Anglofuturism

Part two begins, as promised, with Louis pulling down his trousers. The underpants in question — a toile de joie printed with pastoral scenes labelled Seductio, Commiditas, Protectio — turn out to be the origin story of the entire British Cræft Prize. What started as a quest to produce bespoke boxer shorts from Northern Irish linen eventually mutated into a £60,000 national prize for maverick craftsmen.
The conversation then turns to whether cræft can serve as a binding agent for a country that no longer shares an informational commons. Louis presents his framework of 16 Dreams of Britain — from Royal Britain and Workshop Britain through to Silly Britain (Mr Blobby, cheese rolling, Paddington Bear as psychopomp) and New Britain (Stormzy’s stab vest, Oswald Boateng’s BA uniforms). His claim is that excellence in making — the deep hand-eye-mind entanglement of cræft — cuts across all of them. Calum pushes back hard: these are competing aesthetic and moral universes, not fragments of a whole.
Submit to the British Cræft Prize. £60,000. Deadline: 31 August 2026. [link]
The episode explores:
* The boxer shorts to national prize pipeline, via Saint Pantalone
* Why Irish linen is grown in Flanders
* The 16 Dreams of Britain and whether they can coexist
* Calum’s objection: competing aesthetic universes cannot be synthesised by goodwill
* Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism and Paul Ricœur’s defining question
* Hiroki Azuma’s database animals and the collapse of the grand narrative
* The Magdalen College library debate: homage or imposition?
* Why the Anglofuturist typeface has borrowed from five traditions and still doesn’t have a full alphabet
* The Peter Thiel two-by-two and why definite pessimism has no joy
* Sprezzatura as the missing ingredient in British national renewal



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From the King Charles III Space Station — whose thatch is in a worrying state of disrepair — Tom and Calum welcome Louis Elton, founder of the Cræft Prize, a new £60,000 national award for maverick craftsmen, makers and technologists who fuse heritage crafts with cutting-edge technology.
Louis begins with the crisis: Britain’s heritage crafts are dying. The handmade cricket ball is officially extinct in the UK. Thatchers, stained glass makers and stonemasons are retiring without apprentices. The economic model is broken and the younger generation all went to university. But the answer isn’t pure revival. Louis traces the word cræft back to King Alfred’s translations of Boethius, where it meant something closer to virtue — a deep entanglement of hand, eye, mind, body and material intelligence, all forged into excellence.
The conversation then turns to whether new technologies can produce genuinely new aesthetics rather than endless pastiche. Louis points to Carmelite monks in Montana building a monastery with CNC-milled stone, a Chinese studio using robotic bricklaying to create patterns no human could construct, and a children’s clothing brand applying origami principles to make garments that grow with the child. The enemy throughout is slop — content without form, without virtue, produced to satisfy a single metric. The default setting of modernity is the slop machine. Cræft is the antidote.
The episode explores:
* The Anglo-Saxon meaning of cræft and why it matters more than craft
* Why the handmade cricket ball is dead and what that tells us about British manufacturing
* AI slop versus cræft as opposing forces in modern culture
* CNC monks, robotic bricklaying, and 3D-printed Cornish lobster pots
* Whether Silicon Valley’s obsession with taste is just pattern recognition
* The trad wife aesthetic as craft pornography
* Iranian AI Lego propaganda as an unlikely signal of the future
* What humans are actually for in a post-AGI world
* The Cræft Prize: £60,000 for inventions that fuse heritage wisdom with frontier technology

King Alfred's translation of Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae
Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
Not Quite Past — AI Delftware in Stoke-on-Trent
Monumental Labs / Gondor Industries
Aki Union — Shanghai parametric brick gallery
Atelier Missor



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Back from the break and fuelled by Diet Coke, Tom and Calum push Josh on the harder questions. If HomeDAO is selecting for a new elite — relentless, agentic, indifferent to the rules of polite society — what kind of elite is it? The aristocrat as leader, or the aristocrat as exploiter?
Josh mounts a defence of Pump.fun against charges of exploitation, arguing that the real narrative distortion comes from Silicon Valley incumbents who control both capital and media. Google is an advertising company. Revolut’s revenue is almost entirely from crypto trading. The difference is that Pump.fun never needed to take venture capital from the people who set the terms of respectability.
The conversation then turns to what good companies actually do. Josh’s framework: they automate layers of the civilisational stack, freeing people to focus on higher-leverage work — the same logic that runs from the Black Death through the Industrial Revolution to self-driving cars. Britain’s declining birth rate, he argues, could be a blessing in disguise if it forces investment in automation rather than cheap labour. But the automated cavalry isn’t coming on its own. Someone has to build it.
The episode closes on aesthetics: why Anglofuturism’s AI-generated thatched cottages on the moon are a cry for something better, why the answer might be neo-neo-Gothic, and how Tom once stole a brick from Keble College.
In this episode
* The aristocrat as leader versus the aristocrat as exploiter — and where startup founders fit
* Why Pump.fun is more honest than most of Silicon Valley
* Josh’s framework for social value: automate the civilisational stack
* The Black Death as the bullish case for declining birth rates
* Grammar schools, nuclear energy, and the policies that might actually matter
* Why Anglofuturism needs a coherent aesthetic — and what neo-neo-Gothic triple-glazed stained glass might look like
This conversation took place in November 2025 and was delayed in publication due to triggering an Environmental Impact Assessment from Oxfordshire County Council.


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From a hand-dug allotment in Stroud, Tom and Calum announce a fundamental change of direction for the podcast. After eighteen months of speaking to founders, technologists, and policy thinkers, they have come to an uncomfortable conclusion: it was all wrong. Growth is a trap. GDP is a fiction. The SMR under the village green was never going to save us. What Britain needs is less.
The conversion happened gradually, then all at once. Calum attended a silent retreat in Totnes where a man named Giles explained that fusion energy would simply allow humans to destroy the biosphere more efficiently. Tom read a pamphlet about doughnut economics on the FlixBus from London to Oxford and wept. They have since decommissioned the King Charles III Space Station and replaced it with a community pottery studio.
The episode explores:
* Why GDP is a meaningless number and Britain should stop chasing it: Every guest on this podcast has said something like “Britain needs to grow.” But what is growth? More cars? More data centres? More Georgian townhouses? Tom and Calum now believe that true prosperity is measured in leisure time, hedgerow density, and the number of independently owned bookshops per capita. “We looked at the data and realised we’d been measuring the wrong things. The happiest people we’ve ever met were on Pitcairn Island.”
* The case for shutting down Britain’s tech sector and replacing it with cooperatively owned farms: Technology has given humanity targeted advertising, algorithmic anxiety, and a website where you can bet on meme coins named after dogs. Britain’s attempt to replicate this is not a national strategy — it is a cry for help. What if, instead of incubators, we had more allotments? What if, instead of AI, we had more canal boats? Calum explains why the Coase theorem actually supports a return to subsistence agriculture if you think about it hard enough.
* Deindustrialisation was actually good and we should finish the job: The listeners of this podcast have spent two years complaining about deindustrialisation. Tom and Calum now believe it didn’t go far enough. Why does Britain still manufacture anything at all? Every factory is a moral injury to the landscape. The Lake District doesn’t need a semiconductor fab. It needs to be left alone.
* Immigration, but for trees: Britain’s real population crisis is botanical. There are fewer mature oaks in England than at any point since the Domesday Book. Tom proposes a radical visa programme for ancient woodland — expedited planning approval, no environmental impact assessment, immediate indefinite leave to remain. “If we treated trees the way we treat care workers, the New Forest would have a unicorn by now. But it wouldn’t need one, because it’s a forest.”
* Why this podcast will now be released quarterly, on handmade paper, delivered by bicycle courier: The subscription model is itself a form of growth ideology. Anglofuturism will henceforth be an Anglopastoralism zine, printed on recycled copies of The Economist, available at selected zero-waste shops in Frome and Hebden Bridge. Calum will illustrate each edition with potato prints.
Plus: why notice periods are actually too short, why the overseas territories should be returned to the seabirds, the case for replacing the House of Lords with a citizens’ assembly selected exclusively from people who have never read a Substack, and whether Georgian townhouses on the moon were, in retrospect, a warning sign.
Tom and Calum recorded this episode by speaking into a hollowed-out gourd connected to a length of twine. The audio quality reflects this. They will not be taking questions. Aeron has been fired.
This episode was recorded on 1 April. Normal service will resume once we get the biodiesel engines back up and running.


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From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum descend into a drone-filled kitchen in West Oxford — the home of HomeDAO, a startup programme that’s part incubator, part monastery, and part answer to a question British universities have stopped asking: what do you do with the most relentlessly ambitious young people in the country?
Josh, HomeDAO’s co-founder, has been running the programme since he was 21. The model is unusual: 18 members per year, $350,000 each, no requirement for a fleshed-out idea or even a co-founder. What HomeDAO selects for above all else is commitment — the willingness to go all in. The results so far include Pump.fun, now essentially a Twitch competitor built on meme coins; ExoLabs, a distributed inference company attracting serious AI investors; Rhinestone, Ethereum infrastructure born out of a hackathon; and Footium, a virtual footballing universe that raised over $3 million in an NFT sale in under an hour.
The conversation turns to why Oxford’s universities have become hostile to the disagreeably ambitious, what it takes to build institutions that endure, and whether Britain could capture the next generation of global founders simply by opening the door.
The episode explores:
* Why HomeDAO selects for commitment over raw intelligence — and what that looks like in practice
* The idiosyncratic origins of Pump.fun, ExoLabs, Rhinestone, and Footium
* How universities have excluded the maniacally ambitious in the name of openness
* The Coase theorem applied to startup formation and why coordination costs are falling
* Oxford vs Silicon Valley vs Bali: what makes a place magnetic to founders
* Whether Britain has a massive immigration arbitrage opportunity — and why problems of taste don’t scale
This conversation took place in November 2025 and was delayed in publication due to triggering an Environmental Impact Assessment from Oxfordshire County Council.


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