A crossover between my business marketing day job and five decade interest in the Punk Rock ethic.

This book began as an attempt to explain a pattern I kept encountering across different industries, decades, and technologies.

‘Long before the language of lean startups, bootstrapping, or the creator economy, punk had already solved many of the same problems. How to act without permission. How to operate with limited resources. How to build audiences into communities. How to grow without losing coherence. And, crucially, how to stop.‘

Rather than treating punk as a cultural moment or aesthetic, this project examines it as a working system. A set of practical decisions about production, attention, exchange, and ethics made under conditions of exclusion and constraint.

The aim is not nostalgia, instruction, or revival. It is orientation. To understand how independence is constructed, what it costs, and why these same structures continue to reappear whenever formal systems become rigid or inaccessible.

This is a book about choosing coherence over scale, limits over optimisation, and intent over accidental growth.

Here’s a link to my draft manuscript. The PunkOperating System