Clayton Christensen

Mid-century-style painting of a sunny country-house lawn: a silver flying saucer hovers over the grass beyond an empty wicker chair and a set tea table, a manor house in the distance.

Circular Century

The Circular Century — So What

Clarke said that whether or not we are alone in the universe, the prospect is terrifying. This season's final letter asks what would make us worthy of the answer.

Illustration of an Edwardian country lawn at golden hour: a tea table and croquet set on the grass, a wind turbine turning behind the manor house, and a rocket rising in the distance.

Circular Century

Coping with Abundance

Every age of plenty before this one was fleeting — squandered by an economy that profits from more. The Circular Century is the first abundance built to stay. Which leaves only the question of how to cope with it.

Automat

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.

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.

Carousel of Plenty

Something Borrowed

The performance economy comes home.

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.

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

On the Bubble

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.

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

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.

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.

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