Circudyne (Page 2)

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An ornate animal-shaped coffee spout pours dark coffee into a white cup on a citrine yellow counter, with a hint of an automat's little glass food windows behind. Mid-century poster style.

The Commissary

What if the best place in town were the one we all went to? The Commissary is the Automat reborn — good food made special, and within everyone's reach.

Small curated wardrobe in morning light: citrine knit jacket, sage blouse, charcoal sweater, coral scarf on wooden hangers, folded sweaters on a wooden bench, canvas shoes lined up below.

The Curated Wardrobe

What if your wardrobe just got better instead of bigger? The Curated Wardrobe is clothier as tailor at scale — so anyone can dress smart.

A coral red cordless drill stands upright on a counter at a tool library, citrine yellow wall and pegboard of hand tools behind. Mid-century illustration style.

Something Borrowed

The performance economy comes home.

A painterly still life in warm afternoon light: a worn blue leather-bound folio, a well-loved tan baseball glove, and a small handheld device resting together on a sunlit table.

The Personal Companion

A device fitted to you on your first day of school, that grows with you across a lifetime. What consumer electronics looks like when it lasts.

A mid-century-style illustration: a suburban home with rooftop solar panels and a pergola of solar panels shading tomato plants in the back yard. Late afternoon golden sky.

Energy Sovereignty

The household has been at the far end of a long fragile string for a century. Energy sovereignty is the move out. Solarpunk 2.0, and the triad that builds it.

A sunlit home workshop in mid-century illustration style. A small desktop 3D printer extrudes a citrine yellow modular part on a wooden workbench; a modular kitchen visible beyond.

The Living Home

How it feels to live in a home that gets better with time, and what it takes to make one. Why the dwelling is the test case for better living with circularity.

Mid-century illustration of a warm neighborhood street: a figure walks toward an open workshop, a small food counter sits across the way, and a citrine yellow delivery vehicle rolls past.

The Neighbors

What happens when a block generates its own power, grows its own lunch, and tends its own things? The neighborhood becomes the operating layer of plenty.

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.

Simplicity

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.

Rebellion

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.

Future Proofing

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

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.

On the Bubble

Transformative Ends, Incremental Means?

The era of incremental change is rapidly coming to a close

Maintenance

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.

Diplomacy

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.

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