🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 243
July 16th, 2026
Episode 243 — July 16th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/243
Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Ade Oshineye, Erika Rice Scherpelz, MK
Additional insights from: Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, 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.
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism… that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
🥗🎁 The beauty of paying it forward
When invited to a potluck, how does everyone figure out what to bring? For example, you might bring your specialty homemade lasagna while someone else shows up with a bag salad and another person provides the wine or a stack of plates. The host obviously provides the space, and if everyone is lucky, that much rarer gift of actually remembering everyone’s name (and introducing everyone to each other).
It’s clear that everything at that table has a value, in cost, attention, and effort, and it’s plain to everyone seated at said table. However, it would be pretty strange if someone went through and priced every part of it. Still, *something* is in effect because the unfortunate freeloader who arrives empty-handed three times running will get noticed (and maybe gently admonished or even conveniently omitted from the next event’s invite list). That said, the system only works because nobody converts all of it into explicit units of exchange and value. For the moment we do, the whole thing falls apart and ends up no longer being a party.
Anthropologists call the above dynamic *a gift economy*, where value circulates through the ordinary machinery of mutual aid: hospitality, reputation, and everyday care. Gifts are able to build trust precisely because they keep moving from one hand to the next without the need for expensive, inefficient coordination and negotiation. Consider how a mentee could repay the mentor who changed their life for the better years ago: to cut them a check would be gauche so instead, they repay their mentor by helping someone else down the road without ever calling it (or thinking of it as) repayment.
Despite this, gifts obviously still create obligations; they just aren’t the clean, legible obligation of debt and value exchange. While a debt demands speedy repayment and closure, a gift wants to live on and on.
That imbalance is the point and the consensual forcing function. It powers an open loop that keeps people coming back to the table, to keep the party going.
Of course, it’s not all conviviality and revelry: the open loop of paying it forward can cast long shadows. Over time, generosity can curdle into unspoken expectations that fall unevenly (usually on whoever, due to either social pressures or individual differences, finds it hardest to say no). One benefit of accounting is to prevent exactly this: a ledger makes obligations legible and legible obligations can be fairly shared.
As a result, we might be tempted to run the potluck like a balance sheet. And for a while, this balance sheet party might even work. But when everything is reduced to balances and debts, the community loses the very thing it was for. Accounting makes a system more legible, but also less alive.
The trick isn’t choosing between the ledger and the revel. It’s understanding each one’s comparative advantages and tradeoffs. Ledgers close loops while communities keep them open: knowing that, what might we be tallying right now that would circulate more freely as a gift?
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🥬 The US stopped monitoring the “explosive diarrhea” bug last year
Cyclosporiasis, better known as explosive diarrhea, has been sweeping across the USA, with over 7,000 cases reported so far across nearly every state. Sharp-eyed observers noticed that the US’s Centers for Disease Control used to monitor cyclospora, the parasite that causes the illness, but stopped monitoring it last year, along with listeria, shigella, and other bugs.
🚏🇨🇺 Solar-powered tricycles are taking over Cuba amidst a fuel crisis
Cuba has been virtually unable to get oil or gasoline since the US threatened tariffs on any country that sent it oil; just a single oil tanker has arrived in Cuba since January. Public transportation has been shut down and residents are suffering under prolonged blackouts. An unlikely savior has emerged: cheap electric tricycles from China, which blanket the island country’s streets and are being used for everything from package deliveries to taxi services to trash pickup. (Indeed, they’ve largely supplanted Cuba’s iconic vintage cars.) Some enterprising drivers are even installing solar panels on awnings atop their tricycles to recharge on the go.
🚏🧓 The US is facing a looming workforce shortage as Boomers retire
From 2024 to 2032 (when the last Baby Boomers will likely have retired), 18 million Americans are projected to leave the workforce, while fewer than 14 million will join — which one firm is calling “the largest labor shortage the country has ever seen.” Major contributors include the aforementioned retirements, declining immigration and birth rates, and a mismatch in what college grads are studying — for instance, the country is producing too few healthcare grads and too many business/finance grads. The shortage is uneven across states: 40 states currently have fewer workers than open jobs (South Dakota has the fewest, with 41 workers for every 100 openings), and just 10 have more workers than open jobs (California has 153 workers for every 100 openings).
🚏🧑🏭 Factories are offering flexible schedules to overcome worker shortages
In the depths of COVID, the American manufacturer GE Appliances was struggling to get workers to come into its plant in Georgia, so they turned to a temp staffing firm that could plug in flexible workers for a few hours at a time. It worked, even though manufacturing’s typical culture is one of a static workforce that puts in 40 hours every single week: the plant recently got a $180 million expansion, adding 600 new jobs. Years later, the plant is still embracing flexible staffing; a pool of 900 workers can pick arbitrary 4-hour shifts via an app. This unconventional “Uber for manufacturing” approach has been a hit among employees and has improved retention: workers who would’ve otherwise retired can now shift to part-time work. Besides GE, manufacturers like Stanley Black & Decker and Georgia-Pacific have also started adopting this model.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Personal Business (Are.na) — McLuhan absolutism strikes again: the funding source determines the product. VC-backed software optimizes for scale and dominance, which structurally produces the extractive, impersonal outcomes we associate with Big Tech. The Are.na cofounder’s advice is to find something that is “genuinely fun and interesting and you know you could be interested in it forever,” set modest scaling goals, focus on community, and bootstrap.
On Compositionality (Jules Hedges) — An excerpt from the author’s interesting PhD thesis on ‘compositional game theory.’ Here, the author argues that systems with emergent behavior (like those of biology and economics) are the opposite of compositional systems (like computer programs or well-structured bureaucracies), where the whole is exactly equal to the sum of its parts. While emergent behavior is cool (especially to us systems thinkers), it makes a system much harder to reason about, and thus compositionality “is so powerful that it is worth going to extreme lengths to achieve it.” In programming, for instance, we achieve the desired modularity by minimizing the use of global state or “goto” statements.
Authentic Food? Take It With a Grain of Salt (PCC Community Markets) — Observes that every “authentically Italian” tomato (from the Americas), “emblematically Irish” potato (native to South America), “quintessentially British” fish and chips (fried fish brought by Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition), and “traditional” taco al pastor (Lebanese shawarma technique, via 19th-century immigrants to Mexico) is an artifact of migration and cultural collision, making authentic cuisine less a heritage to protect and more a myth that collapses on contact with history.
How Ukraine Built a War Fighting State (Austin Vernon) — Describes how the small, scrappy country has held its own against Russia through a combination of savvy military reorganizations that let the best units and generals rise to the top; heavy investment in drone manufacturing; and exclusive access to unjammable Starlink internet, which lets operators remote-control drones and see real-time video feeds, even in areas where radio links are weak. One interesting organizational technique was building a ‘marketplace’ where units can buy equipment and supplies; the ‘currency’ was “video-confirmed kills” of enemies. This lets the most effective units get more resources and thus get even stronger.
🔍📆 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: stag hunt.
The team agrees that if we build a generic search system, it could replace a whole pile of one-off hacks. It will be a lot of work, but it will make a whole category of backlog items nearly free. Work starts, then slows. We keep adding one-offs: a tag-specific search, an author filter. They only take a week each. The search system is never built.
This is the Stag Hunt dynamic. If they cooperate, two hunters can catch a stag, which feeds them well. Alone, each could bag a hare. It is not a gap between good and bad (like in a Prisoner’s Dilemma). It is the gap between good and better. Cooperation is stable as long as there is sufficient trust that each of us will do our part. If not, the rational decision is to get the hare.
In organizations, failures of cooperation are often stag-hunt-style small, everyday failures of confidence. When we go after hares, we may feel like we are making the best decision, not seeing how short-term optimization weakens longer-term commitment.
This can become an organizational climate, a shared sense that the organization is bad at commitment. Repetition reinforces the underlying pattern. If we consistently contribute to ambitious goals, the organization gets more ambitious. If we consistently hedge, small goals within our personal control become the rational choice.
In bigger systems, such as international relations, this shows up as a lack of ambition or an inability to believe that big things are possible through cooperation. In smaller systems, such as teams without psychological safety, this dynamic shows up as a belief that everything is a Prisoner’s Dilemma. However, successful systems succeed by convincing the participants to focus on growing the pie rather than merely increasing their slice.
One of the reasons we are writing about the Stag Hunt lens is to expose our audience to the rich catalog of empowering tools provided by Game Theory. These tools give us the freedom to reframe an unhelpful payoff matrix into one that empowers us.
For example, the transition from Prisoner’s Dilemma to Stag Hunt shows that by building trust and commitment we can turn a zero sum or negative sum situation into a positive sum situation. We can do this by making commitment visible: naming the larger goal, clarifying what each of us is depending on, and making the cost of ‘playing small’ legible before the temptation of the easy hare appears.
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