Anglofuturism

Dominic Cummings is the former director of Vote Leave, former chief adviser in Downing Street, and the man most likely to tell you, with no apparent pleasure, exactly which official in which committee killed the thing you wanted to build. He arrives not as a Westminster memoirist but as a diagnostician. The post-1945 order — UN, NATO, WTO, WHO, IMF, the European project — was built for a world that no longer exists, and his frame for the whole conversation is brutally simple: the institutions and the ideas gradually drift out of alignment with reality, and then you have crisis. We are, on this account, somewhere in the gap between the drift and the crisis.
He starts with the technology because that is where the gap is widest. The people who predicted the most success for machine learning have turned out to be the most accurate predictors of the future, the straight lines on the graphs have stubbornly kept being true, and the political world is doing what it always does, which is practise deliberate blindness to the whole thing. Stack the exponentials together — frontier AI, democratised biological engineering, models improving month on month, and what he calls completely crackers agencies regulating all of it — and you get a state of the world that Westminster treats as a fourth-order junior-minister hobby. Technologically it is increasingly China and California that dominate, and Europe, he says flatly, is not in the game: a mix of stagnation and anti-growth bureaucracy dedicated to Leninist centralism in Brussels. Britain’s one accidental piece of luck is that, through sheer inertia, it has not yet adopted every EU regulation and so has not quite shot itself in both feet the way Brussels has.
Through Little Dorrit and the Circumlocution Office, through Northcote-Trevelyan, through the room in summer 1914, Cummings builds the case that the rot is structural and old: by Cummings’s reckoning, 1795 Whitehall was better at procurement than 2025 Whitehall by a massive, massive factor. The Cabinet Office is now the centrepiece. The two things everybody at its founding agreed would be a disaster if it ever happened are now, he says, literally its official functions. Cabinet itself has become a Potemkin process; the real decisions are taken by some director-general or task force, and everyone on the other side of the Number 10 door knows the old system is fake.
The mechanism is everywhere. Officials write memos saying legal advice forbids the sensible thing; ask to see the legal advice and there is no document. Very few MPs have ever hired or fired anyone or built anything, so they cannot grip the machine even when they want to. And the machine has a worldview: in the Cabinet Office, Cummings claims, it is explicit that you cannot talk about personal responsibility, because that is bullying, or fascism. The whole apparatus is designed to programme the prime minister psychologically so that he does not even know what his own powers are — a huge amount of theatre, the Friday box of appointments, a steady drip of “you just can’t do that.” Calum presses on whether this is simply what modern democracies are, and gets the counterintuitive optimism in return: in practical terms it is far easier to do real regime change in Britain than in America or anywhere in Europe, if anyone wanted to.
The prescription is that science and technology must become a fundamental aspect of the prime minister’s job — a top-three priority embedded in economy, security and institutional reform, not a fourth-order issue handed to a junior minister. Britain’s aerospace past demonstrates why. Britain genuinely had frontier aerospace ideas, the Barnes Wallis lineage, the engineers, the possibility — and from the sixties Whitehall shut down the entire way of thinking that says Britain might produce frontier things itself. Tom names the law of the whole episode here: when technology comes up against an ideological commitment from the governance class, technology loses. The idea of Britain building something genuinely futuristic, Cummings says, brings out an allergic reaction in Whitehall, and the fact that it works only makes them more determined to stop it. There is a great deal of talent here and a great many things that could actually be done. The people responsible for budgets and power are actively hostile to doing them.
The episode explores
— Why the post-1945 order drifted out of alignment with reality, and what happens in the gap before the crisis arrives
— The straight lines on the AI graphs that kept being true, and why the people who predicted the most success have been the most accurate
— Democratised biological engineering, exponentially improving models, and the completely crackers agencies meant to be regulating all of it
— Why China and California dominate the frontier, Europe is not in the game, and Britain’s only luck is the EU regulations it was too inert to copy
— Little Dorrit, the room in summer 1914, and the claim that 1795 Whitehall beat 2025 Whitehall at procurement by a massive factor
— How the Cabinet Office became the exact two things everyone agreed at its founding would be a disaster
— Why “I take full responsibility” in Parliament now means “I take zero responsibility”
— The memos that cite legal advice forbidding the sensible thing — and the legal advice that turns out not to exist as a document
— Why talking about personal responsibility inside the Cabinet Office gets reclassified as bullying, or fascism
— The Friday box and the theatre that programmes a prime minister not to know what his own powers are
— Why science and technology has to be a top-three prime-ministerial priority rather than a junior-minister hobby
— Barnes Wallis, the British space plane, and Whitehall’s standing view since the seventies that very big, very futuristic projects are Britain’s out
— A state so broken it has failed four separate times to restart sewage monitoring
Dominic Cummings writes on AI, science, procurement and state capacity at his Substack.


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There is no King Charles III Space Station this week. There is a flat in Saffron Walden — Saf Francisco, as Calum insists on calling it — with a half-built humanoid torso left behind in California and what its makers reckon is the world’s most dextrous robot hand sitting on the table between the beers. Into the flat come Oli and Ivor of Halcyon Robotics, two Saffron Walden schoolfriends who have known each other since they were fourteen. Oli is the roboticist: cybernetics, a mechatronics degree, a master’s thesis spent trying to rebuild the most dextrous hand on earth, then a stint as a one-man army building the hands at 1X. Ivor is the convert: a chemist who taught himself to code, spent the best part of a decade as what he calls a plumber for software engineers, got absolutely shook by ChatGPT in 2022, and concluded that the only safe ground left to stand on is hardware.
The thesis is simple and the engineering is not. Robotics solved walking — Spot the dog, the old Toyota machines that could just about manage the stairs, the endless parade of humanoids doing backflips — but avoided the thing that would actually make a robot useful, which is the hand. Oli’s framing is that you see a great many robots doing backflips and very few doing anything useful. Put a motor in every finger joint and it overheats. Move the motors back to the palm, as Figure does, and the robot can only lift light packages. Do it properly and you end up running forty-odd tendons over the wrist with near-zero friction for a million cycles, which Oli cheerfully calls a mechanical engineering nightmare and the exact place where everyone, Tesla included, is stuck. Elon Musk reckons half the engineering in Optimus is the hands. Halcyon thinks that is an underestimate. The human hand, by contrast, took billions of years, learned to throw a spear, and used that to take over the planet — and surgeons still tend to fuse the bones in a broken wrist rather than repair them, because the biomechanics are so poorly understood. The proudest achievement of Halcyon’s hand, the one Oli says nobody gets, is turning a dial.
What makes a two-person company plausible is the same thing that made Ivor nervous. AI is eating software, so the convert’s logic is to run at the one thing software cannot yet touch — the physical world — and the irony is that AI is exactly what lets two people attempt it. Between Claude and a 3D printer, Oli and Ivor span CAD, circuit boards, firmware and operating-system-level control that used to need a building full of specialists. When their toilet broke they printed the part. And the moment Oli decided Ivor was co-founder material was a fortnight in Greece, where Ivor built an endoscope-and-tape contraption rigged to a laptop to fish a dropped phone out of a wall void, lost it to a marauding snake, and got it back several days later. This is a robot, Oli told him. You’ve built a robot. This is the guy.
From there the conversation climbs. The case for a human-shaped robot is that the world is already built around human hands — every object was designed around the average finger — even though, as the founders happily concede, you would never march a humanoid with a scythe into a wheat field when a combine harvester exists. Calum, who builds specialised robots himself, presses the point, and the reply is that the clothes everyone is wearing were fed through the sewing machine by a human hand while towels are fully automated. The deeper bet is that dextrous hands turn all manual labour into the next thing to automate, the cost of labour falls towards zero, almost everything becomes nearly free, and you are left wondering whether capitalism still works. Oli, who is at pains to point out he would like to keep capitalism for as long as possible, reaches for Alfred North Whitehead on civilisation advancing by the number of operations it can perform without thinking about them.
But Halcyon is leaving Saffron Walden for San Francisco, and the reason is less tax than psychology: in SF everyone you bump into is building something and is unembarrassed about optimism. Americans, Ivor says, believe they are making history every day, while Europeans believe history has already happened — and Calum reaches for the word hypermnesiac, a country with so much history it can no longer move. The British specifics are familiar to this audience and no less damning for it: the Town and Country Planning Act, Victorian infrastructure still doing all the work, energy priced for failure, a neighbour who believes he has a right to your land. They call it losing the mandate of heaven. The close is a clean split — either abundance and a space-faring civilisation of ringworlds and Dyson spheres where everyone owns their own means of production, or a hyper-centralised future where whoever controls the most GPUs and humanoid robots controls everyone at no cost to themselves.
The episode explores
— Why locomotion was the easy part and the hand is where humanoid robotics actually breaks— Motors in the fingers overheat and motors in the palm cannot lift, so the answer is forty tendons threaded over the wrist a million times without friction— Elon Musk thinks half the engineering in Optimus is the hands, and Halcyon thinks that is an underestimate— The proudest achievement of the world’s most dextrous robot hand: turning the dial on an oven— “Claude, make me a billion dollar company, make no mistakes” — how two people now span CAD, circuit boards, firmware and operating systems— Ivor spends two weeks in Greece building a robot out of wood, string, tape and an endoscope to fish his phone out of a wall, a snake sabotages it, and Oli decides this is the man to start a company with— Why the clothes you are wearing were sewn by a human hand and your towels were not— What happens to capitalism when the cost of labour falls to zero, and whether “work gives life meaning” is just a very Protestant cope— Why software people forget that physics matters, and the robot olympics where the best gripper is still seventeen times slower than a hand— Britain as a nation of hypermnesiacs, too freighted with history to act, versus Americans who think they are making history every day— The Town and Country Planning Act, Victorian infrastructure, and the neighbour who believes he has a right to your land— A Second Amendment for humanoid robots, ringworlds and Dyson spheres, and the case for owning your own means of production before someone owns all of them
Halcyon Robotics is building the dextrous hand the humanoid industry needs. Find Oli and Ivor at halcyonrobotics.io.


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We are not in the King Charles III Space Station this week. We are in Harriet Green’s sister station, which is a less reliable bit of lore but a more useful studio. Into it comes Mat Dryhurst: English conceptual artist, Berlin resident, collaborator with Holly Herndon, co-founder of Spawning AI, and the rare guest willing to tell Anglofuturism that Greek statues of ourselves might be a sign of stuckness rather than civilisational vigour.
The episode explores
* Why Greek statues in the space station might be a symptom of Anglofuturist stuckness
* Strange Rules in Venice and the end of art as a separate autonomous category
* Michael Levin, two-headed worms, and why everything starts to look like a communication protocol
* Ken Stanley, PickBreeder, and why greatness cannot be planned
* Aston Villa, the Europa League, and why old forms stop meaning what they once meant
* Instagram and the infinite feed as the actual cultural event of the past 20 years
* Oman banning advertising and the politics of cognitive security
* The Call, choirs, consent, and participatory AI
* Why Bauhaus was not a look, and why commissioning “a future aesthetic” misses the point
* Progressive elitism, Channel 4, Chris Morris, and institutions taking punts before the public asks for them
* The new weirdos who look normal until they start talking about prediction markets
* Spawning AI, machine-readable permissions, and why copyright is too small for model culture
* The 30-year question: which low-status interaction now becomes the future’s obvious value layer?


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From the thatched-roofed orbital pub of the King Charles III Space Station — a structure Nicholas Boys Smith gamely declines to call a pastiche — Tom and Calum welcome the campaigner for architectural beauty, founder of Create Streets, and former co-chair, alongside Roger Scruton, of the government’s beauty commission. The opening question is whether you could ever build a city worth living in on the Moon, and his answer is more practical than you would expect: in large part, we already know how.
Boys Smith’s case is that human settlements take remarkably similar shapes wherever you go — Stockholm, Marrakesh, Malta, a town in the north of Norway — and only the proportions change. Hot climates produce narrow streets and high walls to dodge a murderous sun, a logic later codified in the Quran; cold ones spread their streets out to chase the light. Once you have breathable air on the Moon, he argues, you would end up with something startlingly close to how we already live, only built from moon rock, rendered and quite possibly painted in pastel pinks and yellows, like a Cornish village in orbit. The same goes for the British Antarctic Territory, which Tom is delighted to point out is mostly exposed rock rather than ice.
On the Moon as in a Cornish village, his instinct is to build from what is to hand. Granite, he notes, was the original sustainable material — cheap, durable and loved — until canals and railways made it viable to drag stone and brick across the country, the same shift that once made coal in London cost several times what it did in Newcastle. And building well is not a luxury. Across visual preference surveys in Britain, America, Holland and Norway, large majorities, often 70 to 90 percent, prefer the same things — texture, gentle symmetry, a coherent complexity that rewards a second look — and people who live somewhere they find attractive turn out to be measurably healthier in body and mind, across party, region and race. The striking exception is architects: Boys Smith revives a near-forgotten study by David Halpern showing that while everyone agrees on which faces are beautiful, architecture students’ favourite building tends to be precisely everyone else’s least favourite, and the longer the training, the wider the gulf.
How did a civilisation that once built like this forget how? He points to the mid-century caesura, when architecture schools across the West binned several hundred years of accumulated craft, in some cases literally throwing the plaster casts students used to draw from into the skip. But recovering that inheritance is not pastiche: you can always tell a Victorian Gothic church from Salisbury Cathedral, and Selfridges is a steel-framed modern building wearing classical dress. The Victorians, he suggests, were the original Anglofuturists — Joseph Paxton, a self-trained gardener, throwing up Crystal Palace; military engineers raising the Royal Albert Hall on a steel dome they were genuinely afraid would collapse. All of which makes the proposed £39 billion restoration of the Palace of Westminster, not a typo, the more dispiriting, complete with a scheme to scoop out the interior and refit it in what he calls Ikea-pastiche modernism. His counter-proposal, aired in The Critic, is to demolish the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, raise a fifteen-storey Gothic tower in its place, and let the luxury flats inside pay for Parliament’s visitor centre.
The back half ranges gloriously: a Star Wars taxonomy worked out with his son over the summer holidays, in which the Death Star is the apotheosis of functionalist modernism and Naboo is conspicuously on the side of good; a brisk dismissal of the charge that a fondness for columns makes you a neo-Nazi, on the grounds that he doesn’t believe in dressing up and invading other countries; and a genuinely moving account of co-chairing the beauty commission with a dying Roger Scruton — funny, kind, disarming, and armed with a lethal bureaucratic trick of asking anyone with an unhelpful idea to go away and write a two-page memo on it.
The episode explores:
* Why human settlements take the same shapes from Stockholm to Marrakesh, and what that means for building on the Moon
* Lunar Cornwall: pastel-rendered moon rock and the case for local stone everywhere
* Beauty as a public health measure rather than a luxury, and why the data holds across party, region and race
* The Halpern study, or why architecture students are the only people on Earth who prefer ugly buildings
* The mid-century caesura, when architecture schools binned centuries of craft along with the actual plaster casts
* Why copying the past doesn’t make a pastiche, with Selfridges as a steel-framed building in classical dress
* The Victorians as the original Anglofuturists, from Paxton’s Crystal Palace to the Albert Hall dome nobody was sure would stay up
* Build a Gothic tower, don’t spend £39 billion turning Parliament into a 21st-century building
* Whether rebuilding the burned-down Clandon Park is genuinely “dishonest,” as the National Trust insists
* Why “neo-Nazi” gets hurled at anyone who likes a column, and why stripped classicism was mostly an American state project
* The Star Wars theory of architecture: the Death Star is pure modernism, and Naboo is on the side of good
* Roger Scruton’s trick for killing an unhelpful meeting


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The US has broken with decades of international consensus by issuing its own mining permits for the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a potato field of metallic nodules the size of Western Europe at the bottom of the Pacific. Tom, who has found his next Antarctica-level obsession, reveals that Britain has quietly sponsored two exploration licenses. The age of saying “that’s mine” appears to be back.
Calum reports from Singapore. The city-state is remarkable — a nation summoned into being in 60 years through ethnic quotas, mandatory housing integration, and the relentless repetition of founding mantras. But it is now haunted by the ghost of Lee Kuan Yew, whose historically contingent decisions are being ossified into dogma. The TFR has fallen to 0.87. Entrepreneurialism is lacking. And the ethnic ratios that once stabilised the state are now preventing the emergence of a true Singaporean people.
The lesson Calum draws is not about policy but about method: if Britain wants cultural renewal, it needs hyperculture — the willing use of state formation tools to remake national identity. Charles Wesley did this for Anglicanism among the newly urbanised working class. Singapore did it with light shows and peanut shells on the floor at the Raffles Hotel. The question is whether Britain is willing to do the same.
The episode explores:
* King Charles’s US visit and why the special relationship is a wasting asset
* The Koh-i-Noor diamond and the rise of third worldism in American politics
* Deep sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and Britain’s quiet play for it
* The return of the frontier: space, Antarctica, the ocean floor
* Calum’s Singapore dispatch: what LKY built and what is now ossifying
* Why Singapore’s TFR of 0.87 is a failure of Lee Kuan Yew’s own eugenics programme
* The most photographed barn in America as a model for state formation
* Charles Wesley as the Pink Pantheress of his time
* Hyperculture: the case for a full spectrum British cultural renewal
* Bismarck, repeatedly and without apology


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