The novel was of course J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which had the unfortunate fate — as far as the huffing parents of 1951 were concerned — of being wildly popular and extensively taught in high schools (though some teachers were admittedly fired for assigning it). To date, it has sold more than 65 million copies. That it has never fallen out of favor should not surprise us: reading it is a matter of an afternoon, and it feels at points like reading one’s own teenage diary. The main character, Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old scrawny virgin dropout in a deerstalker hat, is as queasily legible today as he ever was. In 2026, I would go so far as to say that his peculiar misanthropy, his wounded disaffection, his sentimental insincerity, is the internet’s house style.

Gen Z posters are all Salinger’s children. I suspect for a cohort with notoriously declining reading habits, Catcher is among the few “classics” they’ve touched. Its moral world is almost identical to the whinging of a Redditor: like them, Caulfield is confessional, digressive, accusatory, and self-pitying. His account of being booted out of prep school, then marauding around Manhattan in various states of desolation or drunkenness, is littered with “I means”, “and alls”, “or somethings”, and “I’m not kiddings”. He has a private taxonomy of “phonies”, and suspects, knows, that the world is rigged against him. He is a lone seer, a font of authenticity in a cruel and fake world. His delusions are now Gen Z’s.

The novel’s moral vocabulary maps clearly on to that of internet-native young people today: the worldview of TikTok, Twitter and Reddit — as well as darker, nicher places where true Holden chuds tend to congregate — is a bestiary of NPCs, normies, mids, soys, feds, goyslop and grifters. The politics and aesthetics of different corners of the internet vary wildly, but one theme is inextinguishable, whether it’s on an “Am I the Asshole” Reddit page or the comment section of a TikTok rant: the poster holds all the authenticity. Everyone else has sold out, or bought into social performance; everyone else is spiritually compromised. 

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In real life, this instinct is correct often enough: adults are grotesque, like the novel’s “perverts and morons” who cross-dress or spit water in each other’s faces, visible to Holden in the windows of the midtown hotel he runs away to after being kicked out of school. He’s also right that teachers often talk nonsense, expounding theories of the grown-up world which sound borderline fascist to teenaged ears; his history teacher Spencer bores him that “Life is a game, boy… that one plays according to the rules”. Seeing such aphorisms for the pap that they are doesn’t take extraordinary wisdom, but a dash of cynicism makes teenagers — and many of 2026’s failed-to-launch adults — feel like prophets. 

Adolescent eye-rolling is a shortcut to genuine insight, and many of the internet’s favorite voices are suspended in that sighing phase well into their forties. When Catcher’s Holden does it, we read it as the trademark of a developing mind: though he correctly diagnoses the status games of adults, the snobberies of the rich and the pretensions of the charming, we guess that when he’s older, when he’s well, he’ll learn to cope with these truths like the rest of us. But the internet feels no need to graduate beyond cynicism. 

Gen Z is the worst culprit: my generation — not just its blackpilled factions — is obsessed with exposing hierarchies or cabals, whether they relate to the sexual marketplace, the algorithm, Aipac, or nepo connections. We grew up in the shadow of 9/11, in the rubble of its attendant conspiracy theories; our first memorable news cycle involved a global financial crisis followed by years of political polarization, cynical electioneering and, when we were finally flying the nest, the crippling isolation of a pandemic. We were primed to crouch, to second-guess. Catcher, too, lies in the foothills of this paranoia. Everywhere Holden looks, phonies are “coming in the goddam window”; Hollywood, military men and parents are all agents conspiring against him. No wonder he looks so good for 75.

Today, the standard pose of the internet is pessimism packaged in irony. In 1951, this ennui was not yet the mass public style of teenagers. The novel’s swings between tear-streaked earnestness and knee-jerk deflection are the bread and butter of contemporary posting: Holden tells us he “feels depressed” or “went crazy”, then shows us something bitterly funny or gross. Even his red cap functions as a sort of edgelord avatar; it’s not his deerstalker but a “people-shooting hat”, he tells his dorm neighbor. Like an ironic gaming handle or meme-referencing profile picture, the hat is a costume of alienation. 

Holden’s great soft spot is the innocence of childhood, which he knows is slipping through his fingers as the adult world approaches. In some ways, the sentimentality of kids in Catcher is like the internet’s cat: the unknowing ball of tenderness that represents “me if you even care” is as sacred a symbol as the six-year-old boy Holden spots walking down Broadway with his parents, being ignored but mindlessly singing, in a sort of nursery rhyme, the Robert Burns poem that gives the novel its title. He says the sight “made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed any more.” Salinger’s novel is about the uneasy transition between states of innocence and experience — the blank goodness of little children and the “phony” cynicism of adults. This, too, is why the internet loves cat videos: they are small oases in a land of division and gloom, talismans that keep out cheerless reality. You’ll notice I’m suggesting social media resembles the psyche of a fictional mentally ill teenager. This is deliberate.

Salinger once admitted that Catcher is about a “boyhood [that] was very much the same” as his own; “it was a great relief telling people about it”, he said. What he did not prophesy was that the feelings of his deeply unwell antihero would become a permanent cultural stance. Staring down the barrel of an impending depressive collapse, Holden insists he’s simply “going through a phase right now”. He cycles through a clutch of fantasies over a single weekend — he is a shot-up mob victim, a suave lounge lizard, a cabin-dwelling deaf-mute. Yet today, Caulfield’s volatile sense of self seems a little too familiar. These days, even fully fledged adulthood is pitched as a series of phases on an unending journey of growth and self-discovery.

Analogs of Holden can be found everywhere online — many twice his age. They, too, vault between aesthetic, ideological, political, wellness and spiritual phases. So did Salinger himself, a dabbler variously in Sufism, macrobiotics, Dianetics and Zen Buddhism (he was said to have brought reading lists on the subject to dates, which I’m afraid automatically limits my ability to like him personally). This is another of the novel’s great predictions: that more people would become experimental and unstable, trying on identities, cures and postures like Mr Benn in the costume shop. In Catcher it is impossible to imagine Holden settling into contented adult conformity; many modern readers might see his crisis not for the psychological collapse it is, but “the rational response to living under [insert complaint here: capitalism, the patriarchy, tyrannical colonialist curricula etc. etc.]”. 

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By Poppy Sowerby

Because the novel is about a teenage boy, his preoccupations are timeless. He reads a magazine then worries that he might have “lousy hormones”; he worries about when he’ll lose his virginity, about whether his peers are outpacing him. He acts like an expert: “Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy.” Really, like lots of dating gurus online, he knows naff all. Today he’d be fretting about low-T, cortisol, canthal tilts; he’d learn about sex not through the tall tales of his dorm-mates but from hardcore porn. In the novel he has a young prostitute sent to his hotel room: he feels aroused, scared, sentimental and disgusted. How like the porn-soaked discourse of the modern internet, where girls are mysterious and maddening, the cause of both rage and guilt. The difference is that in the novel, our sentimental screw-up is alone, and drives himself to lonely destruction. Today, whole forums would open up to counsel or compound his suffering. 

As in most spaces online, Catcher is not the testimony of a predator; he is more familiar and pathetic than that, a boy terrified by a sexual world he longs to be initiated into. Every time he sees “fuck you” graffitied on a wall, he longs to erase it. Once, at his little sister’s school, he does, so the children don’t “worry about it for a couple of days”. Really, he’s reacting to his own horror. He’s happiest in the company of his “kid sister”, or in a snowball fight. Like Zoomers today, exposed to the adult internet, he must feel he’s grown up too fast.

Catcher is not a period piece about mid-century adolescence; it’s more like a prehistory of the online male voice. Social media amplifies the loud and the self-obsessed, so its stars are necessarily teenagers, if only spiritually. “Phonies” are today’s NPCs; “hot-shots” are our nepo babies or chads. The swaggadocio of the streamer is Holden, holder of zero life experience, hoping to “wave a buck under [a] head-waiter’s nose… in New York, boy, money really talks”. But his real mission, before he is committed to an institution at the novel’s close, is to preserve innocence itself, catching children playing in his imaginary field of rye before they fall off a cliff. 

In 2026, equivalent solutions to internal decrepitude are everywhere on the internet: young men are called to save morality or humanity or the West. The prescribed morality varies but its ingredients are familiar: mending oneself is a civilizational mission and, like Holden’s child-saving fantasy, it counteracts perceived corruption — for example, of porn (among no-fappers), of seed oils (among clean-eaters) or of emasculating feminism (among redpill types). The instinct of many young men online is to transmute personal brokenness into evidence of a broken world: loneliness becomes decadence; mediocrity becomes victimhood of a conspiracy. In The Catcher in the Rye, that sort of thinking gets Holden sent away to the funny farm. In 2026, such delusions of grandeur are a mark of sanity.

In the world that porn has built, young men’s efforts are literally infertile: explosions of violence or otherwise that yield a big, pleasurable nothing. Hatfield’s anti-porn crusade paradoxically embodied this fundamental impotence.

The man was clearly unstable, and his manifesto, with its frequent references to knowledge of secrets that remain “almost entirely hidden from people,” betrays delusions of grandeur. But the manifesto is also of cultural significance, considering the ascendancy of the incel ideology among swathes of the online Right and the percolation of many similar ideas about men, women, and dating in the mainstream. Its Right-Left ideological flattening — Hatfield was both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist; he rails against transgenderism and Western cultural supremacy  — is significant, too, representing the bitter end of Christian metaphysics, even on the Right. 

Hatfield’s manifesto is the first, but possibly not the last, appearance of hypergamy, a new buzzword of the online Right, in a mass-shooting. The word has its origins in an Indian caste law that required women to marry men of the same or higher caste and, in modern parlance, means “dating up.” The desire to “date up” could generically be assumed to be shared by both men and women — aspirational mating is a universal human urge, after all — and to include desires for partner-benefits like social status and finances. But in today’s manosphere and as embraced by Hatfield, it concerns only physical attractiveness. In Hatfield’s definition, this is the only quality that matters when a woman chooses whom to have sex with — which she can do freely in contemporary culture. He defines it as a “phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically [sic] and culturally to just one male.”

As the theory goes, a man’s height and physical attractiveness are signs of “health” and “genetic quality” which are desirable qualities in a mate because they suggest healthier offspring. Hatfield is cribbing from evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are more invested in any individual child than men are, since men can have hundreds of children, and women only a few. Thus women are supposedly especially motivated by attractiveness — which signals health, meaning a better chance for survival of the offspring — in their choice of sexual partners. Women are also choosier about partners than men are for the same reason: the sum number of chances a woman has to pass on her genes is very limited; men have hundreds, or theoretically even thousands, of such chances, no childbearing or nurturing work required. 

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By Valerie Stivers

When you combine the female preference for tall, attractive men with a liberal sexual culture, according to the incel theory, you get a situation in which tall, attractive men are having lots of sex with multiple female partners, and the other men are having no sex at all. This, supposedly, has nothing to do with the men’s habits, personalities, or physical presentation, but is purely genetic. In the “hypergamy state,” as Hatfield writes, the “common man” is hopelessly “cast out of the divine realm of truly intimate love and attraction” through no fault of his own. “The only things that matter when it comes to experiencing love as a male … are the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” 

All this takes many wild leaps, but it is to some extent — and more than Hatfield actually references — based on theories of evolutionary biology and psychology that are becoming increasingly popular. One such popular, biology-based idea about the psychology of dating is the conviction among very-online Zoomer young women that the birth control pill “makes you choose the wrong guys.” A groundbreaking work on the matter is evolutionary psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill’s book, How the Pill Changes Everything, which focuses on the Pill but also provides a fascinating walkthrough of the evolutionary view of modern dating. According to Hill, the preference for healthy offspring is — and in many more ways than Hatfield’s manifesto suggests — encouraged by female biology, and gene-maxxing in fact does play a significant role in women’s partner choices, though the standard seems more likely to be highly complex issues of genetic compatibility, which is predicted by sexual attraction, rather than brute height-and-looks measurement on some objective scale. Hill would also argue that social and psychological traits such as female partner-choosiness are hardwired by evolution. 

Hill’s research doesn’t support incel conclusions throughout. She has found that women in the pre-ovulation phase of their menstrual cycles are more likely to choose men they find sexier or better-looking. Post-ovulation, the preference switches to men they find rich, nice, or reliable. Her argument is that since hormonal contraception sets female hormones at a permanent “post-ovulation” state, it may be skewing partner choice toward provider types,  and away from the men women are most attracted to. The skew is bad in that it affects birth rates and marital happiness, since couples who have good sexual chemistry also seem to have better child-health outcomes (due to genetic compatibility) and lower divorce rates. Given that around 30% of women in their 20s are on hormonal birth control of some kind, with the share presumably higher among the sexually active, many women in the dating pool, artificially influenced by hormones, in fact should be seeking personality over looks. 

Still, the underlying premise that sexual behavior follows rules of hard science is shared by both men and women. And distorted through a million video clips and Reddit threads, such material could make the position of short, unattractive men seem desperate indeed. Hatfield calls it the “ghastly state of things that the Western world has found itself in” and a “situation of terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation.” 

In his theory, this problem for men is particular to the modern world, because while hypergamy ruled in the state of nature, the misty dawn of agriculture and civilization somehow naturally produced monogamy, supposedly a great leveler against the tyranny of female choice. He discounts or is unaware that Christianity was the foundation of monogamy in the West, and that it substantially improved women’s cultural position. Instead, he views monogamy as a spontaneous “stabilizing” development that served the purpose of bringing formerly discarded men into useful social participation by giving them something to live for — subservient wives. “Having gained secure and steady access to intimacy through the institution of monogamy,” he writes, “these men could now experience copulation and romantic love, thereby attaining self-actualization, something which was previously inaccessible to them.” 

Now, Hatfield says, capitalism has eroded monogamy, pushing women into the workforce and giving them the freedom to return to their preferred state of hypergamy. Hence, his call to social violence seeks to end “high capitalism,” and to return women to enforced monogamy with the type of men he refers to as “common” — not tall and attractive. The manifesto concludes with a list of 12 categories of  “class-A targets” that would hasten this state of affairs; section V — yes, he uses Roman numerals — addresses targeting the headquarters of players in the porn industry. “Be unflinching, go forth and KILL THEM ALL!” he commands.

It’s nothing new to say that incels hate and dehumanize women, viewing them purely as sex objects. A description of one woman as a “vaguely female-looking clump of humanoid biomass” in Hatfield’s manifesto is fairly typical. Nor is it new to say that for all their talk of love and intimacy, what such men are really focused on isn’t even sex, but instead status and self-worth. Hatfield’s rant is clearly envious of the kind of dominant man he claims to despise. His fever-dream descriptions of the vile and disgusting life of pleasure and bliss lived out by attractive men are almost touching in their transparency. “And let nobody convince you,” he writes, “that the more wealthy of these males do not occasionally indulge in the blackest depths of depravity and twisted perversions, together with countless attractive women of differing backgrounds, within various orgies and other such hideous events, that take place in their skyscrapers, mansions, and at many luxury hotels in major cities.” Sounds terrible! 

Moreover, the length of the section in the manifesto where Hatfield responds “in dialectical format” to “objections” that he could get a girlfriend if he just changed his behavior, suggests that the whole thing is a desperate cope to avoid accountability, and that the incel project really is just the Right-wing version of progressive victim culture. 

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By Sohrab Ahmari

However, the fully consumerist, materialist understanding of love and dating is, to some extent, a new and unwelcome development. Materialism, according to natural-law philosopher Heinrich Rommen, “regards man as nothing more than a highly evolved animal” and puts “in place of a personal God … a doctrine of impersonal eternal force or of perpetually recurrent changes of matter in accordance with the blind necessity of the laws of nature.” Marxism is one form of materialist metaphysics — society is determined by “the conditions of production” — though Marx, unacknowledged, retained much of Christendom’s old framework of good and evil. What Hatfield calls “biological consciousness” is another kind of materialism — everything happening between men and women is in accordance with our lower animal natures. 

That such a philosophy serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it. 

In this sense, Hatfield is one of an emerging cohort of young people — and not only men — committed to violence for causes that are either overtly or covertly in search of self-esteem. The confusing new reality in which the political sides seem to be getting mixed up is often attributed to “internet extremism” looking the same in any flavor, but it actually represents a deeper convergence. Is Tyler Robinson — the pro-trans youth accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk — on the Right or Left? It’s hard to tell. Is Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot an insurance executive, a Left-wing freedom fighter? Is he any different than the failed Seth Scott Hatfield, his Right-wing-ish doppelgänger? And don’t the armed or violent ICE protesters in Minneapolis feel like they’re on the same continuum, despite their arguments of righteous civil disobedience? 

The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless. 

Given the magnificent performance of the stock, it should be little surprise that many in Reddit’s “r/rycey” community share the view of the user “globalpm-retired”. He or she put it plainly in an update two weeks ago: “I am not selling any shares, I hold it like it was one of my children.”

Every part of this story feels quintessentially American. But the memes aren’t of Joe Exotic, but Roger Moore. The man they call Turbo isn’t a silent-retreat-attending founder, but an ex-BP executive living in St John’s Wood. And the company is far from a NASDAQ darling, but a stalwart of the pale, stale, FTSE100. What these devotees call Rycey, you and I would call Rolls-Royce.

The name still conjures polished wood, hand-stitched piping, and the hum of an electric clock at 60mph: the company Charles Rolls and Henry Royce envisioned when they met at Manchester’s Midland Hotel in 1904. But today, it makes no cars, having sold the brand to BMW in the late Nineties. Instead, it builds the kind of technology nations depend on but barely notice.

First, the jet engine: specifically, the advanced gas turbines that power modern commercial aviation. The company has dominated this space since the late Sixties, when it developed the RB211, its first engine built specifically for a new generation of wide-body aircraft (twin-aisle planes designed for long-haul travel). The RB211 evolved into the Trent. This is the flagship of Rolls-Royce’s current fleet of engines, and it has powered aircraft carrying over 3.5 billion passengers.

These engines are so commonplace we forget they are miracles. The XWB, the most advanced in the Trent series, inhales 1.3 tonnes of air per second — a squash court’s worth — while each of its 68 high-pressure turbine blades generates around 900 horsepower. That’s the equivalent of the entire Formula 1 grid, tripled, with extra cars to spare, strapped beneath an airplane wing.

Rolls-Royce is one of only three companies on Earth that are capable of building these engines. The other two are American, making this one of Britain’s few genuinely sovereign capabilities. They are our largest high-value manufactured goods export, generating $27.4 billion annually: roughly 1% of GDP.

The company’s reach, however, extends far beyond commercial aviation. Its engines lift the F-35B, the only fifth-generation fighter jet capable of vertical takeoff, as well as the Eurofighter Typhoon, Europe’s air superiority workhorse. Rolls-Royce will also keep the B-52, NATO’s largest heavy bomber, flying into the 2050s.

At sea, the company drives the world’s most advanced warships — from the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers to the USS Zumwalt, the US Navy’s experimental destroyer. This ship was recently pictured test-firing a directed-energy weapon known as Helios — though the specifics of how, and even if, its Rolls-Royce MT30 engines power the system remains classified.

Yet, the company’s most vital contribution to national security lies beneath the sea. In 1965, as Harold Wilson entered Downing Street and Rubber Soul hit the charts, the PWR1, Britain’s first naval nuclear reactor, went critical. Since then, Rolls-Royce has designed three generations of pressurized-water reactors, the core (quite literally) of the UK’s continuous at-sea deterrent.

Rolls-Royce remains at the frontier of nuclear engineering. The latest generation of its reactors will power Australia’s new AUKUS-class submarines, while its Small Modular Reactor program, launched in 2021, will adapt submarine-proven technology to use on land. It’s the only company in the SMR race that has actually built and operated this kind of reactor before.

Most of this power will go to homes: each of Rolls-Royce’s proposed 470-megawatt SMRs will be able to power around a million of them. But in an era where new energy demand is being driven less by households and more by the demands of hyperscale computing, the company couldn’t be better positioned: already, it’s the world’s third-largest supplier of emergency power systems to data centers.

For security reasons, its clients in this space remain undisclosed. But one is described in official materials only as a “well-known provider of search engine, web portal, and email services”. If you need to Google it, you probably already have your answer.

Despite all this, Rolls-Royce remains oddly absent from the public imagination. Perhaps that’s because we expect the companies of Britain’s future to look new, and different: not the fourth or fifth reinvention of a 100-year-old company that has experienced its fair share of challenges.

Take the RB211: an engine so advanced it bankrupted the company in 1971, after costing $7 billion in today’s money to develop. Rolls-Royce was nationalized, only clawing its way back to private markets in 1987. Three decades later, the Trent 1000, designed for the Boeing 787 dreamliner, ran into critical durability issues, forcing an expensive redesign and a public dispute with British Airways.

To solve its financial problems, Rolls-Royce perfected a model they call power by the hour. Instead of simply selling the engines outright, their products today are sold on a subscription basis, whereby customers make payments based on their usage.

In theory, it’s brilliant. Instead of making money only when an engine is sold, Rolls-Royce keeps earning for years. For example, the Trent 700, a three-decade-old engine, still generates revenue. Airlines keep flying it, and Rolls-Royce keeps maintaining it under long-term contracts.

However, if you wanted to design a business model to implode during a global pandemic, you’d struggle to do better. When global aviation ground to a halt in 2020, so did Rolls-Royce’s revenue, taking the company into its second existential crisis.

Emergency measures kept it alive, but the rebuild would, it was assumed, take years. It’s here we return to r/rycey, and to the man they call Turbo: the ex-BP executive Tufan Erginbilgiç, who has been the Rolls-Royce CEO since January 2023.

US tech companies are now so culturally dominant that our image of a CEO is almost entirely Silicon Valley-coded: athleisure by day, Loro Piana by night; a rotation of niche hobbies, and a faintly (or not so faintly) messianic presence. Despite the “Turbo” nickname, this most certainly is not Erginbilgiç.

We’ll never see Turbo writing Substack essays about the future of energy or publishing books about the fate of the West. Instead, when Erginbilgiç makes headlines, it’s usually for his brutal honesty. Most famously, in a 2022 all-hands meeting, he called Rolls-Royce a “burning platform”.

On arrival, Turbo moved fast. He replaced the company’s heads of civil aerospace and defense, and he brought in BP allies Helen McCabe (CFO) and Nicola Grady-Smith (Chief Transformation Officer): both firm favorites of r/rycey. Entire divisions — electric flight, fuel cells, and direct air capture — were sold off or shut down. Prices went up. Customer contracts were renegotiated.

Last month came the 2024 results: a financial blowout. Profits surged by 57% to £2.5 billion. Operating margins hit 13.8%. Free cash flow nearly doubled to £2.4 billion. Key turnaround targets — originally set for 2027 — are now on track to be hit this year. The company also announced a £1 billion share buyback and reinstated its first dividend since Covid.

Yet beyond the r/rycey subreddit and the writings of a handful of financial commentators, the company is little-discussed. Perhaps it’s understandable. This is not a charismatic founder story, a moonshot bet, or a desperate Hail Mary. Rather, it is a brutal return to business fundamentals: cut costs, raise margins, sell more.

And in an era where tech companies live and die by narrative, Rolls-Royce refuses to play the game of hype. According to the company website, their mission is to “build a high-performing, competitive and resilient business with profitable growth; grow sustainable free cash flow; and build a strong balance sheet and grow shareholder returns”. Not exactly Mars by 2028.

Yet, Rolls-Royce embodies everything Britain claims to want — a homegrown industrial champion, a provider of sovereign capability, a builder of the hardest things in the world. Not vaporware, not hype, but physical technology of weight and consequence, positioned at the intersection of the defining forces of the next decade: energy and war.

While most moonshots exist as demos and press releases, Rolls-Royce is actually building leading-edge nuclear reactors, laser-firing warships, and micro-reactors designed for space. Yet Britain, fixated on the next big thing, refuses to look up.

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By Ian Birrell

A week after Rolls-Royce’s blowout results, the Ministry of Defense announced a new partnership: not with a British firm, but with the American defense startup Anduril. The announcement caused a stir not for its substance, but for its wording: the company was described not as American, but as “Anglo-American”. The basis for this claim appears to be nothing more than the presence of a UK subsidiary. In the absence of homegrown industrial champions, the Ministry of Defense felt the need to invent one.

But the ability to build great things isn’t something Britain has lost. Instead, it’s something we’ve chosen to overlook. This is because Britain’s industrial struggles aren’t just about the obvious — energy costs, planning permission, regulatory inertia — but about a deeper failure of political imagination.

In every economic roundtable featuring ministers or government advisers, the same question is, at some point, inevitably asked: What would it take to create a trillion-dollar company in the UK? But before we even ask that, perhaps we should start with a simpler one: If we had one, would we even notice?

Simone Weil wrote: “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them, but by waiting for them.” And yet, when we imagine Britain’s economic future, we picture something new, disruptive, exciting. Not a century-old company with a CEO whose favorite word is “efficiency”.

But efficiency built the modern world. And for those who want Britain to succeed, the real failure isn’t a lack of ambition, but a failure of attention.

It is no exaggeration to say that soon almost everything we see or hear online will be synthetic — that is, generated or manipulated by AI. Machines that can “learn” to do almost anything when ‘trained’ on the right data — and they’ve never had access to more data, nor so much power to churn through it all. Some experts estimate that within 5-7 years, 90% of all video content online will be synthetic. Before long, anyone with a smartphone will be able to make Hollywood level AI-generated content.

One synthetic-text generating model can already generate articles that appear to have been written by a human. AI can be trained to clone someone’s voice even if they’re already dead: an old recording of JFK’s voice has been used to make a clip of the former president reading the Book of Genesis. AI trained on a dataset of human faces can generate convincing fake images of people who do not exist, and it can be taught to insert people into photographs and videos they were not originally in. One YouTuber is working on a project to insert actor Nicholas Cage into every movie ever made.

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All this sounds weird at worst and hilarious at best, but this technology has a dark side. It will, inevitably, be misused, and for that most obvious of male-driven reasons. It was reported last week that the messaging app Telegram is hosting a “deepfake pornography bot,” which allows users to generate images of naked women. According to the report, there are already over 100,000 such images being circulated in public Telegram channels; considering that they are almost certainly being shared privately too, the actual number in existence is likely much higher. The women who appear to feature in this cache of publicly-shared fake porn are mostly private individuals rather than celebrities. More disturbingly, the images also include deepfake nudes of underage girls.

Henry Ajder, the lead author of the report, told me that “the discovery of the bot and its surrounding ecosystem was a disturbing, yet sadly unsurprising, confirmation that the creation and sharing of malicious deepfakes is growing rapidly.” When he wrote to Telegram to request a takedown, he “received no response”. The bot and the fake pornography — including that of minors — is still live at time of writing.

Deepfake pornography first emerged less than three years ago, when an anonymous user started posting it on Reddit. He later revealed his methodology: he was using open-source AI software to insert celebrity faces into pornographic films, by training AI on images and videos of his intended target. The end result was surprisingly convincing. When other Redditors started making their own deepfake pornography and news of this AI-assisted community broke to the world, there was a furore: Reddit shut down the community and banned deepfake pornography. But the genie was out of the bottle.

Since its early days on Reddit, an entire deepfake pornography ecosystem has developed online. With a few clicks, it is possible to access deepfake pornography of every (female) celebrity imaginable, from Ivanka Trump and Michelle Obama to Ann Coulter. And celebrities are not the only targets. AI can clone any woman: all that is needed is some training data, and the rapid acceleration of the technology means that less and less training data is required. These days a single picture, a few seconds of a voice recording, or a single video would be enough.

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The tools to make synthetic media are becoming more and more accessible. Anyone can try to create their own by using free software; support communities online explain how to use it. It is even possible to buy “learn to deepfake” courses, or to commission a “deepfake artist” for a bespoke “creation” from little as $20. Recently,entrepreneurs have begun to wrap up the technology in easy-to-use app interfaces, so millions of consumers will be able to experiment with making their own AI-generated fake content.

One such app launched last year, calling itself “DeepNude”. It allowed users to upload photos of a woman to generate a deepfake image of her naked, and for a fee of $50, users could pay to remove a watermark so that the image would look authentic. (Because the underlying AI was developed on training data of female bodies, the app only worked on women.) When the DeepNude was released, the demand was so high that the app’s servers crashed under a stampede of downloads. Facing a barrage of negative press, its developers eventually took their creation offline, saying “the world is not ready for DeepNude app”. Weeks later, they quietly sold their software in an anonymous auction for $30,000.

While deepfake pornography ostensibly seems to be a “woman’s issue”, it provides an early and worrying case study for how synthetic media could be weaponised against us all. It is inevitable, for example, that deepfakes will be used as a potent new tool of identity theft and fraud.

Last week, federal prosecutors in the US revealed the case of a Californian widow who was scammed out of nearly $300,000 by an unidentified overseas con man who romanced her using deepfake videos in which he posed as the superintendent of the US Naval Academy. The widow, only identified as “M.M.”, thought she was building a relationship with an admiral named “Sean Buck”, who told her he was stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. They communicated for months via Skype, during which “Buck” always appeared dressed in his military uniform. According to the prosecutors, “While M.M. believed she was communicating with [Buck] via live chat on Skype, what she was seeing were actually manipulated [deepfake] clips of preexisting publicly-available video of the real Admiral Buck, and not the live video chats that M.M. believed them to be.”

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The costs of identity theft and fraud are vast and on the rise. According to an annual report by Javelin Strategy & Research, identity fraud-related losses grew 15% in 2019 to $16.9 billion — in the US alone. This is largely due to the fact that financial institutions’ methods of identifying and responding to fraud are no match for criminals’ high-tech schemes to steal money, which increasingly incorporate deepfakes.

Of course, they will not only be utilised against consumers, but businesses too. The first serious case of deepfake business fraud emerged last year when the Wall Street Journal reported that a British energy company lost €250,000 when scammers used AI to clone the voice of the company’s CEO to demand (over a phone call) that the money transfer be made.

Libel, identity theft and fraud are nothing new — but the potency of such ventures will increase exponentially as synthetic media becomes prolific. Because of its unique ability to “clone”, AI presents a dire threat to an individual’s right to privacy and security. At the moment it is almost impossible to distinguish between authentic and synthetic media, and the quality of the latter is improving. This, then, is the alarming reality: a world in which our identities can be “hijacked” by almost anyone and used against us.

We have reached the critical moment to set standards — to create ethical and legal frameworks — to define how synthetic media should be created, labelled and identified. Given that the AI behind synthetic media is still nascent, we still have (a little) time to influence the effect this technology will have on our societies and the individuals within them. Too often we build exciting technology without considering how it might amplify the worst parts of human nature, or hand weapons to the cruellest impulses.

The shop was the Games Workshop on Tottenham Court Road; the habit was painting plastic spacemen. As a grown man of 36, I was painting little sci-fi figures again, just as I had been when I was 12. Hello everyone; my name is Tom, and I’m a Warhammer addict. 

This means I like to spend hours at a time painting tiny, intricately detailed miniatures with some ludicrous name like Mortarion, Daemon Primarch of the Death Guard, or Belial, Grand Master of the Deathwing, and it is as though I am cut off from the cares of the world. I just care about the paint running off the brush, and the angle of the light. I won’t check my phone, or think about work, or worry about my kids or the coronavirus or Brexit. It’s an addiction, one my wife tolerates but can never understand, but a healthy one. It gives me access to a sort of Zen stillness and flow; I have discovered a genuine skill of which I am fiercely (if abashedly) proud.

I can trace the exact course of my resurgent problem. It was an indirect route, via another old nerdy habit of mine; building model aeroplanes. We took the kids to the RAF Museum in Hendon in early 2017. We wandered around looking at the Vulcan bomber and the Short Sunderland and so on; I mildly disturbed my wife with my ability to name almost every aeroplane on sight (although I got the Curtis P-40 Kittyhawk mixed up with the Hawker Typhoon. I’m still embarrassed about it). The eldest kid, three at the time, got upset about not being allowed to sit in cockpits, but I was enthralled.

On the way out via the gift shop, as a bit of nostalgia, I bought an Airfix kit with glue and a few basic paints and paintbrushes. My wife went out one evening and I started sticking it together. It turned out to be bloody difficult. I’d forgotten all the stuff you need; for instance, an anglepoise lamp. I ended up sitting at my kitchen table wearing a mountaineering head-torch and I looked genuinely insane. But it turned out to be a gateway drug. 

For those of you following this micro-saga, my 1st airfix kit in 25yrs is complete & I feel PRETTY GOOD ABOUT IT. Only buggered up one decal pic.twitter.com/ib0lpZQ0J4

— Tom Chivers (@TomChivers) February 12, 2017

A few months later, in a local toy shop, buying a Brio locomotive for my son, I found a Warhammer 40K starter kit; three little one-inch-high soldiers and, again, the necessary paints and brushes. After that things quickly got out of hand. Second-hand miniatures off eBay kept turning up in the post; I’d rush to the door to intercept them so I didn’t have to explain why I’d bought something called an “Interrogator-Chaplain in Terminator armour” or a “Lord of Contagion”.

Have I lost you, yet? Perhaps I ought to jump back a bit in time here. In 1975, three young men, John Peake, Ian Livingstone, and Steve Jackson, started a business called Games Workshop. Its initial success was as the first European distributor of Dungeons & Dragons, but in 1983, they created their own game, Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Like D&D, it involved elves and goblins and so on and rolling dice to see how much damage you did. But where D&D involved little groups of warriors completing quests, Warhammer gave you whole armies; you and an opponent would line your miniatures up and do battle, taking turns to fire your catapults or charge your cavalry.

It was all very cod-Tolkien – noble elves and stalwart dwarves, savage orcs and wise mages – but with a difference in tone: the Warhammer world was doomed. The elves, dwarves and the human Empire fought to hold back the forces of destruction, as in Tolkien; but unlike the broadly hopeful if elegiac tales of Middle-Earth, in Warhammer, the bad guys were not going to be stopped.

Then, in 1987, came Warhammer 40,000. It was, essentially, the Fantasy Battle ported into a science-fiction setting: “Eldar” instead of elves, “orks” instead of orcs. And it took the bleakness and turned it up to 11. This was, remember, the 1980s, the time of Judge Dredd and other darkly satirical sci-fi; but this really went all-out. If you’ve ever heard sci-fi described as “grimdark”, that is a direct reference to Warhammer 40K, and its tagline: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” 

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I don’t think I can do justice to the backstory here, but, in essence, the galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man is a fascistic, backwards, hate-filled hive of xenophobia, obsessed with racial purity and fearful of innovation. Genetically engineered super-warriors slaughter millions in the name of the God-Emperor; a brutal Inquisition tortures anyone suspected of heresy; ordinary people live brief, grim lives as slave workers in violent megacities, or conscripted as cannon-fodder for the Imperium’s endless wars. The regime is fairly accurately described as “Catholic Space Nazis”. 

And, for the avoidance of doubt, those are the good guys. And, again, they’re losing. 

Obviously, I love it. 

Like Fantasy Battle, 40K involves moving little miniatures around on a scenery-covered tabletop. You might be playing as Space Marines (the aforementioned super-soldiers) against an opponent playing Orks; you might have guns with a 24” range, say, and when it’s your turn you roll dice to see if they hit their enemies, and then again to see if they hurt them or if it bounces off their armour. Or they charge into combat and try to hit each other with hilariously over-the-top weapons like chainsaw swords or massive electrified hammers. You can play any mission or scenario you like, from “the winner is whoever kills all the other dudes first” to complex capture-the-flag type situations.

A friend who plays more tabletop games than I do tells me that — in terms of the mechanics — as tabletop games go, it’s middling. It’s kind of fiddly; you have to roll a lot of dice to find out if anything happens and the rules can be confusing. Others, such as the Star Wars X-Wing tabletop game, are much more streamlined.

But the point of the Warhammer games is that they’re not just games. The point is that they’re a hobby. The miniatures come unpainted and unassembled; you have to paint them yourself, and some people do it with astonishing skill. If you want to play, certainly at any Games Workshop store but at most organised events too, you need to have painted them – it’s fine to paint them badly, but grey plastic is frowned upon. The game is only one part of a whole lifestyle; there’s a huge amount of fiction, there are video games of varying quality, beautifully made fan-art, painting competitions, and massive festivals, although the latter, obviously, are getting cancelled.

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And the universe is a mad grand-guignol festival of bloody excess, all towers of skulls and shrieking daemons and psychic superheroes; vast spaceships fighting Patrick O’Brian-style broadside-battles in space or gigantic war-robots with gatling guns the size of skyscrapers. But it’s also a rich and detailed backdrop, perfect for telling stories against. Your little characters in their little battle fit into it neatly: you can have your religious-fanatic Sisters of Battle holding an Imperial shrine against the plague-spreading heretics of the Death Guard, or your slavering xenomorph-like tyranid aliens overrunning a last stand of terrified Imperial Guard, bayonets fixed to their cheap, inadequate rifles, their commissar threatening to execute any man who runs.

Games Workshop has had its ups and downs over the last 40 years. It expanded hugely in its first two decades, but the internet, rival games like Magic: The Gathering, and its own bad behaviour – secrecy, overzealous defence of its copyrights, refusal to listen to its fans – led to a collapse in profits in the first years of the 21st century. But the company has changed. It ended Fantasy Battle and released a follow-up, Age of Sigmar, which had some teething troubles but is now much loved; its eighth edition of 40K streamlined the game significantly; and it opened a community website specifically to let fans share ideas and grievances.

Its stores are one of the few remaining high-street successes, because they don’t really exist to sell miniatures but to provide hubs for local gaming communities. If you’d bought a grand’s worth of shares in the company in 2014, they’d have been worth £14,000 in February. (The coronavirus, inevitably, has hit it, but no worse than the rest of the stock market.)

I don’t play much; only half a dozen times or so since I started again, and one of those was against my sister, who took pity on me. It’s the painting that I enjoy. I think it fills a similar space, psychologically, to knitting, or jogging, or gardening: it requires the absolute attention of one part of your mind, while letting the rest of it wander. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts, and focus. Hours can go by. It soothes the soul; problems that seem insurmountable when you start appear, by the time you switch off the anglepoise and put away the brushes, not solved, but somehow solvable. Best of all, I’ve got pretty good.

Just tweeting this so I can link to it! pic.twitter.com/Kjvsku3reI

— Tom Chivers (@TomChivers) March 16, 2020

It’s not perfect, as a hobby. It’s bloody expensive, for a start (£90!?); and as it’s got bigger, it’s become harder for Games Workshop to maintain the sly, satirical nature; it’s a gigantic business now, and playing it straight sells more. But traces of the old black comedy remain, especially in the gurgling, foetid troops of the plague-god Nurgle, and the cheerfully malevolent orks with their junkyard tanks and comically oversize guns. Besides, spending £50 on some minis that take you 20 hours to paint is probably good value for money, and they’re of incredible quality, all made in Nottingham where the business has its base; it’s a huge, global British success story.

And the best thing of all is its community. It’s so wholesome – hilariously so, given the spectacularly un-wholesome subject matter. The tendency of online communities (from Star Wars to Young Adult fiction to, weirdly, knitting) to turn toxic has been well-documented; gatekeeping and purity spirals. But, at least in the Reddit forums I spend time on, the Warhammer community is gentle and kind. There’s something deeply heartwarming about someone writing in the comments underneath a picture of Abbadon the Despoiler, Chaos Lord of the Black Legion, saying “I love how you’ve got the skulls looking so clean and realistic! Care to share your recipe?” When newbies tentatively show off their first models — blotchy thick paint, mould-lines still visible — experienced painters share helpful tips (“two thin coats!”) and make supportive noises. It’s a male-dominated hobby, predictably, but very welcoming to the many women who do play and paint. 

I don’t know what it is about it that keeps it so friendly. One possibility is the absolute ban on any political discussion: I once shared what seemed to me an interesting post about why the universe was more engaging than the Star Wars one, and was quickly but kindly told to take it down because it included some very minor hypotheses about the political implications. The complete absence of any discussion of Trump, Brexit, or any other hot-button issue might be why everything seems so civil. Or perhaps it’s just that everyone gets their aggression out by shooting lascannons at the enemy’s Keeper of Secrets so they don’t need to scream at each other online, I don’t know.

Whatever the reason, though, I am glad to have it in my life. Community and social contact is going to be at a premium for the next few months; having a bunch of like-minded nerds online telling each other that they’re doing nice work seems like a good start, even if we’re not supposed to meet up to play it. Besides, self-isolation comes easily when you’ve got miniatures to paint. Perhaps my shameful pile of grey plastic will finally start to shrink.