🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 166

October 17th, 2024

Oct 18, 2024

Episode 166 — October 17th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/166

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

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

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 greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.”
— Marshall McLuhan

🌍📖 The lore of life

In the best creative works, a quality often goes unnoticed. The stories feel infinitely more expansive than what’s on the surface. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, with its histories, languages, and cultures, stretches far beyond the pages of The Lord of the Rings. Similarly, Bluey is not just a simple show about a family of anthropomorphic dogs. Its continuity and references to off-screen lives create an emotional depth that resonates with children and adults.

This is the lore, the rich story behind the story, that sets these works apart. It gives them coherence, a sense of cause and effect, and a feeling of meaning. This lore provides structure and logic beneath the surface, even if it's not always explicitly presented.

We can extend this idea to the coherence of our actions and beliefs. Just as great lore creates depth in storytelling, our actions are more meaningful when supported by deeper values and experiences. If our actions are like the visible chapters of a book, then values, beliefs, purpose, history, and mental models provide the story beneath. Our small decisions grow when they inform and are informed by that larger vision.

Our lives can feel fragmented when we act without alignment or lore. Our choices may appear random, like a story that jumps from event to event without a bridge or a segue. You know what we're discussing if you ever heard a small child tell a story. Grown-ups generally achieve some sense of continuity without trying. We are typically socialized to narrativize our life’s stories, and so we intuitively try to make sense of things we see and experience and line them up into a coherent whole.

For the inner world that is unseen and difficult to grasp (“Why the heck did I do that?!”), we can deepen coherence through self reflection. This echoes virtue ethics: cultivating an evolving, adaptive internal landscape to guide us through the complexities of life by creating a sense of internal orientation.

We can also apply the concept of lore to organizations. An organization is less like a novel and more like a TV show with multiple writers. Everyone is making a narrative, either contributing or hindering coherence.

Without intentional effort to drive alignment, the final product of such an environment will appear fragmented. Organizations that fail to articulate a clear mission, values, or even operating principles become disjointed. Policies seem random, and long-term coherence is lost.

Organizations must constantly work to increase coherence by defining their mission, core values, and principles. But definition is not enough. Good institutional lore cares about the details, even down to the most mundane processes. Organizations must reinforce the lore by embedding it in everyday actions. Shared rituals, stories, supporting processes, and open communication help reinforce the message. Just as a well-planned TV series relies on its lore to maintain cohesion, an organization can achieve coherence through a strong, shared foundation.

In great stories, the richness often lies in the world behind the scenes. And so it is in life. When our actions are supported by deeper coherence—an unseen structure of beliefs—they carry a sense of meaning. Living with this internal coherence allows us to navigate life’s complexities with purpose and alignment that others can recognize and respect.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🕰️ Georgia shattered its first-day early voting record

In-person early voting in Georgia started this Tuesday, October 15th, and over 320,000 early votes and absentee ballots were cast that day. That far surpassed Georgia’s previous first-day record of 136,000 votes, set in 2020. Wednesday the 16th was another monster day, and by the end over 620,000 votes had been cast — representing well over 10% of the state’s total turnout in 2020.

🚏☀️ Solar generators are helping victims of Hurricane Helene

After natural disasters, communities often turn to gas- or diesel-powered generators. Still, gas is expensive and hard to get (especially when roads are washed out), and these generators are loud and polluting. Instead, volunteers have been bringing solar-powered generators to the North Carolina and Georgia towns hit by Hurricane Helene, offering clean, green energy with a simpler supply chain. The nonprofit behind the project is also setting up machines that can pull water from the air.

🚏🎭 Zoom will let you make AI avatars to talk to colleagues for you

A new Zoom feature will let you create an AI avatar to send your colleagues messages. You record a brief video of yourself and Zoom creates a digital avatar that looks and sounds like you. Then, you can write a message, and your avatar will convert it into a video message sent to your coworkers. These avatars can’t attend meetings yet, but Zoom’s CEO has said his goal is to let “digital twins” eventually join meetings and answer emails on your behalf.

🚏🎓 US colleges are closing even as the number of applications is rising

At least 20 American colleges have closed in 2024, but the number of college applications has also jumped 11% over the past year. It’s a paradox, but a common one: the top schools get more and more applications (like Yale, which “accepted 3.73% of the record-high 57,465 students who applied”), while less-prestigious schools draw fewer and fewer applicants. One college counselor summed it up well: “The consensus is, it’s only worth going to college if it’s a life-changing college.” (It doesn’t help that tuition costs are ballooning and the US college-age population is shrinking.)

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

It Feels Like 2004 Again (Anil Dash) — The head of Glitch is optimistic that “the renaissance of the open, human internet is in full swing,” arguing that the decay of today’s major tech platforms mirrors where the industry was twenty years ago. After the late-’90s tech bubble burst, communities and independent creators were given space to thrive, new social media platforms were born, and open formats like podcasts started taking off.
Is Malcolm Gladwell Out of Ideas? (The New York Times) — Anand Giridharadas reviews Gladwell’s new book Revenge of the Tipping Point. While Gladwell is a rare writer who can get the general public to read books and engage with big ideas, he tries too hard to extract overarching frameworks that attempt to explain everything. His broad rules are too vague and “slushy” to have much explanatory power, and Gladwell himself doesn’t take a stand on the issues of the day.
The Americans Who Yearn for Anti-American Propaganda (The Atlantic) — Anne Applebaum writes that foreign countries that seek to influence the United States have discovered an effective strategy the Chinese call “borrowing boats to reach the sea”: find homegrown influencers who sow dissent and exploit convenient divisions that play to the foreign entity’s interests, and then amplify the heck out of them.
The Most and Least Linguistically Diverse Countries (LingoLizard) — Introduces a metric used to compute a country’s linguistic diversity (what’s the probability that two randomly selected residents speak the same first language?). The most diverse countries (PNG, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and a bunch of African countries) are impressive, but the list of least diverse countries (Cuba, El Salvador, the Maldives, Haiti, and Vatican City) is both bizarre and somewhat sensible — several are former colonies with few indigenous languages left.

📚🛋️ Book Genre for your shelf

Some reads that will help you dip your toes into systems thinking or explore its broader applications.

This week, we recommend the broader genre of literary variations.

This week we have a meta-recommendation: take a dive into the literary variations and reinterpretations of classic literature. These days, almost any beloved work has a universe of sequels and retellings (and for the more modern works, unauthorized fan fiction) that enrich our experience of the original. Take Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as an example: the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy has inspired an incredible array of reimaginings that expand Austen's world in surprising and delightful ways.

Modern adaptations like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries translate Elizabeth's wit into a vlog format, reinforcing her independence and her sharp and sometimes inappropriate humor by translating them to a modern context. The Other Bennet Sister shines a spotlight on the overlooked Mary Bennet, revealing how even the author sometimes fails to give enough credit to a character. Jo Baker's Longbourn explores life below stairs at the Bennet estate, delving into the perspectives of those in the background—the servants whose stories Austen's genteel focus only hinted at. These stories explore new facets of Austen's characters and themes.

Whether authorized or not, these variations extend, explore, and sometimes intentionally distort the lore of the original, adding layers that reveal something fresh and unexpected. Engaging with these reimaginings lets us enjoy and critically examine the comfort of the original world. They show how timeless stories can remain relevant and adaptable, inspiring creativity and reflection across generations.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review