Join the UK Progress Idea Machine
Momentum is building around a new movement trying to revive the UK. We describe who they are, what is missing, and how you can help.
Views expressed are personal, and not those of our employers
Several years ago, there were very few serious conversations about the deep relationship between technology progress and policy beyond SF house parties and London book clubs. Although social media did break through to mainstream discourse, the only lens was regulation, not building & progress.
Today, the world order is being reshaped around rapid technological acceleration. In the US in particular, the new titans behind these developments have, like many industrial leaders throughout history, manoeuvred closer to politics and policy as a result.
Beyond a few exceptions, we’re not yet in the same place in the UK. But at the grassroots level, a constellation of high-ambition, high-agency initiatives is emerging. Tonight, we’re bringing together a handful of them for an event at Wayve — another of the UK’s leading lights.
We believe that something special in the UK is unfolding. But there’s more to do. So here we trace the evolution of the UK Progress Idea Machine, provide a (non-exhaustive) list of the current initiatives, and end on a Request for funders, operators, scene-builders and supporters, with suggestions of what you could do to keep up the momentum in both the UK and Europe.
Read on for:
How we got here
In 2021 we founded TxP on 2 beliefs:
Technology and policy are the twin engines of progress.
The lack of community built around these pillars – particularly for emerging talent – constrains our potential.
In 2022, we wrote a progressive manifesto for accelerating science, technology and economic progress, and in 2023 launched an essay prize supported by Emergent Ventures to answer: ‘Britain is stuck. How can we get it moving again?’
Since then, we’ve seen a whole series of high-agency, optimistic, inspiring initiatives popping up in the UK that are united in the belief that science, technology and a distinctive sense of ambition – winning our way – can chart a way out of decline.
This is, in effect, what Nadia Asparouhova would call an ‘idea machine’. An idea machine isn’t planned, but emerges from:
a network of operators, thinkers, and funders, centered around an ideology, that’s designed to turn ideas into outcomes
As Andrew has written before, this approach is critical to build a durable coalition bonded by vision and values, not just transactional, ephemeral, short-term incentive alignment.
In that way, idea machines operate as:
a self-sustaining organism that contains all the parts needed to turn ideas into outcomes:
It starts with a distinct ideology, which becomes a memetic engine that drives the formation of a community
The community’s members start generating ideas amongst themselves
Eventually, they form an agenda, which articulates how the ideology will be brought into the world. (Communities need agendas to become idea machines; otherwise, they’re just a group of likeminded people, without a directed purpose.)
The agenda is capitalized by one or several major funders, whose presence ensures that the community’s ideas can move from theory to practice – both in terms of financing, as well as lending operational skills to the effort. (Without funding, an idea machine is just that: an inert system that needs fuel to turn the crank and get it moving.)
It has taken some time for the progress idea machine to mature in the UK. As Tom wrote in 2022, there have been burgeoning sub-cultures for a while, but minimal coordination towards outcomes. But now, the vibe shift is well underway.
These new organisations are united by a few core beliefs:
The UK’s political economy is dominated by scarcity and weak state capacity. Slow growth, high prices, and a vetocracy have made it hard to build the future instead of borrowing from the past.
Returning to growth must be the priority and, in our current situation, should take precedence in most trade-offs.
Science, technology and economic progress are upstream of social progress.
You can just do things.
We know: it can sometimes feel like the UK has reached some terminal value that’s not just economic, but also cultural. Those building this idea machine refuse to accept that. Stagnation is endemic, but not permanent.
As Joe Hill has described, there is a specific ecology to this community:
“There’s a generation of people who are very internet-native...And a lot of us, I think, are in the market for stories about the future of politics and society and Britain that are more positive and optimistic.”
And within this world, there is a broad church of views politically. As Sam Bowman wrote in Boosters and Doomsters:
This cuts across standard left/right divides. Even if these people disagree about how to improve things, their fundamental view is that the UK could be much, much richer if we improved policy.
So we get the increasingly impactful Labour Growth Group, just as we also have the high energy, more right-coded campaigning of Looking For Growth. Even if the leaders of these movements might not agree on everything, they are united in common cause.
Contagious optimism
If there is a bible for this movement, it might be Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance. This excerpt is a clarion call not just in the US, but in the UK too:
“The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance; a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it. That doesn’t lend itself to the childishly simple divides that have so deformed our politics. Sometimes government has to get out of the way, as in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, creating markets or organizing resources for risky technologies that do not yet exist.
Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong and how do we fix it? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?
This is not a mere technocratic vision. There is a creative and spiritual renaissance at the heart of this movement too. As Andrew wrote in Sovereign Albion, we are missing both material progress and transcendent purpose: myth, texture, and participation in something enduring and enchanted. We are stewards of this place for just a short while. We must build, not rest, on our culture, land and history to reanimate the pursuit of an endless frontier.
Whether it is Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon’s The Call or Elijah’s Close the App, Make the Ting, there is this shared ethos of exploring new practices and aesthetics, using the leverage of technology to connect to a deeper sense of meaning. Artists have as much of a role to play here as founders: who else has the craft and risk appetite to conjure entire worlds out of nothing? (We are particularly excited to see Restless Egg invest behind this artist-founder thesis.)
Optimism, taste and agency are how you make a movement contagious:
Too often, for many in the political world, critique has become an end in itself. Yes, it can act as a compass, guiding us to clarity, accountability, improvement and deeper truths.
Yet when criticism detaches from purpose it loses its power to illuminate. It becomes too focused on winning a rhetorical battle at basecamp, rather than iterating to reach the summit. As Max Roser and the Our World in Data team wrote: “The world is awful. The world is better. The world can be much better.”
Builders and makers — of trillion dollar startups, tech & policy communities, local cafes, or pieces of art — act because they want to bring something valuable into the world. They have a differentiated view of the future, taking responsibility — coupled with a childlike excitement — to make this world real.
The British tendency to criticise attempts to start something new reveals something unsettling about our collective mindset. Instead, we must bring an alternative path into higher resolution, championing high ambition and high integrity to win our way.
Request for funders, operators, scene-builders and supporters
Tonight, we’re bringing together just a handful of the organisations building this movement in the UK to hear about their work. Critically, the speakers not only embody reasons to be optimistic about UK and European progress, but we hope their work inspires others to follow suit, providing an on-ramp to agency.
There is so much more to do, and many gaps and blindspots that the current organisations can’t cover all themselves. In particular, 4 stand out:
The UK/European counter-elite can do more: Although there are a handful of early UK/European supporters, today the UK progress idea machine is still mostly funded by US tech and philanthropic capital. In Europe, there’s even more work required to build the scene beyond the likes of EU Inc, the European Ambition Institute and Operators & Friends. It’s well past time for a new generation — a counter-elite — to lead from the front. 180+ European founders stepping up to back Project Europe is a great start. Can we also build an OpenPhil/‘Abundance and Growth’-style sovereign grants fund for the UK and Europe, with a more durable commitment and a tighter feedback loop between funding and impact? We want to make that happen – get in touch if you can help.
More aesthetic experimentation: We’d love to see more attempts to connect ‘progress’ in the abstract to a distinctive collective purpose in Britain, in order to scale this story and movement beyond a small, albeit growing, network. In particular, we need to keep exploring new forms of texture and creativity that do not solely rely on gorgeous, but ultimately nostalgic, Victorian & Georgian architecture. Beauty isn’t ‘solved’! Likewise, there is a rich array of long term, explorative progress media content, but very little that covers short term news announcements. Where is the Future Perfect for Progress Studies?
More women: For these movements and ideas to scale, we think it’s incredibly important that these spaces and communities do the work to appeal to a wide, diverse group, not just very online men. But in particular, we’d also love to see more initiatives started by women, bringing their own tastes, vibes and aesthetics to the progress movement. If we can help with that, we’re absolutely here to provide whatever support we can to make that a reality.
More social and cultural technologies: Technology itself can be an operating initiative. There are many technologies that can help tackle wicked public problems, that government, the private sector, and universities may not have the right incentives to build. Small but committed groups can sometimes make all of the difference (Tom Forth decided to just build his own National Data Library recently). Could Looking for Growth or another org set up an open source initiative identifying and tackling specific problems that government fails to address? Could we take the No10 Innovation Fellowship to local authorities?
Let us know what else you think is missing. We’ll also try to keep the list below updated — if you’re running an org we’ve missed off, let us know.
The energy and enthusiasm we see at TxP and across this idea machine give us a lot of optimism about the UK. If you got to the end of this piece, you are likely part of the UK progress idea machine. And we hope that if that excites you, you can continue to help turn ideas into outcomes.
The UK Progress Idea Machine (updated April 2025)
Ideology
Rediscovering British Progress, David Lawrence, Julia Willemyns, Laura Ryan, Ben Johnson
Foundations, Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, Sam Bowman
The housing theory of everything, John Myers, Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood
A New National Purpose, Tony Blair Institute
Technology entrepreneurship and the disruption of ambition, Matt Clifford
Sovereign Albion, Andrew Bennett
Abundance by Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson in particular, and other works like The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp & Nicholas Zamiska and My Techno-Optimism by Vitalik Buterin, also play an outsized role here, albeit from the US.
Funders
Emergent Ventures, led by Tyler Cowen, provides grants to ambitious people with big ideas on how to transform society
ARIA: the UK’s high-risk, high-reward, invention agency, which runs ‘activation partnerships’, funding organisations which help to catalyse innovation in their relevant research areas.
Project Europe, building a Thiel Fellowship-esque programme for Europe
Entrepreneurs First1, which supported Polaris, launched its own def/acc programme, and backs founders advancing technical progress
Open Philanthropy, which recently launched a new Abundance and Growth Fund (albeit mostly US focused)
Plural, Prima Materia, July, Giant, Entropy Industrial Capital, and the new generation of ‘production capitalists’ — playing a markedly different game from standard VCs — aiming for ‘GDP level’ impact
Again: while we are pleased to see a growing funding base, only a minority of this is actually UK/European capital. If you’d like to help fund or build our own, ‘sovereign grants’ programme, let’s chat :)
Ideas
Digital Frontier, in particular Alys Key on UK 2.0
The Abundance Agenda by James O’Malley and Martin Robbins
Agenda
Looking for Growth’s Infrastructure Bill, a prototype of how to make an agenda executable
Operators
High impact policy entrepreneurs, such as John Myers
Tom Forth, an entrepreneur and schemer
Operating initiatives
The ARIA Bill
Communities & Scene builders
Polaris Fellowship, now living on as the Odyssey Fellowship
Support organisations
Newspeak House, who are a remarkable supporter of many volunteer-led communities
And-Now, who have designed nearly every website listed here
Thanks to Annys Rogerson for her comments and feedback
Where is the longread on the subtle EF rebrand?
Conception X!
Lots of great ideas here, thanks for putting this together. I am an AI engineer and run a consulting firm, working with US-based pro-development think tanks, as well as on my own projects very much aligned with progress agenda. What's the best way to get involved? So far, I've been to a couple of LFG events, really enjoyed them.