🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 250

September 10th, 2026

mk, OM-1 Mark II with M.Zuiko Digital ED 100-400mm f/5.0-6.3 IS II

Episode 250 — September 10th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/250

Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Justin Quimby, Ben Mathes, Ade Oshineye, Erika Rice Scherpelz,

Additional insights from: Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, MK, 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.

“To live effectively is to live with adequate information.”

— Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

📝 Editor’s note: Thanks for supporting us through five-plus years and 250 episodes!

〰️☂️ Leading through the fog of work

Should the onboarding module start with basic functionality or our app’s secret sauce? It’s a legitimate debate. But what the team doesn’t know: the debate may be irrelevant. Upstairs, leadership is discussing how our biggest renewal fell through… and we may not even survive the next six months unless we pivot and focus on our small, profitable core. The team’s manager is in both discussions, but they don’t give even a hint that the team should focus on higher priority tasks. They don’t want to cause churn when there’s a chance that something may rescue the status quo.

From a place of genuine care, the leader is acting as a “shit umbrella.” They don’t want to distract the team with anxiety-inducing volatility and churn. This is fine up to a point, but when an event finally gets through the umbrella, the team may be confronted by months of accumulated drift from the company’s reality. This kind of top-down alteration of signals is akin to the ‘watermelon status’ lens that we discussed back in issue 36. It’s also why the vast majority of shit umbrellas eventually become shit funnels. Over time, the disconnect with reality catches up to them or the manager burns out, leaving the team exposed to a reality they don’t know how to handle.

That’s why this week we want to look at another metaphor to help teams ride the waves of change: the low-pass filter. It blocks rapid, spiky, volatile high-frequency signals, like a rumor before a board meeting or hubbub over a competitor’s blog post. The more consequential low-frequency signals pass to the team, such as a change in the sales team’s Q3 focus or falling revenues.

An umbrella blocks both useful and harmful signals, but a leader who provides no filtering subjects the team to whiplash. However, the low-pass filter aims to dampen the jitter but preserve the trend. Not every competitor announcement matters… but if competitors are consistently winning out, that’s a signal to pay attention to. The communication challenge is avoiding either extreme.

What does this look like in practice? It can mean acting as an interpreter, communicating synthesized information rather than the play-by-play. Or it can mean a leader can readjust plans at a regular cadence but keep stability within a cycle so that when communicating about the bumps, we provide a broader perspective.

The low-pass filter isn’t the only, or always the best, response to a shifting environment. For example, a leader can work to change the environment so that transparency doesn’t feel unsafe.

Protecting a team from noise is an act of stewardship. But shielding them from reality leaves them unprepared for the terrain ahead. The low-pass filter gives us a tool for preparing the team over time to be able to handle the sometimes-harsh reality of your organizational environment.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🚢 A Panama Canal transit slot went for nearly 100x its normal price

Ships that arrive at the Panama Canal without a reserved crossing time can bid for available slots as part of its transit auction; the average winning price (before this year) was about $55,000. But in August, a South Korean gas ship paid a record $5.3 million for a transit slot, beating the previous record auction price of $4.6 million set earlier that month. The disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb likely redirected much traffic flow to Panama. Indeed, the share of vessels approaching the Canal without a booking rose from 10% to 20–25%, and the number of daily bidders rose from “two to three” to a peak of eighteen, which reflects the volume of last-minute changes of plan and the lack of easy alternatives.

🚏🍷 Italy saw record-early grape harvests amid extreme heat

This summer’s heatwaves in Italy forced winemakers to start harvesting grapes earlier than ever before: growers in the Oltrepò Pavese, in the northern province of Pavia, had to start their pinot noir harvest on July 27th, compared to the usual start date of August 10th to 15th. Similarly, winemakers in Lombardy started harvesting the famous grapes used in Franciacorta sparkling wine ten days earlier than last year, and “about a month earlier than three decades ago.” High heat makes grapes ripen more quickly, which raises sugar content and reduces acidity, so grape growers have to be very careful about harvesting on time. Indeed, many in the industry believe that global warming is pushing wine to higher latitudes, such as Britain, Tasmania, Washington State, and Patagonia; up to 90% of traditional wine regions in the Mediterranean and California “could be at risk of disappearing by the end of this century.”

🚏🪨 A Go grandmaster beat the top AI engine (with a two-stone head start)

A decade after the AI program AlphaGo famously defeated the top human player, another grandmaster beat the world’s new top AI Go engine, KataGo, by two matches to one. The grandmaster, Shin Jin-seo, dropped the first match but observed he had to play defensively and preserve territory at the start, only pivoting to counterattack in the middlegame, which helped him win the last two games. Shin later reflected that copying the AI’s strategy didn’t work, and instead he had to “build the board according to [his] own style.” (Interestingly, this mirrors chess, where the unusual, defensive Hippopotamus opening can hold its own against top engines, whereas aggressive gambits struggle.)

🚏🍎 NYC is banning AI for students up to 8th grade

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that the city is placing a moratorium on generative AI use for public school students between 2-K (a preschool program for two-year-olds) and 8th grade; high school students can use AI but will get twice-annual AI literacy classes. The city says it’s the “most expansive AI moratorium in the nation.” NYC’s public school district, the largest in the USA, previously banned phones, tablets, and smartwatches throughout the school day for all students, including high schoolers.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

• Why ‘Cost Disease’ Is the Secret Force Behind America’s Toxic Solitude (Derek Thompson) — Argues that Baumol’s cost disease is the invisible force hollowing out our civic infrastructure: while digital, hyper-scalable platforms like Netflix get cheaper and more productive, labor-intensive third places like cafés and independent bookstores become unsustainably expensive. This economic gravity favors solitude because, unlike the physical world, it is highly scalable. Thompson’s antidote is a structural shift toward sustainable models of conviviality such as membership-funded third places and paid civic clubs to consciously finance and protect human-scale connection.

• AI Is Technology, Not a Product (John Gruber) — Argues that the popular line that “Apple needs to launch a killer AI product” is nonsensical, because no matter how good personal AI agents get, they will always need to be mediated through some device, and nobody can build small personal computing devices better than Apple. Apple will need to upgrade its product suite to incorporate AI, just as it does with every new technology, but for Apple, technologies are just a means to an end.

• “Hybrid War” Is a Red Herring (Kiran Pfitzner) — A Clausewitz scholar argues that the popular concept of “hybrid war” (where cyberattacks, misinformation, and plausibly deniable attacks like Russia’s ‘little green men’ augment conventional military actions) is a category error and obscures more than it explains. The important thing in war isn’t the specific tactics but rather the political situations that make said tactics work. For instance, the useful insight about the ‘little green men’ wasn’t the action in itself but rather that Russia’s 2014 campaign took place at a time when the West wasn’t interested in intervening in Eastern Europe, and the ‘little green men’ gave the West a convenient excuse to ignore the move.

• How 9/11 Shaped My Life (TIME Magazine) — Twenty-five Americans from New York and beyond, spanning firefighters, lawyers, journalists, immigrants, and more, reflect on how that fall morning a quarter-century ago changed their lives.

🧩🕹️ Systemic tools and toys

Games, gadgets, demos, and other nifty interactives to stretch your systems-thinking capacity.

American English is regarded as fairly homogeneous, especially among younger and more educated speakers, but dialectal words and slight pronunciation differences can still identify speakers’ regional accents. The new web quiz “How Do You Talk?” asks targeted questions to guess which part of the USA your speech most resembles, drawing on a famous dialect dataset. If you’re an American English speaker, try out the short, normal, or extended quizzes and see if they get your origin right!

Here are one Philadelphia-born FLUXer’s results. Very close, although the “hoagie” question made it obvious. (Go Birds!)

🔮📬 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.

// 2074. A college lecture hall.

“Alright, Sam, you are the lucky student today. Please come down to the front of class. While they are doing that, here’s a reminder of what we are doing.”

“You are at this University because you want to learn. Not just recite dates and names, but also actively discuss those topics, not just cut and paste a response from an LLM agent. Each week one of you starts the class by talking about the topic from the syllabus. Not only does this get you to know the material, but you will also get to practice public speaking and thinking on your feet, both critical skills in today’s world.”

// Student arrives at the front of the class and sits on a swivel chair across from the professor

“Alright, please explain what drove the ‘Financial Nihilism’ of the early 2030s.”

“Financial Nihilism is a term that rose in prominence in the late 2020s as the US took a hard and visible K shape. Bond rates skyrocketed across the G7 after the Russian and Hormuz oil shock years combined with AI’s white collar unemployment outside the major metros, causing the US market to crash in 2028. The subsequent chaos led to significant rage among Gen Z and Gen Alpha. With the doorway to home ownership seemingly shut thanks to high unemployment and high interest rates, online prediction markets and gambling became more and more common for the young as a way to try to escape their sense that they had no way to get a start on their life or career.

“It was in the 2030s that the Financial Nihilism movement transitioned from a purely economic sentiment to breaching into the real world. Online rage transformed into real-world violence. “Takeovers” of rich gated communities became a regular phenomenon. Despite institutional investors only owning about 3-5% of US housing stock, populists wanted someone to be mad at for their housing costs and set fire to the headquarters of the two largest residential real-estate holders. Attacks by unregistered drones rose against data centers and bank headquarters. Then when the baby boomers began dying of old age in waves, the housing market experienced a flood of homes entering the market. Normally this would lower prices, but the individuals who inherited the homes didn’t want to recognize a lower home value, so housing supply paradoxically shriveled even more. Each homeowner was like Wile E. Coyote, running off the edge of a cliff hoping they’d reach the other side of a canyon before they looked down.”

The professor rises and shakes the student’s hand. “Well done! Now take your seat while we explore how Financial Nihilism impacted federal and state tax codes in the late 2030s…”

Choose Your Own Adventure:

- for optimistic radicalism, turn to page 37 for The Land Value Tax

- for trying ideas already proven to backfire, turn to page 47 for The Wealth Tax

- for war, pestilence, and destruction, turn to page 66 for The Great Leveler

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