🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 144

May 2nd, 2024

“FCP-144” // Photo: MK with GPT-4 and DALL·E 3

Episode 144 — May 2nd, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/144

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

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold, Melanie Kahl, Kamran Hakiman

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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.

“I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me, ‘I love you.’ ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”

― Maya Angelou

🧭🤝 Navigating the symmetry of trust

In a previous issue, we visited the integrative model of trust developed by Mayer et al. Let’s revisit this rich framework. 

In the integrative model of trust, risk-taking is one of the pillars: trust cannot exist without some mutually perceived risk. This is a big idea: it appears that trust cannot exist without the potential for distrust. We build trust when we take risks and engage in a relationship despite that potential. Our degree of trust depends on our previous experience of taking risks combined with a few factors — ability, benevolence, and integrity — that we automatically tally up when we determine another party’s trustworthiness. Put differently, trust-building depends on taking risks and becoming vulnerable to the other party. 

What can this insight tell us about how risk symmetry impacts trust in a relationship? Imagine that there are two parties who are interacting. When the perceived risk is roughly equal, we are in a sweet spot for developing trust: both parties are interested in developing more trust. Developing this trust reduces their personal risk, which allows them to expand the interaction and take bigger risks. Trust grows incrementally. 

When risk is highly asymmetric, trust cannot develop. For example, totalitarian regimes seek total loyalty, not trust. In such relationships, the space for distrust is so great that it is nearly impossible to contemplate trust, even as a concept. In some ways, the complete absence of trust is clarifying. In such a zero-sum environment, it’s everyone for themselves.

The most tumultuous area is the one where the symmetry is ambiguous: we are pretty sure it’s not completely asymmetrical, but we’re also not confident the risk taken by both parties is equal enough. This leads to mistrust: the ambiguity gives rise to unease, with gut feelings and spidey senses guiding our trust-based thinking more often than not. Trust can exist, but it is tenuous and fragile, with sometimes extraordinary amounts of effort required to just retain it.

If an organization has the good fortune to grow, it will see itself transform from small, tight-knit teams that make magic happen to true industry giants beset by hierarchy and process. This journey traverses the space of trust symmetry.

The small team with a shared fate is in the sweet spot of trust. Everyone has similar stakes in the team’s success, and everyone’s role is of similar importance. Trust is paramount here, and the lack thereof will be a sure cause for failure.

Medium-sized teams will experience trouble. The power of the organization grows significantly larger than the power of each individual. Yet the company still needs closeness and high trust to preserve the original effectiveness that brought success in the first place.

Beyond a certain size, organizations will need to exert so much energy to preserve trust that they will inevitably look for ways to reduce the need for it. To continue to function, they will need to find ways to mechanize the relationships and rely more and more on the fact that the risk symmetry is weighted strongly toward the organization. This mechanization isn’t always bad. It can be highly efficient and it can be more fair since it’s less dependent on being in the inner circle of trust. 

However, in making this shift, organizations give up the magic that conjured them. Over time, they may misplace their purpose and, eventually, lose cohesion entirely. Unlike governmental bureaucracies, businesses must continue to add up to more than just the sum of their parts. And that is incredibly challenging when the environment pushes everyone toward the zero-sum game.

Escaping this destiny is hard, but the history of companies that have remade themselves shows that while it is impossible to recapture the highly symmetric trust of the early days, it is possible to replace it with something that is less inspiring but highly effective in its own right. 

🛣️🚩 Signposts 

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

🚏☀️ California powered its entire grid with renewable energy for 9 hours in a day

On a recent Saturday, the entire state of California ran on 100% renewable energy for nine whole hours; it repeated the feat for eight hours the next day. (Solar energy naturally peaks in the middle of the day, so the state can only maintain 100%-green status for a few hours at a time.) This feat has been getting more and more common of late: the Golden State recently hit 100% renewable for nine days in a row and for 37 days in a 45-day stretch, whereas it had only been hitting that mark once or twice a week a few years ago.

🚏🪧 Advertising billboards are coming to a metaverse video game

Roblox, the popular ‘metaverse’ platform where users can create 3D video games for others to play, will start launching “virtual billboards with video advertisements” in its games. Users will be able to show the billboards in the games they create and earn a cut of the revenue Roblox gets from the advertiser. (Roblox is very popular with kids, and the new ad program was touted as a way for “brands to create deeper connections” with Gen Z’ers.)

🚏🚌 A school principal was framed with an AI-generated racist “rant”

The principal of an American high school was temporarily removed from his job and targeted with hateful social media messages after an audio clip filled with racist language, supposedly with his voice, went viral. Investigators soon found that the clip had been deepfaked with AI, and the alleged perpetrator (a former school employee who wanted revenge against the principal) had even edited the tape to add background sounds to make it sound more realistic.

🚏🌡️ The UK will ban easily guessable default passwords on IoT devices

Many cyberattacks in recent years have been spread via poorly secured internet-of-things devices that still have their insecure factory-default usernames and passwords. (In one famous example, hackers broke into a casino’s network through “an internet-connected temperature sensor in a fish tank.”) Thanks to a new bill, the UK will become the first country to ban insecure default passwords like “admin” or “12345” in IoT devices, requiring manufacturers to instead use strong, unique default passwords.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

• Seeing Like a CEO (Interfluidity) — Argues that it’s no surprise that Boeing morphed (largely for the worse) when outsider businessmen took over as CEO; they had to reshape the firm so it’d be legible to them. But the corollary is that “the idea of the superstar CEO turnaround artist, endowed with a managerial g factor enabling excellent leadership at any firm, is bullshit.” More generally, placing an outsider at the top of a complex system risks disrupting and flattening the intricate machinery that makes it tick.

• Office, Messaging, and Verbs (Benedict Evans) — Observes that, while normal people don’t use Photoshop to crop holiday pictures or AutoCAD to sketch out where to put a sofa, Microsoft Word is used for both complex “pro” projects and simple, mundane tasks. A narrow task can lend itself easily to a simple UI, but if you want to encompass lots of different use cases and data types, building an interface that does it all is much more challenging.

• Give Us the Dumbphone EV (Heatmap) — Writes that the comparison of modern electric cars to ‘smartphones on wheels’ is apt, but not in a good way: many EVs are hard to repair or upgrade, reliant on flaky over-the-air software updates, fragile, and stuffed with upsells for subscriptions. “Positioning EVs as fancy gadgets was a natural strategy to get Americans to lust after them” and to make them feel different from gas cars, but making EVs that are more rugged, modular, and maintainable would do wonders for sustainability and quality of life.

• Humble Thimbles and Thor’s Thunder (Danny Bate) — Shares an interesting form of language change: epenthesis, or when people insert new sounds inside sound clusters that would otherwise feel awkward. For instance, English speakers seem to dislike having nasals like ‘m’ or ‘n’ followed by liquids like ‘l’ or ‘r’, which is how Latin numeral picked up an extra “b” to become number, how humility gave rise to humble, and how Old English thunor (with the same root as “Thor”) became thunder. Understanding this phenomenon makes it a lot easier for historical linguists to trace the origin of words!

🔍🧮 Lens of the week

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

This week’s lens: trading zones.

Many goals can only be accomplished by bringing together different perspectives — be they practices, domains, or expertise. However, doing this well isn’t always straightforward. Different perspectives often bring different vocabularies, different mental models, and often different value structures. 

To mediate this gap, we need to form a trading zone that allows different perspectives to exchange information. The idea of a trading zone originates from places that would trade in goods even though they didn’t speak the same language. Potential traders needed a shared language to be able to transact. This could result in a pidgin, a set of shared words that got the job done without being a full language. Eventually, with enough trade, this could grow into a creole language that was a language in its own right. 

The same dynamic applies when different perspectives need to collaborate. Peter L. Galison wrote about this in his essay “Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief.” Creating the first atomic bomb required people from the theoretical physics community, engineering community, and other fields. It was often hard for one person to learn everything needed, so a sort of pidgin was created to communicate in that trading zone. A key characteristic of these trading zones is that they allow groups to get the job done without having to learn everything about the concept. 

We can see trading zones everywhere, especially in cross-domain work — for example, the work technology teams do across product management, design, engineering, and other practices. This particular trading zone brings up an important failure mode: sometimes, a shared vocabulary can become too specialized. In software, this can manifest in using language that is technology-centric instead of associated with the language of the customer (domain-driven design) or outcome (jobs-to-be-done). 

When we are having trouble working with someone or another team, we should ask whether we are speaking the same language. If we are not, can we use or develop a shared language that encapsulates valuable concepts that we all need to know? This shared language won’t encompass everything, but it will be enough to share ideas and generate insights that can only come from collaborating across perspectives.

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