Summer Holidays, and a best of Full Moon taster

Fellow Lunartiks!

Tonight the Buck Moon is full. And for the first time since we launched, there is no new essay to go with it.

It's the summer holidays. We're taking a breath — reading, travelling, looking after family and arguing gently with each other about what comes next. David is for the machines going to the Moon, I'd rather we fixed the planet first; long story, it's here.

But a full moon without anything to read felt wrong. So instead of a new essay, here's a tour of every essay we've published since we started late in 2025, with a few key lines from each. If one catches your attention, that's some beach reading sorted. Everything is free to read now, no paywall.

Tell us what you think of Full Moon!

The only think we ask in exchange is that we'd love your feedback. So here's a simple five question form where you can do so. It would really help us.

Lining all these up, we checked on how we are delivering on our original vision. Whatever the subject — toothbrushes, wolves, Ferraris, Dunbar numbers — we keep coming back to one question: how do humans stay at the centre of the intelligence age? What centre is that? We veer strongly towards themes of design, of brands, of work, of knowledge, of power. This our thread so far. It was pretty much planned and eight moons in, it's unmistakably who we are. Please tell us in the survey if you want this tweaked, and how.

And if you want us to talk to your organisation about all this and more, write to us at hello.wearefullmoon@gmail.com.

So, on to the tasters.....

Where is Design Heading? — December Cold Moon

"We are at another historic moment when a new technology needs to be designed. I am talking about AI. I am talking about you, too. Design is something we all need to think about – now. Why? Because the way we use technology is never without social consequences."

"Expect AI to eventually develop a new form: one day not too far away Chat GPT will look as laughably old fashioned as Yahoo in 1996 does now."

"AI will make services competent; feeling right will make them relevant."

Who Designs the Future When Everyone Can? — January Wolf Moon

"AI has effectively 'consumed' the history of design, democratizing the ability to create and collapsing the distance between idea and execution. But access isn't artistry. As barriers fall, we risk a flood of 'vibe coded' mediocrity. The role of the designer shifts from making to meaning."

"We are currently in the 'radio with pictures' phase of AI: stuck in text-heavy chatbots that fail to utilize the medium's full potential."

"If AI makes everyone a designer and floods the system with output, then effective design becomes: holding intent, curating quality, creating trust, and insisting on authentic, verifiable, human meaning. That's the job for the next decade."

Zombies at the Theme Park — February Snow Moon

"Our deep fear is that we have become zombies eternally lost in a theme park of endless preference satisfaction. Inside the walls of the park we live a surface existence, unconsciously consuming, clicking, and scrolling our way from one dopamine hit to the next, and never quite experiencing any of it."

"What we need most now is freedom from ourselves. Freedom, that is, from the tyranny of our own immediate preferences."

"Perhaps the most meaningful dividing line for those of us who make things for other people is this: Is your work serving the zombies, or those who are awake?"

Being Relevant — March Worm Moon

"What if we look down the telescope the other way? What if we reverse the question? How do we make customers and employees themselves feel more relevant?"

"The endless quest for relevance is one of the central and most powerful motivators of human behaviour. If we want to understand how people work, we need to understand their search for relevance."

"This is what I call the asymmetry of glamour: while I am sitting on the toilet in a damp English county in February, someone I know is always in Bali having fun."

Only People Can Build Brands That Other People Care About — April Pink Moon

"In this thought experiment, the glass box is empty. The lights are on but nobody's home. And what that means is that the layer of human intent is gone. The layer that mediated the brand for me, the consumer, is gone. And in this way, the brand dies."

"Human intent is the animating force of brand. It is what separates a living brand from a logo stamped on a product."

"If there are no people, then there can be no authentic culture. And if there is no culture, there can be no meaningful brand. Only people can build brands that other people care about."

AI and Work – How Young People Are Thinking About the Future — May Flower Moon

"I'm learning how to make things work. Not how they work." — Clara (25), one of the 25 young people we spoke to

"Their anxiety is not really about job numbers. It is about something harder to quantify: meaning, credibility, connection — and intent."

"There is no shortage of doom-laden narratives, but there is a complete absence of a big, coherent vision of how this future can be brilliant for young people."

What AI Knows and What It Doesn't — May Blue Moon

"Explicit knowledge is legible to AI; it is the type of knowledge that an AI can know. Tacit knowledge, emphatically, is not. A large language model can know Pythagoras's Theorem. It cannot know how to ride a bicycle."

"In the age of AI, we can redraw that distinction in terms of machine legibility. There is knowledge the machines can know, and knowledge they can't."

"The deepest truth of all here is stark: the organisations that win will be those that can avail themselves of that potential and retain the ability to think critically, to be authentically creative, and to speak human."

Customer Love is Rarer Than You Think — June Strawberry Moon

"There is a massive asymmetry at work here. Brand owners (especially their marketing teams) spend 40+ hours a week thinking about nothing else than their brand. Consumers spend much less than a second in most cases – if the brand is lucky."

"We are confronted on a daily basis with incredible levels of choice, and we cannot process all of it into relationships. And yet, deep down, in the middle of the night, every brand fervently hopes to be loved."

"A brand can capture our hours and remain a cold utility; but the rare few that touch our identity don't just fill our 'brief hours and weeks' — they define them."

And in between the moons…

The essays arrive every 29.5 days, but the Ideas keep coming in between. A few lines from those.....

• "While I am deeply suspicious of the idea of Bullshit Jobs, Bullshit Tasks are everywhere." - Bullshit Theory
• "The knack of arranging the world so that we do not have to experience it has now extended to thinking itself." - The Knack of Not Experiencing
• "The labour did not disappear. It migrated." - Work You Didn't Know You Were Doing
• "In the clash that lies ahead, will you find yourself standing with the creatures, or the machines?" - Creatures and Machines
• "In the age of intelligent machines, brand, know thyself." - Brands, Meet the AI Backlash
• "Most of all, who gets to decide?" - Autonomy For Who?

What's next

We're not idle over the summer. Our research conversations with designers about how AI is actually changing their work are underway.

If you want to join our last research session its on August 7th; the link to do so is here. We've opened up one more to check some points we are hearing.

The report essay lands at the August full moon, and in September we're hosting a webinar to share the findings. If you're a designer and want to take part, sign up here.

If any of these lines made you want to argue with us — good. Hit the comments. And if you know someone who'd enjoy this, forward it on and swell the ranks of the Lunartiks.

See you at the next full moon.

Mark and David

Full Moon delivers deep thinking on technology, business and the human future, from Mark Curtis and David Mattin. If someone forwarded you this, subscribe at wearefullmoon.com.