Circudyne (Page 2)

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Mid-century illustration of a craftsperson at a well-lit workbench in a neighborhood atelier, tending a textile with care. Warm citrine light, gouache texture, 1960s World's Fair poster style

The Atelier

The neighborhood workshop where skilled artisans tend your things before they break — making them more yours over time.

Autonomous delivery vehicle in citrine yellow at a suburban doorstep at dawn, a homeowner handing back a return container. Mid-century illustration style.

The Robot Milkman

The Circular Century's symbol: an autonomous vehicle that delivers what you need and retrieves what you're done with. One stop. Both ways.

Jean Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles, ca. 1733–34. Oil on canvas. A young man in quiet concentration blows a single iridescent bubble. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

On the Bubble

Closing out a season that asked why circularity stalled — and discovered that the environmental case, while critical, is not enough to close the deal. The benefits hiding behind it are the ones that will.

Workers building a hydroelectric dam in William Gropper's 1938 New Deal mural — laborers scale rock, a steel section hangs from a crane, and a crowd gestures upward against mountains.

A New Deal You Can Acquire For Yourself

Personal sovereignty in energy, attention, time, and your relationship with things. The Circular Century is a New Deal you can acquire for yourself — the full inheritance of a surplus you were always owed.

Winslow Homer's Breezing Up: a man and three boys sailing a catboat in fair wind, leaning confidently into the sea, with a schooner visible on the horizon

Why Self-Disrupt?

The environmental imperative is the reason to begin. This is about why you'll be glad you did it. Have to versus get to. Part I of a two-part conclusion.

Wang Meng, "Simple Retreat," ca. 1370. A scholar's hermitage nestled in energized mountains — the retreat as a reservoir of calm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

More Joy, Less Work

Abundant energy and intelligence are arriving just as the culture demands simplicity. The brand that sells "enough" will own the biggest business opportunity in history.

Three peasant women bend over a harvested field, quietly gathering what the system left behind. The establishment's surplus towers in the background. They don't look up. They don't need to.

Are You a Punk?

When institutions produce the chaos, order becomes the rebellion. The punks of 2026 don't sneer. They say "no thank you" and build something without you.

A luminous figure rises from a recumbent body, arms extended in reluctance. William Blake's 1808 engraving for Robert Blair's poem The Grave.

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?

Mary Cassatt's "Young Mother Sewing" (1900): a child leans into her mother's lap with total trust while the mother calmly continues her work, absorbing the contact without interruption.

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.

Tiny figures lost in Piranesi's impossible prison of arches and stairs—architecture so vast and self-referential that individual optimization becomes meaningless.

Transformative Ends, Incremental Means?

The era of incremental change is rapidly coming to a close

Oil painting of the aging warship HMS Temeraire, its tall masts shown ghostly, being towed up the Thames by a small steam tug at sunset, symbolizing the end of an era.

Maintenance Is a First Principle

Why your strategy's relationship with "stuff" determines its limits

Two Renaissance diplomats in rich attire flank a table laden with globes, scientific instruments, a lute, and books — the tools of their multilateral craft.

From Managers to Diplomats

Managing within a system in decline is a form of denial.

Vincent van Gogh’s The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix), showing a compassionate figure helping a wounded man onto a horse, rendered in expressive brushwork.

On the Bubble

Empathy Is a Strategic Capacity

It enables worldbuilding where time and value are not yet fixed, providing a path to product–market fit before markets, metrics, or demand signals exist.

A painterly parody of Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” reimagined with stylized, hand-painted symbols of decay replacing the river’s ice floes as the boat moves forward.

On the Bubble

Leadership in the Time of Enshittification

Why do rigidly managed systems so often end in decay? A closer look at enshittification, linear logic, and why this moment calls for leadership.

A hazy seascape with a distant cargo container ship receding toward the horizon, its form partially dissolved by light and atmosphere.

On the Bubble

The Supply Mirage

Circularity was built for a moment of expected scarcity. What happens when that pressure never fully arrives — and what must change as a result?

Painterly night scene of an ancient Greek sailing vessel beneath a circular constellation of luminous stars, symbolizing a constellation of ideas guiding the close of A Circudyne Odyssey.

Circudyne Odyssey

A Circudyne Odyssey

Closing out a season tracing a constellation of thinkers and ideas behind circular transformation — sharpening how we see perception, storytelling, and imagination, and preparing the ground for a harder question: what circularity must now deliver.

Painterly image of Earth aligned beneath a black monolith, with the Moon and Sun above, rendered in a mythic, cosmic style inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Circudyne Odyssey

McLuhan, Perception, and the Role of Brands Today

Marshall McLuhan argued that experience shapes behavior before understanding. In a moment defined by overload and institutional fatigue, this letter explores what that insight means for brands, and why helping people see has become their responsibility.

Digital illustration of Homer, the ancient Greek poet, gazing toward a radiant circular future city, linking timeless storytelling traditions with a coherent vision of the Circular Century.

Connection

You Don't Need Better Storytellers

Stories begin with choices. Without internal coherence, even the best storytelling can’t help us imagine, or choose, the future we need.

Perfect Days

"Something Goes Wrong!"

We’ve absorbed decades of stories that teach us to wait for the break: build a world, then watch it fall, because “something goes wrong!” is where the meaning begins. Tales of the Circular Century require a different rhythm. “Perfect Days” reveals the quiet power of a world that holds.

A Van Gogh–style portrait of Joseph Campbell set against swirling cosmic colors in blues, greens, magentas, teals, and citrine yellow, suggesting shifting cosmology and mythic meaning.

Cultural Mythology

Closing the Mythology Gap

When the world changes faster than our stories, organizations lose coherence and momentum. This Letter shows how Joseph Campbell, George Lucas, and Coca-Cola demonstrated the deeper work of cultural renewal — and what it means to become fit for purpose in the Circular Century.

Impressionist maritime painting: elderly civilian mariner in work clothes steering wooden pleasure craft across dawn-lit Channel waters during Dunkirk evacuation

Dunkirk

Dunkirk Spirit and Circular Transformation

Like the Royal Navy at Dunkirk, today's corporations are unfit for the task. Circular transformation needs 1,000 small boats, not one big ship. What's yours?

Imagination

Toward Imagination

Scientific management made imagination possible. Then it made imagination impossible.

Isometric pixel art of Apollo spacecraft on lunar surface with Earth rising in background. Spacecraft has yellow and magenta accents. Grey-brown moon, vibrant blue-green Earth, black space.

Overview Effect

The Overview Effect: An Objective Moral Context for the Circular Century

Astronauts who've seen Earth from space—Cold Warriors and Captain Kirk alike—report the same truth: we live in Eden. That fact will reshape what we accept.

Ceramic plate with gold kintsugi seams and rabbit design, framed by cherry blossoms before a Shinto shrine under soft light.

Mottainai

Sparking Joy: The Secret Ingredient of the Circular Century

Marie Kondo taught us how to part with what doesn’t spark joy. Circularity challenges us to build a world where everything does. What if joy isn’t just an outcome — but the compass for transformation itself?

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