Hyperculture, hypermnesia, and the Clarion-Clipperton Zone

The US has broken with decades of international consensus by issuing its own mining permits for the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a potato field of metallic nodules the size of Western Europe at the bottom of the Pacific. Tom, who has found his next Antarctica-level obsession, reveals that Britain has quietly sponsored two exploration licenses. The age of saying “that’s mine” appears to be back.

Calum reports from Singapore. The city-state is remarkable — a nation summoned into being in 60 years through ethnic quotas, mandatory housing integration, and the relentless repetition of founding mantras. But it is now haunted by the ghost of Lee Kuan Yew, whose historically contingent decisions are being ossified into dogma. The TFR has fallen to 0.87. Entrepreneurialism is lacking. And the ethnic ratios that once stabilised the state are now preventing the emergence of a true Singaporean people.

The lesson Calum draws is not about policy but about method: if Britain wants cultural renewal, it needs hyperculture — the willing use of state formation tools to remake national identity. Charles Wesley did this for Anglicanism among the newly urbanised working class. Singapore did it with light shows and peanut shells on the floor at the Raffles Hotel. The question is whether Britain is willing to do the same.

The episode explores:

• King Charles’s US visit and why the special relationship is a wasting asset
• The Koh-i-Noor diamond and the rise of third worldism in American politics
• Deep sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and Britain’s quiet play for it
• The return of the frontier: space, Antarctica, the ocean floor
• Calum’s Singapore dispatch: what LKY built and what is now ossifying
• Why Singapore’s TFR of 0.87 is a failure of Lee Kuan Yew’s own eugenics programme
• The most photographed barn in America as a model for state formation
• Charles Wesley as the Pink Pantheress of his time
• Hyperculture: the case for a full spectrum British cultural renewal
• Bismarck, repeatedly and without apology