🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 170
November 14th, 2024
Episode 170 — November 14th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/170
Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Stefano Mazzocchi, John Cutler, Dart Lindsley, Anthea Roberts, Wesley Beary, Jasen Robillard, Boris Smus, Neel Mehta, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Dimitri Glazkov, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Jon Lebensold, Melanie Kahl, Kamran Hakiman, Chris Butler,
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.
“Cease quoting laws to us that have swords!”
— Pompey Magnus in Plutarch
🌊🛶 Finding your flow
A paraphrase of a conversation between FLUX members.
🦊 Fox: I’m trying to push long-term organizational change, but it’s rough going. It doesn’t line up with the usual incentives. Someone who’s been here longer told me to think of the place as a river: we can’t turn it without accounting for the flow. I need to understand how to act on the river to change its course but also appreciate the fact that doing so creates friction and turbulence, which needs to be predicted and mitigated. It also takes a substantial amount of effort, more than if the river was empty... but it can’t be. The river metaphor has helped, but it doesn’t feel like the whole story.
🦦Otter: An extension of the river metaphor might be the idea of oxbow lakes. An oxbow lake is formed when a wide meander from a river is cut off, creating a free-standing lake. When you try to change the river, you might end up cut off—you become the oxbow lake. Or you try to figure out what will oxbow, and make sure you are on the right side of it.
🦆Duck: I’ve also tried to steer some big systems toward illegible outcomes. I’ve had luck with thinking of my goal as a canoe on the river, not an attempt to change the river itself. A canoe is much more in your control. There are two ways to turn a canoe: by paddling backwards on one side or by paddling harder on the other. Paddling backwards is trying to push back against bad behavior. It creates resentment and trains people to avoid you. Paddling forward is about amplifying good things through public praise, funding, etc. so that people are attracted to your goals. People may not even know at first what you are training them to do, but they will still respond.
🐻Bear: Let’s build on that. Paddling backward—or even just letting the paddles rest in the water—kills your forward momentum. You avoid it by “feathering,” where you turn the paddles so they are above and parallel to the water on the return stroke. This allows the paddles to stay nearer to the water without touching it and even contribute (in, I imagine, a rather tiny way) to aerodynamics. Speed comes from paddling forward and avoiding backward friction.
🦘Kangaroo: Ann Pendleton-Jullian talks about 3 metaphors for her life. Early on, she saw it as a large cruise ship steaming straight ahead. In her 30s, she switched to the metaphor of a sailboat as she became more aware of how life’s winds can throw you off course. You need to respond to the waves and the weather. But in her 40s, she needed to explain the chaos and complexity around her. She switched to the metaphor of a white water kayaker: it’s fast, it’s furious, and there’s no way to take your whole environment into account. Instead, you have to feel it as you go through. You have to put your oar in the water to even understand the currents and how to respond.
🦦Otter: What I love about this lens is that it speaks to experience and familiarity with the river. Even in whitewater, a seasoned river guide or a local paddler picks up on so many signals and patterns. If a seasoned river guide goes to a new river, they must leverage all their sensemaking and exploration skills consciously. They feel their way forward. They know they shouldn’t go full gas or commit to any seemingly one-way door decisions.
🦘Kangaroo: Isn’t water such a great metaphor for complexity? We often use metaphors of water’s state changes—solid ice to liquid water to gas. How we navigate different modes of water from still to violent seas provides a different angle on water metaphors.
🐙 Octopus: If you like water metaphors, I’m playing around with “the waterpark” as an organizational metaphor that combines strong structure, fluidity and emergence, Pace Layers, and learning organizations. A waterpark is an amalgamation of spaces where different areas have their own unique flows, jobs to be done, rhythms, roles, and purposes but all work together to create an amazing experience for everyone. Every area of the park—from the gate to wave pools to the lazy river—has specific needs, roles and responsibilities.
🦊 Fox: This has given me a lot to think about. Thanks so much, everyone! 🙏 I’m not exactly sure how to translate all of the expansion of the water metaphors to my specific problem, but I love the divergence of it all; it feels like a good mental stretching routine.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🦋 A decentralized social media platform hit #1 on the iOS App Store
Bluesky, a new competitor to Twitter/X and Threads, recently hit the top of the iOS app store, topping even TikTok and ChatGPT as it crossed the 15 million user mark. Bluesky is built on top of a decentralized “federated protocol for large-scale distributed social applications” called the AT Protocol, which enables data portability, decentralized identity, and interoperability with platforms like Mastodon. Bluesky is also known for lacking a central ranking algorithm, instead allowing users to build and share their own algorithmic feeds.
🚏🎸 The Beatles’ new song became the first AI-assisted song to get a Grammy nom
Last year, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the living members of the Beatles, released “Now and Then,” dubbed the “last Beatles song.” The song used an AI technique called “stem separation” to clean up and isolate an audio track of the late John Lennon for use in the song. The song recently earned a nomination for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance in the upcoming Grammy awards, making it the first AI-assisted song to get a nomination. The song has caused some controversy, but it’s worth noting that the AI was primarily used for editing rather than deepfaking.
🚏😷 A Pakistani province banned most outdoor activities due to heavy air pollution
Lahore, a major city in Pakistan’s Punjab province, is considered to have the most polluted air in the world, with its AQI briefly hitting 1900 earlier this month (anything above 300 is considered hazardous.) The smog got so bad that the province’s government closed several cities’ schools and parks for a week; temporarily banned most outdoor activities like sporting events and festivals; and ordered most shops and malls to close early.
🚏🪫 A projected 40% of data centers will suffer from power shortages by 2027
The generative AI boom has been driving a surge in data center construction, and accordingly the amount of power they’ll need will skyrocket: the consulting firm Gartner projects that AI data centers’ energy usage will almost double by 2027. The cost of electricity to data centers is expected to increase, and Gartner estimates that, by 2027, 40% of data centers “will be operationally constrained by power availability.”
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books (The Atlantic) — Observes that, for years, educational initiatives like No Child Left Behind emphasized short-form informational texts and standardized testing, sacrificing young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts: a classic example of McNamara’s fallacy in action. Since there's no way to directly measure whether you can sit down and read Tolstoy, instructors have little incentive to assign it, and thus a new generation risks losing a “sophisticated form of empathy.”
The Presidential Election of 1876 (History Today) — Explores one of the US’s lesser-known but most chaotic, disputed, and controversial elections in history, which erupted in a constitutional crisis as both sides (somewhat legitimately) claimed victory. Civil war loomed and the parties set up an unconstitutional commission to decide the outcome — and in the “corrupt bargain” that followed, Hayes was awarded the Presidency but Reconstruction in the South was killed off.
How Strong Is India’s Economy? (Economics Explained) — Argues that India is suffering from “brain drain” from above as its skilled workers move to Western countries and “brawn drain” from below as its most physically capable go to the Gulf for construction jobs. India’s main growth driver is thus middle-skilled jobs (like the infamous call centers), but those are also the jobs most likely to be automated away by AI.
So You Want Continuous Time Zones (qntm) — Time zones are annoying, so what if we had hyperlocal time, in which the time was derived directly from the position of the sun? A nice example of first-principles thinking concluding with “it’s not perfect, but it doesn't honestly get a whole lot better.”
🔍🌪️ Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: disaster mapping.
The situation is dire. Operating costs are spiraling for a beloved product you promised to keep running when your company acquired it. If this continues, you will need to do something drastic. You’re considering axing it. You’ve looked for alternatives, but nothing comes to mind. Idea after idea succumbs to the challenge that you can’t slay quicksand. Your mind is stuck on the seemingly unavoidable worst-case scenario. But instead of spiraling into dread, you can ask yourself, “Step-by-step, what would we do if we did decide to shut it down?” Still with fear, but with the clarity of acceptance, you get ideas for charting an unconventional roadmap: frank conversations, graceful exits, clever workarounds. Then, the real insight occurs: you don't have to wait for things to become dire to make some of these adjustments. You can implement them now... and maybe avoid turning the product down.
Inspired by anecdotes in Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, disaster roadmapping turns a scary “what if” on its head. Instead of getting stuck in the emotional baggage of a worst-case scenario, you play it out. How would you actually execute this scenario in the best way possible? Even if you conclude that the worst is still the only path, it will feel less intimidating when it starts to take on the shape of a concrete plan; the risk has moved from emergent to controlled. And—sometimes—you may discover bold, resilient moves.
Challenging scenarios will come up. By facing the worst-case scenario directly and understanding how you would approach it, you gain a sense of control and clarity. Instead of being paralyzed by fear of the unknown, you build a proactive mindset, ready to act and adapt. This process not only uncovers practical steps but also empowers you to make better decisions now, potentially mitigating the very crisis you feared. Disaster roadmapping isn’t just about preparing for the worst; it’s about using that insight to strengthen your approach today, ensuring you’re always a step ahead.
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