🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 180

March 6th, 2025

Mar 07, 2025

“FCP-180” // Photo: MK with Midjourney and Claude 3.7 Sonnet

Episode 180 — March 6th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/180

Contributors to this issue: Ade Oshineye, Jon Lebensold, Ben Mathes, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Dart Lindsley, Lisie Lillianfeld, Justin Quimby, Boris Smus, Neel Mehta, MK

Additional insights from: Alex Komoroske, Chris Butler, Dimitri Glazkov, Jasen Robillard, Julka Almquist, Kamran Hakiman, Melanie Kahl, Robinson Eaton, Samuel Arbesman, Scott Schaffter, Spencer Pitman, 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.

“Somehow successful people are open to falling off the path. Instead of blind devotion to their original objective, their secret ingredient seems to be a willingness to make a complete 180 when the feeling is right.”
— Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman

🔼🔽 The Geometry of Dissent

It’s time for an update to your team’s strategy. Leadership shifted focus from user-driven innovation to aggressive cost-cutting and efficiency measures. This isn’t just a tactical shift—it’s a fundamental change in the company's values. You feel the tension: Do you stay and adapt? Push back and try to shift leadership’s thinking? Is it time to move on?

These three options illustrate Albert Hirschman’s model of exit, voice, and loyalty for the ways we can react in the face of a system we disagree with:

Exit: Leave and seek better conditions elsewhere. For example, you're out if these cost-cutting measures aren’t rolled back.
Voice: Advocate for change from within. For example, you gather data to advocate for investment in innovation.
Loyalty: Stay committed. E.g., identify and implement cost cutting measures.

None of these options is better than the others. It depends on context, and each has a light and a dark side. Voice can be expressed as well-reasoned advocacy or cynical complaints and performative dissent. Exit can appear as an amicable, well-considered move toward something better or a toxic, knee-jerk reaction that burns bridges. Loyalty can be based on agreement and trust or become blind allegiance or complacency.

And they are not exclusive. We often simplify these to a choice: exit OR voice OR loyalty. Yet, in practice, it’s a blend of the three forces, a ternary plot of your relationship to the system. Picture a triangle—a perfect 180 degrees of tension—where each corner pulls you toward a different response. For example, you may be deeply committed but still see a need to change some things (high-loyalty, high-voice, low-exit). Or you may have one foot out the door but still want to register your dissent (high-exit, moderate-voice, low-loyalty). Some of these blends have names. Disagree and commit is a way to combine voice and loyalty. Quiet quitting is the seemingly paradoxical (and unsustainable) blend of exit and loyalty.

Your position in this ternary plot isn’t static. As conditions evolve, your equilibrium shifts: if leadership starts listening, voice becomes more viable. If resistance is futile, exit may become inevitable. Navigating change requires honesty about what each force looks like in the moment. Are you raising your voice in good faith or just venting? Is your loyalty principled, or is it inertia? Is your exit strategic, or is it just avoidance? Is any of it having the impact you want it to have?

This tension isn’t limited to a change in team mission. The same dynamics exist at the scale of entire companies, institutions, and nations. The more voice is suppressed, the more people will tilt toward exit. The more exit is difficult, the more we must choose between silent loyalty and futile protest. Systems thrive when all three forces remain in healthy tension—when loyalty isn’t blind, voice isn’t ignored, and exit isn’t a punishment.

So the next time you face a pivotal decision, don’t just ask whether to stay, fight, or leave. Ask how much of each you’re currently leaning into—and whether that balance is shifting in a way you can live with.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🗼 Tokyo will offer government employees a 4-day workweek to help new parents

Japan has been facing a well-known crash in birth rates and a rapidly aging population, so the Tokyo city government announced that its employees would now be allowed to work a four-day week; it’s also adding a “childcare partial leave” policy that’d let some parents work two fewer hours per day. The regional governor says the goal is to “help employees balance childcare and work” and increase work flexibility to “ensure that women do not have to sacrifice their careers due to… childbirth or child-rearing.”

🚏🇵🇼 Palau is letting Americans buy digital IDs to bypass crypto exchanges’ rules

The tiny Pacific island country of Palau is letting foreigners buy digital residency cards for $250 a pop; you can apply online and never have to visit the country. These have become popular with American crypto traders because many exchanges heavily restrict US-based accounts due to that country’s strict regulations. To get full access and pass the exchanges’ know-your-customer (KYC) checks, you must provide an ID from a non-US country —these cheap ID cards do the trick. (However, some exchanges started banning Palau IDs once they heard about this loophole.)

🚏🚗 Europe will require carmakers to put physical buttons back to get a five-star safety rating

Car manufacturers are increasingly replacing knobs, buttons, and dials with digital buttons on a touchscreen; this frees up dashboard space, allows for over-the-air updates, and saves money during manufacturing. But it also leads to distracted driving — so Europe’s independent car safety body is releasing new rules that aim to dial back the screens. To get a five-star safety rating, cars will now need physical controls for five core safety features: turn signals, hazard lights, the horn, windshield wipers, and emergency calling.

🚏🥸 Russia and China may be trying to recruit laid-off CIA spies

As the US government moves ahead with its plan to lay off large chunks of the federal workforce, Russia and China are reportedly looking to hire “recently fired employees with security clearances” and national security employees with knowledge of “US critical infrastructure” and “government bureaucracy.” According to sources, several countries have started making job posts and reaching out on LinkedIn, and foreign intelligence officers have been looking for sources on “LinkedIn, TikTok, RedNote and Reddit.” The CIA has reportedly been “quietly discussing [this] risk” for the last few weeks.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

A Calculator App? Anyone Could Make That (Chad Nauseam) — Describes the surprising mathematical difficulty of creating a humble calculator app and tells the story of how Google hired a legendary programmer to create one for Android. Modeling arbitrary-precision real numbers is fiendishly tough, but the Android team used clever system design to find a solution that is “100% correct, and gets 99% of the way to the perfect UX at only 1% of the implementation complexity.”
Non-Zero Sum Games in Nature (James Brown) — A collection of nicely drawn explorations of positive-sum games, including cross-species symbiosis (with some cute pictures!) and a case study of “win-win” situations in coral reefs. Also includes a good piece on costly signaling and Nash equilibria.
A New Oral Culture (Oblomovka) — Observes that, in online communications, the pendulum seems to be swinging away from written artifacts and toward calls and live chats. But perhaps this doesn’t represent a mere ‘dumbing down’ of discourse: human communication is multi-modal, and writing alone (while great for its compressibility and legibility) can’t capture everything we want to say.
Political Parties Are Illegal in the United States (Michael Kinnucan) — Argues that American political parties, unlike those in almost every other modern democracy, aren’t allowed to control who runs under their banner or who gets to vote in their primaries. The two major parties, thus, aren’t self-regulating civil society organizations so much as labels that politicians choose to run under. If you squint, the American primary-then-general election system is basically an open “two-round ‘runoff’” system where voters pick one of the two first-round elections to vote in, and the top two finishers go head-to-head.

📚🛋️ Book for your shelf

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

This week, we recommend Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet (2013, 272 pages).

Turn the Ship Around! is based on the author’s real experiences as captain of a nuclear submarine. He and his team enabled a 180° transformation of one of the worst-performing crews in the fleet—not through tighter control, but by giving control away.

The book explores a simple, radical truth: how we typically run organizations—with decisions bottlenecked at the top and obedience flowing downward—doesn't just limit people. It limits the system itself. When you distribute control, build real expertise, and create clarity of mission, you remove leadership bottlenecks and unlock the full potential of your organization.

Piece by piece, Marquet dismantled the hierarchy of permission. Orders became intentions: "I intend to..." Sailors were no longer just doers of tasks but owners of outcomes. But this wasn’t anarchy. Alongside distributing control came a relentless focus on competence—ensuring that anyone making decisions had the technical mastery to do so—and clarity—ensuring everyone understood the larger purpose guiding their actions.

Individually, none of these moves are particularly complex. But together, they formed a self-reinforcing system. Authority fed responsibility. Responsibility fed skill. Skill fed trust. Trust fed clarity.

Ultimately, this is a story of what happens when you stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and start building a room full of smart, capable, committed people who don’t need to be told what to do. It’s a story of a leader who dared to disappear—and left behind something much stronger.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review