🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 230

April 9th, 2026

“FCP-230” // Photo: MK with Midjourney

Episode 230 — April 9th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/230

Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK,

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

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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.

Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato’s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.

— Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982)

🧠🔋 The decision treadmill

You’ve spent the morning reviewing AI-generated code, reading AI-drafted emails, approving AI-proposed plans. Rarely did you write the final sentence from scratch or build anything with your hands. Instead, you decided. Dozens of times: keep this, change that, approve here, push back there. By 2pm, you’re more exhausted than you’d be after a day of just doing it yourself.

As AI takes over execution, humans don’t get freed from cognitive load. Instead, it gets concentrated into its most demanding form: decision making.

The result is decision fatigue, repeated decision-making that depletes our mental energy. Studies show that the quality of decisions degrades over a session as our cognitive machinery quietly wears down. But we rarely notice. Instead, we remain confident that we’re deciding on the merits, even as our judgment narrows.

Traditionally, execution has helped mitigate this. Doing “stuff” has a rhythm that manages cognitive load. When we’re doing, the work paces us. At its best, it pulls us into flow, a state that restores attention rather than depleting it. Constant judgment has no such pacing.

Paul Graham wrote over a decade ago about the “maker’s schedule” versus the “manager’s schedule.” Makers need long, uninterrupted blocks. Managers live in decision-shaped fragments. AI might be forcing everyone into the manager’s mindset.

Today, organizations are measuring how much more a person can produce when paired with AI. But increasing the rate of production also increases the rate at which decisions queue. We’ve sped up the factory floor while the quality inspector is still working at biological speed.

There is a flip side worth noting. The work that remains is also, arguably, the work that matters most. This is where domain knowledge, meaning making, and taste create value that can’t be averaged away. If AI handles the execution, the human becomes the part of the system that holds the values.

But these value-based decisions are only as good as the decider can put into them. We might find that the bottleneck of the AI-augmented economy isn’t compute. It’s the finite number of good decisions any one person can make before dinner.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🪙 Ships going through the Strait of Hormuz will have to pay in Bitcoin or yuan

Iran is reportedly planning to charge laden ships going through the Strait of Hormuz $1 per barrel of oil for safe passage; large crude oil carriers typically carry around 2 million barrels, leading to the commonly cited figure of $2 million per ship. The toll will reportedly be payable only in Bitcoin, though other reports have mentioned that yuan or stablecoins could also be accepted instead. As a ship nears the Strait of Hormuz, it will have to email Iranian authorities for approval; Iran will then inform the ship of the toll amount, and they’ll only have a few seconds to pay in Bitcoin. The short window ensures that the money “can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions.”

🚏🚗 BYD electric car sales are surging amid high oil prices

The Chinese electric car giant BYD has been a major beneficiary of rising fuel prices across the globe, seeing a 65% jump in exports last month. The company also raised its projected exports for this year from 1.3 million to 1.5 million units. BYD sales overall have been suffering from seven straight months of year-over-year declines as competition in its home Chinese market has heated up, showing the importance of overseas sales to the company’s strategy. Indeed, exports currently account for 40% of BYD’s total sales, and one report believes that exports could soon make up the majority of sales.

🚏🦋 Mexico’s monarch butterfly population increased 64% this year

The World Wildlife Fund found that the number of monarch butterflies in Mexico increased 64% this winter, a huge turnaround from the decades of decline that the popular insect has suffered due to habitat loss and herbicides. The butterflies migrate from the US and Canada to central Mexico each winter, blanketing trees in orange. The butterflies covered 2.93 hectares of forest this winter, up from 1.79 hectares the previous year but still way down from the peak of 18.21 hectares in 1995 and (worryingly) below the 6.07 hectares that “scientists say are necessary for the species’ survival.”

🚏🏛️ The SEC is preparing a plan to make quarterly financial reporting optional

The US’s Securities and Exchange Commission is working on a proposal that would make quarterly financial reports for public companies—which have been required since 1970—optional, loosening the requirement to twice a year. The proposal could be published this month, and after a public comment period of at least 30 days, the SEC would vote on it. But the impact may not be as drastic as you’d expect: one analyst noted that the EU and UK scrapped the quarterly earnings rule in 2014, yet most large companies in those regions continue to issue quarterly reports, and one study found that the move had “virtually no impact on firms’ investment decisions.” The rationale is that investors value transparency and that more frequent reporting gets more analyst interest, both of which incentivize companies to keep issuing quarterly reports.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

• Take a Tour of NASA’s New Ride to the Moon (National Geographic) — Artemis II astronauts Koch, Glover, Wiseman, and Hansen share short videos about key parts of their spacecraft, including the kitchen, sleeping arrangements, navigation system, air recycling unit, gym, and even the toilet. Along the way, the crew share some of the quirks of living and working together in just 330 cubic feet—“about the size of two minivans.”

• AI Will Make Anyone a 10x Programmer, but With 10x the Cleanup (The Register) — Summarizes a recent AI engineering conference where practitioners from major companies shared patterns they’d found useful. “Adversarial” coding agents check each other’s work; decomposing problems into bite-sized pieces is much more powerful than begging agents not to hallucinate; careful prompt chaining and “context engineering” can avoid “context rot,” where agents’ quality degrades as their context windows fill up. Many talks referenced the Jevons Paradox, where AI (despite enabling greater efficiency) ends up creating more work for engineers because of the sheer increase in task volume.

• The Great Entertainment (Kyla Scanlon) — Argues that the line between show business, governance, and economics has blurred; observe the US’s reality TV star president, nostalgia-baiting political campaigns, and made-for-spectacle policies and wars. Similarly, the economic system is increasingly governed by speculation, gambling, and hype cycles. Indeed, we over-rely on market cap (a vibes-based metric) as a “barometer of economic health.” But at some point, “the real world still asserts itself,” and material economic reality (such as the potential loss of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency) will force us all back to systems that do real things rather than play for TV.

• Knud Rasmussen and the Making of Modern Greenland (Engelsberg ideas) — Traces how Greenland narrowly avoided partition in the early 20th century, with Norway actively occupying the eastern territory in 1931 and the US using northern Greenlandic sovereignty as a bargaining chip to purchase the Danish Virgin Islands. The prospect of a divided Greenland was thwarted by explorer Rasmussen’s 1912 expedition, which proved the landmass was contiguous and helped Denmark secure full sovereignty at The Hague in 1933.

🔮📬 Postcard from the Future

A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing our world.

// What might be an unexpected consequence of AI adoption?

// September 2030

// Harvard Business School class on “Executive Leadership in Times of Crisis”

“Welcome to our talk with the CEO of GrooveStation, the online ticket sales powerhouse. You are known for your direct approach to leadership. We’d love to hear your take on the 2030 turnaround of GrooveStation.”

“In 2027, GrooveStation controlled over 80% of the market for ticketing and live events in the US, thanks to shrewd business deals and venue lock-in contracts. There was a huge scalping problem, but the company didn’t care. Most tickets were resold at least twice through our systems. There were anti-scalping programs, but the reality was that we made money every time a ticket changed hands. We had no real incentive to decrease sales and the potential for scalpers to make massive amounts of money meant they worked around every roadblock we put up.

“The second half of 2028 was the breaking point. Scammers and savvy consumers adopted AI at scale, overwhelming our systems. Over 95% of shows were sold out in seconds, with the vast majority of tickets posted for resale within hours. Media channels erupted in anger as influencers, performers, consumers, and politicians poured fuel on the GrooveStation hate.

“Massive boycotts followed. Ticket purchases, both initial and resale, dropped 70%. While some folks kept buying tickets from scalpers, the vast majority stopped paying $1,000+ for tickets that, two years prior, would have been $100. Our profits and stock price plummeted.

“The media painted picture after picture of nearly-empty stadiums and fair grounds. Festival organizers, promoters, and labels were unable to adapt to the massive drop in revenue. Some artists reacted quickly, moving to online shows. But it wasn’t enough. Scalpers continued to buy tickets, assuming that consumers would break. They didn’t.

“My idea and the key to becoming CEO? Bring friction back to the purchase process. Don’t make it impossible, but make it so that scalpers need to invest in more than just VPNs and cloud compute credits. We started requiring that initial ticket sales would be in-person and require showing government ID, with per show and per month limits. Once a ticket was bought, it could still be resold online, retaining reselling profits for us and convenience for customers.

“The next problem was creating ticketing locations that met these criteria: able to handle large numbers of people waiting in line; public transportation or sufficient parking; geographic distribution; and a consolidated ownership model so we wouldn’t have to cut deals with thousands of space owners. That last point is why we didn’t go with malls. After the post-Covid retail collapse, few mall owners still owned multiple locations.

“The solution, and the reason I’m sitting here today? Mattress store chains.

“There are over 30,000 mattress stores across the US. And after the 2018 bankruptcy of Mattress Firm, the remaining players were excited by additional revenue from ticket sales and the occasional additional mattress or pillow up-sell to folks in line.

“Ticket sales rebounded, scalping dropped to early-internet-era-levels, and resale prices stabilized. Our profits soared.

“Someone on Reddit did summarize it quite nicely: ‘It makes perfect sense; both businesses have mastered the art of making you lie down and take it.’”

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