Anglofuturism

This episode is sponsored by Isembard, the industrial base for the West. If you want to own and operate a factory in Britain, America, Germany or France, email franchise@isembard.com and go reindustrialise the West.
No guest makes it through the airlock this week, which is fortunate because Tom has brought a better visitor: pictures of potato-sized black lumps from the bottom of the Pacific. Calum keeps finding him in the sitting room gazing at manganese nodules. Tom would prefer the real thing. Our hosts set out to explain why the metals embedded in those improbable objects matter to every magnet, battery, submarine, missile and wind turbine Britain hopes to build.
The story begins with a message from Queen Victoria that took nearly seventeen hours to crawl across the first transatlantic cable. Its failure started a quarrel between Wildman Whitehouse, who wanted to solve the problem with more voltage, and the future Lord Kelvin, who wanted to understand the ocean. That quarrel opens a path for the sickly naturalist Charles Wyville Thomson, his deep-sea dredges and a succession of Royal Navy vessels culminating in HMS Challenger: a 200-foot corvette stripped of fifteen of its seventeen guns and refitted as a floating laboratory. Four years, tens of thousands of specimens and thousands of new species later, the expedition has found the deepest known point in the ocean and hauled up strange, metal-rich nodules wrapped around teeth, bones and fragments of sponge. The Victorians went looking for a cable route and discovered a resource frontier.
A century later, Malta’s Arvid Pardo declares the seabed beyond national jurisdiction the common heritage of mankind. The principle becomes an international regime, complete with a proposed UN mining enterprise, compulsory technology transfer, Ronald Reagan’s refusal to sign and, eventually, the International Seabed Authority. While that system spends decades debating a mining code, China becomes what the hosts call an electrostate: a country whose command of critical-mineral supply chains gives it the geopolitical leverage that oil once gave petrostates. The environmental question is real. Mining machines are giant underwater Henry Hoovers, sediment plumes do not respect claim boundaries, and the nodules are habitat for sponges, corals and the ghostly “Casper” octopus. But leaving the seabed untouched does not make the mineral demand disappear. It only moves the damage out of sight.
Britain now occupies a peculiarly British position. The government supports a moratorium on commercial deep-sea exploitation while continuing to sponsor two exploration contracts in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, now held through UK Seabed Resources by Glomar Minerals. To Calum and Tom, that tension is not a reason to surrender the option. It is a reason to decide what the option is for. Should Britain remain inside the UN system and shape it, align with an American route around it, or accept that China will write the rules by being the country prepared to act? And what does it say that the government’s own 2035 ambition is to meet only 10 per cent of annual critical-mineral demand through domestic production? Recycling yesterday’s stock cannot supply an economy that intends to build several times more of everything.
The Anglofuturist answer runs from the ocean floor to the edge of the possible: rebuild the Royal School of Mines, train mining engineers, specialise in autonomous excavation robots, carry those machines from the North Sea to the Pacific and eventually to asteroids, and treat scientific data with the same seriousness as physical resources. There is, Tom observes, more stuff Britain chooses not to do than it actually does. Fifty years from now, Britain could be one of the world’s major electrostates — rich in energy, minerals, machines and the leverage to set its own course. We have business in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
The episode explores
— Tom’s habit of gazing longingly at pictures of manganese nodules, and a special episode marked by the complete absence of a guest
— Ninety-eight royal words in seventeen hours: the failed 1858 transatlantic cable, Wildman Whitehouse’s high voltage and the future Lord Kelvin’s better answer
— Charles Wyville Thomson, the death of the azoic hypothesis and how cable security persuaded the Royal Navy to fund deep-ocean science
— HMS Challenger: seventeen guns reduced to two, laboratories below deck, thousands of new species and metallic potatoes wrapped around sharks’ teeth
— Arvid Pardo’s “common heritage of mankind”, the proposed UN mining enterprise and why Ronald Reagan refused to sign the Law of the Sea Convention
— How China became an electrostate, and why critical minerals sit inside batteries, magnets, missiles, submarines and the electrical grid
— Giant underwater Henry Hoovers, sediment plumes, ancient nodules and the “Casper” octopus: the environmental case against deep-sea mining
— Britain’s two sponsored exploration contracts, the Glomar succession and the strategic choice hiding inside an official moratorium
— Why a target of 10 per cent domestic production is not an industrial strategy, and why recycling cannot meet multiplying demand
— Mining engineers, autonomous robots and the route from the Royal School of Mines to asteroid mining
— Automated laboratories, OpenBind and the argument that proprietary scientific data can be as strategically important as ore
— A fifty-year vision of Britain as an electrostate, and why coyote time is ending


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Space is tight in the King Charles III Space Station’s dining room this week — ten million pounds a square metre, the collapse in housebuilding having consequences even in orbit — which is fitting, because coming through the airlock are two men who tried harder than most to fix it. Jamie Rumbelow and Henry Dashwood founded Tract, the venture-backed startup that set out to speed Britain’s planning system up with software. Two years later they returned the capital and wrote the postmortem everyone in British tech has read.
But this episode isn’t about that postmortem. It is about what Jamie and Henry learned when they pulled back the curtain on the people who are meant to be building Britain’s homes.
With sincere apologies from production, this interview has sat in our backlog since last autumn. Nevertheless it is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the subject, utterly timeless. Our thanks to Henry and Jamie for being so patient.
The episode explores
* How Jamie was radicalised by The Housing Theory of Everything
* Why £1,600 a month makes housing a moral issue
* What a land promoter actually does: title deeds, unanswered letters to farmers, and a month of knocking before anyone will talk
* Twenty thousand pounds a hectare until planning permission touches it
* Forty types of document for a small builder, versus the 1990s red-line sketch that got you an agreement
* The land-banking myth: housebuilders aren’t hoarding, they’re terrified of paying subcontractors to do nothing
* NIMBYs have a legitimate point: traffic, GP waiting times, and Section 106 as a feudal tribute system
* Abolish stamp duty first — the quickest win in housing, and the one that sorts everyone into the right house
* Why not Birmingham?
* Reading every single Paul Graham essay, making all the same mistakes anyway, and the unglamorous responsibility to build a very big company very quickly
* Victorian railways approved by committees of six MPs forbidden from owning land on the route
* Thirty million Londoners at the density of Paris, “we could be Taiwan”, and the ten-storey Sloaney Pony
Jamie and Henry’s postmortem of Tract is at buildwithtract.com. Henry writes at henrydashwood.com and Jamie is at jamierumbelow.net. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors — get in touch with aeron@anglofuturism.co.


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No guest at the airlock this week — no radar contact at all, in fact, because Tom is patching in from a French heatwave, leaving Calum alone in the captain’s seat. Domestic matters first: the long-foretold big score has finally materialised (34 runs, since you ask), and England are in a World Cup semi-final.
Which turns out to be geopolitically relevant, because Britain’s principal adversary this century could well be Argentina. The last country to declare war on us has a standing claim on the Antarctic Peninsula and a date circled for 2048, when the treaty system parking everyone’s claims comes up for review.
Elsewhere: Tom, broadcasting from a continental-sized armpit at nearly forty degrees, discovers France is having a full culture war about air conditioning while Britain quietly makes cooling near-impossible to permit and calls the heat character-building. And a new Acemoglu paper hands the show a victory lap on a long-running thesis: labour scarcity forces innovation.
The episode explores:
* Why Britain’s principal adversary this century might be Argentina, with 2048 circled in the diary
* “The Antarctic Peninsula is British and it shall remain British. I am sending a task force to Port Lockroy” — the duelling Thatcher impressions
* The dream of an episode entitled simply Gotcha
* Why there is still no British city on the Falklands despite ten trillion pounds of oil in the neighbourhood
* Harry Kane, the Chagos Islands, and the Diego Garcia tattoo
* How England should handle Messi (flood the midfield; he doesn’t run very much)
* France’s aircon culture war: Le Pen promising cooling for all, Mélenchon scandalised
* Air conditioning as civilisational technology — the most important thing Lee Kuan Yew did for Singapore’s civil service
* Barocal, the Cambridge spinout doing solid-state barocaloric cooling with no refrigerant and 2-3x the efficiency of commercial HVAC
* The Acemoglu natural experiment: wartime labour loss, 9.1 per cent higher GDP per capita fifty years on
* The automated car wash you never build while labour stays artificially cheap
* The Motor Car Act, the Isle of Man TT, and what the CAA could accidentally do for drones
* Politics as downstream of TFR: pensions eating the state and Luttwak’s end of the heroic generation
This one is a salon for our paid subscribers — thank you for keeping the station pressurised. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors: get in touch with aeron@anglofuturism.co.


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There is a knock at the airlock this week, and the King Charles III Space Station’s radar detected nothing incoming. The undetected arrival is Will Blyth: major in the Army for twelve years, infantry platoon commander in the Rifles in Afghanistan, then Palantir, then Helsing, and now founder of Arondite, the London company building Cobalt, the command-and-control layer for the robot-heavy battlefield. He has come to upgrade the station’s defences and, first, to show off: the hosts spend the opening stretch war-gaming a Donovian invasion of Wales on Cobalt’s live map — Donovia being NATO training doctrine’s standard enemy, nothing whatsoever to do with Russia — adding javelin viewsheds and enemy units to the Brecon Beacons and marvelling that government software now ships in dark mode. Behind the toys sits the serious claim: the modern battle space has hundreds of sensors, drones and robots built by manufacturers who never expected them to work together, and the question is how you orchestrate all of it, plus the humans, at machine speed.
Will’s answer starts in Helmand in 2009, where his patrol base sat a kilometre or three from the next one and, if that base was on a different VHF net, “you really never spoke to them, ever” — an information black hole courtesy not of Taliban electronic warfare but of British procurement. Fifteen years on, the reconnaissance patrol of six plucky infantrymen is three robots from three different companies, the drone you bought six months ago is already the wrong drone, and Ukraine has proved you can own ten thousand airframes and still not know where to send them. Cobalt is the answer to the common data fabric that was, in Will’s words, literally laughable in 2009 — and he wants Britain to garden its way there, with the centre setting data standards and the edges buying fast.
Britain built its entire post-war security apparatus on the belief that America would be there when it mattered, and Will — emphatic that betting against the United States is historically a losing trade — argues that recent behaviour means things can never be the same again. It is not a cheerful conversation — the ghosts of 1915 and 1937 both make appearances — but it is, in the end, a romantic one: Arondite is Lancelot's sword, unsheathed in the name of Arthurian Anglofuturism.
The episode explores
* War-gaming a Donovian invasion of Wales, live, from the Brecon Beacons down
* How British procurement, not the Taliban, made a kilometre of Helmand an information black hole
* Why the six-man reconnaissance patrol is now three robots from three companies — and why Will remains long on plucky chaps
* A weapons programme as HS2 with an active adversary, and whether Arondite has a drone for NIMBYs
* Drones as ammunition: Britain’s wartime ramp-up maths for 5.56mm and its total absence for the munition that defines Ukraine
* The 1915 shell crisis as political dynamite waiting to be re-detonated
* Procurement as gardening: data standards at the centre, fast buying at the edges
* Why a country whose infrastructure is struck day after day changes its politics very quickly — and the national conversation about sacrifice Will wants started now
* 1939, minus the rearmament programme
* The one thing that hasn’t gone wrong with Ajax
* Fifty years out: keep NATO strong, reassure the Americans, move one notch — just one — towards the French model
* Muddy boots at VC events, Lancelot’s sword, and the ideals of Camelot
Are you a general with C2 problems — and not a Donovian? Arondite is at arondite.com. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors — get in touch with aeron@anglofuturism.co.


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Calum and Tom are back in the King Charles III Space Station bar, and this week they have a hit piece to enjoy. Prospect has run two thousand words on the online right under the headline “decline porn”, filed Anglofuturism alongside the doom-scrolling aesthetics accounts, and decided the whole project is aestheticised cope that lets the right avoid thinking seriously about Britain’s future. Best of all, it commissioned an illustration: five enormous, union-jack-tattooed Anglofuturists emerging from the darkness to menace the magazine’s readers.
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Mythos, said to be the best hacker in the world several times over, has been held back, and the US government has now banned roughly all non-citizens from its other model, Fable — a ban that reaches even the AI Safety Institute, the British body that built a world-famous testing capability and can no longer run evals on the leading models. Calum’s gloss is the line of the episode: if it is not your national model, you are going to be a vassal. From there it is a tour of what sovereign capability actually looks like — Cosine, the British startup fine-tuning air-gapped coding models for banks still running on COBOL no one dares replace, and Lumen Sovereign, the mixture-of-experts model it is building with government money on the Isambard supercomputer in Bristol so that British firms can use frontier coding without shipping proprietary code overseas. There is a clear-eyed detour through the new national labs, BOLD and FAIR, through continual learning and the transformer’s attention mechanism, and through the uncomfortable fact that the straight lines on the graphs are still holding up — that something like 65 per cent of Anthropic’s own code is now written by Anthropic’s own models.
And in politics, Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms are about to enter Parliament, and behind the asylum headlines sits the Boriswave and indefinite leave to remain — a settlement the hosts price at something like £292,000 a person across perhaps two million people, done thoughtlessly to hold inflation down and now a permanent liability. Immigration is a futurist issue, Tom argues, because the decisions governments make about migration have effects that run not for years but for generations, and Calum puts it more bluntly: it is the thing most likely to prevent the future they want. Hence the title. If Britain wants high-productivity, high-GDP-per-capita, spaceport-building wealth, it has to decide what it can afford, and prioritise spaceports or pensions. Nothing we talk about on this podcast is impossible, a great deal of it has been done elsewhere, and all it takes is will. Other countries, after all, have massive spaceports. Be the Anglofuturist Prospect Magazine thinks you are.
The episode explores
— Prospect’s illustration of five muscle-bound, union-jack-tattooed Anglofuturists emerging from the darkness to menace its readers, and why the hosts take it as a compliment— The US government bans non-citizens from Anthropic’s Fable, the AI Safety Institute is locked out of the leading models, and the line that follows: “if it’s not your national model, you are going to be a vassal”— Cosine’s air-gapped, fine-tuned coding models, the Lumen mixture-of-experts on the Isambard supercomputer, and why Britain’s banks are still maintained in COBOL by people who refuse to retire— The BOLD and FAIR national labs, continual learning, and the claim that 65 per cent of Anthropic’s code is now written by Claude— Why “many on the right have abandoned conservatism with a small c” — and why the real status-quo party is now Labour— The left-wing case against the Boriswave: a few million arrivals unused to first-world wages suppress the bargaining power of workers— Japanese private railways, natural monopolies, and a country with “no state capacity and yet huge state liabilities”— Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms, indefinite leave to remain, and settlement priced at £292,000 a head — Why immigration is a futurist issue rather than a distraction from one — “a thing that might prevent the future we want”— Rivals as Anglofuturist Valhalla: a world of post-AGI abundance where the only meaningful competition is for status, not wealth— The striving middle class as “the destroyers of all that is England”, and the correct etiquette for stealing your co-host’s kimchi
Anglofuturism is looking for sponsors and is at an exciting point in its growth — it has just hit number six in the UK tech charts. Get in touch with producer Aeron at aeron@anglofuturism.co.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit anglofuturism.co/subscribe