🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 173
January 9th, 2025
Episode 173 — January 9th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/173
Contributors to this issue: Jon Lebensold, Scott Schaffter, Scott Schaffter, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Scott Schaffter, Justin Quimby, Dimitri Glazkov, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, 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.
“They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.”
— Douglas Adams
🕶️☀️ Growing in the shade
Organizational inertia is real. As organizations grow, they often ossify. This isn’t nefarious; it’s a byproduct of success. The very mechanisms that help organizations scale—structured processes, dedicated resources, and risk-averse mindsets—can also entrench them. While this stability protects during continuity, it stifles innovation when new ideas need space to grow.
Imagine your team has a transformative idea. As it shows promise, stakeholders step in: legal raises compliance concerns, privacy offers guardrails, and reliability engineers prepare for scale. While well-intentioned, these efforts collectively pull the idea toward immediate productionization, unintentionally drowning it under the weight of processes and risk mitigation. The intense observation occurs before the ideas are proven.
When the sprout of an idea endures the full power of direct sunlight—excessive scrutiny and premature formalization—it may wither. Instead, allow it to grow in the shade to develop resilience without the pressures of immediate productionization or visibility.
The antidote to inertia isn’t simply to ignore processes but to sequence them wisely. In early project stages, delaying broad visibility or scaling can be advantageous. This creates space to experiment, iterate, and fully explore the problem space.
We could see this as a problem, but an alternative is to embrace, empower, and enhance. We embrace the notion that some ideas can start small and slow. We empower teams to adapt the standard process to their needs, clarifying what is non-negotiable and what can be delayed. Like a sprout becoming a seedling, we then enhance projects by providing additional resources only to match their maturation stage.
Organizational inertia is not inherently bad: it creates stability and scale. But when it's the only option, it can become a straitjacket. By adopting a strategy of flexibility in the early stages of innovation, organizations can balance the benefits of stability with the necessity of adaptability. Sometimes, the best way to empower a seedling to grow is to shelter it from too much sunlight until it is strong enough to stand independently.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🍋 ByteDance is pushing users to a TikTok clone amid the looming TikTok ban
The US is slated to ban TikTok later this month, so the app’s owner ByteDance has been posting sponsored videos on TikTok that encourage users to move to ByteDance’s new app, Lemon8. You can use your same TikTok account credentials and keep your TikTok username and followers on Lemon8, which is very similar to TikTok (including the short-form videos and “For You” feed) but adds Instagram-style photos. (The coming ban is on all ByteDance apps, but ByteDance’s convoluted corporate structure might help save Lemon8.)
🚏🆚 AI teammates are coming to a popular battle royale game
Nvidia and the publisher of the battle royale game PUBG: Battlegrounds are working together to launch an AI-powered “ally” character that can drive cars, fight enemies, find treasure, share advice, and otherwise help players out in a PUBG match. These “Co-Playable Characters (CPCs)” will be powered by “small language models” for fast decision-making, as well as multimodal audio and visual models for perceiving the game environment.
🚏🗞️ Online ad safety tech is blocking ads from running next to newspaper crosswords
Online advertisers generally try to avoid running ads next to stories about politics and disasters—nobody wants their ad screenshotted next to a piece about plane crashes—so they use algorithms to identify potentially risky material on news sites. These algorithms are often pretty blunt, banning ads on any article that mentions certain words (“guns”, “racism”, etc.). However, an increasing amount of innocuous content is getting swept up: ads were blocked on the Washington Post’s crossword page at least seven times in one month, and stories about drugstores and other retailers were blocked due to the word “drug.” The Post says that 40% of its material is “deemed unsafe” for ads at any given point.
🚏🌭 All of Chicago’s government buildings now run on 100% clean power
As of January 1st, all 400 of Chicago’s municipal buildings — including both O’Hare and Midway airports, 98 fire stations, and two huge water treatment plants — are running on 100% clean energy. The switch is (literally) powered by a huge new 3,800-acre solar farm in central Illinois, and it’s projected to cut as much CO2 emissions annually as taking 62,000 cars off the road.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Impossibly Hungry Judges (Daniel Lakins / The 20% Statistician) — Argues that many of pop psychology’s most striking findings often have implausibly large and tidy effects. For instance, one famous study on mental resource depletion found that judges handed out 65% favorable verdicts after lunch but 0% before lunch (and it jumped back to exactly 65% at the start of each session). If humans really behaved like this, the author argues, we’d have known about this for centuries and our societies would have found ways to cope: “We would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal.”
We’re Getting the Social Media Crisis Wrong (Henry Farrell / Programmable Mutter) — Argues that social media’s problem is less disinformation and more that it “creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” We generally calibrate our political beliefs based on what we think others think, but when social media presents a distorted view of others’ beliefs (selecting for extreme opinions and in-group shibboleths), that leads to a dangerously misinformed body politic whose views are far off from reality.
Why Canada Should Join the EU (The Economist; Archived) — Makes the unusual case that Canada joining the European Union would benefit both: Canada is vast and rich in resources but lacks population, while Europe has plenty of people but wants more land, minerals, and energy. While this idea is probably unrealistic, Canada and the EU would still benefit from forming a closer relationship through trade deals and military partnerships.
The Polar Cavalry (Darya Slyunyaeva) — A look at Soviet Reindeer Transport Battalions: unique units used by the Sami people against the Nazis in the Lapland War of 1944, to surmount the challenging environment of the arctic tundra: terrible cold, strong winds, polar night, few roads, and very sparse populations. Deer are far superior to horses and dogs in such environments because they are fast in the snow, frost resistant, and highly loyal to their drivers — and when in danger, they gather together rather than flee.
🔍📆 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: challenge questions.
You’re venting to a friend about your team’s constant failure to meet deadlines. You explain the steps you’ve taken to improve communication, your repeated reminders, and the generous timelines you’ve set. They nod thoughtfully and then ask, “How might you be enabling these delays?” The words sting for a second, but they stick. Could you be avoiding hard conversations, setting unclear priorities, or unintentionally undermining accountability?
Challenge questions like this force us to reckon with being vulnerable. They expose blind spots and prompt deeper reflection. They are uncomfortable, invasive, and—frankly—annoying. But this discomfort is also an invitation to reclaim agency. While not everything is within your control, challenge questions can point you to where you can shape the outcomes, transforming irritation into insight and inertia into progress.
The effectiveness of a challenge question depends on context. In a trusted relationship or growth-oriented environment, its provocative nature can serve as a spark for thinking. Without this foundation, it can create alienation or defensiveness. A bit of annoyance is intentional… if it is delivered with care. Calibrating tone, timing, and intent ensure these questions open the door to dialogue and reflection rather than shutting it down.
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