Performance Economy

Companion Device

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.

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.

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.

Atelier

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.

Robot Milkman

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.

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.

New Deal

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

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.

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?

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?

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?

Pop art milkshake with striped straw on yellow table. Window shows sunlit meadow with dome structure and rolling green hills—a circular economy future in yellows, teals, greens.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)

From Milkshakes To Meaning

Clay Christensen showed us how to understand consumer preference beyond the A|B test. That key unlocks product-market fit for the Circular Century.