On the Bubble

When I first started the practice of writing these weekly letters last year, I landed on the idea to group them by the dozen according to a specific theme. That way, I could access broad subject matter while going deeper on another. After three seasons, I'm ready to declare victory on that objective. It's been an effective learning process.

Three seasons ago, Introduction to Circudyne laid out an architecture: five domains, a transformation methodology, and the argument that circularity should be understood as Lean's successor.

Two seasons ago, A Circudyne Odyssey traced the constellation of thinkers who shaped that architecture — and discovered, along the way, that storytelling was not just a theme in the work but its connective tissue.

The season that just ended asked a harder question. If the architecture is sound and the ideas are robust, why hasn't the Circular Century arrived by now?

On the Bubble was written to confront that question honestly. Circularity is rich with promise, heavy with expectation, and now under pressure to prove what it can deliver. This series examined why — and what must change.

A trove of motivations

Twelve essays later, the answer is clearer than I expected. The Circular Century has not arrived yet because its advocates have been selling the wrong thing.

For thirty years, circularity has been pitched as an environmental obligation. Reduce waste. Cut emissions. Close loops. The logic makes sense. So why hasn't it worked? The circularity gap is moving in the wrong direction not because the science is flawed or the economics don't pencil out, but because moral obligation alone does not produce enough momentum to justify radical transformation.

Letter by Letter, On the Bubble compiled a serviceable inventory of benefits circularity actually offers — to brands, to individuals, to the culture at large — once the environmental frame is set aside as table stakes rather than raison d'être.

Strategic advantage. Organizational resilience. Joy. Sovereignty. Dignity. A relationship with objects and systems and time that is fundamentally more humane than what the linear economy provides.

The environmental imperative is the reason to begin. Everything else is the reason to stay.

That distinction — have to versus get to — turned out to be the season's moral. And it is the bridge to what comes next.

🔜 Next week marks the beginning of our next series. The last three seasons on architecture, ideas, and honest diagnosis are conceptual pillars for a circular future. Now it's time to populate it. The next series will explore specific products and services that could only exist in a circular economy.

A note on this letter

Each season of The Circudyne Letter follows a rhythm: twelve substantive essays for our Dynamo subscribers, and a thirteenth — this one — offered freely to everyone.

To our Dynamo members: thank you. Your patronage makes this work possible. The depth of the weekly letters — the Practitioner Insights, the frameworks, the extended arguments — exists because you've decided it's worth investing in. That matters more than I can say.

To everyone reading this summary: welcome. If what you find here resonates, I hope you'll consider joining the Dynamo tier. Each of the essays below represents a full letter, and what follows is a brief sketch of each. The real substance lives behind the links.

The season at a glance

On the Bubble did not follow a pre-drawn map. The question — is circularity a bubble? what is the state of play? what would it take to regain momentum? — resisted clean answers. Each essay followed the thread where it led, and the season's shape became visible only in retrospect. What follows is a sketch of where each letter went, and what it found there.

The Supply Mirage
Circularity was built for a moment of expected scarcity. That moment never fully arrived.

The season opened by confronting an uncomfortable origin story. Early circular economy advocacy rested on a supply-side thesis — rising material costs and resource volatility would force redesign. The thesis was reasonable. It was also wrong, or at least premature. The absence of that forcing function left circularity without its most compelling economic argument.

→ The supply case was necessary but insufficient. Demand-side motivation must carry the weight now.

Leadership in the Time of Enshittification
Why rigidly managed systems so often end in decay.

This letter examined what linear optimization actually produces when left to run its course. Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification provided the lens: the systematic extraction of value from users, then business customers, then the platform itself. A feature, not a bug, of linear logic.

→ Enshittification is what happens when optimization has no regenerative principle. Circularity is the antidote, not the cost center.

Empathy Is a Strategic Capacity
A path to product–market fit before markets, metrics, or demand signals exist.

How do you build for a future that doesn't have established demand signals? This letter argued that empathy — the capacity to model another's experience before data confirms it — is not just EQ but strategic infrastructure. It's what enables worldbuilding where time and value are not yet fixed.

→ Empathy is how you achieve product–market fit for futures that don't yet exist.

From Managers to Diplomats
Managing within a system in decline is a form of denial.

This letter turned the lens on leadership itself. Management optimizes within existing frames. Diplomacy negotiates between frames — between what is and what must become. Circular transformation requires the second skill. Drawing on international relations and statecraft, it distinguished between the two, and argued that circular leaders more closely resemble diplomats than operators.

→ The circular leader's job is not to manage the existing system better. It is to negotiate the transition to the next one.

Maintenance Is a First Principle
Why your strategy's relationship with "stuff" determines its limits.

Stewart Brand's thesis on maintenance — that how we care for things determines our fate — became the pivot point of the season. This letter connected Brand's thinking to circular strategy, arguing that the relationship a company has with the physical world reveals its actual values, regardless of what the annual report says.

→ Maintenance is not a cost center. It is the most honest expression of what a company believes.

Transformative Ends, Incremental Means?
The era of incremental change is rapidly coming to a close.

This letter confronted the most common objection: wouldn't a hybrid, incremental approach be safer? The answer, examined in structural detail, was no. Circular transformation and linear optimization are not compatible modes. You cannot incrementally transform a system whose logic runs in the opposite direction. This was the letter that planted its flag hardest.

→ Incremental change is how you improve a system. Transformation is how you replace one system with another. These are different activities.

Reassurance Is a Strategic Capacity
The performance economy, at its best, creates the conditions for play. At its worst, it creates the conditions for vigilance.

John Hench, the Disney Imagineer who spent decades thinking about the felt experience of designed environments, meets Walter Stahel, the architect of the performance economy. Hench solved a problem Stahel hadn't addressed: how do you make a long-term service relationship feel worth staying in? Subscription fatigue, in this light, is not a pricing problem. It is a care problem.

→ Joyless durability is a sentence. Reassurance — the felt sense that someone is looking after the details — is what transforms obligation into loyalty.

Vendor Dependency and the Loveless Long-Term Relationship
In a performance economy, the product is a vessel. The software is the spirit. What happens when the spirit departs?

This letter examined the dark side of product longevity. A durable good in the performance economy is a software-defined good, and software-defined goods die when their makers lose interest, or go away. Rivian's brand promise — and others like it — illustrated the challenge of the covenant: when companies ask customers to commit for the long term, they assume a responsibility they may not yet be equipped to honor.

→ Durability is a joint function of the product and the relationship. One without the other is abandonment with extra steps.

Are You a Punk?
When institutions produce the chaos, order becomes the rebellion.

The polarity has flipped. For fifty years, punk meant smashing things. Now the institutions are producing the chaos — enshittification, planned obsolescence, attention extraction — and the counterculture responds with order: repair, conscious non-consumption, saying "no thank you" and building something without you. This letter explored the conscious non-consumer: people who communicate through absence, invisible to demand models, powerful beyond measure.

→ The rebels of 2026 don't sneer. They organize. And the brands that can see them will have first-mover advantage into the largest underserved market in history.

More Joy, Less Work
The brand that sells "enough" will own the biggest business opportunity in history.

What you crave tells you what you lack. We crave simplicity — and abundant energy and intelligence are arriving just as the culture demands it. This letter returned to the Joy Hypothesis (joy is to circularity what quality was to Lean) and extended it: the circular economy's ultimate competitive advantage is not efficiency but liberation. Less friction. Less waste of time and attention. More of the life you actually want.

→ The market for "enough" — abundant, simple, joyful — is the largest unclaimed market opportunity in the world.

Why Self-Disrupt?
The environmental imperative is the reason to begin. This is about why you'll be glad you did it.

Part one of a two-part conclusion. This letter catalogued the non-environmental benefits of circular transformation for brands: strategic positioning, organizational health, customer intimacy, design coherence, cultural leadership. The environmental case is real. It is also not what makes executives commit. What makes them commit is seeing that circularity produces capabilities, positioning, and identity that linear firms simply cannot access.

→ Have to versus get to. The difficulty is the moat.

A New Deal You Can Acquire For Yourself
Personal sovereignty in energy, attention, time, and your relationship with things.

Part two of the conclusion turned the lens toward individuals. If the previous letter was about what brands get, this one was about what people get: sovereignty over energy, attention, time, and their relationship with objects. The Circular Century, framed this way, is not an environmental program. It is a New Deal — the full inheritance of a surplus we were always owed, now finally within reach.

→ The Circular Century is not something that happens to you. It is something you acquire for yourself.

Parting thought

When this season began, the question was: why hasn't the Circular Century arrived?

By the end, the question had changed. It became: what would it take for people to want it?

The answer, it turns out, has been hiding in plain sight. Not in policy papers or lifecycle assessments, but in the lived experience of care, joy, sovereignty, and honest abundance that circular systems make possible.

The environmental case opens the door. Everything on the other side of it is what makes people walk through.

📬 The Circudyne Letter returns next week with the start of a new series. Thank you for reading.