This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
I’m looking at an AI-generated image in which Concorde soars through a pure blue sky over a landscape of rolling English meadows with a city of towering skyscrapers shimmering in the distance. I’ve seen it shared online many times. It’s the nation Anglofuturists want to see.
Retro-futurism, using bits of the past to imagine the future, is a trusty artistic device, creating the visual language of steampunk, movies such as Brazil and TV shows like Severance. Now it’s being applied to political marketing.
But what is “Anglofuturism”? Here the problems begin. We love to define things in the hope that the definition becomes an explanation. But any definition of Anglofuturism is elusive because it evolves every day in a kind of collaborative game played out on social media. It can be whatever you want it to be, so long as the vibes are right.
Nor does an etymological investigation yield many clues. Advanced by the journalist Aris Roussinos in a 2022 essay, the phrase gained traction with the ethnonationalist online right; implicit in its AI-generated fantasies was the idea Britain was a white country. But the knowing in-joke then demanded to be taken seriously, and to Roussinos’s further dismay, a corner of the Westminster policy world has now obliged.
The Adam Smith Institute describes Anglofuturism as part of “a vibrant and growing movement amongst Millennials and Zoomers”. Who do they mean? The think tank is referring to young rationalist policy wonks who in recent months have won the hearts of Tory tastemakers. For example, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings enthuse about the new policy talking shop and lobbying operation Looking for Growth, or LFG, and the Crush Crime initiative, which proposes technocratic fixes such as data dashboards to identify crime hotspots. Both were created by a thirty-something called Lawrence Newport.
Sebastian Payne at The Times obligingly describes LFG as “a movement”. Robert Colville, head of the Centre for Policy Studies, told his Sunday Times readers that “the real energy in British policymaking these days” is driven by LFG and kindred groups such as UK Day One and UK Foundations — the latter led by “three of my friends”.
Yet, one feature of the groups’ output is amateurishness: LFG’s “oven-ready” draft infrastructure bill contains typos and spelling mistakes. An Anglofuturist campaign to create a “super spaceport” was met with derision from those working in the UK space sector. One executive told me: “The Hebrides already has three ‘spaceports’ and they’re just car parks. It’s the one thing the British space industry doesn’t need.”
Professor David Edgerton, a historian of technology at King’s College, London, added: “It’s a measure of how degraded our political and economic culture is that some of this stuff is taken seriously. The UK Foundations piece [on Britain’s stagnation] was ludicrous, but apparently a lot of people, including a lot of people in the Labour Party, took it seriously.”
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The arrival of the neorationalists is the product of two contemporary trends: one financial, the other sociological. A powerful new American donor class has emerged from the tech sector and is ploughing its cash into influencing UK policy. Gnarly policy problems are regarded as a simple machine the experts can tune or re-engineer. (Cummings now discusses policy exclusively using such machine metaphors.)
Impatient for results, they favour what Evgeny Morozov derided as “solutionist” interventions in his 2013 book To Save Everything, Click Here. Supply-side regulatory reforms are advanced, expressed in an obsession with tweaking planning rules, rather than, say, reducing demand via controlling mass immigration.
This tsunami of new money rains freely on the new surplus elite we have created: graduates in economics and psychology who perceive the world in rigidly rationalist or behaviourist terms.
Neorationalists have made various attempts to brand themselves: “The Grey Tribe”, (from the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex), or “The River”, offered by author Nate Silver. All these rebrands seek to distinguish themselves from the incumbent policy elites.
Yoking progress to technology is not new, but this is not your grandad’s scientism
From Comte’s positivism to Engels’s scientific socialism, yoking progress to technology is not new. But this is not your grandad’s scientism, for there are some distinctly peculiar 21st century quirks here. One is an obsession with artificial intelligence, either a utopian view — abundance is imminent — or its dark twin, AI doom. Both views are really two sides of the same coin: a form of quasi-religious machine worship. The new rationalists regard AI sceptics in much the same way as Scientologists view their critics as “suppressives”.
Another characteristic is hard to miss. Many luminaries of the new rationalism are high-functioning autists; Cummings recently adopted the slogan “weaponising autism for regime change”. But the problem for his would-be guerrilla policy movement is not attracting autistic people but attracting anyone who isn’t already on the spectrum.
Confidence bordering on arrogance gives rationalism its peculiarly eccentric and very earnest flavour. One attendee of LFG events who works in policy thinks Cummings has over-estimated their skill set. “When LFG supporters say they work in ‘tech’, it almost always means they work in tech sales or marketing,” he says.
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The phenomenon has historical roots in online rationalist forums such as Less Wrong and Slate Star Codex, which incubated the Effective Altruist (EA) phenomenon. More recently, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at the Mercator Center at George Mason University and another early blogger, has emerged as a significant donor.
In 2019 Cowen teamed up with Patrick Collinson, the Irish-born, EA-aligned co-founder of payments firm Stripe, whose net worth is estimated to be around $10 billion, to declare a new field of intellectual endeavour. They modestly called it “Progress Studies”. Since then, Cowen’s Emergent Ventures bursary has funded over 800 individuals and operations, including the UK Foundations trio.
The scale of the philanthropic funding that enables EA-backed policy causes is breathtaking, including one donation of $665 million from a crypto billionaire to the EA-aligned Future of Life Institute to publicise “AI risk” — which went on to influence prime minister Rishi Sunak’s 2023 summit. A recent intervention to relax copyright legislation in the name of AI-power growth came from the EA-aligned UK Day One.
So is Anglofuturism a new force to be reckoned with? “It needs be taken seriously as a political phenomenon, but it can’t be taken seriously intellectually,” says Edgerton. “It’s not popular because it’s radical and challenging; it’s popular because it’s utterly conventional.”
Roussinos, meanwhile, is dismayed by what’s happened to his baby, deriding today’s Anglofuturism as “space-imperialist kitsch of right-wing AI memes” and a “bombastic space opera”. The vastly better Britain of the past, says Roussinos, “was a social-democratic nation state, strongly focused on the interests of the British people as a whole and not on a free-floating tech elite”.
We only need to look more closely at the Anglofuturists’ own pictures of Concorde and meadows to see what they have in mind for us — by noticing what is missing. Absent from the AI-generated utopia are towns, farmers, crops, livestock, roads and cars. Families or children are absent, too, and industry is invisible.
The Anglofuturist landscape turns out to be an urbanist’s dream, cleansed of things that may discomfit a twenty-something policy wonk. How nice, for them. A revolution without people won’t need people at all.
