🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 194
June 12th, 2025
Episode 194 — June 19th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/194
Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Boris Smus, Neel Mehta, 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.
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
— Terry Pratchett, Diggers
🛰️🌾 Depth by degrees
Imagine two people responsible for the health of a farm. One on the ground, walking a particular farm—checking the soil, adjusting irrigation, spotting early signs of disease. The other is looking at things from a higher altitude, reviewing satellite imagery and weather data to track patterns across an entire region of farms, monitoring drought zones, mapping long-term soil shifts, and interpreting seasonal forecasts. Both are working to ensure agricultural resilience, but in very different ways. Neither can fully replace the other.
This is the paradox of scope. For leaders in particular, as you rise in an organization, your zone of authority grows wider, but your depth of influence shrinks. You trade intimacy for altitude. It’s a tradeoff, one that becomes dangerous when you forget that it is, indeed, a tradeoff.
We often assume that leadership naturally expands both authority and influence—the higher you go, the more control you have. But that’s only true on paper. In practice, authority broadens scope. Influence becomes thinner, more symbolic, more dependent on trust and narrative than on direct intervention. You might be able to make broader decisions at a higher level, but your ability to understand their implications on the ground diminishes. You can see more, but you can’t touch as much.
That gap leads to familiar leadership traps. When they control from a distance, leaders often try to compensate by tightening their grip — micromanaging details they don’t fully understand or imposing decisions without local context. This instinct, while often driven by urgency, tends to erode autonomy and trust rather than improve outcomes.
Leaders may engage in narrative overreach and mistake their messaging for shared understanding. They deliver strategies that make sense from above but don’t land below—either because they miss the operational nuance or because teams experience them as disconnected from reality.
Decisions may become context-blind. Broad, top-down shifts that overlook how work is actually done can create ripple effects. An elegant solution at altitude can fail on arrival on the ground.
These traps don't emerge from bad intentions. They stem from a mismatch between the view a leader has and the actions they can truly take. The temptation is to behave as if higher scope still comes with local depth. It doesn’t.
And yet the breadth that comes with altitude is not a weakness. Used effectively, it enables alignment across teams and functions. It reveals patterns that no single unit could detect. It allows a composite view that integrates localized perspectives into a shared direction. This is what makes coordination possible. Without that view, the system fragments. Everyone optimizes locally, and the bigger picture suffers.
At higher altitudes, leaders operate in a different kind of structure—less execution, more meaning-making. Influence travels through system design, stories, signals, and trust networks. It’s not about directing each move—it’s about creating the conditions under which good moves can be made.
This is why pretending that breadth yields depth is so dangerous. Satellite data can’t diagnose root rot on a specific farm. The person walking the field can’t anticipate regional water scarcity. But both perspectives are essential… as long as we don’t confuse them.
The solution lies in building systems of trust and communication. Those who see broadly must share clear direction and the reasoning behind it. Those who are closer to the details must be trusted to reveal constraints, insights, and emerging patterns. When that exchange is active and reciprocal, leadership doesn't require control over the details, just connection. The best outcomes happen when depth and breadth are actively in dialogue. Not when one pretends to be the other.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🧑💻 New grads—especially CS majors—are facing high unemployment
Although overall US unemployment has remained steady this year, the joblessness rate for new grads (defined as 22–27 year olds with college degrees) has ticked up to 5.8%, well above the national average. In fact, 85% of the rise in US unemployment rate since 2023 is due to these new grads. Fresh grads in computer science, long one of the hottest majors, are having a terrible time: the unemployment rate for new CS grads is 7.5% (the third-worst of all majors). And while CS employment for those 27+ has grown 0.8% since 2022, it’s fallen 8% for those aged 22–27.
🚏✍️ Chinese AI companies are shutting off functionality during exam week
This week marked China’s high-stakes gaokao exams for high school students. To stymie cheaters, AI chatbots from companies like DeepSeek, ByteDance, and Alibaba temporarily disabled features that let users take a picture and ask questions about it. During testing hours, LLMs nationwide would refuse to answer such queries—even if you said the picture wasn’t from a gaokao exam.
🚏🛒 AI-generated video ads are coming to Amazon
Amazon is launching a free advertising tool for merchants that can auto-generate “photorealistic video assets” given real product photos. The AI creates videos of products in use, like turning photos of a watch into videos of people putting on and checking the watch. The tool also lets sellers stitch multiple generated scenes into a finished ad, thus resembling a traditional TV commercial that jumps between shots.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Claude Code: an Analysis (Southbridge Research) — A deep analysis of Claude Code’s technical architecture and execution engine—written entirely by Claude and other LLMs! The author also shares the model orchestration techniques he used to compile such a huge report (it wasn’t a one-shot output!), including “chunking” information to fit within context window limits, transferring context between LLMs, picking the right model for each sub-task, iterative re-prompting, and using LLMs to merge and clean up the individually written sections.
More Stuff and Fewer People to Share It With (The Sooty Empiric) — Argues that economic growth largely relies on free trade, immigration, education, and building infrastructure—generally, expanding opportunities and sharing the gains with others. So if you want higher growth, you have to share some of it with “undesirables”; if you want to hoard all the benefits for your in-group, you have to live with making everyone poorer (i.e. degrowth). The problem is that many people want the impossible combination of “more stuff and fewer people to share it with,” and many dishonest politicians will gladly promise them that.
The Untold History of Toontown’s SpeedChat (Habitat Chronicles) — Examines Disney's ill-fated attempts to create a chat app that was “safe for kids” and concordant with their brand—which sparked an arms race between Disney and clever children. Given a chat interface where you could only choose harmless words, teenagers created sentences full of sexual innuendoes; allowing players to push blocks quickly led to them spelling out swear words. “By hook, or by crook, customers will always find a way to connect with each other.”
Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate (Reactor) — Observes that, throughout all the Star Wars movies, you never see a character reading for pleasure, nor do you see news media, journalists, or text chat. This suggests a culture that has progressed past the need for functional literacy, since droids and technology can do everything for them. But when education becomes obsolete, society “forgets how to repair the machines left behind by their ancestors.”
🔍📆 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: prestige & dominance.
An online creator steadily builds a following with layered insights, clear sourcing, and a willingness to say “I don’t know.” The community that forms is small but high-signal—a network of learners.
Another figure claws their way to prominence through controversy and intimidation: public takedowns, fear of exclusion, zero tolerance for dissent. Followers pile in, eager to join in—and avoid becoming the next target. There are followers, but no community.
People are deeply sensitive to status, but not all status is the same. In The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich describes two core types: prestige and dominance. Prestige persuades; dominance coerces. Both are sources of power, but they wire cultures very differently.
Dominance has its uses. When speed is critical — emergencies, combat, hard pivots — it provides clarity. But it also shuts down feedback, distorts information, and breeds fragility. Worse, it’s a natural attractor: as systems scale or face pressure, dominance creeps in unless actively resisted.
Prestige moves slower but builds deeper. Influence flows through earned trust and competence; followers stay engaged because they choose to do so. But prestige isn’t foolproof. It can ossify, turning imitation into stifling dogma. To stay adaptive, prestige must be continuously refreshed — what earned it yesterday must still earn it today.
People become like the leaders they see. Dominance breeds more dominance. Prestige, when kept alive, cultivates curiosity and competence. The challenge is to design systems where prestige stays earned — and dominance is used sparingly, when it’s truly needed.
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#2 "Worth Your Time" is a restatement of the Marxist insight that capital must circulate. Shares some material, if not language or outlook, with David Harvey and his work on acceleration and the spatial fix.