Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, the first K2 — or “Kiosk no.2” — was designed by another titan of British architecture, Giles Gilbert Scott. In his submission to a contest run by the Royal Fine Art Commission, Scott wanted to design a kiosk that used tradition to close the cultural rupture created by the telephone and networked modernity. A trustee of the Soane Museum, Scott borrowed the tomb’s distinctive neo-classical dome.

John Soane’s tomb: a familiar outline. (Photo by Jim Dyson/Getty Images)

The simple but elegant design, laid atop an industrial glass and iron box, gave birth to a form that is now iconic. Today, it is ubiquitous to Britain’s aesthetic in the national and global imagination. A century later, the society-rupturing technology of the day is artificial intelligence. Thoughtful observers might ask: can we once again create elegant and rooted aesthetic forms that encase cutting-edge technologies in ways that spark joy and connection?

Scott came from a family of great Victorian architects whose work attempted to tame technological upheaval. Techno-industrial revolutionaries had made Britain into the workshop of the world, sowing deep division in the process. Scott’s grandfather George attempted to temper the culture war by dressing modernity in Gothic revivalist architecture with a Christian face. The red brick façade of the hotel at St Pancras Railway Station, near Soane’s Tomb, typifies his approach. The hotel’s elaborate Gothic structure, echoing the cathedrals of yore, was designed as a counterbalance to William Henry Barlow’s epic iron-and-glass railway hall.

Decades later, in contrast to his grandfather’s Gothic shield against modernity, Giles took a different track. In an address to the Royal Institute for British Architects, Scott described his grand architectural theory of a “middle line” between the traditionalists and modernists. He said: “I want to see [Modernism’s] best features and characteristics retained and grafted at first onto the architecture of the past and then gradually developed.”

Through this “middle line”, the architectural historian Gavin Stamp argues, Scott found a compromise that gave his clients cutting-edge aesthetics while also building with traditional forms and materials to blend into the fabric of the built environment. Another critic, David Frazer Lewis, compares Scott’s philosophy to G.K. Chesterton’s theory that Christianity resolved its furious tensions by allowing “two opposite flames burning brightly”. By creating designs that could be everything at once, Lewis argues, Scott seamlessly synthesized the modern, traditional, abstract, and archaeological into a new vision of the future.

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The K2 is the perfect embodiment of Scott’s middle line. The Soane-inspired dome is formed by a vaulted roof cut from a hemisphere. Its four sides are gently ornamented with striking reeded strips above and fluted architraves below. These border a shallow inner patera which houses the “TELEPHONE” sign. The body features a grid of cast iron with rows of small panes of glass — which magically code as both Victorian factory and Georgian sash windows.

Rather than replicate the grandeur of Soane’s neo-classical embellishments, Scott avoided ornament that could be broken off. Instead, he delicately perforated holes in the shape of the King’s crown, simultaneously creating a ventilation system. The red paint, meanwhile, was not Scott’s choice. While he suggested silver with green interiors, the Post Office chose red to align with their post boxes.

Manufactured at various ironworks across Falkirk and Kirkintilloch, the K2 proliferated around London as demand for telephones skyrocketed. For King George V’s Jubilee in 1935, Scott was recalled to re-design a later iteration, the smaller K6 kiosk. Seeking evolution over revolution, he simplified the detailing and windows further and the K6 spread to the rest of the nation. When Scott died in 1960, there were 60,000 kiosks dotted across the country.

In the century following the K2 boom, the kiosks have been on something of a journey. While the K6, standing a little shorter with a wider central window pane, was a great success, the rise of domestic and then mobile phones gradually rendered them useless. The box’s successors, such as British Telecom’s hideous KX design, were loathed by the public. BT attempted to reimagine them as a “Street Hub” WiFi network, but campaigners are nevertheless trying to root them out of the nation’s pavements.

Yet many of Scott’s kiosks are still in rude health. Nearly three thousand are now listed monuments of national heritage, and many have taken on new lives. They are homes for defibrillators, mini libraries, cafés, public art works, smartphone repair shops, a pub, the world’s smallest nightclub — the possibilities are endless. The dividend for investing in timelessness is a return that compounds through each reinvention.

How has the K2 endured, despite its technological obsolescence? To a more trad-inclined critic, the kiosk’s success is evidence of the Scrutonian adage that if you “put beauty first, what you do will be useful forever. It turns out nothing is more useful than the useless.” Yet the K2 has survived not simply because it’s a pretty red box. Countless other beautiful constructions have failed to stand the test of time.

There are deeper forces sustaining the K2, even if the kiosk’s power to unite a nation is somewhat paradoxical. The telephone connected the Edwardians to those far away, but it also had the potential to detach them from our physical world, thus beginning the atomization that has since been accelerated by the mobile phone. Like all technology, the telephone was not a neutral tool. It detached live voice from an in-person body, rendering it instead as sound that could come from any corner of the globe. Suddenly, as if by magic, one was free to connect to others miles away, but also to disconnect from one’s immediate world.

In his 1985 classic No Sense of Place, Joshua Meyrowitz fuses the media theory of Marshall McLuhan with Erving Goffman’s sociology of face-to-face behavior to explain how electronic media warp our sense of place. Meyrowitz argues that the ancient bond between where you are and how you experience the world is severed by electronic communications. For all of human history, physical place has governed what you knew and how you behaved with those around you. This “situational geography”, as Meyrowitz calls it, dictates the norms and possibilities of a given place.  A courtroom makes you behave formally, a pub is convivial, and a church could make you reverent.

Electronic media like telephones do strange things to that experience. Once information can fly in from elsewhere, the physical boundaries that guide behavior start to melt. With a phone or the internet, one could be in church while also being in a warzone or at a football match. This renders us, Meyrowitz argues, “more informed but less rooted”. Indeed it can happen to a nation as well as an individual. On a grand scale, the complex web of institutions held together by language, custom and print media could start to dissolve.

Rather than accelerate this dissolution, the K2 delayed it. What could have been an avatar of placelessness instead became a shared source of national unity, one that drew on and refashioned a common, recognizable, and rooted vernacular. A century later, wherever one is in Britain, the K2 — along with post boxes, hedgerows, and drystone walls — is the ultimate reminder that one is somewhere, not nowhere.

Today we stand at a similar crossroads. This time it is artificial intelligence that threatens the further erasure of our sense of place. Information is no longer located in just physical (or virtual) paper, books, places, or people. Rather, it now floods out from a chatbot in streams of text seemingly from everywhere and nowhere.

A skeptical public increasingly sees AI as a parasitical amorphous intelligence, poised to strangle them with surveillance, job losses, even techno-apocalypse. Once again, some companies seeking AI proliferation are invoking vague noises about “culture” and “taste” to prime consumers to welcome their technologies.

Yet, electronic media’s form has shape-shifted in the last century. Mobile computing has pushed physical infrastructure mostly out of sight — though backlash against ugly data centers has sparked the AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, to incentivize architects to dream bigger. His glitzy new data center design prize might encourage more humane design.

Data centers, of course, are rarely our most direct physical experience of the digital age. The smartphone has become the primary human interface for computing — but that might not last. In June, Paul Graham, the founder of the legendary Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y-Combinator, observed: “No one knows yet what the next form factor for computing will be, and yet there will be a next form factor, and it will seem obvious in retrospect.”

Some candidates are beginning to emerge. Meta is starting with eyeglasses, tapping into fashion culture by borrowing the valor of Ray-Ban and Oakley’s iconic designs and partnering with Kylie Jenner. Buying iconicity may temporarily work, but has borrowed valor ever endured? OpenAI, meanwhile, is betting on earbuds, hiring the iPhone-designing superstar Sir Jony Ive to build Dime. A recent stealth advert suggests the buds will live in a steel case resembling a space-age Anish Kapoor sculpture. In its deliberately futuristic design, the case oozes a familiar, clean rootlessness that may no longer inspire jaded consumers in the way early iPhones did. Meta and OpenAI are big enough companies that their new products will sell well. But whether those products will become timeless is doubtful.

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Back in London, the voice AI firm ElevenLabs is taking Scott’s wisdom very literally. Rather than chase modernity, the startup is experimenting with a tried and tested model: the K2 telephone box itself. By training an AI mimicking Sir Michael Caine’s voice, then embedding it in an old-style phone within a replica K2, Eleven Labs has won hearts, minds, and eyeballs. Paying tribute to Scott’s great aesthetic innovation is a welcome act, if not quite the same as doing the painstaking work required to become the true heirs to his “middle line”.

Instead, it is perhaps a small Swedish design studio that could one day prove Scott’s heir. Founded in 2005, Teenage Engineering makes musical synthesizers. They constantly play with form and function, rooting new devices in culture and history. Their medieval “Instrumentalis Electronicum” weds medieval design to the warm functionalism of Dieter Rams, while the Riddim ‘n’ Ting sampler plays with Jamaican dancehall aesthetics. The firm has since branched into wooden doll choirs and reinvented the Polaroid. Teenage Engineering’s cult following won them the job of co-designing Rabbit’s R1, a toy-like, AI-native computer styled after Eighties gaming. The R1 flopped, since it arrived too early for the AI boom and its Eighties-style plastic gave the appearance of cheapness. Yet the firm’s restless thirst for combining experimentation with roots shows how one can keep the best of modern design while borrowing the beloved ideas of the past. This could well lead Teenage Engineering to Scott’s promised land.

A hundred years on, the battles over the aesthetics of modern life rage on: glass towers versus Georgian townhouses, tailored versus sprayed-on suits, serif versus sans serif fonts. The argument will never stop. Yet the true heir to Scott will neither pick a side nor lazily approximate a middle ground. The harmony at the heart of the K2 comes from a delicate thoughtfulness, a commitment to crafting something that shields us from the rupturing force of technology, while also rooting us in a shared story. Those roots might come from a local vernacular, or simply from an earlier, less inhumane era of computing. For now, Scott’s throne is there for the taking.

We live in bizarre times. For all of the tech industry promises that AI will unlock an age of abundance and innovation, it seems that so far, its greatest achievement is the mass proliferation of AI-slop anthropomorphic fruit TikTok micro-soap operas, which have gained billions of views in just a few months. An infinite tide of AI-generated video is torching our retinas and our souls. Is this it? Is this really the future of culture? An endless torrent of AI slop, engineered by an invisible Slopbeast.

Most agree we should reject the Slopbeast. Humanity is built for greater things than amusing itself to death in TikTok pleasure palaces. However, few agree on how we move forward. The difficulty is that changing culture requires changing norms. Yet, if we have no sense of what should replace our current norms, then the task feels impossible. At both the individual and collective levels, few have any idea what humans ought to be beyond pleasure-seeking machines.

But AI did not create the Slopbeast, it merely fed it. As Mark Fisher wrote, we are living through “the slow cancellation of the future,” and amid this pessimism, a toxic nostalgia has become entrenched. The process was already well underway when Fisher was writing in the early 2000s, evident in endless Hollywood reboots, the “retromania” turn in music, the constant band reunions, the upcycling of fashion trends. This zombie culture was intensified by recommender algorithms that trend towards what pleases (or simply does not offend) the most people possible.

It has reached its apotheosis with large-language models which, short of unleashing new forms of cultural production, simply remix the detritus of the past. Our techno-industrial system has created mass audiences and vast production capacity, owned by investors who are increasingly incentivized to favor low-risk rent-seeking and margin expansion over innovation. As Jon Askonas argues: “The incentives for investors skew more every year towards the marketing, exploitation, and further development (aided by deepfake technology) of the old over the discovery of the new.” 

In other words, cultural stagnation and the slop machine are the by-products of extreme market efficiency. And so, the dopamine-inducing delights of a Las Vegas casino have become the organizing logic of the economy. Hence the slide into what Fisher calls “depressive hedonia”, a hollow existence where we compulsively chase cheap digital thrills not to feel good, but simply to numb ourselves. Our economic model feeds this cycle of distraction, entirely blinding us to the question of how we forge the future.

What, then, is to be done? 

A spiritual war is brewing over the future of our culture in the age of AI. Two loosely connected factions have taken shape: I call them the Arcadians and the Prometheans. 

The Arcadians believe humanity can free itself from the meaninglessness of the slop by recovering a sense of rootedness from the past. They take their name from Arcas, the son of Zeus who taught his people to weave, bake, and farm. He embodies the pastoral ideal of a life defined not by conquering nature, but by deep rootedness within it. Arcadians take many forms: digital detoxers swapping smartphones for dumbphones; trad-wives baking sourdough to reject the girlboss grind; the tradcath movement; vitalists consuming raw milk and offal to escape industrial food; and RETVRN aesthetes posting images of classical architecture on X. Among the privileged, this manifests as Bopeas — or bohemian peasants trading doomscrolling for doomstrolling, retreating into nature, Waldorf schools, and the revival of heritage rituals.

While the Arcadians’ politics often vary wildly, they share a hunger for community and rootedness. Taking their cues from everyone from Jean Jacques Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau to William Morris and Martin Heidegger (and even Ted Kaczynski), the Arcadians believe the war against digital ephemera requires embracing friction and things that are “real”. To the Arcadians, the idea of craft has gained a magical reputation as the antidote to the algorithm. Whether it is the tangible crust of sourdough, the ink of a real pen on paper, or the labor of a woodworker, they look to craft as a source of stability. If slop is easy to create, consume, and forget, craft is the opposite. 

Now, many Arcadians have some good ideas. They are entirely correct that we ought to slow down and tune into the material world. There is profound wisdom lost to the efficiency of technological society, recovering some roots is essential.

Yet, as a political and cultural strategy, the Arcadian retreat is doomed to fail. Without some vast hidden fortune funding the lifestyle, or a genuine reduction in living standards, it is either financially inaccessible or a lot less aspirational than it looks on the screen. Further, the Arcadian appeal to some nebulous idea of “authenticity” can easily lead them to fetishize a pastiche of the past that never existed and no longer makes sense. People who learn from the wisdom of the past do not seek to live there. Aspiring to all live like chic bizarro Amish may ward off the slop for some, but it is unscalable. If we want to save the world, we cannot just retreat to the woods. We need a vision that is as powerful as the technology we face.

This brings us to the Prometheans. Named for the Titan who stole fire from the gods, they embody the industrial ideal of using power and technology to transcend our limitations. The Prometheans agree with the Arcadians: the slop must stop. Yet rather than retreat to nature, they believe we must seize the means of computation. They want to capture the raw power of AI, nuclear energy, and heavy industry to deliver a new era of civilizational dynamism. 

The obvious avatars of the movement are the modern oligarchs: Elon Musk with his visions of interstellar colonization; Peter Thiel and his dream of using Palantir to fuse the digital and real-world infrastructure; Jeff Bezos with his Project Prometheus AI Lab; and one crypto entrepreneur’s mission to build a 305ft Great Colossus of Prometheus on Alcatraz. But the energy spans the political spectrum. On the right, it animates the so-called Effective Accelerationist (e/acc) movement as well as Marc Andreessen’s “American Dynamism” defense tech fund and his Techno-Optimist Manifesto (inspired by the Italian Futurist, Filippo Marinetti). The Yuppiefuturists also live here. 

However, there are Prometheans of the left, too. Prometheanism fuels the emerging Abundance/YIMBY axis — progressives like Ezra Klein who argue we must aggressively deregulate and build our way to post-scarcity. Uniting them all is a hunger for agency. There was a strain of this thinking in Aaron Bastani’s decade-old vision of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, too. While the Arcadians crave rootedness in the past, the Prometheans demand mastery over the future. 

The Promethean worldview is most fiercely articulated in Palantir co-founder Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s manifesto, The Technological Republic. Karp mourns the collapse of Western ambition, lamenting an engineering elite trapped in a “thin utilitarianism” — building addictive social media and delivery apps instead of solving the hard problems of civilization. He argues for a new alliance between the state and software industry to reboot the West. 

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Yet, beyond energy abundance, fully automated industry, and unstoppable militaries, the Prometheans lack a vision of culture. The more trad ones say we can choose to re-engage in Western traditions. The progressives focus more on growing the pie to distribute goods. But what should this future look and feel like? Why are we doing all this? Do we want energy abundance, dark factories, and robot militaries, just so we can go back to mindless slop consumption?

Even Karp, unusual in Silicon Valley for his philosophy PhD from Goethe University, acknowledges the problem.

“Other nations, including many of our geopolitical adversaries, understand the power of affirming shared cultural traditions, mythologies and values in organizing the efforts of a people. They are far less shy than we are about acknowledging the human need for communal experience. The cultivation of an overly muscular and unthoughtful nationalism has risks, but the rejection of any form of life in common does as well. The reconstruction of a technological republic in the United States and elsewhere will require a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.”

Nevertheless, this nod to shared culture lacks bite. Re-embracing a Western canon of shared texts, values, traditions, and rituals is easier said than done. Without reopening the endless debate of what constitutes “canon”, the real problem is that the social ecosystems and infrastructure that once enabled a canon to shape minds have been scrambled. 

As Tanner Greer has argued, the technologists of earlier industrial revolutions were animated by more than a love of money and a reading list. In the United States, industrialists “demanded coor­dinated action across economic, political, social, and cultural fronts.” To cultivate the flame of their revolutionary cultures, industrialists built institutions that rooted wealth and expertise in a shared national project: from Protestant civic culture and Union League clubs to elite schools, Ivy League colleges, and engineering societies that forged a techno-national elite.

Despite its aristocratic flavor of hierarchy, Britain followed a similar pattern. Its industrialists built both ambitious firms and moral worlds. Henry Tate, the literal sugar daddy industrialist, transformed wealth into culture, founding the Tate Gallery in 1897 to elevate cultural enrichment and taste. Meanwhile textile magnate Titus Salt’s Saltaire and chocolate king Henry Cadbury’s Bournville represented an attempt to build healthy, flourishing communities around the principles of self-advancement. We may laugh at such high-handed visions — or suspect the motives of those who advanced them — but still. Can you imagine a contemporary tech founder proposing anything remotely similar? 

In focusing on power alone, Prometheans risk falling into the same trap as Arcadians: cosplaying the past with no sense of the deep interrelation of cultural, politics, and techno-industrial progress. What matters is not rebuilding the institutions of yesterday but decoding what functions culture must serve in the future, and how ideas from the past can be revitalized, reimagined, or forged anew within institutions capable of sustaining them.

Reindustrialization is meaningless without an optimistic and popular future to build towards. A pure worship of computation and power offers, at best, a sterile utopia, and at worst, a narrow Nietzschean framework that prizes brute strength above all else. We need economic and technological dynamism — but we also need soul.

Perhaps this is where the Arcadians have something valuable to contribute. If the Prometheans wish to destroy the slop machine by building a harder, better physical world, maybe the Arcadians can enchant it. But where do we find the binding myths and practices to forge a cultural foundation for the Age of AI? How do we reconnect with our roots while unleashing dynamism?

Currently, the marketplace of ideas is highly theoretical. Andrew Bennett’s Sovereign Albion project seeks to revive a shared cultural framework rooted in deep British folklore, while also pursuing AI sovereignty and energy abundance. Meanwhile, various strains of Anglofuturism promote an archeo-futurist dream of small modular reactors, village cricket, and thatched roofs. 

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But for now, much of this remains trapped in the realm of ideas. Vibes are not enough; we must make the word flesh. Ideas may change the world, but to make meaning, they need to be seen and touched.

The Victorian polymath John Ruskin understood this better than anyone. For Ruskin, buildings were not merely structures but physical manifestations of moral philosophies. In The Stones of Venice, he argued that architecture reveals the inner life of a civilization: its ideas of the good life, its hierarchies, its sense of beauty. Ruskin defended Gothic revival architecture, arguing that rather than being twee and nostalgic, it was a rebellion against the efficiency-obsessed culture of Victorian industrial capitalism. Gothic revivalism, by contrast, embodied human imperfection, craftsmanship, and dignity. 

Contemporary culture is similarly obsessed with optimization. But where Victorian industrialism produced the factory town, today’s forces are globalization and high-tech capitalism. Soulless neo-modernist towers of glass and steel stand as monuments to a placeless world optimized for capital and mobility over roots. Ruskin diagnosed the spiritual cost of industrial modernity, but reviving Gothic today could never fully answer the problem once steel, concrete, globalization, and high-tech culture reshaped the world. The deeper question remains: how can a civilization become modern without becoming placeless?

Written over four decades ago, architectural critic Kenneth Frampton’s seminal 1983 essay, Towards a Critical Regionalism, offers a path through the Arcadia-Prometheus maze. Drawing on the French philosopher Paul Ricœur, Frampton highlighted the defining cultural tension of our time: “How to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.” Frampton offered a blueprint for navigating this exact tension. He argued that we must fiercely reject both the sterile, placeless monoculture of globalized modernism and the sentimental, kitsch cosplay of historical nostalgia. Instead, we must harness the universal power of modern engineering and technology, while remaining rooted in the local topography, climate, light, and tectonic traditions of its specific place. It is a demand to use the machine to honor the local.

Today, this philosophy inspires some of the most compelling architecture in Britain. We see it in Witherford Watson Mann’s Stirling Prize-winning work at Astley Castle, where ancient, ruined masonry is seamlessly fused with ultra-modern glass, timber, and brickwork. We see it in Niall McLaughlin’s New Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which marries modern environmental engineering with centuries-old structural timber traditions, seamlessly blending in next to the neo-classical Pepys Library, its considerably older brother. Both blend technological and material innovation with the deep wisdom of heritage, culture, and aesthetics.

This dynamic fusion need not be limited to architecture. Several maverick technologists and makers around the world are rallying around an emerging new approach to design, aesthetics, and manufacturing that brings the Arcadian spirit of heritage craft together with the cutting edge of Promethean technology, fusing the best insights and capabilities of both to develop things that are not only useful and beautiful, but scalable. Their work falls into four paradigms of what I call “artisanal intelligence”: resurrecting lost styles, augmenting struggling crafts, pushing aesthetic frontiers, and scaling the genius of craft into entirely new domains.

Some are reviving dormant aesthetics for a mass audience. Not Quite Past uses generative AI to design personalized delftware and chinoiserie-inspired ceramics, digitally printed in Stoke-on-Trent, Britain’s pottery heartlands, making a dying aesthetic once reserved for the wealthy accessible to all.

Others use technology to augment crafts on the brink of extinction. Monumental Labs pairs CNC-milling robots with stonemasons to produce ornate statues and facades, absorbing the apprentice toil that is no longer sustainable. Meanwhile Sony has trained AI on centuries of Japanese archives to generate new, structurally complex kimono weaves for master artisans to execute.

Others push aesthetic frontiers altogether unreachable by just hand. At Shanghai’s Chi-Se gallery, Archi-Union programmed robotic arms to salvage and re-lay recycled bricks with inhuman precision, generating a fluid, undulating façade whose curves draw on the ornamental tradition of jali brickwork, a form that could never have been achieved by conventional masonry.

Finally there are those that are transcending traditional craft logics and aesthetics by unlocking their deeper logic and pushing them into entirely new domains. Petit Pli merges the ancient geometry of origami with advanced materials science to create children’s garments that grow alongside the child.

This virtuous fusion of heritage craft and cutting-edge technology is more than an aesthetic choice — it is a path to a glorious, techno-crafted future. A future with a soul, even. Empowering craftsman-technologists to unleash this artisanal intelligence to build the magical products, processes, and industries of tomorrow is essential. Indeed, the digital age itself was born from the workshop: the modern computer would not exist without the Jacquard loom, where the ancient craft of textile weaving birthed the concept of programmable punched cards. What other world-changing innovations might we unlock by bringing the invisible wisdom of master craft to the bleeding edge of the technological frontier?

Today, however, the tech elite defaults to a deracinated, placeless approach to design and innovation, while traditional makers remain deeply skeptical of the machine. These two worlds need not be at war. As Askonas argues, the machine has no innate tradition — it must be given one. Following Simone Weil, Askonas argues the future relies on an act of enracinement, or intentional re-rooting — refracting innovation through active participation in a community that preserves ancestral treasures to anchor our placeless technologies in local, material culture.

A vision of how this might look in a British context is found in historian Alexander Langland’s 2017 book Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts. Examining King Alfred the Great’s ninth-century translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, Langlands notes that cræft — the forefather of today’s “craft” — rarely meant simply “handmade.” Rather, in contexts ranging from statecraft to navigation, cræft referred to the virtuous application of power, skill, and knowledge to forge excellence. As Langlands writes, Alfred used it to translate the Latin concept of virtus into an Anglo-Saxon context. Cræft blended moral excellence, power, and capability into “an almost undefinable sense of knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness.” It was not simply the physical labor of hands — but a profound, embodied coordination of the hand, eye, and mind, representing a state where physical execution and deep intellectual ingenuity are at one. 

This older, deeper definition of cræft is what we must recover in the age of AI. “In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool,” Marx argued in Das Kapital, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”

In previous Industrial Revolutions, the factory liquidated the cræft of the weaver and the smith, replacing the dynamism of what David Pye calls the “workmanship of risk” with a “workmanship of certainty,” where inputs and outcomes were entirely predetermined. In a mature industrial society, whether producing a chair or a SaaS tool, certainty is baked into the system. The human exists simply to ensure the machine does not jam.

While AI, as the ultimate machine of prediction, could be the apotheosis of this logic, it cannot replace the hazardous magic of genuine creativity. Such work is more than pattern recognition and regurgitation, but an exercise in is restraint, deep storied insight, and cræft.

To catalyze this, we need maker-technologists to embrace a new vision of the workmanship of risk — where the CNC mill, 3D printer, and AI-powered software handle the tedious toil to unleash deeper creative work. We already see this in Monumental Labs’ delegation of rough cuts to robots. Meanwhile, facing a shortage of apprentices, luthiers are turning to CNC mills to raise their ambition, making kooky new types of stringed instruments that were previously too risky to attempt. It is in this bold synthesis of artificial and artisanal intelligence that the future of humane, cultural excellence lies. 

Where do we go from here? The opportunity is vast, but action is more limited. If we want to tame the Slopbeast and root our future technologies, we must refuse to be trapped cosplaying in Arcadia, nor should we blindly worship the brute power of Prometheus. Rather than succumb to the AI fruit slop, the builders of the future must unleash the spirit of artisanal intelligence and breathe meaning into the machine. It’s time to cræft.

For all the pioneering smartphone refuseniks and buzzy new alternatives, the data tells a less optimistic story. In Britain, Nokia brick sales jumped from 400,000 to 450,000 in 2024, but 68 million people have smartphones. Screentime restriction apps and all sorts of lobotomized dumbphones are not actually flooding the market. The most hyped post-screen pioneers — the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit — were honorable but catastrophic failures.

The situation is critical. The scrolletariat is swiping itself into oblivion. While distinctions between productivity and entertainment make measurement tricky, the average human spends roughly 4.9 hours on mobile apps daily. For the young, it’s even worse. American teenagers average a staggering 8 hours and 39 minutes of daily screen time for entertainment, while British 18-24 year olds clock in at nearly 6 hours and a half hours. The scale is vast, and with the rise of hyper-personalized AI slop machines, the quality is degrading further. Add to that the wider outsourcing of human cognition to AI, we risk becoming hollowed out fleshy middleware lost in an endless mind maze.

In the face of this smartphone-AI-dopamine axis of evil, various schools of neo-Luddite resistance are emerging. Like the loom-smashing weavers of the 19th century, today’s resistance is united by a distaste for the machine. However, they are divided on the best course of resistance — many want to run for the hills, others want to destroy their phones, and some believe they can tame the effects. All are doomed to fail.

To those with a more romantic vision of resistance, the digital world is only avoided by escaping into a prelapsarian Arcadia of nature, craft, literature, and “dumb” technology. They range from the Bopeas trading screen time for soil and wild swimming and the hip Gen Z resistance groups such as the gnome-hatted Lamp Club and Breaking the G(loom) all the way to noted anti-machine rager Paul Kingsnorth and The Times’ James Marriott wielding his Qin F21 Pro. They all instinctively understand the sickness, but their cure is fundamentally unscalable. Unchaining oneself means battling the network effect, the mechanism that locks users in by punishing non-participation with isolation. Escape therefore requires the social capital to survive being cut off from the herd — a luxury most cannot afford.

Equally romantic, but much less chill are the more violent neo-Luddites. These are the spiritual children of the late Ted Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber who resisted industrial society through manifestos and mail bombs. They share a quasi-millenarian view of techno-industrial society, seeing the destruction of the mega-machine as essential to the preservation of nature and humanity, and are willing to break some legs to get there. These neo-Luddite extremists include the Greek anarchists Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei, the mystical Latin American terrorist networks of Individualists Tending to the Wild, and France’s emerging Anti-Tech Resistance. While they may be true believers, tying salvation to the destruction of techno-capitalist civilization is not a winning formula with the less insane.

More pragmatic is the network of politicians, policy wonks, academics, and journalists pursuing reforms through legislation. On the Left, Shoshana Zuboff, American author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and British journalist Carole Cadwalladr want to tame the techno-beast through privacy, anti-trust, and online safety bills. On the Right, there’s a mirror universe of pro-family tech critics, from US Senator Josh Hawley through to Tory MP Miriam Cates. While legislation is crucial, attempts are glacially slow and critics are fundamentally divided on the true source of evil. Are screens the enemy? Or surveillance? Hate speech? Big Tech? All forms of social media? Dopamine culture? Governments must play a role, but for now we are in a race against time. Endless hubs, quangos, and inquiries will not outrun the shapeshifting onslaught of innovation. Even if they do eventually succeed, citizens will bypass them.

Further, governments seeking to address the neo-Luddites’ concerns face a paralyzing paradox. While they may want to halt mass cognitive atrophy, other crises take priority. Faced with anemic growth, declining living standards, geopolitical instability, and climate pressure, government ambitions are increasingly beholden to Silicon Valley. Leaders see AI as the silver bullet in the hunt for productivity, security, and sustainability. Yet, the very titans building these frontier technologies are the same ones powering the brain rot. This Faustian pact is laid bare by the British Government’s new partnership with Alphabet to harness AI for clean energy research and public services. If Google is crucial to the state, tackling YouTube addiction is politically impossible.

Thus, we are at an impasse. If we cannot yet regulate through force or law, what is to be done? Perhaps there is a way to become masters of our domain and usher in a grand transformation of social norms.

We have been here before. The Luddites failed to stop the Industrial Revolution quashed by an alliance of government and merchants comparable to today. Industrialization continued and unleashed a different blight: cheap hard booze. From schools and asylums to factories and prisons, everyone was getting lit. The 18th-century Gin Craze, immortalized in Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane diptych, was unstoppable. Despite the Gin Acts, the state was captive to the alcohol lobby and tax receipts. Those in power, it was often said, wanted workers too drunk to organize politically, but not too drunk to operate machines effectively in their factories.

In the 19th century, the Temperance movement did what law could not. In September 1832, in a converted cock-fighting pit in Preston, Lancashire, a cheesemonger named Joseph Livesey and six working-class comrades — the Seven Men of Preston — signed a pledge of total abstinence. They believed a drunken proletariat could never be liberated and so-called “Giant Alcohol” was the ultimate tool of subjugation.

Their genius was to reframe the issue. They advanced the debate beyond religious sin to a campaign for wealth, health, and inter-generational morality. Temperance activists argued that alcohol stole a father’s wages, wrecked the worker’s liver, and shattered the peace of the home. As Benjamin Disraeli’s physician Joseph Kidd wrote in 1879, the goal was a virtuous citizen “accustomed to self-restraint and moderation”, a state he called “one of the chief delights and aspirations… of a true man”. The mission was not just to change laws, but to change the soul.

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Crucially, campaigners invoked the innocence of the young. Founded in 1847, a society called the Band of Hope inspired children to sign a pledge of sobriety. It aimed to inoculate children against alcohol through a cultural program including its iconic magic lantern shows, using cutting-edge technology to project vivid, terrifying images of the drunkard’s decline. British alcohol consumption finally peaked in 1876. By 1897, the Band of Hope had enrolled 3 million children. By 1931, a Royal Commission officially declared that “drunkenness has gone out of fashion”.

What can we learn from the Temperance movement? In his 2025 Reith Lecture, “Fighting for Humanity in the Age of the Machine”, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman argues that the Temperance movement is the perfect blueprint for our time. He warns that “today, we face a new addiction industry, not of wine and whiskey, but of apps and algorithms, [where ]many of Stanford’s brightest minds are building a single great moloch, an attention-hijacking machine that devours our focus”. Bregman proposes using the state to break this machine, advocating for dopamine taxes on ad revenue similar to alcohol taxes. Yet, given our governments’ increased reliance on AI companies, these changes seem unlikely to happen soon enough. If we cannot yet liberate the soul through regulation, then perhaps changing norms is the method.

This cultural rewiring begins with a return to collective accountability. Just as with the Seven Men of Preston and the Band of Hope, this begins with a pledge to personal and collective accountability. There are several leading candidates for a modern neo-Temperance movement such as America’s Wait Until 8th, which encourages parents to delay giving their child a smartphone until the end of 8th grade, and Britain’s Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC), pledging to restrict smartphones until 14 and social media until 16. The latter is particularly impressive: having only been founded in February 2023, it has already amassed over 300,000 parents — including Kate Winslet and Paloma Faith.

Will Orr-Ewing, who co-founded SFC’s Smartphone Free Schools campaign, explains that this is fundamentally about re-establishing lost boundaries. He describes the pact not merely as a petition, but as a “covenant that you sign with other parents” to hold the line collectively. The goal is to revive “the Victorian idea that children are a separate category”, establishing childhood as a “sacred time that is given special prominence” and protected from the encroachment of adult vices.

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While we chew through the messy battle to regulate addictive algorithms, neo-Temperance activists are attempting to ensure existing laws are interpreted to factor in novel technologies. Orr-Ewing is already pursuing this, recently launching a Judicial Review to force schools to apply existing safeguarding statutes. He argues that schools have failed to understand that their safeguarding obligations apply to smartphones just as they do to a classroom ceiling full of asbestos. “Whether it’s a beheading video or high-definition porn,” Orr-Ewing argues, “nine-year-olds should not be watching this shit. I think we’ve still got enough moral norms to have consensus on that.”

Beyond the classroom and the courtroom, success requires rediscovering the lost art of judgment. The polite relativism of contemporary liberal culture has trained us to avoid criticizing others. Yet, if we stand by as the minds of tomorrow are obliterated, politeness is complicity. It may feel rude and fogeyish but we must scold — and be scolded. Take inspiration from Chile’s outgoing Millennial President Gabriel Boric who recently paused a speech to phoneshame 11 audience members for staring at their screens before showing off his own dumbphone. We can all harness the spirit of Boric. Be judgy. Call your friend a swipewanker. Ban phones at dinner. Smartphone zombies must be rendered socially toxic. Norms can only be transformed through a collective effort to hold each other to account.

Yet, stigma alone cannot remake a people, one needs stories and symbols woven into culture. The original Temperance movement understood this well. In art, following Hogarth’s lead, George Cruikshank’s wildly popular The Bottle (1847) series depicted a respectable British family’s descent into poverty and madness due to drink. In literature, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) shattered the Victorian illusion of the merry drunk, exposing the brutal horror of addiction. In mass entertainment, the Band of Hope’s magic lanterns inspired millions. To succeed today, the neo-Temperance movement must find and celebrate its very own Hogarths, Cruikshanks, and Brontës and propagate their works in the physical world. Who will paint the Beer Street and Gin Lane of the smartphone era?

Finally, a neo-Temperance movement will fail without a positive vision for what humans actually ought to be beyond mere pleasure–satisfying machines. Who is the post-smartphone human? What should they do instead of staring and swiping? Gabriella Nguyen, the 24-year-old founder of Appstinence, an anti-social media campaign, argues we do not need to solve this immediately. To avoid simply trading screen time for increased productivity is reductive, so first we must return to “ground zero” to work out how to live. Then, through Appstinence, we can reclaim these “luxuries of time, practice, social support, and a clear mind” and begin to “no longer see these meandering, unbound exchanges as lavish expenses of our time and productivity, but the regular course of events”. It is here, Nguyen claims, we can reflect and forge the post-smartphone human.

At this rate, billions will spend 25 years of their lives on their smartphone. Yet, mass sloppification is ultimately a choice. Neither government nor Big Tech is going to change things anytime soon. The neo-Luddites will not smash the data centers. The blueprint of the Temperance movement reveals that salvation will not come from above — it must be reclaimed from below. The solution is not a single law or tax, but a collective recovery of cognitive sovereignty. It’s time for neo-Temperance.

“Notice how muted the reaction has been to the new Hubs,” wrote the anonymous X memelord Drukpa Kunley shortly after Starmer announced his third-party deportation scheme. Indeed, there was no “return hub” discourse. But perhaps that was the point. The suspiciously twee euphemism suggests Labour has discovered a quietly revolutionary way of doing its dirty work.

On the surface the “hub” is a bastion of technocratic benevolence, an embodiment of a British state that wants to be your bestie. The word conjures images of Technicolor beanbag chairs and gel pen-wielding lanyard-wearers. Yet, scrape a little and the hub reveals itself as a formless, fickle, and malleable euphemism — it bends to the whims of whoever wields it.

Before it became a term of civic optimism, the hub had a rougher beginning. Once upon a time, the hub was a “hobbe”. From the proto-German hubbel, meaning “hill” or “bump”, the early hobbe was an unappetizing prospect. Geoffrey Chaucer used “hobbe” to describe something wretched, while a medieval English-to-Latin dictionary defined it as a tumorous swelling, a synonym for a “bube” — of bubonic plague fame. These hubs signaled sickness, not progress.

Around two centuries later, in a 1570 farming manual, English poet and country gent Barnaby Googe gave the term a new meaning. He described the hub as “the midst of the Wheele, called the Naue or Hobbe of the wheele”. Reincarnated as the bump at the center of a wheel, it became a mechanism of both physical and moral progress.

As English standardized, the hobbe became the hub, and went transatlantic. In 1858, Boston grandee Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. declared the city’s State-House to be “the hub of the solar system”, and you couldn’t “carry off a hub without taking the spokes with it, or you would damage the wheel”. Boston soon became widely known as “The Hub of the Universe” or simply “the Hub”. Holmes asserted that this progress was driven by an intellectual and moral WASP elite he termed the “Boston Brahmins”, positioning them and Boston at the forefront of American prosperity.

Yet it was in the second half of the 20th century that the hub’s galactic potential began to emerge. Following the war, the Western imagination underwent a profound shift, rejecting a world of essentialism and rootedness in favor of motion and interconnection.

As N.S. Lyons observes, before 1945 nations were moored in soil, faith, and kin — what Karl Popper derided as the “closed society”. After the catastrophe, those bonds began to be seen as a gateway to fascism. Theodor Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality” diagnosed loyalty to family or nation as pathology. Popper went further, branding the national community itself “anti-humanitarian propaganda”. The postwar settlement determined that the “strong gods” of belonging and faith were to be dismantled, replaced with the “weak gods” of openness, tolerance, doubt, and consumer comfort. This cultural transformation set the stage for the rise of the hub.

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Bringing this dream to reality would require three consecutive revolutions — in politics, commerce, and technology. First, a postwar political reconstruction to engineer openness and interdependence. Second, a global managerial and commercial revolution to facilitate this ever-deeper integration. And third, a tech revolution to eliminate friction from the system entirely.

Western leaders embedded the new postwar values into the emerging supra-national institutions. By sharing coal, steel, law, and standards, the founding fathers of the European Union, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, argued that war would be “not only unthinkable but materially impossible”. In this new era, centralization and technocracy would become the overarching political theology.

Then, to manage the emerging sprawl of global interconnection, the hub was unleashed. Amid the postwar manufacturing and consumption booms, the hub became the weapon of choice for the new managerial class tasked with holding the new system together. First, in 1955, Delta Airlines pioneered the “hub-and-spoke” system at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport to consolidate flights through a central location. The idea was simple: concentrate routes, reduce operating costs, and increase connectivity. The aviation hub model quickly became industry standard, and a model for managing all complex systems.

Logistics followed suit. Inspired by the Delta Airlines model, a young Yale student named Fred Smith wrote a thesis proposing that a hub system could enable overnight deliveries. Years later, he put the idea into action, founding FedEx and revolutionizing logistics by routing all deliveries through the company’s global SuperHub in Memphis, launched in 1981.

Finally, the Internet arrived. It would streamline not only physical infrastructure (think Ethernet hubs), but societal infrastructure too. “Technology hubs”, explained Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham, were where “rich people and nerds” clustered to build the future. And so Silicon Valley became a mythic ecosystem that could change the world. By 2000, Wired magazine was documenting a global outbreak of “Silicon envy”, observing that “high-tech hubs now dot the globe” all seeking to unlock the wealth, productivity, and magic that the hub could conjure.

Enter, Tony Blair. Despite lacking a phone and an email address, Blair wanted to emulate Silicon Valley’s boundless techno-optimism in British government. And so he waged a hub revolution of his own: launching the Policy Hub website in March 2002. This online tool was designed to centralize policymaking through shared initiatives, tools, and case studies, bringing the spirit of the hub to government. Awestruck by American productivity and desperate to modernize the state, Britain became hub obsessed. Prior to Blair, the term “hub” appeared in Parliament only 613 times in 200 years, mostly in reference to transport. In just 13 years under New Labour, it was used 885 times.

If Blair was a hub emissary, then David Cameron was a hub zealot. Amid austerity, he sought to rewire the state with a series of efficient hubs that combined services. Growth Hubs attempted to reshape local enterprise. Family Hubs provided womb-to-tomb family support. Launched in 2012, GOV.UK was the hub of hubs. It was a digital paragon of efficiency: soothing sans-serif GDS Transport font, paternalistic “nudges” drawn from supposedly cutting-edge psychological insights. All of it designed to dissolve the sprawling machinery of government into a single, frictionless one-stop shop. In just six years, hub discourse in parliament exploded to 2,067 references — doubling Labour’s efforts in half the time.

The Cameron years were defined by the mythos of the hub. If we all come together — individuals, communities, ideas and technology — there’s nothing we cannot solve. From GOV.UK and the London Olympics, to legalization of same-sex marriage, Cameron unwaveringly believed in the open society, benevolently ruled by hubs.

But Brexit was a devastating blow. In search of sovereignty and border control, the spirit of the closed society returned. Voters had rejected the hub ideology of frictionless integration. In the years that followed, successive Tory Prime Ministers attempted to invoke “strong god” rhetoric. Theresa May scorned “citizens of nowhere”; the Rwanda policy aimed to shatter the postwar consensus.

However, in practice things were different. The open society continued to prosper through none other than the hub. Theresa May doubled down on tech hubs. Boris Johnson followed with green energy, nuclear fusion, and hydrogen. Rishi Sunak sought to establish the UK as a global center for AI safety and launched the Quantum Computing Innovation Hub.

This tension reveals a burning psychodrama at the heart of the British state’s self-conception. It wants to be a high-tech superpower without the pain of rebuilding its Victorian bureaucracy. It wants to make cuts to state services while sounding friendly and benign. And it wants to project global openness while addressing the concerns of an increasingly reactionary electorate. Rather than confront these paradoxes, Britain reaches for the soothing Potemkin policy of the hub. Time and again, leaders choose cuddly vagueness over the hard work of politics.

It’s now Starmer’s turn to take up the mantle. In the brand-new Modern Industrial Strategy, published in June, the Government announced its intention to invest in no less than 19 different genres of hub. Some are mere updates of existing hubs, but others are entirely new: commercial innovation, AI skills, life sciences, defense, professional and business services, and robotics.

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In just one year since Starmer entered Downing Street, “hub” has appeared 966 times in parliamentary debates. In June 2025 alone, it popped up 166 times — the highest month since records began. At this pace, the term may feature over 4,000 times before the next election. So inundated by hubs, we are numb to them. Ubiquitous and bland, they’re an instant eyeball glazer.

Which brings us back to the return hubs. The policy embodies the central paradox of the Starmer project. “Return” gestures toward something more reactionary — not just deportation, but a broader RETVRN to an imagined orderly past. Meanwhile, “hub”, of course, is the open society incarnate.

Amid the metaphysical civil war bubbling between voters, Starmer must tread a tightrope. To keep the favor of metropolitan progressives, he must demonstrate technocratic competence. To hold off Reform, he must cut immigration. If he can wield the return hub, flexing toughness while preserving a progressive surface, he might just keep hold of power. The result could be a distinctively British settlement: quietly hardcore with a cuddly demeanor. It would represent yet another evolutionary leap for the hub.

But if Starmer falls, the hub could go down with him. A leader more hostile to the hallowed open society, perhaps a Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick, may choose to kill this symbol of the ancien régime. What might come next? The answer may already be here: look no further than the meme-powered “Skullcrushing” remigration subsuming America. The hub’s wheel will turn — or it will break. Its fate is in Starmer’s hands.

It all started last Tuesday when a relatively obscure tech entrepreneur, Grant Slatton, uploaded a seemingly ordinary family photo to ChatGPT-4o’s new image generator to “Ghiblify” it. Awash in pastel skies and gentle smiles, the image it spat out was the perfect encapsulation of the studio’s aesthetic.

The post went viral, amassing more than 43 million views in just a couple of days and prompting an eruption of Ghibli content. Suddenly no meme could escape Ghiblification. And backlash swiftly followed. Some critics took aim at the obvious intellectual property ambiguities. Others circulated clips of a 2016 documentary where Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki declared AI animation “an insult to life itself”.

However, this rapid onset Ghiblification foreshadows a much darker, and crucially stranger future than mere IP infringement and artistic degradation. In tech criticism, it is fashionable to contrast two dystopias: Beijing versus Las Vegas. The former is well-known. It foretells a 1984 Orwellian future of mass surveillance and thought control, turbocharged by AI-powered spyware. This is best characterized by Republican congressman Mike Gallagher’s warnings of a Chinese Communist Party-exported “Orwellian” AI surveillance dystopia.

In contrast, the Las Vegas dystopia envisions a future where we are distracted by entertainment as foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. This vision, proposed by Neil Postman in his 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, presents the future where “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.” This is a future of limbic capitalism where we are inundated by the addictive soma of Las Vegas pleasures. Books don’t need to be banned, because everybody’s too busy scrolling, eating fast food, gambling, gaming, and watching porn.

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Yet the rise of Ghiblification presents a third tech future, not from Beijing or Las Vegas — but from Tokyo. This is not a future of mere tech surveillance or opiate. Rather, it’s a vision of the world that fuses the pleasures machines of Vegas with the emotional worldbuilding of the Japanese otaku subculture — a niche consumer tribe known for their devotion to anime, manga, and video games. While long subjugated to their parent’s basements, weird corners of the Internet, and Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood, otaku is now going mainstream.

In order to make sense of how this unique style of consumption is shaping our future, we must understand two macro shifts: one cultural, the other technological. The first is the mainstreaming of a postmodern otaku logic that prizes fiction over fact and vibes over shared mythologies. The second is the potent concoction of next generation multimodal AI and their capacity to create custom alternative realities with the touch of a button. Together, they herald a future not of a shared digital commons, but of hyper-personalized Matrixes-for-One.

To grasp the first shift requires digging out Japanese media theorist Hiroki Azuma’s 2001 cult media theory book, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Chronicling the rise of Japan’s otaku subculture, Azuma coined the term “database animals” to describe a new kind of postmodern consumer emerging from the worlds of manga and anime obsession. These consumers no longer follow grand narratives or cohesive story arcs. Instead, they graze from a vast database of aesthetic elements, characters, and tropes — selecting whatever fragments give them the most effective hit. They are “animals” not in a pejorative sense, but in that they prioritize instinctual pleasure over ideological coherence or shared meaning.

Azuma explains the rise of otaku subculture in the context of what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called the “decline of the grand narrative”. From the late-18th to the mid-20th century, overarching grand narratives were the cornerstones of modernity, providing order and meaning for citizens. Now, in a thoroughly postmodern world where traditional horizons of meaning have collapsed, “grand narratives” have given way to something very different.

Grand narratives, according to Azuma, function like a tree. The trunk is the big “worldview” — a shared mythos that structures culture. From this trunk grow the branches and twigs of “small narratives”, the everyday stories, rituals, and traditions that reinforce and transmit the deeper worldview. In essence, the “surface outer layer” of small stories, rituals, and acts of consumption connects consumers to the “deeper inner layer” of the grand narrative. In Britain, rituals like churchgoing, learning Shakespeare, or buying a royal-warranted Wedgwood teapot tethered citizens to the mythos of God, King, and country. Similarly in Japan, reciting the Imperial Rescript on Education, visiting shrines, conducting tea ceremonies bound citizens to a virtuous vision of Emperor, nation, and spiritual destiny.

Azuma argues that these grand narratives were disrupted by waves of turmoil. First came the Westernization of the Meiji Restoration, then the Second World War. In their wake, citing Jean Baudrillard, Azuma describes an emergent postmodern world where the trunk-and-branch models of reality are replaced by a rhizomatic “hyper reality”. In this world, meaning becomes a tangled web where the lines between truth and fiction blur, and symbols become unmoored from the realities they once represented. Here, the grand narratives are “swallowed by the chaos of a sea of simulacra”, a world where there are “no originals and no copies”. All that survives is endlessly circulating fragmented content with no shared story — if only Baudrillard were alive to see our world inebriated by memes, trends, and vibes.

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This post-modern hyperreality breeds ideological chaos. As the grand narratives collapsed — in Japan and globally — their absence was felt in various ways. Azuma argues that the otaku were the first to trailblaze a new mode of reality-making in a world stripped of unifying mythologies. Abandoning conventional “narrative consumption”, they pioneered what he calls “database consumption”: a logic that replaces the tree-and-branch structure with a database and hyper-individualized pick-and-mix consumer mindset. Stories are no longer linear journeys with moral arcs, they become modular fragments, plucked from a database of options and consumed as highly personalized forms of pleasure and identity-making.

Azuma observes that otakus — in contrast to regular fans — are almost entirely uninterested in official canon or coherent storytelling. Rather, they are obsessed with animalistically chasing an emotional rush — known as moe — triggered by modular elements of certain manga/anime characters. Different otakus chase different “moe-elements” (or moe-yoso). Some are visual: cat ears, knee-high socks, specific hairstyles, maid or sailor outfits, flaming swords. Others are more abstract: distinctive speech patterns, familiar plot beats, even particular curves or camera angles.

Otakus call the hunt for this affective sugar hit chara-moe. Many actively search for their preferred moe elements regardless of what franchise or series they come from. Further, otakus use search engines like TINAMI to filter the endless databases and feast on their moe of choice — whether it is styles of ships or spectacles, or just good old-fashioned bikinis.

For Azuma, what distinguishes the otaku is not their devotion to manga or anime per se, but their distinctive mode of database consumption. While the objects of their obsession — Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sylvanian Families — have had an obvious cultural spillover into the West, it’s this underlying logic of fragmented, non-narrative consumption that has truly gone mainstream. The seemingly endless and narratively incoherent Marvel Cinematic Universe and online culture wars demonstrate the hypnotic power of non-linear database consumption over linear grand, cohesive narratives. Our media landscape now resembles an endless database of familiar image templates, catchphrases, and decontextualized references — shared and reshuffled for the sheer thrill of recognition. To giggle at and share an AI Ghibli meme that hits right is to indulge in chara-moe. In essence: if database consumption is now the primary driver of demand, then it’s now suddenly met with a perfectly created and curated supply.

Which brings us to the macrotrend powering Ghiblification: the rise of next-generation multimodal AI. Last week’s ChatGPT-4o update offered a glimpse of what happens when ordinary users are handed tools to conjure images in any style they wish, instantly. While Ghibli aesthetics may have stolen the spotlight, the algorithm’s reach is far broader. From Lego to Pixar, South Park to The Simpsons, the internet has exploded with a surreal parade of fan-made transformations. Ghibli versions of The Office. Pixar versions of Severance. The possibilities are endless. Ghiblification is not really about Studio Ghibli, it’s about the turbocharging of hyperreality with AI.

This shift is being driven by a new frontier in generative AI: the rise of multimodal, or “omnimedia” large language models. Just a few months ago — the Dark Ages, in AI terms — most models were siloed by medium. To write or code you used ChatGPT or Perplexity. To create an image, DALL·E or Midjourney. To create a video, Runway or OpenAI’s Sora were your best bet. Yet with the latest update to ChatGP-4o (the “o” stands for omni), we have entered a stratospheric new era. Very soon, models will no longer be confined to one input or output. Instead, they are being stitched together across modalities — capable of inhaling and exhaling text, image, video, audio, and more. In this new “anything-to-anything” paradigm, you can turn a photo into a cartoon, a game, a song — even a 3D-printed statue. With just a single, frictionless prompt each of us becomes the world-builder of our own private universe.

It’s only going to get faster. The primary barrier to fully automated Ghiblification is no longer AI developer genius or human creativity, but computing power. Today, it takes 30 seconds to generate a near-perfect detailed image. Soon it will be instant. In 2024 alone, tech firms poured more than $100 billion into AI processing infrastructure to speed things up. By 2028, that number is forecast to go over $200 billion. The direction is clear: the only thing standing between users and immersive, personalized AI worlds — whether they be Ghibli, Pixar, or South Park — is processing time. IP rights and energy costs may be barriers, but on matters of AI, it seems that politicians are more concerned with Chinese AI drone swarms than artists’ rights and emissions. Everything else — the demand, the tech, the servers — is there.

Furthermore, it’s amplified by a different kind of AI: interest-graph recommender algorithms. In recent years, feed curation has quietly shifted from the social graph (what you and your friends like and follow) to the interest graph (what you actually pay attention to). The algorithms of TikTok’s “For You” page do not care what you claim to value; they optimize for what you linger on. And what do people want? AI slop. As Altman put it: “one man’s slop is another man’s treasure”. The latest research backs it up. A recent blind study found that most people genuinely prefer AI pastiches of the great poets to the real thing. On a critical level, it is easy to say one believes in the Miyazaki and Nick Cave characterization of AI creativity as “a grotesque mockery”. In practice it’s harder. While older models made creepy, creatively bankrupt pastiches, emerging visual models are increasingly indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Ghiblification is unlikely to be a fleeting trend.

And so here we are at the beginning of the new age of Otaku, possibly the end of shared reality as we know it. While reflecting on the creative process, Miyazaki once explained that “the creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos”. Now, in a cruel twist of fate, the opposite is happening. Reality is being shattered into billions of AI-crafted otaku worlds for one, but perhaps that’s exactly what we want.

Yet, this isn’t just mindless nostalgia. No, the resurgence of Eighties aesthetics and the “greed is good” spirit is one half of an emerging American Dream. One that has been forged in the dynamic collision between Trump’s MAGA nostalgia and his new friendship with the tech-utopian Silicon Valley squad. Call it: Yuppiefuturism.

It is emerging from the confluence of two epoch-defining vibe shifts. One hails from the past, the other from the future. The first is the return of a bolshy American Yuppie dominance — in all its ostentatious, deal-making, power-worshipping glory. This is the Manhattan-coded spirit of an economically ambitious, Trump-voting Gen Z pining for old money aesthetics. The second is the ascendency of what has been called Right-wing progressivism, or “space fascism”. Embodied by Silicon Valley titans such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, American Right-wing progressivism is no conservative movement: its adherents worship technology and space colonization. Yuppiefuturism is a bastard child of both ideologies — a hybrid Nietzschean will to power, sporting a Rolex and Space Suit.

To grasp the first vibe shift, it’s essential to understand how the brash, self-promoting, deal-making demeanor of the Yuppie emerged. This ambitious and ostentatious mindset, the way the Yuppie talks and thinks, is part of a long history of oral culture from ancient civilization to TikTok. For most of human history, culture and politics have been an oral affair. That is to say, “orality”, raw verbal communication unsupported by writing, was the default currency of dialogue — the Petrodollar of communication.

In literate societies, human cognition is shaped by structured argument, the linear development of ideas, and the permanent record that writing provides. For groups, this enables words, thoughts, and memories to be externalized, aggregated, and distributed (or gatekept) with ease. For individuals, it offers the capacity to “look things up” and deliberate.

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Oral societies are built different. In his seminal 1982 book, Orality and Literature, Walter J. Ong explained that such cultures function in ways that the modern literate mind cannot comprehend. Communication requires heavy repetition to aid memorization and ensure continuity of knowledge without written records. Discourse is often agonistic and confrontational. Storytelling must be charismatic and communal to make an impact. Epithets and mnemonics become key weapons in shaping the agenda. Society reveres the old men and women who repeat the stories of the days of old. This “politics of rizz” was the lifeblood of ancient civilizations. In Rome, a world of endless competing interests, rhetoric was the irrefutable force that legitimated power. Mark Antony’s funeral oration was said to have turned the masses against Caesar’s murderers, and re-united Rome under the leadership of the Second Triumvirate. Rhetoric was the weapon of mass seduction; it stimulated union to prevail over division.

Yet, the post-Gutenberg centuries attempted to put the politics of rizz to rest. Print media radically reduced the cost of scaling the written word. Societies went all-in on literacy. The rest is history. Print remade the world ushering in the Reformation and Enlightenment, mass democracy, double-entry accounting, peer-reviewed scientific research, novels, newspapers and all that lovely stuff. In this new era, the “politics of wordcels”, in all its majesty, would reign supreme. From Martin Luther to Alexander Hamilton, it was thought that learned men would debate, educate, and inspire a literate population to collectively reason their way to a better future. The nostalgia of oral cultures would be replaced by the unyielding march of progress.

This was but a blip. With the advent of new media, the politics of rizz began to creep out of its coffin in the 20th century. In his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that TV fundamentally altered human cognition, pushing communication and thought to the realm of entertainment. Postman explained that video fundamentally biased audiences towards what could be called screen-friendly rizz. Citing the infamous 1960 televised debate, stale and sweaty Richard Nixon was no match for slick and sunny John F. Kennedy.

This emergence of electronic media such as television and radio triggered what Ong identified as “secondary orality”. Wordcels would still depend on writing and print, but soon their communication would be inflected with rizz characteristics. In this era, silver-tongued, photogenic politicians used their charisma to captivate audiences while smoothly maintaining the machinery of literate politics. From saxophone-wielding Bill Clinton to mic-dropping Obama, this emergent fact-based rizz prospered. Yet, to engage in the politics of rizz is to risk leaving the door open to superior rizzlers. Which brings us back to the Yuppies.

Yuppie rizz blends ruthless ambition and a polished corporate image. It’s all about unapologetically walking the walk, projecting the success of a “winner” to close the deal. Trump, as Frederic Kaufmann has describedd, is the very “apotheosis of the yuppie tribe” — the living breathing “avatar of American capitalism” spawned in the Reagan-era of supposed American greatness.

In 2016, Trump’s distinctive Yuppie rizz eviscerated Hillary Clinton’s wordcelery. Through a Roman mastery of orality, complete with memorable mnemonics (MAGA) and epithets (Crooked Hillary), Trump became the archetypal storyteller of old, reborn in the body of a Yuppie Caesar. Through this, deal-making Trump — like Rome’s greatest orators — skillfully crafted a coalition of contradiction by harking back to various American nostalgias. For big business, it was the Eighties era boom time. For evangelicals, it was the pre-sexual revolution Fifties. For Steve Bannon, it was the Jacksonian 1830s. While ideologically divergent, Trump’s coalition coalesced in pursuit of the destruction of their common enemy: a Democrat establishment of wordcels they see as plotting to destroy America.

In the eight years since, the media landscape has only got better for Trump. Trust in and demand for legacy media has collapsed. The explosive growth of podcasts combined with social video platforms like TikTok, Reels, and YouTube have been a boon for rizzlers everywhere. Despite the wordcel-information repression complex’s best efforts, Trump’s “tertiary orality” entirely bypasses literacy — he simply refuses to engage with cries of hypocrisy and logical inconsistency. With seeming ease, he has rizzed his way to a series of deals that any thinking wordcel would decry as paradoxical. By ignoring his wordcel critics’ calls for logic and facts, he’s won over almost everyone. Arab Americans and Orthodox Jews. Isolationists and war hawks. Podcasters and evangelicals. Wall Street kingpins and union boys. Bernie Bros and white supremacists. And in perhaps the most remarkable union of all: the nation-loving have-nots of Appalachia and the money-loving have-yachts of Silicon Valley.

Which brings us to the second vibe shift that is feeding Yuppiefuturism: the ascendency of Right-wing progressivism. If Yuppie rizz is the aesthetic and attitude, then Right-wing progressivism is the political economy. While hailing from Silicon Valley, rather than the Yuppie terrain of Wall Street, this AI Space techno-utopianism is best articulated in Marc Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”. In his impassioned call for tech accelerationism, Andreessen argues that “America and her allies should be strong and not weak” and that “[e]conomic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength”. He blames the decline of that strength on the “anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness” ideology of the Washington establishment.

For now, Trump has managed to build an unwieldy coalition by tapping into many Americans’ disdain for this supposed “anti-greatness”. Yet, the magical glue of negative cohesion that has bound his voters together may begin to wear off as their diverging desires become more pronounced. For example, as big business and Silicon Valley’s desire for cheap foreign labor comes into conflict with the Build the Wall crowd, things may become more perilous for Trump. So, to avoid it all unraveling, Trump — like all great rizzlers — needs a spectacle that binds his voters, while blinding them to their obvious differences. He cannot take his voters to the various pasts they crave, so he’s decided to take them Back to the Future. Enter Elon Musk.

When the SpaceX founder started to gravitate towards Trump after 2020, the connection stemmed from a shared disgust for “woke” politics, censorship, and government overreach. Yet, in recent months their interest in space exploration has rocketed to the top of the agenda. In early October Trump started to explicitly link America’s return to military supremacy to reaching Mars. While no mission is planned yet, Trump declared in his inauguration speech that it is Manifest Destiny that Americans will plant a flag on Mars. To wordcels, rushing a mission to Mars would be unthinkably reckless — the technology is not ready, the window of opportunity is too narrow. Yet, in the new age of orality, where rizz and heroism rule, why not risk rocket explosion and death, if it furthers the mission of revitalized American techno-supremacy? Trump has yet to ask any astronauts for their noble sacrifice, but in the immortal words of Horace: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”

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In the 2014 Silicon Valley classic Zero to One, Peter Thiel — the mentor to and former boss of Vice President J.D. Vance — categorizes societies based on their visions of the future. He argues societies have definite or indefinite visions of the future and are either optimistic or pessimistic. Before the Space Race ended, America was a land of definite optimists, dreaming of the future. When it did in 1975, America’s vision became less definite but remained optimistic. In recent years, Americans have slid into indefinite pessimism — a dark realm where Thiel claims the West’s nostalgic bureaucracy rots. In this vein, for Trump to Make America Great Again, he must first Make America (Definite) Optimistic Again. Silicon Valley, the world’s future factory, offers a vision to do just that.

Silicon Valley’s historical liberal allegiance previously made it a no-go zone for Trump. However, as Democrats demanded more control of AI, privacy, and speech regulation, MAGA and the tech broligarchs’ causes converged over their shared dislike of the wordcels overly censorious and controlling hand. Despite being the Masters of America’s ultimate logic-and-order based industry, Silicon Valley’s progressives believe that, in Trump, they have a president who will reverse the gradual ceding of AI dominance to China. In June 2024, Ben Horowitz, Andreessen’s legendary VC partner-in-crime and literal friend of Kamala Harris, stunned Silicon Valley with his endorsement of Trump. Horowitz declared, “We truly believe that the future of our business, the future of technology, and the future of America is at stake.” Andreessen, himself a longtime Democrat, also backed Trump in response to the Biden-Harris administration’s onslaught of tech regulation. Andreessen explained that “without the tech component, you can’t sustain the economy or the military”.

Here is the crucible of Yuppiefuturism. By harnessing unrepentant Yuppie rizz and ostentatious aesthetics with Silicon Valley’s buccaneering liberal apostate AI cowboy class, Yuppiefuturism reveals itself as the face of raw American power in 2025. For Trump, it provides a path to forge a vision of MAGA that transcends its obvious tensions. If he conjures the ultimate Mars-shaped spectacle, and accordingly American AI techno-military primacy over China, then Trump will etch his name into history as America’s Yuppie Caesar — and the purest incarnation of the rizz made flesh.

And for the rest of us? While we are only a few weeks into Trump’s presidency, the post-inauguration triumphalism still shows no signs of waning. If things keep on going the same way, then perhaps it’s time to pack your Rolex and Brioni suit and strap yourselves in. We’re off to Mars — there’s a new frontier to gentrify.

This passion for excellence over exuberant attention-seeking mirrors the wider British luxury industry. Unlike France and Italy, we lack iconic listed luxury growth engines. There is no British Louis Vuitton-Moet Hennessy (£285 billion market cap) or Ferrari (£71 billion). Our greatest champions of Burberry (£2.4 billion) and InterContinental Hotels Group (£12 billion) languish at the bottom of the FTSE 100.

Of course, Britain is still a playground to the wealthy. As Butler to the World, we serve the globally rich with private schools, real estate, and a historically handy tax regime. Savile Row and Jermyn Street are luminaries of menswear. Our luxury automotive industry remains iconic, albeit foreign-owned. However, our disdain for poor taste and glitzy tat prevented us from becoming a gigafactory of shallow status symbols. Unlike our continental counterparts, we have failed to feast on the desires of the growing hordes of global affluence.

But what if this snobbishness was a well-placed long-term bet? Over the past two years, I have been conducting anthropological research into the lives and desires of ultra and high-net-worth individuals — or “(U)HNWIs” to the brands and banks that seek their riches. From Manhattan and Monaco to Singapore and Seoul, I have found that the aspirations of the global rich are undergoing a subtle but tectonic shift. The superficial brand mythologies and logos that have fuelled much of the European luxury boom are fast falling out of fashion.

Instead, these HNWIs are embracing deeper forms of luxury, rooted in a different set of values. They are increasingly rejecting the obvious and explicit badges, instead preferring more subtle, meaningful, and nuanced forms of distinction. “I used to spend lavishly on clothes, mostly buying major French and Italian labels,” explains Bao, a venture capitalist based in Guanghzhou, China. “Now, I spend more pragmatically. I buy less and focus on quality, long-lasting items. It should have its own special story and design, not just a logo.”

Among the global new elite, there is a feeling that not only are conventional status symbols no longer markers of distinction, but they also fail to satisfy deeper emotional needs. “There’s a sense of emptiness, of just consuming things, because they’re showy, or they’re pretty and you get that kind of consumer lust for them that you want to sate,” explains Nadia, a jet-set entrepreneur living between Dubai and Monaco. “It has an emptiness that a new handbag won’t fill.”

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None of which is to say that the rich no longer care about status. Quite the opposite: expressing “status” is now increasingly about conscious virtue rather than chest-beating dominance. To these HNWIs, distinction is not about having the shiniest watch, but signalling an appreciation of craftsmanship, community, patronage and planet.

What’s driving this shift? First, the sheer scale and growth of HNWIs is galactic, and the wealthy need new ways to distinguish themselves. UBS’s 2024 Global Wealth Report estimates there are currently 59.4 million millionaires globally. That number is expected to grow to 86 million by 2027. In a slightly more exclusive tier, there are 243,000 ultra-high-net-worths — those with over $50 million. This cohort of living gods is projected to rise to 372,000 by 2027.

In his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen argued that luxury is essentially a symbolic social performance where the excess time and wealth of the rich are displayed through unnecessary, conspicuous consumption. Yet, in a world where 100,000 millionaires are born every week, signalling that distinction has become harder. Behind these astronomical numbers and opaque acronyms, the reality is that owning a Rolex does not set you apart. Being rich isn’t rare anymore.

To further distinguish themselves in a crowded elite world, HNWIs are embracing what Giana M. Eckhardt et al. call “inconspicuous consumption”. This holds that, amid the flash and the fakes, true distinction now comes from signalling to their in-the-know micro-peers groups. The masses are now cottoning on with the Succession-inspired #quietluxury TikTok trend garnering half a billion views.  While online mainstream interest in the trend might have dipped slightly since its zenith in 2023, it still represents a paradigm shift. Over the past 12 months, the stock market value of quiet luxury’s poster children Brunello Cuccinelli (+21%) and Hermès (+15%) far outstrips the now shrinking LVMH (-13%).

Related to this, the global rich are also increasingly mindful of impact of their spending. Endless studies indicate that younger luxury consumers seek sustainability. By 2030, the wealthy youth will make up 80% of the global luxury consumer base. “These younger consumers are more interested in the ethical aspects and the stories behind the products than older generations,” explains Helen Chislett, co-author of Craft Britain: Why Making Matters. In this new landscape, the ethical origin is no longer a side perk but essential to the foundations of the luxury myth. As Chislett explains in a distinctly Carolean tone: “They now seek products that tell a story, with authenticity and a clear lineage. This isn’t just about luxury; it’s about connection and understanding the provenance of the things we bring into our lives.”

Which brings us back to Britain. In this shifting cultural environment, many of France and Italy’s maisons have sold out the quality and authenticity to fatten themselves on the fruits of globalisation. Britain’s luxury artisans, by contrast, stood their ground. Save for the prodigal Burberry’s years in the wilderness, the local industry has consistently maintained its reputation for sustaining a tradition of tasteful craftsmanship, understated timeless design and ethical leadership. As the nouveau riche reach their era of maturity, Britain can feast on the Europeans’ lunch.

In her introduction to Walpole’s 2024 British Book of Luxury, CEO Helen Brocklebank emphasises Britain’s unique opportunity. “All the elements for success are there,” she writes, “a growing market, a new generation of young, savvy consumers, and a shift in what luxury means towards qualities and values where Britain has always excelled.”

And yet, few in Britain seem to care. Parliament endlessly debates the importance of building Tech Britain, which certainly makes some sense: the tech sector contributes £150 billion to our annual GDP. However, the luxury sector, despite contributing £81 billion annually, supporting 450,000 jobs, and paying in £25.5 billion to the exchequer, is almost never discussed by politicians. Apart from stopping Russian oligarchs from buying luxury cars — they get them via Azerbaijan now — and occasional attempts to bring back VAT-free shopping, the British luxury is hardly on the political agenda.

Why ignore this engine of growth? Most likely, it is seen as frivolous. As Brocklebank writes: “Luxury brands create some of the most beautiful, exclusive, and desirable products on the Earth and yet our industry is rarely seen as serious… [It is seen as] indulgent, transient and nonessential.” More cynically, it’s likely that pseudo-salt-of-the-Earth politicians seek to avoid association with a sector they perceive as intrinsically serving the rich and powerful. When Prime Minister Keir Starmer explained last week that “those with the broadest shoulders should bear the heavier burden”, he obviously only meant taxes. Actively persuading the rich to volunteer their cash through craft and charm is nowhere near the agenda.

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Elite commentators often reflect this myopia. Writing in The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh recently suggested that luxury is “Europe’s joke on the world” and “profits from the cultural insecurities of other regions”. While he accepts that these businesses pay taxes and employ people, he critiques the supposed “ghastliness of the products” and international consumers’ “postcolonial urge to ‘mimic’ the metropole”. But what if, rather than being merely a job and tax revenue creating “joke”, the luxury sector is something deeply good for both the economy and the spirit of the nation?

In her four-part review of Kenneth and Gillian Bartlett’s The Renaissance in Italy, Angela Nagle explores the historical realities of an industrial policy that celebrates luxury and beauty. Focusing on the glass-blowing industry, Nagle argues that “the first lesson of Venice is that industry and beauty are not incompatible, as some sentimentalists believe, but can be entirely complementary. This is especially true if you choose to invest in producing luxury or high-quality goods and take pride in their quality.”

This is just as potent a force in Renaissance Venice as it is in 21st-century Sudbury. Employees across the silk mill beamed with glee at the splendour of their businesses. Even beyond the creatives, this pride resonates. “I used do accounting at a sock business, we were just making black socks all the time, you wouldn’t feel the same investment in that,” says one woman in the silk mill’s finance department. “But here there’s a lot of pride that goes into what we do, because we’re always creating something different.”

Her colleague continues: “We make high end fabrics, for absolutely everybody. It’s not an off-the-shelf process — it’s a collaboration of all the people that want to make something very special. From start to finish, everyone is involved, and when we see some of our fabrics on TV or in a magazine, we all think ‘I’ve got a piece of me in that’. Everyone feels connected when we produce a finished product.”

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In this, we find a vision of British industry that is truly inspiring. In stark contrast to the soulless WeWorks of London, where dead-eyed graduates, over-qualified and under-skilled, waste away their twenties selling B2B software subscriptions, we encounter a vibrant, joyful community of art and commerce. Here, highly skilled creatives, manufacturers, and professionals work seamlessly together, united by their shared admiration for the craftsmanship of a truly exquisite product.

In 18th-century Britain, there was a deep pride in luxury craft. In a 2023 essay Fired by Creativity, Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A and former Labour MP, delved into the epoch-defining impact of Josiah Wedgwood — porcelain industrialist extraordinaire. In Wedgwood’s time, Hunt explains, there was no embarrassment in celebrating the merits of high-end craftsmanship. On the contrary, the intertwined economic and cultural significance of openly supporting and taking pride in one’s luxury industry was regarded as a noble pursuit. As Hunt puts it: “There was nobility and virtue in seducing the buyer, in pleasing the consumer, and in expanding the provision of material goods” to sustain the region’s thriving industries. Quoting Prime Minister William Gladstone, Hunt further emphasises that “Wedgwood was the greatest man who ever, in any age, or in any country…[who] applied himself to the important work of uniting art with industry.”

In an era where the winds of luxury are once again turning in Britain’s favour, we could do worse than reanimate Wedgwood’s spirit. And there are endless policy reforms that would unleash British luxury — from reinstating tax-free shopping and making exports easier to protecting IP rights and apprenticeship reforms. First, however, we must renew a sense of pride. Once that’s achieved, we will still be a long way from Making Britain Cool Again. Perhaps, in the meantime, we can make it craft again.

On the surface, this new race to curb screen time seems like a positive development. For years, underwhelming iPhone launches have triggered dreary sighs of boredom rather than round-the-block queues, while critiques of addiction-powered surveillance capitalism have trickled out of the academy and into the mainstream press. If screens are our tormentor, one could easily conclude, then perhaps these screenless devices will be our salvation.

But what if our obsession with “screen time” is itself a smokescreen? What if, rather than saving us, this vanishing act obscures the deeper drivers of our digital dissatisfaction? After all, the real rot at the core of modern computing is not screens, but the Scylla and Charybdis of digital life: the unceasing acceleration of culture and human anxieties about our finitude.

Once upon a time, speed was the aspiration of commerce. The rise of clock time and the industrial revolution made doing things quickly the lifeblood of competition. Responding to this acceleration of life after the Second World War, French philosopher and architect Paul Virilio lamented how: “The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world.” Since then, speed has graduated from being the aspiration of commerce to becoming the central objective of culture. Whether it’s the movement of goods and services or the diffusion of ideas, Virilio’s theory of “dromology” explores how intense capital investment in technologies that compress time and space have become our defining logic. These technologies accelerate the transportation of matter and ideas, scrambling our experience of time and place. In Open Sky, his 1997 polemic on technology, he mourns: “How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?”

If Virilio saw time-space compression as an inherently destructive force, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a 20th-century Jesuit theologian and palaeontologist (best known for discovering Peking Man) actively cheered it on. To Teilhard de Chardin and his Silicon Valley intellectual descendants, the creation of a light-speed sphere of knowledge and communication that floats above our mundane world was the ultimate aspiration of humanity. Through his Darwin-inspired Catholicism, he longed for an invisible consciousness that he termed the “Noosphere” — a realm of cognition between the atmosphere and the biosphere. This, he dreamed, would foster a unified connected human consciousness which would be the final stage of evolution: the convergence of the physical (the “hardware” of human brains and technologies) and the metaphysical (the “software” of human soul and intellect). At this evolutionary end point, which he called the Omega Point, humanity would achieve divine salvation.

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Virilio and Teilhard de Chardin’s competing worldviews represent the tension at the heart of this battle of salvation from screens. Altman and Humane identify screens as the barrier to a better future, but Virilio leads us to an altogether different view: screens are not the problem. They are simply the portal that enforces constant communion with this Noosphere. It is the possibility of being connected to it, and transcending ordinary life, that is breaking our brains — not the medium that gets us there.

The notion that the Noosphere gives us rapid and better knowledge drips into all facets of life. In Politics of the Very Worst (1999), Virilio describes the phenomenon of “teleobjectivity”, the idea that some remote consciousness is better than what we can do with our bodies. The TripAdvisor star-rating of a restaurant overrules your eyes and nose. Google Translate kills the need to dust off one’s GCSE French. Wikipedia’s objectivity makes you interrupt conversation to check one’s phone for the right answer. We trust the Noosphere, not ourselves.

This remote consciousness, Virilo explains, “destroys the world as we know it”, leaving us feeling that our messy and fleshy experiences are not quite as good as the infinite Noosphere. And here lies the flaw in Altman and Humane’s vision of humanity: the obsession with overcoming our inevitable finitude. In this, they merely represent the latest expression of a phenomenon described by philosopher Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought (2001): “Human beings appear to be the only mortal finite beings who wish to transcend their finitude.”

To Altman and Humane, this finitude can only be overcome by helping people address their apparent lack of self-control by removing the screen which they see as a portal to the world of dopamine-inducing distractions. Yet, the real battle is not with the portal — but instead with the cosmic FOMO spawned by the idea that there is a better self and life floating out there in the Noosphere. It is easy to remove the glass and stainless steel in our hands. To curb our longing to be super-infinite is harder.

Paradoxically, then, this hype around “humane technology” does not reveal a hunger for humanity. Quite the opposite: it exposes a desire to transcend our very human frailty and ignorance once and for all.

If anything, these devices could become the first mainstream transhumanist product, further normalising a millenarian Silicon Valley ideology of self-optimisation among everyday consumers. Consider the AI Pin’s live translation feature: demonstrated last year, the synchronous translation system renders the cognitive and cultural struggle of learning a language meaningless.

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Nussbaum, by contrast, states that human “development entails many moments of discomfort and frustration”. She continues: “if everything were always simply given in advance of discomfort, [humanity] would never try out its own projects of control.” In other words, by chaining us to the Noosphere and providing real-time cognitive babysitting in every moment, these new technologies may simply eradicate the impulse for humans to struggle or engage their brains at all. The problem won’t be that we are Amusing Ourselves to Death — rather, we will entirely opt out of projects that create that sense of self in the first place.

Poignantly, with its live translation feature, the AI Pin appears to be a real-world manifestation of Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Humane is simply conjuring Douglas Adams’s “small, yellow, leech-like” creature that “feeds on brainwave energy” and excretes a telepathic matrix that enables one to “instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language”. Adams, of course, named this fish after the Tower of Babel. In Genesis 11:1–9, the Babylonians, drunk with pride in their ability to speak one language, attempt to build a tower that reaches into the heavens and challenges God’s power. Irritated by the hubris, God came down and scattered them across the world.

In a similar way, screenless smartphones and the ancient Babylonians are two sides of the same eternal coin. They represent an innate thirst for grand projects of human perfectibility — a longing for a deus ex machina with which to defeat with nature. Yet, we are all fallible. Until we see that the real battle is not with screens but with our own dissatisfaction with the present, nothing will Change Everything. Endless scrolling will simply be replaced with new mindless interactions; we will remain anxiously plugged in, dreaming of perfection.

As Virilio writes in Pure War (1983), “wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth”. And here we can see the hidden side of Humane and Altman’s salvation narratives: the real motivation is not to rescue us, but to simply compress time and space better than an iPhone can. What could this achieve? A quick glance at Apple’s $3-trillion market value says all you need to know. Silicon Valley’s talk of screens and “humane” technology is simply sheep’s clothing. Beneath it, ravenous wolves await, hungry for your attention and wallet.

What we need, then, is something that both binds us and shines to the world: a new Cool Britannia to resurrect the “swaggering sense of national self-belief” we have lost. The problem here is that our former bluster was powered by the fundamental belief that Things Can Only Get Better. Today, most of us simply hope that Things Can’t Get Any Worse. Liz Truss’s short-lived Big Bang 2.0 and Rishi Sunak’s Californian techno-utopian dreams of a start-up Britannia have failed to provide any sense of collective belief in a better future.

Cool Britannia’s optimism was turbocharged by an onslaught of aspirational cultural production that gave Britain a joyous vibe of buzzy creativity and irreverence. We had Blur, Oasis, The Spice Girls, Suede, Massive Attack and Pulp. Our fashion industry was trailblazing with Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Paul Smith, Ozwald Boateng, and John Galliano. The YBAs made British art the talk of the planet. Hugh Grant looked fabulous.

We still have star power. The problem is that so many of our icons — consider Harry Styles, Adele and Daniel Kaluuya — have a British-accented charisma that feels more Hollywood than Blighty. They are too geographically and thematically distant and mainstream to build a new national myth around.

So, what do we do? The answer can perhaps be found in Tara Isabella Burton’s latest book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Here, Burton explores how figures through history have mastered the art of self-creation to fulfil their wildest dreams. From Renaissance Italy to Instagram, Burton reveals the dark arts of building a hypnotic brand that bends an audience to its will. From narcissist painter Albrecht Dürer and Regency dandy Beau Brummell to the proto-fascist Giovanni D’Annunzio and Paris Hilton, each character offers a playbook for how Britain can build a brand that delicately synthesises a new inspirational self-image.

Burton’s theory is simpler than you might expect: concoct a cocktail of mesmerising vibes and fake it until you make it. Quoting Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 handbook The Courtier, she explains that the best brand-building comes from going “about selecting this thing from one and that thing from another. And as the bee in the green meadows is ever wont to rob the flowers among the grass, so our Courtier must steal this grace from all who seem to possess it”. Castiglione’s methodology is captured in the mysterious concept of sprezzatura — translated as nonchalance or lightness. Sprezzatura, Castiglione explains, “conceals design and shows that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought”.

Burton says that this can be achieved by “lying, at least the delicately artful ‘little white lie’ kind, is integral to self-making”. To become who we want to be, “we first have to convince other people that we are what we are not”. In other words, modern Britain might be far from a fountain of relentless creativity, but if we take on the sprezzatura mindset of Castiglione’s honeybee, perhaps we can begin to give the impression that we are. After all, it is also the case that everything was not fine in the Nineties — no matter how much Blair wandered around pretending to be Jesus in chinos.

One bee who is already busily buzzing about is Daniel Lee, Burberry’s new Chief Creative Officer. Lee, a 37-year-old working-class Bradford-born designer, has been working in the shadows cultivating a Cool Britannia 2.0 that is both scintillatingly hot and British. Only five years ago, his predecessor Riccardo Tisci torched Burberry’s classic crusader knight logo and replaced it with an Instagram-friendly orange monogram. Trampling over a century of heritage, he turned Burberry into yet another bland cosmopolitan luxury brand. Yet, this year, Lee launched a whipsaw reversal. Not only has he restored the knight, but he has revived an even more ornate version of the logo from 1901 that emphasises the Latin prorsum slogan, meaning “progress”.

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But Lee’s new Burberry is far from jingoistic heritage maximalism. With adverts that feature foxes, corgis, swans, rabbits, Vanessa Redgrave, Raheem Sterling and Skepta, his rebrand captures the timeless equities that Britain has leveraged in our greatest moments. Lee recognises the dynamic contradictions that underlie the nation’s soul: the heritage and the zest for innovation, the aristocratic and the punk, the local and the global. Harmoniously resolving these tensions is the key to driving modern Britain forward — and making it sexy.

Of course, the quiet revolution triggered by Lee must not solely be led by a fashion brand; Burberry’s Britannia is not a substitute for a whole nation’s hopes and dreams. A national mythology cannot be driven by adverts alone, it should be accompanied by a wave of art and culture that transmits something new.

Moreover, if Cool Britannia 2.0 is to thrive, it needs a conductor. In the Nineties, that role was partly filled by Tony Blair. And he was desperate to make sure everybody knew it, constantly orchestrating photo opportunities that placed him in the thick of it. Comparably, despite an equivalent lead in the polls, Keir Starmer is the antonym of Cool Britannia. Not even a photoshoot in a Stone Island polo shirt next to a graffitied wall in Berlin would convince Britain that we are entering a new dawn of cool. Nor will his faux-nostalgia for football, the smell of hamburgers and horse shit.

This leaves a vacuum, a gaping hole awaiting a Arch-Sprezzatura Honeybee who will come out of the shadows and deliver us this hallowed new Cool Britannia. They must have the stature of a statesman, the respect of the masses, and the nonchalance that makes the nation gush and gasp. With Starmer and Sunak ill-equipped for the role, and King Charles now 74, the throne lies empty.

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Why we can't let Britpop die

By Dorian Lynskey

Princess Kate, Britain’s most popular royal, may stake a claim with her Vampire’s Wife dresses, misspent youth, and ketamine-fuelled-rave attendance, but ultimately she is too above culture to really drive it. Stormzy, the rap phenomenon and emerging national treasure, has signalled a willingness to wear the weight of the crown. In his Banksy-designed Union Jack stab-proof vest, he has demonstrated pedigree in wrestling with Britain complex modern identity. Perhaps more importantly, he is also on Burberry’s roster. However, as an already iconic creative powerhouse, he seems better suited as the first violin.

Noticeably lurking is Manchester mayor Andy Burnham. The bookies’ favourite to succeed Starmer has already signalled his honeybee credentials. After two failed leadership bids, Burnham has rebranded from strait-laced Blairite Westminster drone to a laid-back-but-serious, 24-hour-partying King of the North. In October, he will launch his new SXSW-inspired Beyond The Music festival and conference in Manchester — the originator of so much of Britain’s cool. The event, Burnham claims, will be about building “a creative alliance for the future” that brings together music, tech, gaming, brands and more.

Amid the pessimism, however, the prospects of a Cool Britannia resurgence feel dim. Yet consider this: in the age of self-making, the currency of vibes trumps stark realities. The ultimate heroine of Burton’s book is Caroline Calloway, the audacious Scammer Priestess. Despite squandering a half-million-dollar book advance and selling Snake Oil, Calloway has thrived by distorting reality. From faking exam results to get into Cambridge to selling fake workshops and proudly buying Instagram followers, every lie she tells sees her soar to new heights. Her audacious approach, an intoxicating dance with risk is the brand-building equivalent of Bazball. She throws everything at the wall and does not care what sticks. She’s the master of fucking around and finding out. Perhaps Britain’s path to rediscovering its swagger lies in harnessing the spirit of Calloway, simply ignoring the gloomy reality and playing without fear.

The woman thrashing me pauses to throw a ladleful of eucalyptus-infused water onto a sauna stove. There is a hiss, and steam clouds the room. “Beware the puddles, for they are fiery intra-planetary cauldrons, used by the Sussex dragons to travel to Australia,” chants the English siren. Outside, a hip Canadian woman chops wood to sensuous French-Malian rock-kora fusion playing from a portable speaker. Others are busy at work, sweeping and carefully preparing the enchanted sauna ceremony.

My birch-twig attacker is Jamie, the ethereal saunameister of this spa-start-up-cum-pagan-temple. In a previous life, Jamie was a MacBook-using, flat white-sipping hipster photographer from east London, growing slowly disillusioned with the pressure and precarity of the city’s gentrification. Then, one day, while hungover at a music festival, she stumbled upon a sauna. “I came out of the sauna into nature and plunged into a cold lake and was reborn,” she says.

Months later, Jamie left London, moved to Sussex and set up her first sauna venture. After just five years, she’s flourishing: “I’ve created a really beautiful life for myself. I live on the beach, I work in a forest, I run my own business. I’m doing work that feels purposeful and impactful.”

In this, Jamie’s rebirth is far from unique. Quite the opposite: she is part of a vanguard rejecting the refined hedonism of the globalised Brooklyn-Shoreditch urban creative class. Suffocated by the downward mobility induced by our neo-feudal economy and its spiritually malnourished consensus, Jamie is part of an emergent socio-economic class — the Bohemian Peasantry, or Bopeas for short.

The Bopeas are a new paradigm in culture and consumption. They are the descendants of other post-war consumer groups: the Hippies, the Yuppies, and the Bobos of Soho House. However, unlike their predecessors, who grew from the boom of generational upward mobility and urbanisation in the 80 years after the Second World War, the Bopeas are responding to something else: a crisis of what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” — and a diminishing need for everyone to be an urban creative.

For the past year, I have been investigating and decoding the experience of the downward mobility of the elite-aspirant creative class across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and China. As part of a collective of social scientists, I have been exploring optimistic alternative responses to widespread disenchantment. Contrary to the depressing “opting-out” tales of global NEETs, hikikomori and the Great Resignation, I studied people and communities finding new ways to live a fulfilling life within society.

Like the rest of their generation, the Bopeas were bred to chase a particular vision of the good life, but they now know they cannot replicate their parent’s lifestyles — waiting until their deaths to inherit. Thomas Piketty calls this the return to the “inheritance society” that has been the norm for most of history. Steve Bannon puts it more bluntly: they are “nothing but 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re better fed; they’re better clothed; they’re in better shape; they have more information than anybody in the world at any point in time, but they don’t own anything.”

Yet rather than succumbing to the doom and gloom or burning themselves out by hustling, Bopeas are developing new ways to build a life. They cultivate meaning and status in ways that expand the ideals of success beyond conventional material accumulation and instantly decaying “cool”. Moreover, while this modern serfdom may not be able to accrue capital, Bopeas are spoiled for choice in a consumer universe built by brands. They can’t buy houses in the city, but they do have disposable income and a clear idea of “how to spend it”.

But what are Bopeas? The Bopeas are diverse in demographics and geography, but united by a shared mindset. Like the creative class that now dominate our culture, they draw inspiration from the bohemian ethos of artistry, non-conformity and self-expression. At the same time, however, they are wary of the narcissistic excesses of bohemianism, and enjoy a neo-medieval peasant worldview rooted in community values, rituals and natural rhythms.

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The Bopeas don’t wear a uniform. There is no universal white sneaker choice and craft-beer calling card. Instead, it’s all about the niche, the hyper-local and the mythic. While they might be wearing an expensive French worker’s jacket bought from a nose-to-tail restaurant, they are more easily spotted by their deeds and search for harmony. Unlike their success-obsessed Yuppie and Bobo ancestors, Bopeas want to flourish holistically. They want to feel deeply in tune with their bodies and the world. They are the wild swimmers,  the sauna obsessives, and the knitting, foraging and fermenting revivalists. They’re the ones rewilding our forests and guts. They are already shaping elite culture — they’re the reason the Financial Times wants you to buy £1,225 Givenchy cargo gardening trousers.

In essence, Bopeas opt for enchantment over refinement. In an algorithmic meat market of homogenous aesthetics and lifestyles, Bopeas differentiate themselves through their intentional cultivation of harmony. While Bopeaism incarnates in individuals — Paul Kingsnorth is perhaps the Bopea made flesh — it is also an aspirational mindset. During the Covid lockdowns, for instance, many of us transfigured into sourdough Bopeas.

The Bopeas I studied are essentially united by a desire to nurture genuine connection and finding meaning in life. They care about wider societal issues such as climate change and inequality, but they are rarely overtly political. Instead, they are driven by a small-scale politics of harmony channelling their values into making a positive, sustainable impact in their immediate world through their work, social and family lives. They don’t care for empty virtue-signalling.

Bopeas want to immerse themselves in nature and quirky culture. All of them are tired of trends, off-the-shelf lifestyles, and endless inane scrolling and swiping that leaves them feeling hollow. Instead, they seek wisdom that provides lasting guidance to shape life, even if it comes from ancient practices and traditions — or even (gasp) institutional religion. There is no central inspiration hub for Bopeas. They curate their own constellation of ideas and wisdom from a dynamic fusion of writers, podcasters and micro-influencers who align with their particular Bopea passions.

Most importantly, Bopeas don’t want to do it alone. Frustrated by the loneliness of modern branded “community”, Bopeas seek the comfort of tight-knit fellowships pursuing shared projects and a soulful life comforted by real community obligation and nature. In many ways, then, the Bopeas are a kind of post-internet Arts and Crafts movement. And yet, the dark satanic mills they rebuff are not the soulless Victorian workhouses, but the design agencies and tech start-ups that inhabit the WeWorks that have colonised the very same factories. Indeed, if the Victorian backlash was ideologically led by John Ruskin and manifested by William Morris, then their Bopea spiritual successors are King Charles III and Taylor Swift.

Like Ruskin, Charles III serves as the Apex Bopea philosopher king. With his tireless environmentalism, Perennialist theology, and mystic outlook, Charles has set the agenda for a bohemian neo-medieval revolution that places harmony and ancient wisdom at the centre. As Aris Roussinos writes, as “a Christian mystic, a layer of hedgerows and protector of the soil, there is a mythic quality of identification between our King and his land which we have not experienced for some time”.

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Meanwhile, like Morris, Taylor Swift has served as an avatar of the King’s Bopea ideology. In the midst of the lockdowns, Swift used her albums Folklore and Evermore to position herself as the ultimate Bopea vessel. With her knitted cardigans, enchanted forests and magic, Swift catapulted the niche Pinterest-TikTok cottagecore aesthetic community to a global platform. By celebrating the wonders of a simple, traditional lifestyle surrounded by a bucolic paradise and manual crafts, she made the enchanted Bopea worldview sexy.

Elsewhere, Bopeaism continues to be evangelised to the masses through notable Bopea Elders. Jeremy Clarkson’s Clarkson’s Farm is now the most-viewed original series on Amazon Prime in the UK. Nick Cave has transitioned from post-punk enfant terrible to earnest coronation-attending Christian. Tilda Swinton set up a tiny Steiner school in rural Scotland where phones are banned and children must learn to care for bees. Even Carrie Johnson, with her strawberry picking and knitted blankets, has become the nation’s Bopea tradwife. These are clear signals of a subtle re-enchantment of the world — a paradoxically countercultural conservatism.

Beyond the global stage, the internet is awash with Bopea missionaries. One does not have to search too far before getting lost in the world of doomstrolling, Irish water worshipers, entrepreneurs restoring small holdings, fungi activism, and Gladstone’s foraging and wild-swimming chef many-great-granddaughter. Bopeaism is simultaneously everywhere and totally invisible to those that are not looking. Some go full Bopea and are living off the grid. Others are more likely to gentrify semi-urban spaces like Hastings or Polperro — or perhaps Bruton if there’s family money. Financially, most Bopeas often maintain more conventional urban creative industry jobs — in marketing, design or tech — but work remotely from their more affordable homes. However, the most committed enter the Bopea culture production industries, selling Bopea artefacts and services to wealthier Bopea aspirants — like Jamie and her sauna business.

What next? Will Bopeas go the same way as the hippies? Bopeaism certainly seems more robust than its ancestors. It is, after all, more than just a set of aesthetics and practices that you can trade in and out of, but rather a mindset inspired by a hunger for timelessness. It serves as the North Star of a more harmonious post-internet worldview that rises above the digitally mediated pleasure that David Courtright terms “limbic capitalism”. But if it is to survive, it must be nurtured carefully and protected from the trend-market feedback loop, lest it be bled dry and discarded.

When Richard Florida published the The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002 and anointed the Yuppie-slaying “No Collar” hipsters and Bobos, policymakers and corporate brands descended like vampires. Within two decades, the creative class has been drained of all vitality. Investment bankers now wear white sneakers. Wetherspoons sells smashed avocado muffins. Everywhere looks like an Airbnb. In such a world, Bopeaism is surely something that must be nourished and sustained — not for a generation, but for eternity.