🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 183
March 27th, 2025
Episode 183 — March 27th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/183
Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Alex Komoroske, Ben Mathes, Chris Butler, Dart Lindsley, Dimitri Glazkov, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Julka Almquist, Justin Quimby, Kamran Hakiman, Lisie Lillianfeld, 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.
“Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.”
— China Mieville
🤯🏗️ From “getting it” to “building it”
You're sharing a new direction with the team. It’s a strategy you’ve thought through deeply. You know where it’s going and why it matters. At this point, it seems so obvious. Someone asks a clarifying question. It’s reasonable, but you wave it off: “You’ll get it once you’ve seen it in action.” A few people nod. Others go quiet. No conflict, no uproar—but a subtle divide opens up: those who “get it,” and those who don’t.
And if they don’t? Some part of you wonders if it’s even worth trying to bring “those people” along.
It’s a subtle pattern, but a consequential one. When conviction meets complexity, it’s tempting to conserve energy by focusing on those who instantly align. You’ve done the work to connect the dots, and the friction of going back to basics feels costly. But over time, this stance can harden. We stop building shared understanding—because we’ve already decided who can get it.
It can sound like: “People just need to do it.”
It can feel like: your growing frustration when the team doesn’t click fast enough.
It can manifest as: writing off someone’s questions as proof they’re not a fit.
We don’t do this because we’re intentionally dismissive. We do it because we’re navigating ambiguity while trying to preserve momentum. However, when we treat understanding as a fixed attribute instead of a shared construction, trust becomes a test of loyalty. Doubt is mistaken for deficiency.
So what’s the alternative?
We need to treat alignment not as a prerequisite, but as a process. “Getting it” isn’t a static quality—it’s a product of access, timing, exposure, and experience.
One method is to design for shared sensemaking. That might mean narrating your mental model instead of assuming it’s obvious. It might mean making space for dissent even when time feels tight. It looks like asking what someone else is seeing instead of doubling down on being understood.
Instead of trying to explain your insight, the most powerful move can be to design an experience that allows others to feel the tension for themselves. Insight often lands not through explanation but through recognition—when someone hits the same friction, feels the same constraints, or bumps into the same blind spot.
Ultimately, clarity that can’t be shared isn’t strategy—it’s soliloquy.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🤖 Open-source site admins are adding proof-of-work challenges to stymie AI bots
AI crawling bots have reportedly been overwhelming the websites and Git repositories of open-source projects, destabilizing servers and driving up bandwidth costs; one report found that, for some open-source projects, bots comprised 97% of all traffic! Website admins have tried filtering traffic or blocking crawlers’ user agents, but many crawlers have evaded these checks with residential proxies or spoofed user agents (i.e. pretending to be a normal browser). So, some devs have taken more drastic measures: “proof-of-work” challenges that force browsers to solve crypto-style math problems before they can access a page, or even banning all traffic from some countries (one admin blocked all visitors from Brazil after seeing a surge of scrapers from there).
🚏💬 Signal downloads spiked after the Yemen war plans scandal
The encrypted messaging app Signal has been in the news because it was the venue for several top US officials’ discussion of classified war plans (a group chat where they accidentally added a journalist and revealed precise plans of attack hours in advance). After the scandal erupted, Signal downloads jumped 28% worldwide; downloads were up 45% in the US and 42% in Yemen compared to the 30-day average.
🚏🛬 Canada–US flight bookings for this summer are down 70+%
As geopolitical tensions between the United States and Canada have risen, demand for cross-border flights has cratered. Compared to last year, the number of Canada–US flights booked for every month from April to September is down over 70%. Airlines have only reduced the number of cross-border flights for this period by between 1.6% and 3.5%, so we may see some severe cuts in capacity to match the fall in demand.
🚏🕹️ GameStop announced it’d buy Bitcoin, prompting sudden stock swings
MicroStrategy, the publicly-traded company that’s part of the NASDAQ 100, became famous for investing large chunks of its balance sheet into Bitcoin, thus giving stock market investors an indirect way to invest in crypto. GameStop announced it’s doing the same and plans to spend some of its $4.8 billion in cash on Bitcoin. The meme stock jumped 12% on the news. However, just a day later, GameStop announced it would raise $1.3 billion to buy the coins, prompting a nearly equivalent crash in its share price.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Motion, Thought, Systems and AI (Sam Schillace) — Observes that, when horses were the dominant source of mechanical power, they were too large to power a kitchen appliance, but also too small to pull a locomotive. It was only steam and electricity that unlocked the up- and down scaling of horsepower. The AI revolution may have a similar scaling effect on human intelligence; what will this unlock?
Congestion Pricing is a Policy Miracle (Sam Deutsch) — Shows some of the remarkable second-order benefits that the simple congestion pricing policy has brought to New York City: Broadway show attendance is up 21%, restaurant reservations are up 7%, retail sales are up $900M, subway crime is down 37%, and more. (The first-order effects are impressive too: train ridership is up, buses are faster, pedestrian injuries have decreased, and honking complaints are way down.)
The Better Boarding Method Airlines Won’t Use (CGP Grey / YouTube) — Shows that the way airlines load planes is close to the mathematically least efficient strategy. However, airlines aren’t optimizing for efficiency: some time-inefficient strategies (like letting first-class passengers board at the front of the plane first) make pricier tickets more attractive and encourage customers to use loyalty programs, which is good for business. Plus, several mathematically optimal methods don’t account for real-world constraints, like passengers wanting to board with their families or people not following instructions.
Becoming a Magician (Autotranslucence) — Asks: Have you reached a plateau? Is your well-worn strategy bringing you diminishing returns? Take a pause and consider who you want to be next. What are the fears that hold you back? Who are you actually impressed by? Surround yourself with those people who look like magicians to you, learn from them, articulate your new goal, and find a new strategy to get there.
🔍🧸 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: beginner’s mind.
Being able to hold multiple lenses at once helps us think better. One way to build this skill is to use the well-known, but hard to practice, beginner's mind.
The term comes from Zen Buddhism: shoshin, or “beginner’s mind,” refers to approaching a situation with openness, curiosity, and a lack of preconceptions, even when—especially when—we’re already experienced. As Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki wrote: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Having a beginner’s mind doesn’t mean being naïve. It means resisting the reflex to slot new inputs into old categories. When we approach a system—or a person—as if we already understand it, we stop noticing what doesn’t fit. Complexity gets filtered out in favor of confirmation. And then we mistake recognition for understanding.
Beginner’s mind is a choice: to delay judgment, to decenter expertise, and to stay open to emergent structure. It’s a posture that invites insight not through mastery, but through presence.
It’s not about knowing nothing.
It’s about noticing everything.
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