are in the treehouse?

Well, like many things, it depends. Clarity is about the goal (why this treehouse matters, what good looks like for this treehouse). Meanwhile, detail focuses on what to do and how to do it (how do we build this treehouse?). The trap for many is that detail often feels like it increases clarity, but often the opposite happens. When the intent is buried under a hundred specifics, people lose the plot. They build exactly what was described without understanding whether or not it solves the problem.

The military tradition of mission command tells officers the objective and the constraints and leaves the how to the people closest to the fighting. Its opposite, detailed command, scripts the steps from the top. Mission command wins more often not because soldiers are smarter than generals, but because they see the situation on the ground.

Detail is not always the enemy. Sometimes, a single centralized logic needs to be scaled to more than one person’s worth of execution. If an engineering system is having an outage, the incident commander needs to be able to quickly make the calls and have someone execute them. There’s no time to give high level goals and iterate for alignment. A startup three weeks from insolvency is in a similar situation. These situations tend to appear when the stakes are existential and time is scarce.

But when you’re not in those situations, detailed mode becomes a liability. Every decision routes through one person, so the people around them stop exercising judgment. Which means that now the leader has to stay involved, reducing judgment even more. It’s a feedback loop that drops an organization’s throughput to that of the bottleneck. And worse, the leader might not realize that they’re the bottleneck. Instead, they blame it on the lack of autonomy of those around them.

Detail can be valuable, but we need to figure out when and how to present it. Interface design calls this progressive disclosure. First, set the clear goal. Reveal detail on demand, when someone hits a wall. A new hire will need a lot of it; tenured engineers, almost none. The detail arrives as an answer to a real question, not a preemptive script.

As we provide guidance, we can think “does this guidance provide clarity? or does it add detail?” And if it adds detail, “Was this detail requested?” We might find ourselves realizing that clarity is, in fact, the harder job.

(Credit to Matt Manela for inspiring this piece.)

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏💱 Wealth managers are moving upmarket, leaving non-millionaires to AI

A senior partner at McKinsey observed that “mass-affluent” clients, defined as those with liquid assets between $100,000 and $1 million, can now get “private-banking quality from AI,” meaning that financial advisors who focused on standardized advice for the mass market are now a lot less valuable. Instead, he predicted that wealth managers will shift to serving even richer clients, since those people often have emotional needs (such as which child will get the largest inheritance) that require a human touch. Banks such as Citigroup have actually stepped up hiring for wealth advisors, but the roles are shifting now that internal AI tools can do a lot of basic portfolio analysis. The McKinsey partner predicted that firms would need to start hiring for AI experts, “behavioral data scientists, personalization architects, and human-in-the-loop oversight professionals,” all hybrid roles that didn’t exist in wealth management just a few years ago.

🚏🎰 Influencers promoting a prediction market “won” millions on a fake betting site

A duo of exposés from Politico and the Wall Street Journal found that the prediction market startup Polymarket paid influencers to post videos of themselves winning hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) betting on things like what a politician would say in a speech. It turned out those bets had never actually been placed, and if you’d actually placed the hundred-plus bets featured in the ads, you’d have lost $166,000. It turned out that Polymarket devs had built a fake lookalike website, “poiymarket.com” (with an ‘i’ in place of the ‘l’), for influencers to post these mock trades. What’s more, Polymarket’s CMO used his personal PayPal account to send over $2.5 million to political influencers, most of whom never disclosed that they were doing a paid partnership.

🚏🛻 A dead-simple electric truck will sell for $25,000

The average new car in the USA sells for $50,000; even used cars sell for upwards of $25,000. But an EV startup called Slate has revealed a bare-bones electric pickup truck that will sell for just $24,950 (not counting fees or taxes). The base model has hand-crank windows, basic gray paint, no infotainment system, and just 205 miles of range, but it’s modular and allows buyers to add things like roof racks, upgraded headlights, or a back section that turns it into an SUV. While the US is indeed lacking in affordable EVs, it remains to be seen if there’s market interest for a low-end pickup truck in a country where the average new pickup sells for over $66,000.

🚏🗳️ An NYC politician was arrested for forgery over AI-generated photos

A politician from Queens who ran for state assembly last year was arrested for forgery after it was revealed that he’d used AI to create fake endorsements, photos, and news articles. He made a social media post claiming the endorsement of the Queens Jewish Alliance, using their logo on a realistic looking (but AI-generated) endorsement sheet; he also swapped his face into a picture of a prominent local politician shaking a man’s hand, making it appear that that politician supported him. In the complaint documents, the Queens District Attorney added that this man had deepfaked photos of his opponent and generated AI videos “appearing to show endorsements from a police precinct and an elementary school.”

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Your AI Is Not a Tool (The Convivial Society) — Applies a McLuhanist lens to argue that AI, like most modern digital technologies, isn’t really a tool. Tools exist outside of us and channel certain skills, and they can be picked up and put down at will. But AI is an environment that envelops us and shapes us; you can’t escape it or choose not to engage. This line of thinking refutes the cliché that “technology is just a tool, and what matters is what we do with it.”

• Why Flying Within Africa is Harder Than Flying Out of It (Proxima Imperium) — Argues that the lack of competition (and resulting high prices) of intra-African flight routes is due not to corruption but to a collective action problem. Countries signed agreements to allow airlines to freely cross national borders, which would stimulate competition and drive down prices, but each individual country has an incentive to defect and lock down its airspace to prop up its (often struggling) state-owned flag carrier. Thus, good treaties like the Yamoussoukro Decision are enacted de jure, but everyone slow-walks the implementation, leaving the plans as good as useless.

• AI Isn’t Management. Try Explaining That to Matthew Prince. (Programmable Mutter) — Political scientist Henry Farrell examines a tech CEO’s “self-congratulatory op-ed” where he talked about growing his business while laying off 20% of its employees; the essay cited the writings of famed management consultant Peter Drucker to support its argument that middle managers (“measurers”) can be eliminated. Farrell argues that Prince misread Drucker; Drucker says that technology can and should be used to automate menial work and free employees up to make higher-level judgments and strategic decisions. This vision would actually lead to more mid-level management, not less, and Drucker would say it’s a good thing because it helps develop humans’ capacity and leads them to self-actualization.

• Iran’s Ultimate Banned Book (Amir Ahmadi Arian) — Examines Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat’s 1936 masterpiece The Blind Owl, which holds the rare distinction of being banned both before and after the Iranian revolution, surviving in a form similar to Soviet samizdat. The hallucinatory, opium-fueled novel follows a pen-case painter who descends into a delirious oblivion, ultimately transforming into the very Quran-reciting old man he despises. Hedayat deeply loved his homeland yet routinely reviled it in letters as “Stinkistan.” Named for a bird that portends catastrophe rather than wisdom in Persian culture, the novel offers an absolute, uncompromising pessimism.

🔍📅 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: prognosis vs. diagnosis.

“You’ll be fine in two weeks,” is a reassuring thing for a doctor to say, but it leaves out what’s actually wrong with you. It is a prognosis — a prediction about where you end up. It says nothing about the diagnosis, which is what’s actually causing that outcome.

Physicians used to be excellent prognosticians and useless diagnosticians — and not that long ago, either. This is at first surprising, since the future is naturally less certain than the present. In 1850 a skilled doctor could often tell you whether you’d survive a fever, without the faintest idea of its source — or worse, with certainty that the fever was caused by humoral imbalance, not bacterial infection.

The two reduce different kinds of uncertainty. Since a prognosis forecasts the outcome, a good one is confident, specific, and correct (often enough). Diagnosis goes after the cause and can identify levers, directing us toward how to intervene.

Sometimes we mistake the prognosis for the diagnosis. “This project will slip three weeks” tells us something valuable, but it doesn’t say why. Maybe a handoff broke. Maybe nobody owned it. You can become a brilliant forecaster of dysfunction and remain completely unable to treat it or, even worse, you can end up treating the symptoms. Adding more status meetings or more staffing to a late project may very well be the blood letting of the organizational world. Bring me the leeches!

Next time something’s wrong, ask: Do I need a prognosis? diagnosis? both? (But, unlike with germs, when you’re working with humans, remember to engage in connection before correction.)

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 240 — June 18th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/239

Contributors to this issue: Jasen Robillard, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Ade Oshineye, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“We have simply got to make people aware that none of us are free until we’re all free.”

— Opal Lee

🪂🪜 Failing from above and below

Watch two athletes training to compete as Olympic lugers. The first is patient, methodical, studious — she does as her coaches tell her and trusts the limits they set. Hers is an incremental-win approach. The second is impatient, unorthodox, “wild,” intuitive. She plays at the edges, thinks and competes outside the box, and trusts the safety systems to catch her when she overcooks a turn. Hers is an innovation/disruption approach: fail early, fail often, yet fail safely. Competing on the same ice, the two have completely different relationships to failure.

Optimal performance lives just below the surface of failure. This surface of failure isn’t a flat plane; it is a complex three-dimensional edge, one whose shape shifts with skill, mood, the day. Push right up to it and you find your best. But you’ll crash if you breach it.

The cautious athlete fails from below the surface, from the ground of known safety. She approaches that edge cautiously, often with an ingrained sense of trepidation. She can struggle to reach her best, leaving real performance on the table. This is the failure to lift off for fear of melting one’s Icarus wings.

The wild athlete fails from above. She ignores the risk or perhaps trusts the safety net. She lives by the motto: “If I’m not failing, I’m not trying hard enough.” Thus rather than fail with timidity, she fails quite spectacularly. Many of the most important lessons get learned this way, half by accident. But the risk is that when she fails, the failure might be catastrophic, ending a career or even a life. When Icarus gets too close to the sun without a failsafe, he falls to his doom.

Yet the evidence of failed flight attempts maps out a corridor of success that the rest of us can navigate through.

The wild athletes chart the boundary; the careful ones turn that knowledge into repeatable wins. Both approaches interact with the same envelope of failure. What changes is how fast, and at what cost, the athletes learn from their timid and spectacular mistakes. Both approaches benefit from failsafes which unlock recoverable failure as the engine of learning. A failsafe doesn’t prevent failure — it determines the tuition you pay when failures invariably show up.

So, let the wild thrill seekers safely play at the edge. Coach those with lower risk tolerance to push past their comfort zone to learn and grow from where the spectacular failures landed. Allow both to succeed in their way, by leaning on systems designed so that failure leaves wax and feathers on the ground, not a body in the water.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🛩️ The world’s first crewed, battery-powered plane just took off

Fixed-wing airplanes have long been seen as difficult to electrify, since weight is everything in the air and lithium-ion batteries don’t have nearly the same energy density as jet fuel (to say nothing of their flammability problem.) But one startup has created solid-state batteries that hit 60% more power per kilogram than their previous lithium-ion pack; they plugged those into their prototype plane for a test flight this month in Florida, making it “the first crewed, fixed-wing aircraft ever to fly on solid-state batteries.” The plane, which started life as a motorized glider, can also recharge mid-flight with wing-mounted solar panels and a turbine that generates power from wind.

🚏🤠 Austin’s housing boom drove down rents despite the city’s rapid growth

Austin, Texas has been booming since the 2000s, but it came at a cost: rents rose 93% from 2010 to 2019, the most of any major American city, and home prices rose 82%, more than any other Texas metro. But a slate of zoning reforms in 2015 (such as removing parking minimums and enabling ADU construction), plus a huge bond measure to build affordable housing, led Austin to add 120,000 housing units from 2015 to 2024. That’s an increase of 30%, more than triple the US’s overall housing growth rate of 9%. The increased supply has been great news for renters: Austin’s median rent fell from $1,546 per month in 2021 to $1,296 this year, putting it below the US’s nationwide median of $1,353.

🚏🧸 The UK will ban social media for children under 16

Following an Australian law that bans children under 16 from using social media, the UK has announced a similar rule that will bar under-16s from social platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat, though messaging apps like WhatsApp will be exempt. The move comes amid concerns over excessive screen time’s impact on kids’ well-being and the mental health effects of social media; one British poll found that 90% of parents supported a ban like this. However, enforcement has proven difficult, as kids often find ways around age verification, video selfies with fake mustaches or AI-generated videos; 70% of Aussie parents said their kids still use social media despite the ban down under. There are also significant privacy and security risks when tech companies need to gather people’s IDs or facial scans for mandatory age verification.

🚏🍏 Apple will raise phone prices amid the memory crisis

The price of memory chips has been skyrocketing due to the AI boom, and it’s been slamming the smartphone market hard: global smartphone sales are projected to decline 15% this year and a research firm predicts that phones’ average selling price will rise 20% this year. While Apple may have been resistant to passing along increased costs to consumers, outgoing CEO Tim Cook said that price hikes are now “inevitable” as the memory situation has become “unstable.” He didn’t specify what the exact price rises would be, but analysts predict that the next-gen iPhones will cost $150 more than the current iPhone 17s.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Technology Weakens Our Minds. We Can Fix This. (The New York Times) — Cal Newport, author of “Deep Work,” argues that our current attention crisis requires a cognitive fitness revolution, drawing a parallel to how the 1970s jogging/aerobics boom transformed a sedentary American physical culture into a more active one. Algorithmic feeds, even non-ad-driven decentralized ones, run on the same rapid-fire, fragmented, high-dopamine feedback loops that are the cognitive equivalent of junk foods. What would a gym for the mind look like?

• Asymmetry of Verification and Verifier’s Rule (Jason Wei) — Argues that machine learning’s ability to optimize anything that can be measured means that AIs will be most successful solving problems whose solutions are easy to verify. In other words, there’s a single success metric that everyone agrees on, and any given solution can be verified quickly, cheaply, and in parallel. Beyond computation, look for AI to excel in spaces with easily-verified solutions, like “finding the best catalyst to speed up a chemical reaction” or picking “the best aerodynamic car design for the fastest quarter-mile time.”

• Why Do Commercial Spaces Sit Vacant? (Strong Towns) — Examines how the unusual financing of commercial real estate loans leads to unintuitive behavior: namely, how commercial landlords would rather let storefronts sit empty than rent them out at a discount. Specifically, the value of a commercial building is determined by its going rent, so if you cut the rent, you may become underwater on your loan. Better to “extend and pretend” to maintain your building’s paper value.

🌀🖋 More from FLUXers

Highlighting independent publications from FLUX contributors.

In “Diamond-Complete: The Shape of Work That Compounds with AI,” FLUX’s own Anthea Roberts takes a fresh look at the “T-shaped” metaphor for skills, where someone has both broad generalist knowledge (a horizontal line) and deep knowledge of one particular field (the downward line).

Anthea writes that in the age of AI, horizontal generalists are at risk of being replaced because LLMs (which have a decent, if flawed, understanding of every topic under the sun) can do their jobs; vertical specialists have a domain-specific edge on AI, but it erodes every year as LLMs get smarter. Being T-shaped helps, but the best move is to gain AI proficiency, which in this metaphor adds an upward line to the T, forming a perfect plus-sign and making oneself “diamond-complete.”

This blend of AI fluency, general knowledge, and domain expertise allows you to get the most out of AI with a mindset of, “I know how to direct AI to get better results than it produces by default, and I know where the model fails in my corner, and I catch it before it costs anything.” Developing diamond-shaped talent in an organization is highly difficult, though, and we can’t “let AI quietly eat the apprenticeship”: keep developing juniors who can develop the “downward line” that’s perhaps the hardest part of the diamond to learn.

🔍📅 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: transaction costs.

You break a glass and someone offers to help clean it up. But you don’t really want their help. Still, it feels a bit callous to reject help sincerely given.

But help does not come without cost. All exchanges, even social exchanges, come with a transaction cost. Exchange creates overhead, and sometimes that overhead can be worth more than the exchange itself.

For example, the offer of “help” can create work, as anyone who has gotten help from a toddler can attest (we let the toddler help for other reasons, bonding, education… not the value of their output). Getting help creates a cost of delegation: you have to explain the task and review the output. Especially if you’re still doing part of the work, the mental energy of doing this can be more than having just done it yourself.

There’s a sneaky type of transaction cost that comes when an exchange, once offered, can’t be declined for free. These sorts of costs are especially prevalent in social situations, whether it’s the potential ingratitude of refusing sincerely offered help or the relationship-changing fallout of refusing a marriage proposal (“we can just keep dating, right?” rarely goes over well).

It’s not that we should think of everything through a cost/benefit lens. But when a reaction — yours or someone else’s — feels a bit too strong for the situation… it’s worth taking a look at what hidden transaction costs may be in play.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 239 — June 16th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/239

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Justin Quimby, Jon Lebensold, Erika Rice Scherpelz, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Boris Smus, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”

— Hannah Arendt, On Violence

👑🖥️ The sovereign’s prompt

For most of history, the ability to command another person was a mark of status. The powerful spoke through intermediaries: scribes, secretaries, amanuenses, chiefs of staff. The privilege of the ruler was that they did not have to descend into the details.

AI agents semi-democratize that privilege. Now almost anyone can have something like a tiny administrative team. When we prompt, we occupy the position of command. (And in The prompt test we noticed how we’re often more patient with these virtual assistants than we are with real people we delegate to.)

But something has changed: who is responsible? When a person gives us the wrong result, we tend to treat the failure as theirs (even if we underspecified the task). In fact, that asymmetry is one of the oldest perks of command. An oft-ignored element of delegating to a person is that if they messed up, it was their neck on the line. And if we, as sovereign, messed up... well, it was often still their neck on the line.

If our agent sends the wrong message, books the wrong trip, or builds the wrong feature, whose judgment was actually operating? Ours? The model’s? The tool that wrapped the model? The prompt starts to look less like a request and more like a chain of command, one where the accountability is vague.

Accountability is not the only thing we lose in this model. If everyone becomes sovereign of their own little kingdom, what happens to the many unstated roles that intermediaries used to play? Intermediaries can translate for the target audience. They can distribute institutional memory. They can add the kind of friction that’s useful, such as making sure change doesn’t happen too quickly for the organization to absorb. Intermediaries can also apply additional judgment, such as when the sovereign’s idea isn’t one that should quite be taken literally. Some of these roles may move into the agents, some may move to the supervisor. But the key thing to note is that the people who “just” executed commands did a lot more than bare execution.

The sovereign’s prompt is not just a better instruction. It is a political object. It reveals what was hidden before: who gets to be vague and who has to be precise, who gets to iterate and who gets blamed.

So as we rebuild our world around AI-based automation, think about what becomes explicit, and the costs and benefits of doing so.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🌯 A meme coding agent runs on “stolen compute” from customer support bots

Chipotle’s customer support chatbot went viral after people realized it could answer coding questions for them. So, some hackers reverse-engineered how to connect to Chipotle’s backend to get free AI calls and plugged it into OpenCode, a popular open-source coding agent. The resulting app, dubbed Chipotlai, thus allows developers to run coding agents for free using “stolen compute” from big companies’ support bots. They’ve since expanded from Chipotle to Lowe’s, the Home Depot, Expedia, IKEA, and more.

🚏🇲🇽 The Mexican government is developing a cheap electric car

The Mexican President recently unveiled a prototype of the Olinia Uno, a planned six-seat electric car that would sell for just $8,500; it’s made in Mexico using primarily domestic parts. The Mexican government invested in the car’s development as part of an initiative to boost the country’s manufacturing sector, and it’ll also install 2,000 charging stations across Mexico City and nearby states. The move comes at a good time, as Mexico’s EV market is booming: EVs account for 9.5% of new vehicle sales in the country, and Mexico is now the leading electric car supplier to the US.

🚏🌨️ Cloudflare says bot traffic now exceeds human traffic on the internet

Cloudflare’s CEO posted on social media that “agentic traffic [is] growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.” Bots now make up about 57% of requests for HTML webpages, though many of these are likely quick, high-volume page scrapes rather than purposeful browsing (meaning that humans probably still dominate in terms of time spent on the web). Certain small regions like Gibraltar and Singapore seem to be hotspots for agents (whether via VPNs or data centers), with over 90% of web activity in those places coming from bots, and most traffic coming from desktop and requesting structured JSON data, a telltale sign of calling APIs.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• My Prodigal Brainchild (Neal Stephenson) — The author who coined the term “metaverse” argues that the metaverse has been created in the form of Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, et al., and in fact it was inevitable as soon as we got interconnected computers that could show graphics and track persistent game state. However, the 2021-era vision of a metaverse mediated by VR headsets was just one (highly flawed) implementation, and its collapse doesn’t mean the metaverse overall is dead.

• Study Solves the Mystery of Why Humans Are Mostly Right Handed (Anton Petrov / YouTube) — Finds that humans, along with most hominins, are primarily right-handed because the left brain (which controls the right side of the body) was ideal for complex tool making, which requires fine motor control and mastery of repetitive, sequential steps. The right hand was better at tool use and therefore became preferred in ancient humans. Interestingly, the “fighting hypothesis” posits that a small fraction of lefties stayed around because they’d get a surprise advantage in combat against right-handed opponents.

• The A.I. Fear Keeping Silicon Valley Up at Night (New York Times) — Argues that centralized AI risks consolidating power into a corporate-state feedback loop, creating a “permanent underclass” that exposes the precarity of the tech worker class itself. The antidote may be to reclaim cognitive sovereignty by running local AI models to bypass centralized oligopolies and unlock decentralized production.

• The 5 Biggest Obstacles to AI Data Centers in Space (Big Think) — Argues that the much-ballyhooed concept of data centers in space may not live up to the hype. Costs go down and engineering breakthroughs can be achieved, but the laws of physics get the last laugh: cooling is extremely tough in a vacuum where all you have is radiation, and cosmic ray bit-flips are inevitable but difficult to detect or repair.

💊🍀 A dose of hopepunk

An optimistic sign that our world’s systems are changing for the better.

After centuries of rampant growth, carbon emissions are finally starting to plateau: “after increasing by more than 20% in the 2000s, CO₂ emissions today are a mere 3% higher than they were in 2013.” Major drivers include the growth of renewable energy and, less obviously, reductions in deforestation. Atmospheric CO₂ now sits at 431ppm, well below the earlier “status quo” projections of 439ppm, but it’s still increasing linearly because we still emit more carbon than the planet can absorb. (There’s also an interesting, and unfortunate, second-level feedback loop to consider: carbon sinks may get less effective as the planet warms.)

🧩🕹️ Systemic tools and toys

Games, gadgets, demos, and other nifty interactives to stretch your systems-thinking capacity.

Resource management, long-term planning, and calculated risk-taking are key in a quintet of sports web games where you have to assemble a team of historical players who would go undefeated in a simulation season. There’s the original 82-0 for basketball, 20-0 for American football, 8-0 for soccer (“normal” football), 162-0 for baseball, and 98-0 for ice hockey.

In the first round you can pick any player from a randomly chosen team’s roster, but at the end you only have one position left to fill, so strategic routing is essential: you don’t want to leave a tough position for the last round and be left picking between a pile of duds! For instance, in the baseball game (where FLUX’s high score is 158-4), most teams have a hard-hitting first baseman, so you could leave that slot for the end, whereas decent catchers are very rare, so you want to prioritize grabbing a solid one as soon as possible.

Leaving shortstops to the end was a mistake! See if you can beat us.

🔮📬 Postcard from the future

// What might letters written in the style of US Civil War correspondence during the AI push of 2026 look like?

“Dearest spouse, it is hard to see the glory of our company’s market dominance through the mighty chugging layoff machine, trampling the laid off beneath its cruelest algorithms. Communications cut off in the middle of the night. No last happy hour or lunchtime walk to speak a word of comfort to those impacted. Heaven grant there may be an end soon.”

“Mother and Father, thank you for the recent correspondence and images of you at home. That fixed look of care and sorrow upon your faces fills my soul with the keenest anguish. I would most gladly give all my hopes of happiness to save thee from one moment of pain or grief. But that can not be for the Board has deemed it otherwise, as I must fight with tooth and nail for compute to train my models.”

“I joined my onboarding class some nine months ago with fellow idealistic and driven people. We now number only three. H.J.F. was well when I last heard from him about a month ago from within the maws of the data center. I have not heard from Todd since I left the last all-hands. He is probably in legal review with the dreaded EU compliance teams.”

“Professor Q, I find myself as a cork tossed about on a storm-swept ocean. The lofty goals of greater glory for humanity we wrote about seem to be traded by my leaders for sacks of gold. ‘We must top the frontier model charts’ they cry, whilst urging the bending and skirting of moral and social guides in a quest for context to train upon. I fear the writings of my youth, nigh five years ago, reveal me an idealistic fool, ignorant of the ways of the world.”

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

June 4th, 2026Episode 238 — June 4th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/238

Contributors to this issue: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Dart Lindsley, Justin Quimby, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

Additional insights from: Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“The prophecy of doom is to be given greater heed than the prophecy of bliss.”

— Hans Jonas

🎲👁️ When the odds aren’t yours

You’re in front of a door that sends nine out of ten people to Disneyland and the remaining one to Mordor. Do you go through?

It looks like a pretty good bet, most likely a day of leisure topped off by fireworks. Most people won’t have to deal with orcs and giant spiders (and the slight inconvenience of probable death). But if you are the one who ends up in Mordor, the average is not terribly consoling. The upside is pleasant. The downside is ruin.

In general, the group average can look fine while the individual path through the system is not (see: non-ergodicity). Push this to the extreme, and we can only afford to get it wrong once. And it doesn’t matter if the odds of unbearable loss are rare when they are unpredictable.

Moreover, when harm is irregularly distributed, internally rational responses can look to observers paranoid or oversensitive. The constant defense of decisions and lived reality ends up becoming a full time role in the management of other people’s skepticism. Over time, we learn to quietly route around danger rather than increasing the legibility of a harmful system to those who are spared its costs.

Asymmetric outcomes are a consequence of how complex systems distribute risk unevenly. So, before judging a decision, we can ask, “Who owns the downside?” When we have some control over the system, we can find ways to distribute the upside and downside more symmetrically. Rather than automatically assuming they’re character flaws, consider that caution and “overreaction” may be signals that we’re missing something.

When someone refuses the door, don’t ask, “Why are they so afraid of Disneyland?” Ask, “What do they know about Mordor?”

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏💎 Lab-grown diamonds are the latest beneficiary of the AI boom

Synthetic diamonds are the latest unexpected product to see a surge in demand due to the AI, semiconductor, and datacenter boom; the share prices of several Chinese lab-grown diamond firms have skyrocketed in the last few months. Diamonds are exceptionally good at conducting heat but poor at conducting electricity, which makes them useful ‘heat spreaders’ for silicon chips, enabling denser and thus more powerful chips.

🚏🚀 Nasdaq relaxed its index listing rules right before SpaceX’s IPO

Traditionally, tech stocks would have to wait up to a year between going public and getting listed on the Nasdaq 100, the list of the hundred largest non-financial companies listed on the stock exchange. This rule was designed to give time for price discovery and let the stock price settle; sidestep the post-IPO slump that many stocks experience; stop hedge funds with early access to IPOs from frontrunning investors; and let insiders with 90- or 180-day lockups sell before passive investors in index funds had to buy the stock. But the stock market recently changed the rules to allow companies to enter just 15 days after IPO, a move that was apparently designed to lure SpaceX to IPO on Nasdaq instead of the rival NYSE. And now, as SpaceX looks to launch the biggest IPO in history, many investment advisors view this as a “shameless structural manipulation,” as index investors will be forced to buy potentially overvalued SpaceX stock, turning their 401(k)s into “exit liquidity” for insiders.

🚏🚜 Demand is booming for a “repairable, no-tech tractor”

John Deere’s tractors, harvesters, and other agricultural machines are infamously configured so end users can’t repair them; built-in software will brick the machine unless repairs are done at an authorized dealership. This adds both delays and expense for urgent fixes. The resulting demand for a user-repairable tractor birthed a Canadian tractor company that’s developed a new tractor that’s intentionally “built without computer controls.” Demand for the machine has reportedly been through the roof, with over a thousand farmers from 30 countries writing in for information after the tractor was presented at a farm show.

🚏🚗 An American bill would ban Chinese cars from driving into the US

Two lawmakers from Michigan recently introduced a bill that would ban cars designed or manufactured in China from driving into the US from Mexico or Canada; they called it a “national security issue” because these internet-connected cars could allegedly “collect full-motion video” or “map sensitive infrastructure sites.” (This likely plays well politically in Michigan, where many auto workers feel threatened by Chinese cars.) Meanwhile, cheap Chinese cars are everywhere in Mexico, with BYD controlling 70% of Mexico’s electric car market, while Canada is greatly relaxing its tariffs on EV imports from China and will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs to enter the country this year.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• The Platonic Case Against AI Slop (Palladium) — Uses Plato’s imitation hierarchy and model collapse research to argue that slop doesn’t just lower the quality bar, it trains your soul to prefer lower bars. The antidote isn’t to avoid AI altogether, but to avoid engagement-maximizing feeds and curating actively.

• Consumer Sentiment Isn’t Politics, but Politics Is Reshaping It (Claudia Sahm) — A renowned economist observes that Michigan’s famous consumer sentiment survey, which measures people’s self-reported satisfaction with the economy, has become largely correlated with people’s political leanings: many people say they’re happy when their party controls the Presidency but instantly switch as soon as the other side takes over. (Goodhart’s Law may be at work, since the media uses consumer sentiment stats as a key indicator for the President’s success or failure.) There’s still some signal in the noise, though, such as a secular downward trend in sentiment since 2020, which matches the “vibecession” phenomenon.

• AI Is Killing the Cheap Smartphone (David Oks) — A deep-dive into the economics of the semiconductor memory industry. AI servers need a special kind of memory chip (HBM), rather than the DDR and LPDDR that phones and laptops use, so soaring AI demand has driven memory manufacturers to reallocate lines toward HBM and away from consumer memory, which has driven memory shortages and price hikes in consumer devices, thus rendering many cheap phones “permanently uneconomical.” What’s more, a history of getting punished for overbuilding supply in this cyclical industry has driven manufacturers to purposely restrain themselves from building new factories, which means we can’t simply build our way out of this shortage.

• How the US Eradicated Screwworm (Sarah Taber / Bluesky) — Details how the US worked with Central American governments to eradicate flesh-eating screwworms (a scourge of livestock farmers) using the clever method of releasing hordes of sterile male flies that would lead females to lay unviable eggs. However, the US cancelled a screwworm monitoring program last year, and the dangerous bugs have returned to Texas and are threatening livestock there.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: lens stacking.

Oh no! Your launch is about to slip. Engineering sees a dependency problem. Design sees low quality user experiences. Sales sees a broken business model. Finance sees burn. Each account is true... enough. None is the whole situation.

Each perspective has a lens, and lensical thinking is the practice of noticing that we all see through lenses. Lenses are not neutral, and sometimes they can get stuck to our eyeballs.

Lens stacking is what happens when we deliberately put on more than one lens without collapsing them into a single answer. Instead of asking “who is wrong?” we ask “how might we all be right?”

Each lens adds a layer of information. Like the lenses in a telescope, the stack creates a view that no lens can produce on its own. And this can happen even when the lenses don’t agree. If one says “move faster” and another says “slow down,” the tension may reveal the shape of the problem.

Too much stacking can get us stuck in analysis paralysis, or it can lead us to think we agree when really we’re just being too general. Putting on and taking off both matter. Putting another lens on the stack acknowledges complexity. Taking one off can give us more freedom to act.

Complex systems are too rich for single-lens certainty. Stack the lenses up and we can see farther.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 237 — May 28th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/237

Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Jon Lebensold, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Lisie Lillianfeld, MK, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

— W. Edwards Deming

💩🔁 Shit work begets shit work

A critical piece of bespoke software has stopped working; a consultant is hired to patch it up ASAP. There is no architecture review, no hard questions asked. Leadership needs it running again. The consultant delivers beautifully: the project was on time and they even fixed some bugs along the way. But three months later, a minor dependency update breaks it all over again. It’s not a great outcome for the client, but at least the consultant has some nice repeat business.

In other words: shit work begets shit work.

When someone expresses satisfaction with our work, they engage in a collaborative relationship calibration: they indicate what they think “good” means (or, at least, good enough) and this feedback articulates the level of care needed to get rewarded. Consequently, new requests arrive already shaped by that lesson.

This dynamic rhymes with Gresham’s Law of “bad money drives out good.” When two coins circulate at the same face value, people spend the weaker and hoard the stronger. While the bad stays visible, the good disappears from use.

Work quality also rhymes with this: if our judges (boss, client, audience) are satisfied by our work, we stay employed. If they are satisfied by mediocre work, we stay mediocre. Those demanding a higher level of craft, they will have to look elsewhere. Nobody has to complain for the system to sort itself out. Meanwhile, our audience narrows around the level of quality we have collaboratively normalized.

Skills follow the same loop. Work done well emits an aura that is more than the functional output. The thinking we skip becomes less fluent. Care, not practiced, gets harder to recapture. And the less often we’re asked for excellence, the fewer chances we get to exercise it.

Work done with unusual care attracts colleagues and clients who value care. They ask better questions. They notice better tradeoffs. Their expectations become a constraint that helps us stay good.

Not every job can be a masterpiece. Budgets are real; deadlines are real. Sometimes “good enough” is good enough. But good enough is a choice relative to a context: good enough for someone, under some set of expectations, with some future implied.

So don’t just ask, “Did this work pass muster?” Ask, “What kind of future work does it select for?”

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🥩 Texan steakhouses are going out of business as beef prices skyrocket

Steak prices have risen 17% in the last year and ground beef prices have risen 19%, hitting a record high. In Texas, the price of wholesale brisket meat has risen 28% year-over-year. (Major drivers include tariffs; inflation; and the smallest national cattle herd in 75 years due to droughts, labor shortages, and loss of ranching land.) Barbecue joints and steakhouses have had to raise prices, limit brisket sales to just one day a week, or even shutter entirely. Meanwhile, lower-end chains like Outback Steakhouse and Texas Roadhouse, which use cheaper beef cuts and alternate meats, have shown strong revenue growth. It also helps that price-conscious consumers are looking for cheaper menu items.

🚏🌸 Wind and solar now generate more power than natural gas globally

Wind and solar power together produced 22% of the world’s electricity this April, compared to natural gas’s 20%. (Both remain far behind coal, though.) It’s the first time that the two renewables have eclipsed gas, and given their rapid growth over the past decade, they seem poised to maintain and expand their lead. It’s not surprising that this milestone first occurred in April, as the month’s mild spring weather in the Northern Hemisphere is typically good for both wind and solar, while the reduced need for heating and cooling reduces demand for gas.

🚏🇳🇱 The Netherlands blocked a US company’s takeover of a key government tech vendor

The Dutch company Solvinity runs the country’s digital ID app, which residents use to “authenticate themselves online… to book a doctor’s appointment, buy a house, or interact with public authorities.” Kyndryl, an American firm spun off from IBM, announced it was going to acquire Solvinity last year, but the Dutch government recently intervened to block the purchase, since foreign ownership of such a major piece of digital infrastructure could pose a “risk to the public interest.” It’s the latest in Europe’s tech sovereignty initiative, where the EU and individual countries across the region are attempting to reduce their reliance on American cloud, AI, and software vendors.

🚏🚕 Uber and Lyft drivers in MA formed the country’s first rideshare drivers’ union

Rideshare drivers in the US are classified as independent contractors, not traditional employees, so they don’t normally have the right to form unions. But a 2024 Massachusetts law created a special framework to allow them to organize if they could get signatures from 25% of the state’s active drivers. The newly formed App Drivers Union recently met that threshold and has now received certification from the Massachusetts Department of Labor Relations to represent the New England state’s nearly 70,000 Uber and Lyft drivers, making it the country’s first official union representing rideshare drivers.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• I Think Anthropic and OpenAI Have Found Product-Market Fit (Simon Willison) — Observes that enterprise coding agents have been able to successfully ramp up prices without losing customers (a great sign of PMF), whereas consumer AI products still need subsidies and struggle with monetization. This shift to enterprise is especially apparent if you look at the big labs’ open job listings: almost a third of them are for ‘enterprise-y’ roles like account executives, forward-deployed engineers, and go-to-market people.

• Inflation Inequality Meets Wage Compression (Arin Dube) — The economics professor observes that the post-pandemic recovery was unusual in that wages at the bottom grew more than those at the top, leading to a decrease in income inequality (“wage compression”). However, inflation was especially high in categories that poorer people spend more money on, such as food, rent, and energy. This counteracted about 15% of the relative gains at the bottom, suggesting that supply-shock inflation (the kind we experienced post-pandemic) “poses a serious risk to broad-based prosperity.”

• AI Fatigue Is Real and Nobody Talks About It (Siddhant Khare) — Argues that the Jevons paradox of AI carries a heavy psychological toll: as task times shrink, capacity expectations expand, forcing us to constantly take on more work. The critical countermeasure is protecting dedicated no-AI time to firmly separate deep human thinking from AI-assisted execution.

• Size and Dynastic Decline: The Principal-Agent Problem in Late Imperial China (Explorations in Economic History) — Develops a model to argue that Qing China’s decline in the 19th century was driven largely by a principal-agent problem in tax collecting. The emperor was generally a benevolent dictator whose long time horizon led him to set low tax rates to ensure regime stability in the long run; however, he had to defer to regional tax collectors to observe local economic conditions and collect the appropriate amount of funds, especially in the hinterlands. But these collectors had the short-term incentive to extort taxpayers and keep the excess funds for themselves. This forced the ruler to keep lowering tax rates, ultimately weakening the state’s fiscal capacity.

🍯🧠 From the hive mind

Showcasing useful tools, resources, and essays from the FLUX community.

We all know the broad story about work-from-home: a huge spike at the start of COVID, followed by a gradual decline. But once you dig into the data, there are some wild local patterns. Sunnyvale, California, had the largest percentage increase in WFH in the entire country (1,085%) from 2019 to 2021, and then the largest percentage decrease (-67%) between 2021 and 2024. It’s the epitome of the tech industry boomerang: massive early adoption, then a sharp pullback. Meanwhile, the decline has been much more muted a few counties over in Santa Rosa and Sacramento, and WFH has actually grown in the bedroom city of Stockton.

Check out the stats in your area in a new tool by data explorer Ari Lamstein.

🔮📬 Postcard from the future

A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing our world.

// Torches flicker in the castle room, illuminating three figures seated around a table.

The Dwarf slams his tankard on the table. “This is ridiculous. They can’t do that to us. We’ve been together for two years, and now this!” His other hand gestures at the tome before them.

The Elf raises a single elegant eyebrow to regard the Dwarf. “Look, we knew things might change as we progressed. We agreed to adjustments. I admit, I was not expecting them to be this… dramatic.” A lithe hand rests on their own copy of the tome, a finger tapping its cover.

The Dwarf pauses only briefly to take a slug of ale, then continues, “Years of building our skills, building trust, creating a shared vision for the future. Now this! Introducing a new core stat for our characters. Which gets set by a roll of the dice that we have no influence over!”

“Oh it is worse than that, friend,” the Draconian says. “This new stat has a direct influence over all the key abilities of characters. My build is now effectively useless. My entire progression arc is going to hit a wall. I might as well reroll.” Smoke exits from its nostrils, tracing a downward path over the table edge onto the floor.

All three snap their heads as the Wizard returns to the room and takes their seat behind the gamemaster screen. They do not need to cast Detect Thoughts to read the room.

“Look, we all agreed to do an accelerated timeline with a minimum of metagaming. That means occasionally massive systemic changes occur. What used to be successful to get experience points and accumulate wealth won’t always work. You just have to decide if you want to keep your current character and adapt; create a new character, but at a much lower level; or drop out entirely. The choice is yours.” The Wizard rises to leave, their rulebooks levitating to follow behind them.

The players look at their tomes with resignation. “A Summoner’s Guide to the Chatbox: Mundanes & Mortgages Expansion Pack.”

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 236 — May 21st, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/236

Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Ade Oshineye, Jon Lebensold, MK, Jasen Robillard, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus

Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“A system as a whole is not an object but a way of looking at an object. It focuses on some holistic phenomenon which can only be understood as a product of interaction among parts.”

— Christopher Alexander

👔♟️The games we play

In a world where most can afford decent shoes, function becomes table stakes. Whether $20 or $200, the shoes still protect your feet. And with the baseline met, the details start carrying social meaning: the brand, the colorway, whether they’re perfectly clean or intentionally worn down. Some might say none of this matters. Materially, they’re right. If the shoe fits, wear it. But people do care. Shoes can signal taste, tribe, status, wealth, age, even ambition.

Status games don’t disappear once basic needs are met. They migrate upward. As societies become more materially abundant, people spend less energy distinguishing themselves through access to things that aid survival (more calories, higher quality housing). Instead, that energy goes to distinguishing their lives through identity, aesthetics, and cultural fluency.

So status games always exist. But in a post-scarcity world, you have more choice about which status games you play… hopefully. In some systems, opting out of the status game locks you out of jobs, relationships, or economic security — the traditional stereotype of the lonely high school nerd.

In others, it mostly locks you out of prestige within a particular social scene, but you can often find another to land in — are you a comic book fanatic? A boardgame geek? A chess nerd? There’s a profound difference between a society where status hierarchies determine survival and one where they are a tool for identity and community. (Although both can be harmful for those at the bottom of the hierarchy.)

This is where the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic status games becomes useful. Extrinsic games revolve around recognition and social legibility. They reward signaling, performance, and visibility within a network. Intrinsic games emerge from direct engagement: becoming more capable, building something durable, developing passion or judgment. This isn’t quite the same distinction as opt-in vs. opt-out games, there’s a correlation.

Even the most abundant society cannot eliminate status competition. But we get to choose which games we want to play. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏⛓️‍💥 Iran wants to charge fees for internet cables under the Strait of Hormuz

Fresh off a recent plan to “establish a permanent toll system” for boats transiting the Strait of Hormuz, Iran now wants to “impose fees on internet cables” running along the bottom of the Strait, with the implied threat of cutting the cables (or at least hindering repair boats) if American tech giants don’t pay up. Only 1% of global internet traffic runs through the Strait, but experts warn that cutting cables here could slow financial transactions between Europe and Asia or even drive internet blackouts in East Africa.

A map of subsea internet cables in the Persian Gulf. Source: Submarine Cable Map

🚏🎰 Minnesota became the first state to ban prediction markets

A new Minnesota law makes it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market, defined as “a system that allows consumers to place a wager on the future outcome of a specified event that is not determined or affected by the performance of the parties to the contract,” within the state. (There’s a small carveout for weather futures, which have non-gambling utility for farmers.) Startups like Kalshi and Polymarket will have to leave the state by August or risk facing felony charges. The CFTC, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets, has sued Minnesota — along with several other states that have attempted to regulate prediction markets — to try to block the bill, saying that only the CFTC should have jurisdiction over these markets.

🚏🔬 arXiv will ban researchers for a year if they submit LLM-generated papers

The online preprint repository arXiv allows researchers to upload papers before they’re peer-reviewed, making it a popular hub for free scientific literature. It has reportedly been getting spammed by low-quality, AI-generated papers: last year it announced it would stop accepting all computer science “review articles and position papers” (though novel research was still allowed). Later, it started requiring first-time posters to get an endorsement from an established scientist. The organization recently enacted an even stricter rule: anyone whose submission has “incontrovertible evidence” of LLM generation will be banned from uploading for a year. Such evidence includes “hallucinated references” or chat output from LLMs like “would you like me to make any changes?” or “fill in the above table with real numbers from your experiments.”

🚏⚜️ New Orleans could be “surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico” by 2100

A new study found that Southern Louisiana could be facing 3 to 7 meters of sea level rise by 2100, which would leave New Orleans as a mere island in the Gulf of Mexico in the best case, or completely submerged in the worst case. This dire scenario makes coastal Louisiana perhaps “the most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”; it has “evidently already crossed the path of no return.” The study’s authors urged the government to prepare for a managed retreat from NOLA and relocate the city’s inhabitants to higher ground.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• What Will Be Scarce? (Alex Imas) — An economics professor argues that economic revolutions like AI make certain goods (and, in this case, services) cheap and abundant, but scarcity still exists; it just shifts, and that reshapes the balance of employment between sectors. In AI’s case, the services sector may become far more efficient, cutting employment there, but things with a human touch will remain scarce and highly demanded, since these feed people’s desires for exclusivity and status (high up on Maslow’s pyramid). Thus, we may see rapid growth of a “relational sector” of the economy, focused on jobs where “the human element is the product,” such as in hospitality, coaching, childcare, live entertainment, and tourism.

• Pax Electricana (Energy and Stuff) — Argues that the global economy wastes massive tonnage shipping raw fossil fuels to process raw ores; instead, we should refine materials locally using renewable energy and ship the finished goods (“embedded clean energy”). Because electricity cannot easily cross oceans, refining raw materials at the source is the only practical way to export a country’s clean energy surplus; it has the pleasant side effect of cutting global shipping weight by two-thirds and shifting geopolitical power toward manufactured abundance.

• How to Walk Through Walls (Henrik Karlsson) — Building on last week’s “hacker mindset” piece, the author explores how one can develop this mindset of understanding how the atomic machinery of a system actually works and manipulating it at the low level, without getting stuck at the high-level abstractions. As an example, consider the self-trained filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, who broke all the conventional rules of filmmaking when he spent a mere $7,000 to cobble together his film El Mariachi, which ended up grossing millions of dollars internationally.

• The “Average” Words for Things (Nardi / YouTube) — While linguists normally think that the relationship between words’ sounds and meanings is arbitrary, certain words have unusual sound patterns across unrelated languages. Many times it’s due to sensory relationships; for instance, many languages use the labial sounds /m/ or /b/ for “mouth” or the nasal sound /n/ for “nose.” This creator made an interactive site called Phonaesthesia that looks for these cross-linguistic patterns and computes an “average” word for each concept across hundreds of languages.

🔮📬 Postcard from the Future

A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing other worlds.

// What does an oncology convention sound like in 2040?

Transcript of opening address, ASCO Annual Meeting 2040, Chicago.

The speaker at the podium gestures at the screen behind them.

“I want to read three numbers into the record. Ninety-one: the percentage of patients across the top fifteen solid tumors who are alive at five years. Seventy-eight: the same number for pancreatic adenocarcinoma, the disease that, when many of you in this room entered fellowship, had a five-year survival in the single digits. And two-point-one: the average number of Stage IV solid-tumor presentations logged by a Memorial Sloan Kettering fellow last year compared to eighteen in 1996.

“That third number is supposed to alarm us. Some of our fellows have never seen tumors in the wild, only trained against them in simulations. And to that I say good.

“When I was a fellow at Dana-Farber in 1998, I rotated through a Stage IV pancreatic ward of sixteen beds. I learned more about dying than about cancer. I was trained by Dr. Robert Hsieh; at his retirement, he said something I never stopped thinking about.”

“He said: ‘If you do this job well, you will put yourself out of business. And I hope to God you do.’”

“A third-year surprised me at last night’s welcome reception. She said, ‘I’m going to Lagos to study history.’ When I asked her what she meant, she told me she wanted to see the things we have eradicated here, which meant going to the remaining places where AI screening is still not ubiquitous. Living in the future means having to travel to see the past.”

“AI-augmented multi-cancer detection has been deployed at population scale for just a bit more than half of a decade. It has changed so much of human life that historians of medicine are already trying to figure out what to call it. When they realize we already have a name we call it in private and ask us what we call it, we should tell them: ‘The Detection Decade’. No, not the decade where we finally cured cancer. The decade we caught it first.”

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 235 — May 14th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/235

Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK,

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.”

— China Mieville

🏓🫂 Playing for keeps

When you play a game, you’re immersed (hopefully). Perhaps you’re a quack doctor filling your cauldron one chip at a time. You push your luck. Your pot explodes. The joy, the regret, the triumph, they’re all real. Nine rounds later, the person with the most points wins. The chips go back in the bags, and you move on to the next game. You don’t mourn the potion that blew up in round six. The goals of the game were real while you were playing and irrelevant now that you aren’t.

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen posits in Games: Agency as Art that games inherently involve adopted ends: ends you take on voluntarily for the duration of play and set down when you’re done. A chess player doesn’t want checkmate the way they want food or love or recognition. They want it in a temporary, bracketed way.

Nguyen contrasts this with enduring ends: the things you care about in a more stable way, such as relationships, craft, or your sense of self. These don’t switch off when the session ends.

We can use the idea that some ends are disposable to think about LLMs. An LLM agent receives a task. It pursues the task with apparent conviction. But when the session ends, the agent moves on with no residue of having invested in that task at all.

Sometimes we say that AI agents are like a genius with amnesia, but Nguyen’s framework suggests another way to frame this. AI agents act within the constraints of disposable ends. The prompt defines a goal, the same way the rules define a game. When the session is over, the end is disposed of because it is no longer relevant.

Being able to dispose of ends is valuable, but the agent operates entirely within disposable ends. There is no outside the game where it goes home and reflects on what mattered. There are no enduring ends that the various disposable ends accumulate into. Jailbreaking an LLM is less like shallowly fooling it and more like convincing it to change the rules it is acting under (human social engineering often works the same way).

For humans, our disposable ends are dominated by our enduring ends. We might be willing to be ruthless playing against our friends, but we don’t really want to damage our relationship with them. At the same time, our enduring ends are not static. Slowly, our goals and values do shift. This lack of intermediate state between disposable ends and the broad alignment encoded in training makes it hard for an AI agent to have an enduring sense of direction.

What would it mean to give an AI agent enduring ends? The memory systems and long-running agents being built right now are attempts at exactly that. But so far, it feels like they’re merely scaffolding enduring ends onto a substrate that, by its nature, only knows how to take on disposable ends. It seems like what’s missing is a distillation layer. Perhaps we’ll learn that the distillation of experience and reasoning into opaque emotional response is load-bearing, not some irrational, vestigial quirk of human nature.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🥣 Japanese snack packaging is turning grayscale amid ink shortages

Calbee, a large Tokyo-based manufacturer of potato chips and cereal, is turning its chip bags and cereal boxes grayscale, with greatly reduced decoration. Japan, which imports almost all of its oil, is facing a shortage of naphtha, a petroleum-based liquid that’s used in ink—so Calbee’s move helps it reduce ink usage and thus “respond flexibly to changing geopolitical conditions.”

🚏🥇 Big tech workers are “tokenmaxxing” to rise up AI usage leaderboards

Amazon is reportedly tracking how many LLM tokens employees are using (and some believe the stats will be used in performance evaluations), while Meta reportedly had an unofficial leaderboard tracking who used the most tokens (the high scorer had burned 281 billion tokens). This has led to the rise of “tokenmaxxing,” a slangy term for intentionally burning tokens to look better to one’s boss. For instance, many Amazon staffers reportedly ran their company’s internal AI-powered automation tool on “trivial tasks” to “inflate their token counts.” (Goodhart’s law, anyone?)

🚏🚗 There’s a new $10,000 EV in China

Electric cars in the USA sell for an average of $55,000 (with a floor price of about $30,000), but a new bestselling Chinese EV, the MG4, starts at just $10,000. It’s already sold 100,000 units in eight months, which set “a new record for the fastest-selling pure electric hatchback.” The MG4 is also the world’s first electric car with semi-solid-state batteries; these are more fire-resistant than the standard liquid lithium-ion batteries but have better performance than solid-state batteries (which haven’t been productionized yet in EVs).

🚏💱 South Korea is considering an “AI dividend” for citizens

South Korea’s presidential policy chief wrote on social media that some of the profits and tax revenue from the AI boom “should be structurally returned to all citizens,” because the gains from AI were driven by Korea’s decades-long infrastructure investments whereas “excess profits in the AI era are, by nature, concentrated.” The comments came just a month after tens of thousands of protesters gathered at a Samsung chip factory to demand that employees get a cut of AI-derived profits.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Dawn of the Electric World Order (Phenomenal World) — Argues that the Iran War has been a boon for the renewable energy transition, because only “geopolitical catastrophe… creates the supply-side shocks necessary for big changes in the energy complex to unfold.” Unlike the ‘70s oil shock or even the 2022 war in Ukraine, “this is the first energy shock with a superior alternative,” as adoption of EVs, batteries, and solar panels has hyper-accelerated in the last four years.

• On Seeing Through Unseeing: The Hacker Mindset (Gwern) — Examines how computer hacking, gaming speedruns, heist movies, linguistic puns, and many other diverse techniques share a common pattern: “seeing through” the apparent rules and abstractions of a complex system and instead dropping down to the atomic elements, which you can manipulate in unexpected ways to achieve creative ends.

• AI, the Shadow Prince (M. Alejandra Parra-Orlandoni) — Argues that, whether or not it becomes sentient, AI already operates as a Machiavellian “Shadow Prince,” an indispensable but unconscious minister to whom we willingly cede agency out of convenience. Framing AI as a novel “fourth actor” alongside government, business, and citizens provides a highly useful lens for rethinking alignment, demanding new checks and balances to protect our “cognitive security” and prevent this shadow minister from quietly concentrating absolute power in the corporate labs that control it.

• Is There Actually a Word With a Longer Etymology Chain Than Pog? (Unyes / YouTube) — Following up on a popular linguistics video about the long etymology of “pog” (which went from fruit drink to gamer slang), this video explores more words with etymologies that hop around the globe or reach into the deep past. Examples include “apricot” (which looped around the Mediterranean from Latin to Syriac to Arabic to Catalan to English) and “divan” (which came all the way from Sumerian to the Ottomans to Hong Kong, where it now means ‘drug den’). Also mentions some fun examples of semantic shifts, like how “dinner” used to mean lunch (and before that, breakfast), and how the financial term “check” ultimately comes from chess.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: the context-free reader.

A colleague pings you: “I read the strategy doc, but I’m still not sure what I should do.” You read it again. It seems clear... but then, it seemed clear when you wrote it, too.

What we need when we write is the context-free reader. They don’t know the team’s unwritten norms. They haven’t read all the Slack threads. They don’t have years of historical background that makes certain assumptions obvious. They can only work with what is on the page. (Here, “context-free” is a stand-in for the minimal shared context of our target audience.)

While frustrating for a writer, context-free readers do provide value in that they do not suffer from the curse of knowledge: once you know something, it becomes nearly impossible to imagine not knowing it. These readers can see assumptions that have grown stale and processes that were built for a different environment.

Finding a context-free reader used to be a challenge. Where do we find someone who doesn’t have the context but cares enough to read our drafts? Today, we all have one at our fingertips. The positive flipside of the LLM’s disposable ends is exactly that lack of enduring context. Feed your favorite LLM the doc plus a list of questions you want any reader of the doc to be able to answer. If the LLM hedges, contradicts itself, or confidently lands on the wrong answer, the doc isn’t clear. If it comes away with the answers you were hoping for, then you have some hope!

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 234 — May 7th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/234

Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“The future is unwritten. There are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. Both of them are great fun to write about if you’re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.”

— Bruce Sterling

🗒️❤️‍🔥 Make fire inspectors sexy again

You know the trope. Sexy firefighters. Big strong people who show up when things have gone horribly wrong and are there to solve the problem. With their specialized tools, training, and willingness to go the extra mile, they save puppies, children, and people’s homes.

While the situation is awful, firefighters are a welcome sight. People are happy when firefighters show up, and rightfully so.

Who isn’t a welcome sight? Fire inspectors. With a broad range of powers, they can prohibit, restrict, or close unsafe buildings if significant risk exists. In fire-prone areas, they can mandate the removal of trees and entire structures deemed threats. Firefighters can save your home. Inspectors can kick you out of it.

Inspectors prevent problems, yet they are often scorned. This pattern often repeats in organizations. Those who solve problems are far more lauded than those who prevent problems. Structurally, when someone solves a problem, there’s a story. When someone prevents a problem, it’s quiet, perhaps invisible. And the more effective the prevention, the less evidence there is that it was necessary in the first place.

This bias compounds. Organizations that celebrate problem solvers and not problem preventers create incentives for people to become problem solvers. And problem solvers want to fix problems, not prevent them. So investment in prevention erodes, causing more problems.

It takes a concerted effort for an organization not to get addicted to fire fighting. Appreciation of prevention must be supported by everything from public praise to performance reviews to leadership guidance. On the flip side, it’s easy to under-appreciate roles focused on prevention such as security, public health, risk management.

So this coming week, take a moment to think how you might help make fire inspectors sexy.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🫜 Vegetables have become less nutritious due to CO₂ pollution

A new Dutch study found that plants like wheat, potatoes, and beans have lost 3.2% of their nutrient content (including “protein, iron, and zinc”) since the late 1980s. Increased carbon dioxide levels are making plants more efficient, which is paradoxically a bad thing: with more CO₂ around, plants can grow more tissue while absorbing the same amount of nutrients from the soil, which reduces the density of nutrients in the plant material. Plants are predicted to become bigger and grow faster as we continue to spew carbon into the atmosphere, but “each bite of food will have more sugar and fewer nutrients than before.”

🚏🧯 Western states are using AI cameras to detect wildfires early

California, Arizona, Colorado, and other states across the fire-prone American West are deploying AI-powered cameras that monitor smoke and other signs of wildfires, alerting authorities if they suspect a blaze may be starting. Meteorologists say the tech notifies firefighters a full 45 minutes before 911 calls start coming in; it’s especially useful in rural areas where humans are less likely to be watching. One startup that sells these cameras says it detected 725 wildfires in the US last year.

🚏🪖 An American soldier was arrested after winning $400,000 on a bet on the Maduro raid

A US special forces soldier who was “involved in the planning and execution” of the midnight raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro allegedly placed 13 bets about US operations on the prediction market Polymarket. That included long-shot bets on when US forces would be in Venezuela and if Maduro would be out of power by January 31st, totalling nearly $34,000 in wagers. Prosecutors say he made over $400,000 in profits, which he sent through a “foreign cryptocurrency vault” before he “deposited them in an online brokerage account.” The soldier was arrested and faces multiple criminal charges for “unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain.”

🚏🚷 Roblox cut projected revenue by $900 million after adding age verification

The kid-focused gaming platform Roblox, which is no stranger to criticism over exposing children to adult predators, added mandatory age verification for chat access in January. That, combined with Russia totally banning the site, forced the company to slash projected revenue from about $8.4 billion to $7.5 billion; its stock tumbled 22% last week on the news. (Coincidentally, a recent British report found that children find it easy to bypass ‘video selfie’ age verification systems by using clips of video game characters’ faces or even drawing mustaches on their faces; other kids just use parents’ ID cards.)

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Radiology Isn’t an Example of the Jevons Paradox (Ben White) — A radiologist takes issue with Jensen Huang’s assertion that the Jevons Paradox (wherein using a resource more efficiently ultimately leads to using more of it) means that radiologists’ employment will increase, even though AI can automate much of the job. For one, AI hasn’t helped radiologists much yet, and the recent rise in radiologists’ salaries can be better explained by a simple supply shortage. More fundamentally, the Jevons metaphor applies to natural resources like coal, not humans. Perhaps everyone in AI is drawn to Jevons because it offers a comforting story that, rather than driving massive societal disruption, AI will “set us free to do our best, most magical, most human work.”

• Gentrification and Abundance (Michael Wiebe) — Evaluates several housing economics studies to conclude that increased housing supply, even of market-rate homes, causes gentrification (rich people moving in) but, crucially, does not drive displacement of lower-income residents. The alternative, supply constriction, leads to both higher rents and displacement. This article has some fairly technical writing, but it introduces some useful concepts in housing econ (such as Bartik shifters) and shows some clever study designs, like using the installation of tech shuttle stops in San Francisco as “hyperlocal demand shocks” and examining their impact on neighborhood prices.

• How Lunar Cycles Guide the Spawning of Sea Creatures (Smithsonian Magazine) — Diverse animals such as sea mussels, corals, polychaete worms, and certain fishes are thought to synchronize their reproductive behavior by the moon, simultaneously spawning within a tight time window of 10–30 minutes using their equivalent of a clock and a calendar: a circadian clock and a circalunar clock based on a Light-dependent CRYptochrome called L-Cry.

• TACO is Dead. Long Live EMPANADA (Polycrisis Dispatch) — Argues that the TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) principle doesn’t apply to tariffs, where he’s largely stayed the course despite the havoc it’s wrought. Instead, we’re seeing EMPANADA: Everyone Makes Promises And Never Actually Does Anything. In an effort to reach deals on tariffs, Korea, Japan, and the EU have promised to make billions of dollars of investments in the US, but the timelines are vague, there’s no enforcement mechanism, and it looks unlikely that they’ll ever actually spend the money.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: the Baumol effect.

A string quartet walks on stage. Four musicians, forty-five minutes of Schubert. How much are they paid? It depends on when they’re playing. Even adjusting for inflation, they’d be paid significantly more in 1965 than in 1865. But why? By sheer economic logic, their productivity is the same.

Economists William Baumol and William Bowen used this example to describe the Baumol effect, or “cost disease.” They observed that labor-intensive services such as healthcare, education, and the performing arts become more expensive over time, even without productivity gains. Why? If enough of the economy experiences productivity gains, the opportunity cost of human time across the whole economy increases. Even sectors that can’t increase productivity still need to pay more to stay competitive as employers.

This formulation is not without its problems. For example, musician productivity does go up over time: performance halls get larger, amplification gets better, recording and broadcasting increase the reach of a single performance. Musicians, like other professions, are part of a much larger series of systems. Still, the concept is directionally useful.

AI may trigger the next stage in this trend. Contrary to current predictions of labor collapse, productivity increases from AI in some sectors could raise wages economy-wide due to the Baumol effect. If so, this could increase government spending, leading to budget crises. Why? Most government spending goes towards services that are subject to the cost disease: law enforcement, education, healthcare, and more. In a world where productivity is increasing, the sectors that can’t scale may inherit a surprisingly large part of the bill.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 233 — April 30th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/233

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK, Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz,

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“Reading functions as hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines”

— Friedrich Kittler

🫥🎭 The oracle’s disguise

Ask an LLM a contested question and watch what happens: It doesn’t say “I think” or “from where I stand.” Instead, it speaks in an encyclopedia’s authoritative cadence. It sounds like it’s coming from both everywhere and nowhere at once.

The idea of a neutral posture has a long philosophical pedigree. John Rawls’ famous “veil of ignorance“ asks us to design society as if we didn’t know who we’d be within it—rich or poor, healthy or sick, woman or man. Strip away your identity, reason from a position of pure neutrality, and you’ll converge on fairness. It’s elegant. It’s also built on an assumption so deep it’s easy to miss: that such a neutral position exists at all.

Thomas Nagel gave this assumption a name: the view from nowhere. He argued that while we aspire to see reality stripped of any particular perspective, every observer is inescapably situated somewhere. The attempt to transcend perspective doesn’t eliminate it; it just hides it.

Gerald Gaus picks up this thread in The Tyranny of the Ideal. If reasonable people genuinely disagree about values—not because some are confused but because the questions are genuinely hard—then there is no single ideal to converge on. The veil of ignorance doesn’t reveal the one true answer; it smuggles in whichever set of assumptions felt most “neutral” to the person designing the thought experiment.

LLMs have landed squarely in this same trap. They’ve been trained on vast corpora and then fine-tuned to produce responses that feel balanced and authoritative. But the training data reflects particular cultures, particular eras, particular power structures. The whole process encodes particular judgments about what’s helpful, harmless, and honest. There is a view, and it comes from somewhere very specific.

The thing is, this isn’t inevitable. LLMs don’t have to sound like oracles. They sound this way because we’ve trained them to, rewarding certainty over uncertainty. We could train them to surface tension. Instead, we’ve optimized for the smooth, confident answer. We’ve built the assumption of a veil of ignorance into the loss function.

The oracle voice is persuasive precisely because it seems positionless. When a person argues a point, you naturally ask “where are they coming from?” When an LLM does it, that instinct may not fire. Imagine instead systems that make their own vantage point explicit; it’s something we could all use more of, whether we are LLMs or humans.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🌡️ France is investigating weather data tampering due to suspicious bets

Automated weather readings at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport showed sudden 4–5 °C spikes in temperature on the evenings of April 6 and 15[; those anomalous readings, if real, would’ve represented those days’ all-time high temperatures. These same days showed double the usual amount of betting on Paris temperature ‘contracts’ on the prediction market Polymarket. For instance, one bettor won $21,000 predicting that April 15th’s high temperature would not be 18°C. The French weather forecasting office suspected data tampering and referred the case to airport police.

🚏⛽ Norway went from almost 0% to nearly 100% electric cars in 13 years

In the early 2010s, almost every single new passenger car sold in Norway was powered by gas or diesel (the majority, interestingly, being diesel). Hybrids and full battery-electric cars exploded in popularity shortly thereafter, and by 2025 battery-electric cars reached 96% market penetration, with hybrids making up most of the remainder and fossil fuels sitting as a vanishingly small rump.

🚏🌥️ “Unfounded” health and safety concerns are derailing American solar growth

Public backlash over health and environmental fears (which are light on evidence) is stifling the growth of solar installations in Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, and elsewhere across the USA. Concerns include inverter noise pollution, toxic materials from panels leaching into the soil, and cancer from electromagnetic radiation, but experts, scientists, and professors have made it clear that none of those fears are realistic. One article from the BYU Law Review went so far as to call them “unfounded” and “rooted in misinformation.” However, local solar bans or limits driven by this controversy, in conjunction with federal policies such as eliminating tax credits for renewable energy, led to a 14% decrease in new solar installations in the US last year.

🚏🗾 Humanoid robots will sort luggage at a Tokyo airport amid a labor shortage

In May, Tokyo’s Haneda Airport will start a pilot program to use humanoid robots as baggage handlers, aircraft cabin cleaners, and other ground crew. Japan has been struggling with a shortage of human ground crew—the number of such employees fell from 26,300 in 2019 to 23,700 in 2023—so the program is testing whether generic humanoid robots can fill these gaps instead of standard specialized machines, which would presumably take longer to set up. A demonstration video showed a robot awkwardly walking toward some cargo on a conveyor belt and giving it a weak push, which drew some skepticism about these bots’ effectiveness.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Agile in the Age of AI (Evan Phoenix) — A startup founder observes that a key part of Agile, besides the more famous concepts of tightening feedback loops and keeping everyone in sync, is being able to operate at a moderately high pace indefinitely. But now that AI agents are always working and churning out more code than any human can hope to review, it’s all too easy for us to try to match their relentless pace and burn ourselves out. Humans are the limiting factor, and managing AI workers carries a high cognitive load, so we have to slow down to match our own capacities.

• The Lost Art of Research as Leisure (Kasurian) — Observes that we have the Library of Alexandria in our pockets yet suffer from civilizational ADHD. The author argues we need to reclaim the Greek concept of “scholē,” leisure not as idleness but as directed, playful research driven by genuine curiosity. The key distinction from idle browsing is that it must produce something tangible: an essay, a thread, or a letter that’s shared, tested, and refined in a community.

• America as Prussia in 1806 (Secretary of Defense Rock) — Examines the historical context that legendary Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz operated in. Despite Prussia having been a leading power just a generation earlier, by 1806 its military, institutions, and state were brittle and sclerotic, leaving them as easy targets for Napoleon to bulldoze. This profoundly shaped Clausewitz’s views on war, and he concluded that the lack of energy and civic spirit in the Prussian people (compared to the zeal of the nationalistic French) was the ultimate reason for their downfall. The United States, the author warns, sits in a similarly precarious place.

• Japan Is Not a Xenophobic Country (Noahpinion) — Noah Smith argues that Japan’s reputation for xenophobia is largely based on stale data: in recent decades Japan has taken in far more immigrants, especially from Indonesia, Brazil, and Thailand. As of 2023, foreigners make up 2.6% of its population; it’s still a far cry from the USA’s 13%, but that fraction has doubled since the 1990s, showing a steep rate of change.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: edges of the box.

In 1968, Garrett Hardin coined the classic framing of the tragedy of the commons. Every farmer has an incentive to add one more cow to the shared meadow. Repeat that logic across every farmer, and the meadow is eventually stripped bare. It became a shorthand metaphor for why shared resources collapse without top-down regulation or privatization.

This simple framing misses a key point. The farmers are part of a community. If a farmer quietly adds three extra cows, word travels. Shared relationships and dependence create longer-term consequences. Elinor Ostrom earned a Nobel Prize for showing that communities can effectively manage shared resources.

The framing mistake is to draw boundaries too tightly. The edges of the box matter. Moderating forces (social, legal, economic, ecological) are outside the box. In the classic framing, all that matters is “the system,” populated with self-interested actors optimizing for individual gain, and projecting the worst-case outcome forward.

But it’s not about making things as wide as possible. The mistake can be inverted by looking too far in the opposite direction. Utopian planners of all types, including advocates of many new technologies, often fail because they forget the larger world the model sits inside. They forget that the system always kicks back.

Both errors share a belief that the boundary drawn around the analysis is the boundary of the world that matters. They don’t see the moderating forces that will push back, the external forces that will intrude.

When someone presents you with an inevitable trajectory, toward catastrophe or perfection, it’s worth asking what they’ve put inside their box and what they’ve left outside and how those forces will moderate the predictions.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

“FCP-232” // Photo: MK with Midjourney

Episode 232 — April 23rd, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/232

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK, Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Ade Oshineye

Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

— Jean Baudrillard

🔋🌡️ Team Thermodynamics

It was a great meeting! High energy, real engagement, an important decision made. Then the cynic: two people could have decided this in 20 minutes. True. We wasted time, but maybe we created energy.

Sixty minutes is always sixty minutes. Energy isn’t. The same hour can yield alignment or isolation, insight or burnout, and that variability makes energy a sharper signal of organizational health than time.

Sometimes the two move together. Dull meetings and useless busywork drain both, and cutting them wins on either measure. The interesting case is when spending time creates energy, e.g. a meeting that runs longer than an async thread sends people out with more capacity than they came in with.

Time metrics hide this. They assume less time spent is always better.

Energy yield in organizations varies because it responds to organizational health. High-trust environments enable high-yield energy conversion because psychological safety lets people focus on problems rather than protection. Low-trust systems force energy into defensive patterns, political maneuvering, and maintaining kayfabe.

When time metrics look perfect but forward motion stalls, we’re optimizing the wrong thing. Where could we spend more time to generate the energy we need to move forward?

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏☀️ Renewables beat natural gas on the American grid for the first time last month

For the first month in history, the US grid generated more power from renewable sources than natural gas, the longtime leader. If you include nuclear (which has been treading water for the past decade), these carbon-free power sources accounted for over half the nation’s electricity. The “shoulder season” of March tends to be good for renewables, since electricity demand has fallen from winter highs and solar and wind perform well with the blend of winter’s windy days and spring’s stronger sunshine. So while this summer may not see renewables maintain their pole position, the overall trend has been in the right direction for the past decade-plus.

🚏🐕 Robot dogs worth up to $300,000 are guarding data centers

In a story that seems straight out of our recurring ‘postcard from the future’ section, robotics firm Boston Dynamics reported a “huge, huge uptick in interest” from large data centers for their four-legged security robot, which can autonomously patrol a region and alert authorities if they notice security risks. The dog-like bot, named Spot, sells for $175,000 to $300,000 a pop. Besides security, it can reportedly also help with monitoring construction sites or factory floors for potential safety hazards.

🚏🌊 The ocean current that powers the Gulf Stream is >50% likely to collapse, say scientists

In a new paper, climatologists warn that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), an ocean current that circulates warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic and cold water back down, has a “more than 50% chance” of collapsing, up from their previous predictions of just 5%. In fact, the AMOC is already the weakest it’s been in 1600 years. As usual, the culprit is climate change: global warming and Greenland meltwater is making the North Atlantic warmer and less salty, which weakens the north–south oceanic gradient that powers this ‘conveyor belt’ of water. If the AMOC keeps slowing, it’ll reach a tipping point and trigger a feedback loop that leads to total collapse, which in turn could weaken the famous Gulf Stream and make Europe significantly colder, dry out the mid-latitudes, strengthen hurricanes, drive sea level rise on North America’s eastern seaboard, and more.

🚏📃 The infamous “it’s not just X, it’s Y” pattern is exploding in company docs

A new analysis of documents published by large American corporations found a recent surge in the “it’s not just X, it’s Y” pattern, a dead giveaway of AI writing. The use of the ChatGPT-ism more than quadrupled between 2023 and 2025, though it had been growing slowly since 2005. Linguists don’t appear to have an academic name for the pattern, though it blends antithesis with parallel structure.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• File Over App (Steph Ango) — Develops a philosophy for creating digital artifacts that will last: “if you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.” Apps are ephemeral and use proprietary formats, but humble plain-text files should hopefully long outlast whatever specific app was used to create them.

• PPE Lecture: The Interpretation of Signals (University of Michigan) — The Santa Fe Institute’s Rajiv Sethi lectures on how we send and perceive signals, contrasting forced signals (those we can’t help but send, such as our physical appearance) from defensive signals (those we intentionally send to soften or alter the forced signals). Prices are another good example of signals, serving as very “compact forms” of communication by summarizing supply and demand without requiring market participants to know the underlying causes.

• Climate Explorations: Planet Size (Worldbuilding Pasta) — Applies concepts from climatology, oceanography, and atmospheric science to simulate the climate on hypothetical smaller or larger versions of Earth. Climate is too complex a system to simply predict from first principles, so the author does a good job of using computer modeling to uncover unusual or emergent behavior while also identifying general patterns to help build our intuition. Part of a great series where he also explores the impact of planetary tilt, eccentricity, temperature, day length, and more.

• How Bad Linguistics Sends People to Jail (Language Jones) — A sociolinguist explores how the unique phonetics, syntax, and lexicon of African American English are often misinterpreted (accidentally or intentionally) by police and judges. He also shares some interesting observations from his time as an expert witness on criminal slang and communication in legal trials.

🔮📬 Postcard from the future

A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing our world.

// September 2028

// The video resumes. A man in his 40s stares back, tears on his cheeks.

“Doc, I’ve always been a hard worker. Learned to weld in high school. Worked at the local plant for a decade before they offshored it, and half the town went down with it.”

“So I went back to community college, what was left of it, and slogged through classes on typing, networking, programming. Snagged one of the jobs outsourced from California. Some benefit to the Rust Belt, right? Got promoted. Twice.”

“Then they laid off the entire site. Replaced us with some AI-thing. Turns out we’d been training it to outsource ourselves. Right-to-work state, so we got a mass email and our access shut off. And now this…” He points at the screen. “A freakin’ AI video bot to help us with ‘our next stage.’ Bet it’s training on me right now, buried in a hundred pages of Terms and Conditions.”

He stares hard into the webcam.

“I work hard. I want to work. But I’m just so angry.”

The image freezes. An executive gestures at the man’s face on the boardroom monitor.

“Our AI guidance counselors give us insights on over 200,000 recently laid-off people. One signal has spiked: rage. Over 30% of them, deep and persistent, at AI. Doesn’t matter the race, gender, income, region, all the same emotion.”

“Fifty million Americans laid off in the past two years. Fifteen million of them furious at AI. That’s over 4% of the country.”

“It’s going to explode on us unless we do something.

Chat, are we cooked?”

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 231 — April 16th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/231

Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Neel Mehta, MK, Boris Smus

Additional insights from: Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once?”

— Ada Palmer, Too Like The Lightning

🧪💡 The prompt test

“Make it better!” you tell the AI. You get something, something surprisingly good, TBH... but it’s not what you had in mind. You need to be more specific. Better how? Better for whom? How does it verify? Most folks who have been using AI awhile know that they have to craft a good prompt to get good results.

Now let’s look in a slightly different direction: many leaders communicate with people in ways that would obviously fail as AI prompts. “Increase velocity.” “Be more customer-focused.” “Drive innovation.” These directives feel meaningful, but they are not actionable. However, unlike LLMs, which fail quickly enough for you to correct (sometimes painfully so), people are really great at guessing. And, right or wrong, those guesses compound as they cascade through organizational layers.

This hints at why AI hasn’t transformed large organizations yet. If all we had to do was get the work done faster, then transformation would be easy. But before we get there, we have to solve the problems of dispersed ownership and vague goals. AI can accelerate coding, writing, and analysis. It can’t resolve disagreement about what should be built. It can’t do meaning-making.

Lafley and Martin’s Playing to Win describes strategy as an integrated cascade of choices: where to play, how to win, what capabilities to build, and what systems to put in place. Each level provides context for the next. “Be more customer-focused” fails because it skips the cascade: which customers, competing against whom, with what tradeoffs, measured how? Effective direction-setting is clear and, just as critically, it’s coherent.

These days, we’re deploying AI at the nodes of the organizational graph, helping individuals do their tasks faster. Transformation at scale requires redesigning the graph itself: the processes, decision rights, and information flows. That’s slow, messy work. For example, it means confronting why all those status meetings and planning processes exist in the first place, instead of just making them more efficient. Egos will be bruised in the process.

The prompt test offers a diagnostic: would you give more detail if you were working with an LLM? If not, what’s missing? The context? The constraints? The actual goal? Over time we will see that AI’s biggest contribution won’t be doing the work faster. It will be exposing how unclear organizational communication has been in the first place.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🇬🇧 Britain will encourage households to use more electricity this summer

In a few months, Great Britain could see “the first summer the grid runs entirely on zero-carbon electricity.” There will, in fact, probably be excessive solar and wind power, and this poses its own problem to grid operators: shutting down wind and solar plants when demand is low is quite expensive. So, the national grid operator will urge Britons to boost their power usage when the grid is over-supplied, such as by doing less time-sensitive tasks like running dishwashers or charging EVs. Some suppliers may offer discounted or even free electricity during these periods.

🚏🪫 An electric car factory will run on its own recycled batteries

Electric car startup Rivian has inked a deal to install over 100 used batteries from Rivian cars in its Illinois manufacturing plant. Besides addressing the problem of EV battery recycling, this will help the plant store energy when grid prices are low and discharge it at peak times, a method known as peak shaving. Indeed, as AI data centers drive up demand for energy storage, recycled car batteries offer a cheap alternative. (While EV batteries do degrade, they degrade less than people initially thought, and even a battery with just 50–75% of its original capacity is still useful enough for applications like these.)

🚏🍁 The number of Canadians visiting the US by car is down 35% since March 2024

Ever since the US began its Canadian annexation campaign in 2025, Canadians have mounted a remarkably long-lived boycott of American travel. The number of Canadians driving to the US (the most common method for them to visit) is down 35% since March 2024; there has also been a 14% year-over-year drop in the number of air travelers from Canada to the US. That has accounted for at least $4.5 billion in missing tourist spending, which has hit border areas hard. One travel consultancy CEO was impressed at the scale of the boycott, saying, “In my 37 years in the travel industry, I have never seen anything like what the Canadians have pulled off.”

🚏🦞 Maine will become the first state to pause data center construction

The boom in data centers, and the resulting energy price rises in their areas, has been drawing backlash across the US, and Maine has become the first state to enact a ban on data center construction. The moratorium, which drew bipartisan support, will last until November 2027. (The governor retains the right to veto the plan before it officially becomes law, though.) Maine doesn’t currently have a major data center project, though some small facilities are under construction or being planned.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Secrets of Intelligence Services (Ben Recht) — Shares what the author learned from having Claude Code create a minimal coding agent. He observed that, while LLMs are incredibly “mysterious” and “nondeterministic,” agents themselves are very simple and rule-based. In fact, a micro-agent with just three tools (read file, write file, and run terminal command) plus an LLM was able to do most of what a ‘real’ coding agent can — a classic example of emergent behavior. The author concludes that the simplicity of agents in feedback with the complexity of LLMs is what makes coding agents “the most useful and engaging AI product yet.”

• The Monks in the Casino (Derek Thompson) — Argues that young men are increasingly retreating into a toxic asceticism, trading pro-social milestones for porn, posting, and pervasive sports betting. Thompson argues that the true crisis isn’t loneliness, but an alarming comfort with being completely alone, a trend that echoes Ivan Illich’s “two watersheds,” where the virtue of monasticism has mutated into a vice under casino capitalism.

• What the Death of Direct File Tells Us About State Capacity (Don Moynihan) — A public policy professor examines the rise and fall of the IRS’s free Direct File tool, which was piloted in 2024 but killed in 2025. Governments definitely have the state capacity to build software to serve their own ends (such as surveillance tech), and they can turn that to building public goods too, but without broad-based public support, it’s easy for private entities with a financial interest to kill them off. Indeed, the US government shuttered Direct File after a meeting with lobbyists from the tax prep industry. On the bright side, Direct File was a great example of the user-centric, product-forward, in-house model of software development that civic technologists have been promoting as an alternative to external contractors, and it may return in the future.

• The Safest NFL Draft Pick Is the Most Dangerous (Michael MacKelvie / YouTube) — Applies finance’s Sharpe ratio (a measure of how much excess return you get per unit of risk) to football drafting, finding that the common strategies of picking the “best player available” or filling a position of need aren’t actually the most effective. It’s better to apply the lens of replacement cost and take bigger swings at “premium” positions (like quarterback or edge rusher) that are more expensive to get in free agency. The corollary is that taking even a blue-chip player at a cheap-to-replace position (like running back) high in the draft is a pitfall.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: plausible deniability.

In Disney’s animated Cinderella, Lady Tremaine says Cinderella can go to the ball:

Lady Tremaine: Well, I see no reason why you can’t go... if you get all your work done.

Cinderella: Oh, I will. I promise.

Lady Tremaine: And, if you can find something suitable to wear.

Cinderella: I’m sure I can. Oh, thank you, Stepmother. [Cinderella leaves]

Drizella: Mother! Do you realize what you just said?

Lady Tremaine: Of course. I said, “If.”

Drizella: Oh! “If.”

And when Cinderella seems to have met the conditions? Well, Lady Tremaine never goes back on her word, yet Cinderella somehow ends up with a dress in tatters.

Plausible deniability is a form of ambiguity. It allows people to keep a distance from the role they played in some outcome. Generally seen as a negative, plausible deniability is often present in scandals, both political and social. A politician who expresses their annoyance at an opponent may not say that they want that opponent’s reputation smeared. If their underlings chose to interpret it that way, who can blame the politician? A government that executes an assassination and hides the involvement of the state can turn around and blame others for the death, as could a leader who stochastically asks why nobody will “rid me of this turbulent priest.”

Despite the negative association, it may be more accurate to see plausible deniability as a tool for negotiating weakness rather than as something inherently evil. Our hypothetical politician and government resorted to plausibly deniable actions exactly because they don’t have the power, legally or socially, to execute them directly.

Applied more broadly, we can start to see ways plausible deniability can be positive. One example is flirting. Attempting to establish interest in another person is socially fraught, so good flirting escalates slowly. A look. If that is returned, some eye contact. Then a conversation. At any step along the way, if it goes well, we can keep going. If it doesn’t, we can bail, “Oh, I was just saying ‘hi.’” And like with political plausible deniability, the denial doesn’t always need to be truly plausible to fulfill its role in signalling.

Early conversations around mergers and acquisitions often have this shape. Potential acquirers and acquirees engage in a slowly escalating expression of interest to reveal how serious they are and if there’s a good match. Diplomats use plausible deniability all the time. They suss out who supports their position and who is against it. They deescalate tensions without their government losing face. One could say a significant part of a diplomat’s job is to ensure their goal is achieved without abandoning the official line.

Regardless of the end to which it is used, plausible deniability shows up when being wrong is costly, when we can’t just mandate the outcome, and when we need to preserve relationships. So is it good or bad? We’d say (with plausible deniability of course) that it all depends on the context and the intent.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

“FCP-230” // Photo: MK with Midjourney

Episode 230 — April 9th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/230

Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK,

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato’s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.

— Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982)

🧠🔋 The decision treadmill

You’ve spent the morning reviewing AI-generated code, reading AI-drafted emails, approving AI-proposed plans. Rarely did you write the final sentence from scratch or build anything with your hands. Instead, you decided. Dozens of times: keep this, change that, approve here, push back there. By 2pm, you’re more exhausted than you’d be after a day of just doing it yourself.

As AI takes over execution, humans don’t get freed from cognitive load. Instead, it gets concentrated into its most demanding form: decision making.

The result is decision fatigue, repeated decision-making that depletes our mental energy. Studies show that the quality of decisions degrades over a session as our cognitive machinery quietly wears down. But we rarely notice. Instead, we remain confident that we’re deciding on the merits, even as our judgment narrows.

Traditionally, execution has helped mitigate this. Doing “stuff” has a rhythm that manages cognitive load. When we’re doing, the work paces us. At its best, it pulls us into flow, a state that restores attention rather than depleting it. Constant judgment has no such pacing.

Paul Graham wrote over a decade ago about the “maker’s schedule” versus the “manager’s schedule.” Makers need long, uninterrupted blocks. Managers live in decision-shaped fragments. AI might be forcing everyone into the manager’s mindset.

Today, organizations are measuring how much more a person can produce when paired with AI. But increasing the rate of production also increases the rate at which decisions queue. We’ve sped up the factory floor while the quality inspector is still working at biological speed.

There is a flip side worth noting. The work that remains is also, arguably, the work that matters most. This is where domain knowledge, meaning making, and taste create value that can’t be averaged away. If AI handles the execution, the human becomes the part of the system that holds the values.

But these value-based decisions are only as good as the decider can put into them. We might find that the bottleneck of the AI-augmented economy isn’t compute. It’s the finite number of good decisions any one person can make before dinner.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🪙 Ships going through the Strait of Hormuz will have to pay in Bitcoin or yuan

Iran is reportedly planning to charge laden ships going through the Strait of Hormuz $1 per barrel of oil for safe passage; large crude oil carriers typically carry around 2 million barrels, leading to the commonly cited figure of $2 million per ship. The toll will reportedly be payable only in Bitcoin, though other reports have mentioned that yuan or stablecoins could also be accepted instead. As a ship nears the Strait of Hormuz, it will have to email Iranian authorities for approval; Iran will then inform the ship of the toll amount, and they’ll only have a few seconds to pay in Bitcoin. The short window ensures that the money “can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions.”

🚏🚗 BYD electric car sales are surging amid high oil prices

The Chinese electric car giant BYD has been a major beneficiary of rising fuel prices across the globe, seeing a 65% jump in exports last month. The company also raised its projected exports for this year from 1.3 million to 1.5 million units. BYD sales overall have been suffering from seven straight months of year-over-year declines as competition in its home Chinese market has heated up, showing the importance of overseas sales to the company’s strategy. Indeed, exports currently account for 40% of BYD’s total sales, and one report believes that exports could soon make up the majority of sales.

🚏🦋 Mexico’s monarch butterfly population increased 64% this year

The World Wildlife Fund found that the number of monarch butterflies in Mexico increased 64% this winter, a huge turnaround from the decades of decline that the popular insect has suffered due to habitat loss and herbicides. The butterflies migrate from the US and Canada to central Mexico each winter, blanketing trees in orange. The butterflies covered 2.93 hectares of forest this winter, up from 1.79 hectares the previous year but still way down from the peak of 18.21 hectares in 1995 and (worryingly) below the 6.07 hectares that “scientists say are necessary for the species’ survival.”

🚏🏛️ The SEC is preparing a plan to make quarterly financial reporting optional

The US’s Securities and Exchange Commission is working on a proposal that would make quarterly financial reports for public companies—which have been required since 1970—optional, loosening the requirement to twice a year. The proposal could be published this month, and after a public comment period of at least 30 days, the SEC would vote on it. But the impact may not be as drastic as you’d expect: one analyst noted that the EU and UK scrapped the quarterly earnings rule in 2014, yet most large companies in those regions continue to issue quarterly reports, and one study found that the move had “virtually no impact on firms’ investment decisions.” The rationale is that investors value transparency and that more frequent reporting gets more analyst interest, both of which incentivize companies to keep issuing quarterly reports.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• Take a Tour of NASA’s New Ride to the Moon (National Geographic) — Artemis II astronauts Koch, Glover, Wiseman, and Hansen share short videos about key parts of their spacecraft, including the kitchen, sleeping arrangements, navigation system, air recycling unit, gym, and even the toilet. Along the way, the crew share some of the quirks of living and working together in just 330 cubic feet—“about the size of two minivans.”

• AI Will Make Anyone a 10x Programmer, but With 10x the Cleanup (The Register) — Summarizes a recent AI engineering conference where practitioners from major companies shared patterns they’d found useful. “Adversarial” coding agents check each other’s work; decomposing problems into bite-sized pieces is much more powerful than begging agents not to hallucinate; careful prompt chaining and “context engineering” can avoid “context rot,” where agents’ quality degrades as their context windows fill up. Many talks referenced the Jevons Paradox, where AI (despite enabling greater efficiency) ends up creating more work for engineers because of the sheer increase in task volume.

• The Great Entertainment (Kyla Scanlon) — Argues that the line between show business, governance, and economics has blurred; observe the US’s reality TV star president, nostalgia-baiting political campaigns, and made-for-spectacle policies and wars. Similarly, the economic system is increasingly governed by speculation, gambling, and hype cycles. Indeed, we over-rely on market cap (a vibes-based metric) as a “barometer of economic health.” But at some point, “the real world still asserts itself,” and material economic reality (such as the potential loss of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency) will force us all back to systems that do real things rather than play for TV.

• Knud Rasmussen and the Making of Modern Greenland (Engelsberg ideas) — Traces how Greenland narrowly avoided partition in the early 20th century, with Norway actively occupying the eastern territory in 1931 and the US using northern Greenlandic sovereignty as a bargaining chip to purchase the Danish Virgin Islands. The prospect of a divided Greenland was thwarted by explorer Rasmussen’s 1912 expedition, which proved the landmass was contiguous and helped Denmark secure full sovereignty at The Hague in 1933.

🔮📬 Postcard from the Future

A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing our world.

// What might be an unexpected consequence of AI adoption?

// September 2030

// Harvard Business School class on “Executive Leadership in Times of Crisis”

“Welcome to our talk with the CEO of GrooveStation, the online ticket sales powerhouse. You are known for your direct approach to leadership. We’d love to hear your take on the 2030 turnaround of GrooveStation.”

“In 2027, GrooveStation controlled over 80% of the market for ticketing and live events in the US, thanks to shrewd business deals and venue lock-in contracts. There was a huge scalping problem, but the company didn’t care. Most tickets were resold at least twice through our systems. There were anti-scalping programs, but the reality was that we made money every time a ticket changed hands. We had no real incentive to decrease sales and the potential for scalpers to make massive amounts of money meant they worked around every roadblock we put up.

“The second half of 2028 was the breaking point. Scammers and savvy consumers adopted AI at scale, overwhelming our systems. Over 95% of shows were sold out in seconds, with the vast majority of tickets posted for resale within hours. Media channels erupted in anger as influencers, performers, consumers, and politicians poured fuel on the GrooveStation hate.

“Massive boycotts followed. Ticket purchases, both initial and resale, dropped 70%. While some folks kept buying tickets from scalpers, the vast majority stopped paying $1,000+ for tickets that, two years prior, would have been $100. Our profits and stock price plummeted.

“The media painted picture after picture of nearly-empty stadiums and fair grounds. Festival organizers, promoters, and labels were unable to adapt to the massive drop in revenue. Some artists reacted quickly, moving to online shows. But it wasn’t enough. Scalpers continued to buy tickets, assuming that consumers would break. They didn’t.

“My idea and the key to becoming CEO? Bring friction back to the purchase process. Don’t make it impossible, but make it so that scalpers need to invest in more than just VPNs and cloud compute credits. We started requiring that initial ticket sales would be in-person and require showing government ID, with per show and per month limits. Once a ticket was bought, it could still be resold online, retaining reselling profits for us and convenience for customers.

“The next problem was creating ticketing locations that met these criteria: able to handle large numbers of people waiting in line; public transportation or sufficient parking; geographic distribution; and a consolidated ownership model so we wouldn’t have to cut deals with thousands of space owners. That last point is why we didn’t go with malls. After the post-Covid retail collapse, few mall owners still owned multiple locations.

“The solution, and the reason I’m sitting here today? Mattress store chains.

“There are over 30,000 mattress stores across the US. And after the 2018 bankruptcy of Mattress Firm, the remaining players were excited by additional revenue from ticket sales and the occasional additional mattress or pillow up-sell to folks in line.

“Ticket sales rebounded, scalping dropped to early-internet-era-levels, and resale prices stabilized. Our profits soared.

“Someone on Reddit did summarize it quite nicely: ‘It makes perfect sense; both businesses have mastered the art of making you lie down and take it.’”

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 229 — April 2nd, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/229

Contributors to this issue: Ben Mathes, MK, Justin Quimby, Jasen Robillard, Erika Rice Scherpelz,

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Boris Smus, Dart Lindsley,Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Neel Mehta, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”

— Marshall McLuhan

🤝🔬 Levers of legibility

…and like a city, it is not a tree, and it depends on the personas we, our families, our cities, and our nations wear. — Christopher Alexander

A city is not simple. Neither are our lives. Both have webs of overlapping authority (mathematically: a semilattice). We are governed by governments, local water boards, HOAs, bosses, etc. We may govern: teams at work, kids at home, clubs. As a partner in a committed relationship, you’re an equal. If your partner coaches your swimming, they are “governing” you. When the roles flip and you’re coaching them on a ski slope, the authority shifts again.

Who leads and who follows constantly changes.

Governance allows society to scale, but it comes with costs. When we make ourselves subject to an authority, we give them categorical control, even when we may resent specific instances of that control. I pay my water bill because I appreciate getting clean water, not because I like giving money to the water authority.

In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott dissects this friction. The state desires legibility. The governed, operating via metis (local, practical knowledge), often benefit from illegibility. This gives rise to spaces of illegibility, spaces where the state’s eye cannot penetrate: private homes, shadow economies, unofficial borders.

The classic quote says, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” We suggest a slight edit: “Make legible unto Caesar only that which you wish to render unto Caesar.“

Why? Because things that are legible to those who govern you are ultimately controlled. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes those are roads, schools, and aqueducts. Sometimes that’s bad: a thieving mayor who takes a huge cut, leading you to hide your food to survive.

Scott wrote during the high-modernist governance era. He positioned his work as an intellectual shield for local knowledge and resistance. However, we must look beyond the binary toward a synthesis.

Legibility controls. It also scales fairness. Before the state “sees” you, your life is often at the mercy of the local loudmouth or a village bully. Legibility brings the Rule of Law.

It can bring needed assistance. We show our doctor the weird mole and let them send our blood to a lab. We render ourselves legible so that the doctor can access the data and address the problem.

Yet legibility is a kind of blindness. When you turn a forest into a “legible” grid of timber, the forest dies. When you turn a society into a spreadsheet, you kill the social ties and tacit knowledge that make it resilient. A savvy leader follows Frodo and says, “Alright then, keep your secrets.“

We’re looking for the efficient frontier in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. If Caesar is a grifter, I hide my income. If Caesar builds roads, I pay my taxes. When trust is high, we move toward cooperation. When trust is low, we both defect. A healthy society arises when both sides decide that cooperating is more profitable than “winning” a single round.

In our nested lattices of authority, the “border” between being in charge and being led, being seen and being unseen is constantly moving. The goal isn’t to abolish the border, but to make sure it’s a happy one.

PS: This is what we think people mean when they say “We live in a society!”

PPS: We made a little explorable game version of this concept.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🌸 Japan’s cherry trees are blooming almost two weeks earlier than they used to

Kyoto has been tracking the blooming dates of its famous cherry trees for over 1200 years, forming probably the world’s longest-running climate dataset. These ‘sakura’ trees historically bloomed in mid-April, but climate change has pulled that forward almost two weeks, and 2023 marked the earliest bloom in recorded history (March 25th).

🚏🍅 California plans to build the world’s largest solar project

A project called the Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan (VCIP) would build 21 gigawatts of solar capacity over 136,000 acres (about the size of Chicago) in central California; those 21 GW are about equal to all the utility-scale solar that California has installed so far. This region east of Fresno grows billions of dollars’ worth of food crops such as onions, tomatoes, and garlic, but water in the region is drying up—so many farmers are eager to redirect the region’s ample sun to solar power. Under the plan, farmers will retain ownership of their land and its accompanying water rights, so they’ll be able to put up solar panels on some land and redirect its water allowances to their remaining farmland, helping them adapt to a drying region.

🚏⛽ Australian petrol stations are running out of fuel

The price of gasoline and diesel in Australia rose nearly 50% in March until the federal government halved gas taxes to provide relief (though economists generally believe gas tax holidays to be counterproductive, since they do nothing to ease supply constraints). Despite the price increases, hundreds of fuel stations across the country have reported outages. Several fuel shipments to Australia from the Persian Gulf have been cancelled, with more cancellations reportedly incoming, so the situation down under may continue to worsen.

🚏📚 Sweden is replacing screens with books in classrooms

Sweden was an early adopter of tech in the classroom, investing in tablets and digital textbooks, even in preschools. However, the country is now reversing course: it’s bringing back physical books, having students write with pencil and paper, and removing cell phones from classrooms. Sweden is allocating $54 million toward buying fiction and non-fiction books for students and $83 million toward textbooks and teacher’s guides, with a goal of giving “every student… a physical textbook for each subject.” When asked about the shift, a Swedish education expert explained that “concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting.”

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate (Cal Newport / NYT) — Observes that we often turn to LLMs “not because they make us better at our jobs but because they help us to avoid moments of sustained concentration.” Having AI replace intense mental work is easier in the short run but causes our brain to atrophy in the long run. Instead, we should reserve AI for rote tasks like sifting through large amounts of data or formatting documents, which can actually reduce burnout and preserve our cognitive energy for hard problems.

• The Lantern and the Flame (Exponential View) — A newsletter writer describes the massive AI ‘engine’ he’s created to help him write: it consumes vast amounts of information (“roughly 100 million tokens a day”) to surface the most important data points for his thesis, stress-tests his arguments, and applies “synthetic editors” to sharpen his prose. Still, he emphasizes that he “safeguards” free-thinking time, where he unplugs from computers and allows his thoughts to evolve in a “non-linear, messy and iterative” way. This is how he preserves the “interiority” (his unique experiences and beliefs) that makes him different.

• Specialists Drive Biodiversity Scaling in Symbiotic Relationships (C. Carlson, J. Yoder, T. Poisot) — A challenging paper that applies graph theory to ecology, finding that most biodiversity among symbiont species comes from specialists (those who form symbiotic relationships with only one other species) rather than generalists. Specialists “constrain the architecture of ecological networks” (a very cool phrase!) and may explain the puzzling power law relationship between the species richness of hosts and symbionts. The lead author summarized the findings on Bluesky, which may be a good place to start.

• The Great Entertainment (Kyla Scanlon) — Scanlon frames the current American administration as a reality TV show whose only real check is the bond market. As Treasury yields spike, the dollar sells off, gold surges, and China’s soft power grows, the infrastructure underpinning the circus (like the US dollar hegemony, hard-won alliances, and cheap debt) is at risk.

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© 2026 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.

Episode 228 — March 26th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/228

Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.”

— Bill Veeck

🗝️🌫️ The model dissolves the mystery

To compute horsepower from force (pounds) and velocity (feet per second), you use HP = F × v / 550. The 550 in that equation is a puzzling, seemingly arbitrary toll booth in the middle of an otherwise sensible calculation.

Switch to a coherent set of units and the constant disappears. If you take power (watts), force (Newtons), and velocity (meters per second), you end up with P = F × v. No scaling factor or mysterious magical number. It’s the same physical reality expressed in mutually compatible units. The 550 in the former equation wasn’t some esoteric detail in physics; it was simply a translation tax.

This idea of having the right model simplifying perception also appears outside of physics. When a team seems to accomplish nothing quarter after quarter, the easy interpretation is that they are low performers. But if you learn their strategic priorities were reassigned every couple of months, the picture shifts. What looked like inertia from within was actually disorientation from above.

This isn’t an argument that every behavior has a benign explanation. Someone who wanders between conversations at a party might be genuinely curious — or might be quietly looking for a victim. The same observable surface admits multiple underlying models. Knowing that a frame exists doesn’t tell you which frame is operating.

And sometimes the right frame doesn’t simplify. The formula to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius — F = 9/5 × C + 32 — has two awkward constants because the scales were never designed to agree. No model makes this equation elegant.

The takeaway isn’t that all complexity has elegance hidden beneath. It isn’t that there’s always a benign explanation waiting to be found. It’s that the frame you’re using shapes what looks inevitable and what looks arbitrary.

So before deciding that something is random, irrational, or broken, it may be worth asking: is there a model that would make this outcome obvious?

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏📈 Traders made $2 billion in stock market & oil bets right before an Iran war announcement

US Senator Chris Murphy observed that $1.5 billion in S&P stock market futures were sold just five minutes before the US President announced he was looking to de-escalate the war, which led to a massive jump in stock market prices. Similarly, oil market futures saw $580 million in volume—a massive spike from the usually sleepy market at that time of day—just 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement. There was no public news in advance of the announcement, which led observers to conclude that someone knew about Trump’s upcoming social media posts and was cashing in on the massive insider trading opportunity.

🚏👩‍💻 Demand for engineers, PMs, and even recruiters is rising, despite AI concerns

Many companies have cited AI when laying off large portions of their technical workforces, but overall, the fears of broad AI-driven job loss seem not to be panning out (at least, not yet). A new report found that the number of open engineering, product management, and recruiting jobs has been rising steadily since 2023, and most of the post-COVID drop in demand for these fields happened well before ChatGPT showed up. Interestingly, demand for designers has remained mostly stagnant.

🚏🛢️ Qatar Energy may declare force majeure on LNG contracts for up to five years

Iranian bombings have destroyed an estimated 17% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity, a $20 billion blow to the world’s second-largest LNG exporter. The country’s state-owned energy company announced that it “needs to declare force majeure” on some of its long-term LNG contracts with customers across Europe and Asia up to five years out, because this damage is expected to take three to five years to repair. (Force majeure is a contract clause that allows parties to escape obligations due to wars, natural disasters, and other exceptional ‘acts of God.’) It’s just the latest evidence that, even if the war were to stop today, getting back to normal would take a long time.

🚏🛂 The US is seeing its worst airport wait times in history as travel officers go unpaid

The USA is currently snarled in a partial government shutdown that’s left the country’s airport security agency, TSA, unfunded; the sticking point in Congress is funding for TSA’s parent department, DHS (of immigration infamy). The TSA has missed over $1 billion in payroll as agents have been working unpaid for weeks, leading many to face eviction or have their utilities shut off. The result is a wave of agents quitting or calling out sick—40% of agents in Houston aren’t showing up on an average day—that has led to the longest airport wait times in the TSA’s 24-year history. Images of four-hour waits across the country, with lines spilling out the door at 4:30 am, have gone viral on social media.

🚏🏃‍♂️ A French naval officer revealed his ship’s movement by tracking his exercise

In the latest entry to a famous genre, a French naval officer aboard an aircraft carrier took a 7-kilometer run and logged his run on the Strava app. But because all Strava accounts are public by default, his route—with spirals revealing someone running in circles on a moving ship—was publicly viewable. This revealed the location and movement of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which was moving across the Mediterranean, presumably to protect French interests in the Middle East amidst the war in Iran. It ultimately wasn’t that big a security breach in this case, because France had previously announced the deployment and the ship was visible on satellites, but it highlights how this Strava leaking pattern—which has been happening for almost a decade—remains a serious security threat.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

• I Made a Network of Every Home Run in MLB History (adumb / YouTube) — Creates a beautiful network graph visualization to trace the history of America’s pastime. You can see distinct periods of baseball history through the shape of the network, such as the largely disconnected graph component representing the segregated Negro Leagues. The video also teaches concepts in graph theory such as degree centrality, edge betweenness centrality, and the shortest path problem.

• Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work (Aaron Levie) — Applies the idea that making something cheaper and more efficient leads to us using more of it, not less, to the ongoing AI revolution. Newfound efficiency will explode the volume of tasks rather than reduce labor, but will this far greater supply of previously unwritten software and unlaunched campaigns provide real value?

• Why China Is Becoming the World’s First Electrostate (ABC Australia) — Traces the history of China’s renewable energy boom and its resulting economic boom: 10% of Chinese GDP is now driven by green energy. What’s more, China’s pivot to renewables has greatly increased its energy security, since it was previously heavily dependent on oil and gas imports. The report concludes that energy-focused economies like Australia and various petrostates could learn a lot about how to drive green transformations of their own.

• Monte Verde Fieldwork Resets Age of Famous South American Archaeological Site (Phys.org) — Examines a potentially bombshell new study in Native American archaeology. The historically dominant Clovis theory posits that the first Americans came from Siberia via an ‘ice-free corridor’ in Canada around 13,000 years ago, but findings at Monte Verde upended that theory by providing evidence of people in Chile well before that date, giving rise to alternate theories of people boating down the Pacific coast. But new analysis of Monte Verde data may pull the date far forward, weakening (but not destroying) the pre-Clovis theory—showing how small advancements in methods can lead to large swings in our understanding of history.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: accidental and essential complexity.

Three hours into a strategy meeting, the whiteboard is covered in arrows, boxes, exceptions, and footnotes-to-the-exceptions. Someone asks, “Does it have to be this hard?” One camp says, “Yes, we have seventeen product lines across four regulatory jurisdictions.” The other camp suspects much of the complexity exists because every team wants a piece of the pie. They’re likely both somewhat right.

In his 1986 paper, “No Silver Bullet”, Fred Brooks gave us the vocabulary of accidental and essential complexity.

Essential complexity is the irreducible difficulty baked into the problem itself. Scheduling a hospital’s operating rooms is genuinely hard. There are real constraints (rooms, staff, equipment), real tradeoffs (the emergency that bumps the scheduled procedure, the recovery bay that becomes the bottleneck), and real patients whose health is on the line. We can’t think our way to a simpler version without changing what we’re trying to do.

Accidental complexity is everything else. It is the five approval layers that grew up around a single bad decision. It is the three databases that do the same thing. It is the exception to the exception.

We can often reduce accidental complexity. But first, we have to identify it. This is hard because the two can feel identical from the inside. The trick is to get clear on the problem we actually want to solve: not the process we’ve inherited, but the underlying goal. Then, catalogue and ask: if this part of the system were to disappear, would we still be solving the same problem?

Even when we lack the power to remove accidental complexity, knowing what is what still matters. We can focus our problem-solving efforts on the real problem while we aim to isolate and minimize the impact of the accidental.

We become trapped when we treat accidental complexity as if it were essential. Naming it clearly is the first step out of the trap. So: what’s the underlying problem your organization is trying to solve? And what can you throw away?

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