🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 174
January 16th, 2025
Episode 174 — January 16th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/174
Contributors to this issue: Jasen Robillard, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, 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, 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.
“We lived by ignoring. Ignoring is not the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
💪🥞 Flexing or flip-flopping?
Imagine a startup that began as a traditional analytics platform. After two years of steady growth, customers asked for predictive analytics and AI-driven insights. Seeing the trend, the company announced a pivot: a full transformation into an AI-focused analytics suite. Some hailed the move as visionary; others dismissed it as just another startup jumping on the AI hype train. What—beyond the audience’s opinion—differentiates the agile strategist from the flip-flopping opportunist?
Agility, at its core, is about aligning change with purpose. This requires flexing to rethink the how while staying true to the why. Agility often shows some amount of consistency even amid dramatic change. By contrast, when decisions lack a clear connection to a stable core and seem disjointed or driven by hype, they veer into flip-flopping territory.
In today’s fast-changing world, stability can be both a virtue and a vice. Clinging to an outdated plan or incorrect information can lead to irrelevance or failure. However, a stable core is what differentiates agility from flip-flopping. During periods of change, success hinges on building upon what an individual or organization already knows and does well.
This kind of change demands transparency and a clear narrative. By communicating not just what we are doing, but also why, we address skepticism and natural concerns. This approach persuades others that we are acting with foresight, not reacting chaotically. When not done well, however, even a necessary, thoughtful change can look like flip-flopping.
Agility and stability are interdependent. Agility keeps organizations responsive to change, while stability ensures they remain grounded in their purpose. This balance allows for moments of strategic flexing without losing sight of long-term goals. Success lies in navigating the tension between these forces with intention and transparency.
Ultimately, the distinction between flip-flopping and agility may be a matter of perception. But for those steering the ship, it’s the coherence of the journey that truly counts.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🎞️ YouTubers are selling unused video clips to AI companies
AI companies building video generation models have all scraped the same public videos, so the only way to get a leg up on the competition is to get exclusive access to non-public videos. A marketplace has thus popped up: video creators have started selling their unused footage (which they often have hundreds of hours of) for between $1 and $4 a minute. Content created for YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok costs $1 to $2 a minute, while 4K videos and unusual styles like drone footage or 3D animations can sell for more.
🚏🚕 Congestion pricing has slashed commute times in NYC
New York City’s long-planned congestion pricing policy was enacted on January 5th; private cars now pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street at peak hours. The scheme has reduced traffic significantly so far, with travel times on some tunnels and bridges heading into New York’s central business district falling by 30–60%. Buses are faster and ridership is up, and locals have reported quieter and less jammed streets.
🚏🧯 Parts of LA now have a one-year moratorium on home insurance cancellations
California’s insurance commissioner has announced that some Los Angeles ZIP codes in areas devastated by the Palisades or Eaton fires will get a one-year moratorium on homeowners’ and renters’ insurance. Companies that were planning to cancel or not renew policies in these areas will need to keep them on for at least another year. The policy follows an existing California law that requires such a moratorium when the governor issues a state of emergency for wildfires.
🚏🥚 Enron is back and it’s selling joke merchandise and fake nuclear reactors
In 2020, a company bought the trademark for Enron for $275, and they relaunched enron.com as a strange joke website selling novelty merchandise. (The buyers are the same group that was behind the “mock conspiracy theory” Birds Aren’t Real, which is a wild story in its own right.) Enron’s new bosses have now unveiled an even more bizarre idea: a miniature nuclear reactor shaped like an egg. They say they’ll start accepting ‘pre-orders’ for the joke product later this month.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
How to Fix America’s Two-Party Problem (Lee Drutman / New York Times; Archive) — Argues that winner-take-all Congressional districts have led to the US’s rigid two-party system and all its attendant faults: rapid seesawing on policy when power changes hands, increasing extremism and distrust in government, and ideological polarization. A switch to proportional representation in multi-member districts (which most advanced democracies have already adopted) would lead to increased party diversity and a more effective legislature as parties have to start working together in coalitions.
The Five Mostly Disastrous Paths Through Our National Insurance Crisis (Hamilton Nolan) — Argues that the way the US handles homeowner’s insurance in disaster-prone areas has become untenable: insurance rates skyrocket as the climate worsens, the state tries to regulate prices, insurance companies (rationally) leave the market, and the state (now the insurer of last resort) is on the hook for billions of dollars of payouts that it can’t afford. The author argues that the only solution is “the systematic retreat of humanity away from high risk areas and into areas more suited for a burning, hurricane-wracked age.”
We Need to Rewild the Internet (Maria Farrell / Noema) — Citing Seeing Like a State, the author compares the early internet to a healthy forest ecosystem which has since been turned into an “unpleasant and harmful place” through the same high modernist techniques that turned resilient, open-ended German forest ecosystems into ailing plantations. Argues that high modernist forces are very strong; if we want to make the internet more resilient and varied, deliberate re-wilding efforts will be required.
The Afterlife of Big Ideas in Education Reform (Michael Hobbes / Pacific Standard) — Observes that buzzy ideas for fixing K-12 education—from blended learning to splitting schools into small ‘learning communities’—follow a predictable pattern: the reform works in some schools, other schools copy it and it doesn’t work, and everyone moves on to the next faddish idea. Big, sweeping ideas are ultimately irrelevant to improving schools because “school reforms work when they are implemented by good leaders, empowered teachers, and adequately funded administrators. When they aren’t, they don’t.” In short, “there will never be a structure or a technology or a method that is more powerful than the environment in which it is applied.”
🔍💠 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 Shaper.
Your project management is a mess. Tasks pile up and rigid processes bog down creativity. The team feels caught in an endless slog of toil. Enter an unconventional colleague who changes things up. Some of this is substantial work, such as automating repetitive tasks. Other things are more mundane: slight tweaks to workflows; new ways of using existing tools. Suddenly, the system is supporting the team’s goals instead of hindering them.
Inspired by the Netrunner faction of the same name, this is the essence of the Shaper. Shapers do not see constraints as fixed, but as opportunities for transformation. They don’t simply navigate systems; they reshape them, adapting and unlocking hidden potential. In Netrunner, the Shaper’s playstyle reflects this ethos, finding creative ways to redefine the game itself. In life, this means reimagining the structures and assumptions we encounter every day and using them as a canvas for doing something different.
To embody this role is to prioritize curiosity over efficiency and creativity over compliance. It’s not about breaking or destroying the system but about playing with it—tweaking and experimenting to turn it into something that works for you. This can be done selfishly, but if done well, it also improves the system for those around you.
To take on the Shaper mindset, ask yourself: What small changes could unlock new possibilities in my systems or routines? How can I make the existing tools serve me, rather than constrain me? By doing so, you move from being a passive participant to an active co-creator of the stories you inhabit.
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Always a pleasure to read the FLUX review :). Thanks and I hope you'll keep it up!