Episode 251 — September 17th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/251
Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Jon Lebensold, Stefano Mazzocchi, MK
Additional insights from: Jasen Robillard, Justin Quimby, Laura Eberly, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective
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.
“Fast learns, slow remembers.”
— Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now (1999)
🍞 Tuning the rate of change
Heat boils water. Kneading transforms goopy flour into silky dough. Conflict brings an organization suddenly together… or tears it apart. These are all phase changes. The system shifts in a way that fundamentally impacts its nature. Sometimes (as in the case of water) only as long as the external condition applies. Sometimes (as in the kneading) irreversibly.
In human systems, it can be hard to tell what changes are tied to the external pressure and which get baked into the system. For example, neither remote work nor mask-wearing was as persistent after COVID-19 as some thought they would be. Vaccine technology, on the other hand, was changed forever.
Phase transitions can feel like they have a clear shape. An external force comes and it causes change. Water boils at 100°C. But these “absolutes” can change. Physical changes such as adding salt or adjusting air pressure can change the temperature at which water boils. Chemical catalysts, such as digestive enzymes that break down food more quickly, can speed up a reaction. Kneading time changes the nature of dough, and so does the strength of flour you use.
What about in organizations? One “catalyst” for change in organizations is organizational maturity. The maturity of the team, the maturity of the technology, the size of the organization, all of these come together to impact how phase shifts happen. You could look at maturity as one type of agent (in the chemical reaction sense): adding it to the mix changes the phase transition point. We can’t change the maturity of an organization on a dime, but if we’re looking for organizations ripe for change, we can take it into account.
Other change agents can be applied from the inside. Glue work, support functions, change management can all act as catalysts for phase changes. These often-underappreciated factors (and people) provide the social lubrication that reduces the friction produced by organizational headwinds… or sometimes they provide the friction.
An important thing to remember about catalysts is that they cannot cause change on their own. Catalysts only speed up a reaction that’s already happening. The conditions need to be in place to trigger a phase change in the first place.
And speed isn’t always the desired outcome. If a change is happening too quickly, sometimes you need inhibitors, factors that slow down a reaction without stopping it. Inhibitors acknowledge that sometimes a change is good… but the surrounding system’s ability to absorb it must be taken into account to avoid adverse side effects.
So when a system undergoes change, think not only about outcome but also about the rate of change and how to accelerate or moderate it to be most effective. Maybe it kneads a little more pushing and pulling to really come out smoothly.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🇦🇺 EV sales overtook petrol car sales in Australia
August marked the first month in history that more battery-electric vehicles were sold in Australia (27,089) than fully petrol-powered vehicles (25,824); hybrids are counted separately and also account for a large chunk of sales. It will still take a while for EVs to dominate Aussie streets: they currently make up just 3% of cars on the road, but by 2050 they’re projected to represent 97% of all light cars down under.
🚏🍿 AI-assisted ‘micro dramas’ are booming in China
While Hollywood wrestles with how to incorporate AI, Chinese film studios are leaning heavily into it through the genre of micro dramas, which are one- to two-minute, movie-style videos that are “devoured by Chinese audiences” on apps like Douyin. About 128,000 such mini-films were made in the first quarter of this year alone, and over 95% of them were made with AI; they’re a good fit for AI because their disposable nature means they need less production value or skilled acting. On the other end of the spectrum, Chinese movie studios are creating 90-minute feature films with AI for about $500,000, compared to budgets deep in the millions for conventionally produced movies.
🚏🇺🇸 Dozens of congressional candidates are paying for ChatGPT, even where it’s not allowed
An analysis of campaign finance disclosures found that 39 candidates for the US House and Senate (whose midterm elections are under two months away) reported paying for an OpenAI subscription. Two candidates revealed they were using ChatGPT to generate ads, even though OpenAI bans that practice for political candidates; another candidate disclosed that they were using AI to “draft and personalize messages or create synthetic media.” The top-spending candidate has spent around $3,260 on ChatGPT since 2025, so it’s not a major expenditure in the grand scheme of things. (Campaign consultants, political PR and advertising professionals, and PACs may be spending a lot more on AI, though.)
🚏😎 California got through a brutal heatwave with no rolling blackouts
Back in 2020, California suffered a massive heatwave that triggered rolling blackouts due to excessive cooling needs. Last week, the Golden State melted under another record-breaking heatwave, but it didn’t have a single rolling blackout. The reason: California has grown its grid’s battery storage capacity more than 30x in the last six years, which helps the grid handle sudden spikes in power consumption while squirreling away extra power (largely from solar farms) when there’s a surplus. It also helps that California’s grid is now integrated with that of the Pacific Northwest, so California can pull power from its cooler northern neighbors when heatwaves strike.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
On Average (Monkey’s Uncle) — A Stanford anthropologist observes that maximizing theoretical expected value can, in reality, lead to ruin. One reason is using the wrong type of average: arithmetic means (which power expected value calculations) are fine for population-level analysis, but if you’re repeatedly playing a game you have to consider the geometric mean instead. There are also “absorbing boundaries,” such as going broke when gambling, which make simple EV math inapplicable. This is the world of ergodicity economics, which we enjoy discussing here at FLUX.
Dude, You Broke the Future! (antipope.org) — Sci-fi author Charlie Stross inverts the AI timeline: the dangerous artificial intelligence isn’t coming, it arrived in the 1500s. Corporations were humanity’s first AIs: slow, legally recognized artificial persons maximizing not paperclips, but revenue.
Scorched Harvest (4Hunger.org) — A detailed projection of the dire climatic and agricultural impacts of this year’s El Niño, forecast to have a good chance of becoming the strongest on record. Irregular patterns of floods and droughts could cause crop failures across the world, from Australian wheat to Indian rice to southern African maize, and if history is any guide, it could lead to famine and inflation through 2027 and 2028, plus all manner of unexpected consequences. (El Niño is a strange phenomenon in that we can predict it very well, unlike random storms, but its impact is no less brutal).
How Many Cities Should Be in Middle-Earth? (Improbable Matter / YouTube) — Uses probability distribution functions and England’s oldest census to predict the distribution of city populations in rural and urbanized areas. Then, applies these findings to fantasy worldbuilding to predict the kinds of cities we’d expect to see in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
🔍📆 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: resolution asymmetry.
If social media is to be trusted (it isn’t), then university campuses are battlegrounds where civil discourse has died. Walk onto an actual quad at noon and you’ll see freshmen on hammocks, furious debates over mathematical platonism, and raging over… the broken waffle iron in the dining hall. The controversies and trigger warnings, debates about wokeness, cancel culture, and the like may be real, but they are only a minor part of the lived experience.
We can call this resolution asymmetry. There is a gap between the high-dimensional experience of living in a system and the flattened, low-resolution view from the outside. Observing a system from a distance requires compression, often in the form of low-bandwidth proxies such as viral headlines, limited dashboards, or nostalgic memory.
Real systems are almost always full of contradictory signals. But from the outside, these signals are all collapsed into a low-dimensional vector. Is this place thriving or ruined? Is that government pure or corrupt? Someone who has never been inside can mistake the caricature for the territory. For those on the inside… few things are as surreal as having a stranger confidently (and wrongly) explain your own daily life to you.
Even if we know better, we can fall into this trap. So, where might you be relying on a flattened view of a system you don’t inhabit? And what texture gets lost when others view your world from the outside?
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