Monday is Cultural Intelligence: what is actually happening to Black Britain, Africa and the wider diaspora, told in numbers, every figure sourced or cut. Each read ends the way most reporting never does, with how we would fix it, based on the facts and the research, holding everything in balance supported by Renaissance House.

Thursday is Consultancy: Monday’s threat turned into armament for small businesses, sole traders and creatives. Something you can do before the weekend to tangibly move the needle in five hundred words.

Works is the publishing arm of The Renaissance. House, our research and policy lane, carries the deep work under the Monday reads, and its flagship, the Commonwealth Exchange, keeps its books open:

Reading above the fold is free, always. £9.99 a month unlocks every word, opens the subscriber chat with its private market research and courses, includes The Renaissance Exchange, and holds your place on the waitlist for The Renaissance community, where businesses’ and sole traders trade skill for skill. The founding tier of this publication is called The Medici’s, and this group will be focused on investment and patronage in The Renaissance community.

Monday the 7th, we start. Bring somebody.

Share

I thought that too. Then I made the mistake of actually looking, and I haven’t been able to put it down since.

Let’s run the numbers shall we?

Here’s what’s sitting there. Fifty-six countries. Two point seven billion people, nearly a third of everyone alive. A shared working language, legal systems that broadly speak to each other, and the deepest diaspora networks on the planet, families who already move money and people and ideas across these borders every single day. Trade between members hit $854 billion in 2022 and should pass a trillion this year. And trade between two Commonwealth countries costs about a fifth less than trade between two comparable countries outside the club.

Now wait, because that last number is the one that got me and wouldn’t let go. That’s not a treaty. There is no Commonwealth free trade area. No tariff schedule, no single market, no institution making any of it happen. That fifth is just what shared language and shared law and family do on their own, with literally nobody in charge of it.

That’s a third of humanity generating a trillion dollars of trade by accident. Sit in how strange that is for a second. Then ask the only question that matters — What would it do on purpose?

Nobody has ever tried to find out. Sixty years, and nobody has tried.

The man who ran it told me it was broken.

Let me be fair to the Commonwealth before I take it apart, because the fair version does more damage than the cheap one.

The Commonwealth is not a failure. It pulled off the hardest thing in geopolitics. It took an empire, the most poisoned relationship a group of nations can have with each other, and turned it into a club people actually turn up to, of their own free will, decades after they were free to walk. Ghana and Britain in the same room. India and Britain in the same room. No bloc on earth has that. The EU has rules. The African Union has geography. The Commonwealth has the rarest thing going, which is a room where the argument can happen and nobody storms out.

And then it just stops. It works as friendship and it fails at delivery. The second a member needs something built, financed, staffed or sold, the friendship has no arm to reach with. It convenes, it watches your election, it hands out a prize, and the moment the meeting ends everyone goes home and negotiates alone all over again.

I’m not the one who puts this most sharply. The person who puts it most sharply is the man who was, until this year, running the place.

Professor Luis Franceschi spent six years inside the Commonwealth Secretariat, latterly as its Assistant Secretary-General. He is the most humane and most credentialed defender of the institution alive, and he is nobody’s apologist. He writes about the Mau Mau screening camps and the villagisation without once looking away. Read him before you read me. I mean that.

And he wrote the single best sentence anyone on the inside has ever written about what the West owes. Asked what reparations actually mean, he said this:

That is exactly right. Reparations are a ledger, not a cheque. You can cut a cheque and leave the machine that manufactures the harm running in the background, and all you’ve bought is a quieter version of the same problem next year. Redesign the structure, or you’ve done nothing that lasts.

He said it. And then he stopped.

He named the disease and prescribed no cure. He walked out of the room at the exact point where the cure would have cost him something. And I don’t read that as cowardice. I read it as structural. It is very hard to say the machine is broken when you spent six years being part of the machine.

So somebody has to finish his sentence. Might as well be a 21-year-old with no institution to protect and nothing to lose by saying it plainly.

Lip service.

Franceschi’s story of the Commonwealth is a redemption arc. His own chapter is literally called “From Oppression and Dominion to Freedom, Collaboration and Global Friendship.” Empire became family. Beautiful. I now even have a Denzel Washington style tear grazing my left cheek.

Now open the books.

Six African states still— in 2026 — park half their foreign currency reserves in an account at the French Treasury, and France still appoints people to their central bank’s board. Their neighbours only got out of that arrangement in 2021. Sending money home to sub-Saharan Africa is the most expensive money transfer on earth, 8.46 per cent against a global average of 6.36 and a target of under 3, which is a tax on the poorest people making the most necessary payments in the world. And the Secretariat itself, the body narrating this whole redemption, shrank from £50.7 million to £32.9 million in a handful of years, almost entirely because members stopped paying anything they weren’t forced to pay.

That’s not a redemption arc. That’s a relationship where the words changed and the money didn’t. “Empire” became “family,” and the value kept flowing in precisely the direction it always had.

And there’s one more thing Franceschi says, and this is the one I can’t let stand. He writes that colonisation “obeys basically a fact of nature, that is, we are trying to dominate so as not to be dominated.” A fact of nature. Weather. Gravity. Nobody’s fault, just physics.

Here’s why that’s false, and the evidence isn’t subtle.

As the empire wound down, Britain ran an organised operation to destroy and hide the colonial record. Around 25,000 files were shipped secretly out of the colonies and buried back in Britain. More were burned. Others were weighted and dropped into the sea. Roughly 1.2 million documents ended up in a government facility called Hanslope Park, whose existence civil servants flatly denied for decades, to the historians’ faces. The whole thing only surfaced because Mau Mau veterans took the Foreign Office to court in 2011 and forced it into the light. And filed neatly next to the papers that survived are the destruction certificates: careful, bureaucratic receipts, recording the documents they had just destroyed.

You do not burn the evidence of the weather. Nobody covers up gravity. A fact of nature leaves no paper trail, because it has nothing to hide, and a cover-up on that scale is not the fingerprint of something inevitable. It’s a confession. Those men knew exactly what they had done. Making sure you’d never read it is the proof.

And the case Franceschi cites in his own chapter, the Mau Mau case, is the exact case that dragged that archive into daylight. His own footnote pulls his own thesis apart. He was that close.

Africa already built it all. Nobody switched it on.

Here’s where the diagnosis turns into a proposal, and here’s the part nobody in Whitehall is saying out loud.

Every single piece the Commonwealth would need to turn its trust into delivered value already exists. It works. And almost none of it was built in London.

The settlement layer exists. PAPSS, launched by the African Union and Afreximbank in Accra in 2022, already clears payments between African states in their own currencies, in seconds, without going anywhere near a dollar. The self-published national balance sheet exists, and 44 states have been submitting to one since 2003, through the African Peer Review Mechanism. The marketplace and the due-diligence rails exist, in Afreximbank’s Africa Trade Gateway. The dispute court exists, constituted for the African free trade area back in 2021. The mobile money rails half the planet has been copying ever since were in Kenya in 2007, and the world’s been copying that homework ever since. And the diaspora, the biggest untapped economic actor in the entire story, was made a formal region of the African Union in 2003.

Every limb, built. Nobody joined them up.

And the deepest precedent of the lot is the Commonwealth’s own. The Secretariat, the institution itself, was proposed in 1964 by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, formally tabled at the Prime Ministers' Meeting by Milton Obote of Uganda and championed by Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago. In Franceschi’s own words: “London did not receive the idea of a secretariat with much enthusiasm.”

Read that twice. Ghana proposed the machine that runs the Commonwealth. Sixty years later a Ghanaian, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, is the one running it. And in between, the continent that built the Secretariat quietly went and built the settlement system, the peer review, the trade gateway and the dispute court, while the rest of us wrote reports about “potential.”

The ideas keep coming from the edges. The pen keeps ending up in the centre. That is the entire pattern of this institution, and it’s about to happen again, unless somebody says it out loud first.

Why ask when you can trade?

So I built the thing. It’s called the Commonwealth Exchange, and the full architecture is a document I’ll point you to at the end. But strip all of it back and it comes down to one flip.

Right now, when a country needs something, it goes to the IMF, the World Bank, a donor, or Beijing. Every one of those is a begging relationship. You ask. They decide. They attach conditions. You say thank you.

The Exchange kills the asking. Every member publishes two lists: what it’s got in surplus, and what it genuinely lacks. Nobody grades those lists. Then members post tenders against them, saying what they need and what they’ll put up for it, and whoever needs what you have comes to you. A deal between equals, by consent, scored afterwards on what actually got delivered and on how widely the gains landed inside the country, so nobody climbs this network by fattening their own elite.

Take the one corridor that’s already open and already failing. Britain is short of nurses. Ghana trains brilliant ones. Right now Britain has Ghana on a “red list” that bans active recruitment, so officially nothing happens, and unofficially the nurses come anyway, Ghana pays to train them and loses them, and nobody compensates anybody. A ban that doesn’t stop the flow isn’t an ethic. It’s an alibi.

Now write it down as a deal. Same nurses move. But the terms are posted before anyone gets on a plane: Britain funds the schools that trained them, recognises their qualifications both ways, trains Ghanaian specialists in the things Ghana can’t yet teach at home, and sends them back at the end of the term with that specialism attached. Ghana finishes the deal with a stronger health system than it started with. Britain gets the staff it was going to recruit anyway, legally and in the open. And the person doing the actual work is a named party to their own deal, with a contract they can enforce.

Nobody had to be generous. They just had to write the terms down.

That’s the whole idea, and it scales across everything a country has: minerals, grid, ports, research, carbon, credentials, culture. Asking becomes trading. And for Britain, which lost a bloc in 2016 (love Nigel, makes sense why your newest political opponent is a bin) and has spent a decade failing to replace it, this is the thing nobody has put on the table: a purpose that isn’t nostalgia, an alliance that isn’t charity, and a way to get paid for making things again instead of just owning them and renting them back to itself.

You must kick down the door

I tried to do this the correct way. I tried for the academic anchor, the institutional blessing, the meeting. I missed one because I was stranded in Egypt with no wifi. One got cancelled on me. One letter never got answered.

And somewhere around the third rejection it landed on me that I was doing the exact thing this whole document tells countries to stop doing. I was asking. Sitting in a queue, waiting for a body with a stamp to decide whether my idea was allowed to exist.

So I stopped. This essay, and the manifesto sitting next to it, are me publishing my own register. Here’s what I’ve got: the idea, the research, twelve months of graft, a platform, and a genuine willingness to be corrected in public by anyone who knows more than me, which on most of this is a lot of people. Here’s what I lack: economists, technologists, lawyers, a route into India, funding, and argument. If any of it’s right, take a piece and run with it. If it’s wrong, tell me where, out in the open, and I’ll change it. That’s not a weakness in the plan. That is the plan.

Because here’s what I actually believe, underneath all the mechanism and all the receipts. Nobody else is coming to fix this. Not the think tanks talking to themselves, not the institutes, not the ministries that have had sixty years and a trillion dollars sat in front of them. But I look around and I see visionaries, and I see people who can actually build, everywhere, every day, and I know them personally. So this is me calling them. And it might be me calling you.

The Commonwealth is a punchline because nobody finished the sentence. Franceschi got halfway and flinched. Nkrumah started it in 1964. Africa has been quietly building it ever since.

I’m just the one saying it out loud.

Let’s finish it.

The full architecture, every mechanism, every hole I haven’t solved yet, and every way in, is in the Commonwealth Exchange Living Manifesto. Read it. Then come and tell me where it breaks.

The team and I want to extend you the warmest welcome to The Renaissance Exchange and our gratitude for letting us into what you read, watch and listen to. The aim of this newsletter is simple. Through our 3 C’s - Consumption, Creation and Community - we want to:

1. Broaden your horizons in terms of media you consume and how you engage with it.

2. Inspire you to create something special from your personal engagement with quality media.

3. Push you to be grateful for the communities around you and to create societal impact with what you have consumed and created.

That is the way of The Renaissance.

If you want to become an Exchanger, physical or digital, tap in here: Tap Into The Exchange

CONSUMPTION

My Father’s Shadow - KAYZ

The media that hit me the hardest recently has to be Akinola Davies Jr’s - My Father’s Shadow. I had the pleasure of hearing him respond to audience questions in person after the screening and this further deepened and broadened my perspective. Three things are extremely poignant about this film for me.

Firstly, this feels like an embodiment of “Art imitates life” because Davies Jr created a world that was so close to “real life” while preserving so much mystique that you can’t help but melt into your cinema seat and leak into this created world. How true this felt to someone’s real experiences, the parallels I was able to draw to my own life and, the parallels in Davies Jr’s own life, which he explained after the film, really grounded this movie and it was so refreshing after wading through oceans of sensationalised African media.

Secondly, the formatting of the movie as jagged memories, butterfly effects of possibilities, was at first confusing - then entirely fascinating. It then plays less as a film, and more as a walk through someone’s mind as memories flicker, wax and wane as they try to tell you a story. This is so powerful because it speaks to the strong tradition of storytelling from memory in West Africa. However, to me it was most powerful because it speaks to existentialism and the limits of the mind. Why are some memories clearer than others? Why are some memories murky with flashes of clarity? Why do I remember two versions of events happening? Even now, the questions still flow.

Thirdly, this movie has no resolution, no neat “happy” ending. To me, that is the happiest ending possible, because now I get to write my own stories and butterfly effects; I have the pleasure of continuing the culture I love so much and, most importantly, allowing this work to have its own alcove in my mind.

Magic Roundabout Visualiser - MALAYIKA

The photography is strong and reflective of the emotion within the poem.

The black and white colour way is really striking and the whole photoshoot being centred around black masculinity is appealing to me as an artist reflecting on black identity.

And of course, here is the poem itself:

magic roundabout.

growing up,

we’d draw stars in chalk
whilst we starred in talks
of the broken curbs we’d sit upon,
and we would draw them there
so that we had somewhere

even us broken folk could wish upon, because
when we’d look up, there’d be nothing there
for us broken folk to wish upon, and then,
we grew up, and even now, there’s nothing here
for us broken folk to wish upon.

like,

home is still off
of the third exit off the roundabout,
and i hope that will never change,
because everything else round
the roundabout has already been exchanged
for even square pegs, to fit in round holes,

for even square pegs can fit in round holes
if you don’t care about filling them,
and even tired places can come alive
if you don’t care about killing them,


and they don’t care about this place;

that’s why our tarmac’s been a disgrace—
and why our buildings keep getting defaced,
and why our children keep getting encased,
and why our future’s been getting erased
from our what-used-to-be-a-magical place.

i promise you,

my home used to be a magical place,
and my magical place used to be home,
but now, i don’t really think i can afford
to believe in magic the same anymore,

because,
sure,
home might still be off
of the third exit off the roundabout,

but now, i keep missing it,

and no amount of turning right
will take me back to where it all went left,
and no amount of burning light
will illuminate the darkness left behind

by the lack of chalk stars on broken curbs
that used to light the way, and it seems as
though nightfall has been the order of the day
for weeks and months on end, and

i was just round the bend
when they all turned up to mend
all the broken things we’d fixed—
and all the broken kids we’d tricked

into believing you could fix
broken things with sticks,
and stones, and grit,
and groans—

with a whole shit tonne of bricks
and plaster, that paper over cracks
that splinter over chasms that linger
over tracks of laughter coming from

below, and so i look down
at the broken curbs once more,
wishing upon a chalk star—
for somewhere

our broken folk wishes
can actually go far,
and possibly be heard—
and maybe then,

even be listened to.

The John Kiriakou (Former CIA Agent) Edits - Klāëjø

The way those videos are being edited fascinates me so much; the disparity between the current editing style of short-form content (slowed speech, dramatic music, glowing filters etc.), and the traumatic subject matter means that this, to me, feels like a perfect sample of just how desensitised we are to such harrowing stories.



The implications of said desensitisation are being seen in the world’s largely apathetic reaction to the ongoing revelations of the Epstein Files, and so many things that would’ve been unimaginable just 20 years ago are just part and parcel of our day to day, and I think that is so disturbing.

Metal Gear Solid 2 - Ceebo

The way in which the characters all stand to be explorations and analyses of different schools of philosophy as it pertains to morality and, the general human experience is so fascinating.

For those unfamiliar, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a game that disguises some of the most layered philosophical writing in any medium behind the skin of a tactical espionage action game. Ceebo sees this clearly and we trust his recommendation - tap in.

Kamal Demo - Oscar

Oscar doesn’t say much. He doesn’t need to. Tap in.

CREATION

How Cinnamon Buns, Peaky Blinders, Diddy and Black Creatives Getting Absolutely Shafted Will Enact The Black British Renaissance - KAYZ

Does this even need a subtitle? This piece is my proudest recent work mainly because it was so challenging to write. However, it is so much deeper than that; it is so inextricably linked to my life, particularly what I have consumed, created and, the story that continues from my life. If art is continuation of the human story, my section is The Renaissance.

I won’t speak about this piece too extensively here because it is truly something you should read for yourself. What I will mark as my favourite part is the final section. Poetry being the catalyst for my action is…poetic, in and of itself and within the context of myself.

Titled “Stretched” @malayika.art - MALAYIKA

I feel like this piece really speaks on my interests as an artist. The emotion and facial expression of the character is eye catching to me and once complete with colour in the afro, I feel like the piece could really change the way I create art in the future.

Moments of Magnitude and the Canonisation of Cult-Heroes - Klāëjø

This essay really reinvigorated my love of football writing. I really enjoy the process of taking some of my more niche interests and shaping their narratives in ways that makes them more accessible. Additionally, I love doing the research that I feel as though my long-form essay writing requires, and I always feel lucky when I can share that knowledge with others.

New Music - Ceebo

Ceebo’s proudest recent creation is a song still in the works: “the instrumentation truly just gives me that feeling.”. New music will come in time because Ceebo always feeds the streets.

For now, we guide you to “jook” because this exact essence exists for you to stream today. The instrumentation truly just gives you that feeling and that feeling is echoed with a smooth, cocky delivery.

Ft. Detroit - Oscar

I haven’t been active with posting, but I dropped my painting with Detroit. This piece taught me what I really cared about in art: context, familiarity and vulnerability. So, if a piece were to resonate with me more deeply, it would have nuanced context, familiarity and vulnerability.

My Grandma & Me - Khala

A painting of myself and my grandma from a reference photo from 2005.

Medium: oils on canvas.

COMMUNITY

Going back to Christ’s Hospital was truly a seminal moment for me. They invited me down for what they call “Bro Lunch” - a lunchtime talk/group activity, allowing young men to explore masculinity in healthy ways. I was there for their valentines day themed edition and, although I am no authority on love, I have written a couple of poems.

When I shared my work, I could hear a pin drop and that level of respect in people so young is so hard to find.

What really stuck with me though, what made this moment seminal, is what these young men had to say about love and relationships. We all have plenty to learn from those we perceive as children. Teach to learn. Learn to teach.

Patriots L - Klāëjø

The Patriots losing in the Super Bowl!



If you would’ve told me that the Pats would get annihilated in the way they did on the biggest stage prior to their doing so, I would’ve predicted that I would’ve been an emotional wreck. However, somewhat surprisingly, my reaction to the defeat was one less of anger and frustration, but rather, a bittersweet appreciation for what had been an incredible one-season turnaround. And the fact that I got to witness one of the greatest sophomore quarterback seasons from Drake Maye, in my very first season watching the NFL, is something that I’ll never forget.

This loss taught me that I’m pretty certain that I’m someone who has learned to enjoy the journey, so much so, that the destination being undeniably underwhelming didn’t really seem to matter to me.

Perfect is a present thing!

Fan Conversations - Ceebo

Conversing with fans of my music served as a reminder that I don’t need to overthink the formula of expression or seek perfection. Just express. There are people that see themselves in what I say and therefore need it.

Sisterly Advice - Oscar

A conversation with my sister on being more independent changed my perspective.

It seems like the way forward. To be independent one has to trust themselves, show up for themselves. I need to do more of that.

“Our Deepest Fear” by Marianne Williamson - Khala

At the end of ‘Fukizutahmbout’ by Kaicrewsade and Menace4Hire, Rev Dr. Sheila J Grant narrates one of my favourite quotes: “Our Deepest Fear” by Marianne Williamson.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won’t feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.

It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.”

Like many of us currently, I find myself operating from a place of fear. It has taken considerable effort to not give into that heaviness weighing on my chest, and instead choose to show up for myself and the people I come into contact with daily. I used to genuinely believe that my success would be at other peoples downfall, that we, surely, cannot all win.

I now know and believe that that was my fear talking. I also used to be so scared of being seen - that evil eye was always out to destroy whatever I managed to build. That kept me stuck. And scared.

That’s why I love this quote. “There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you”, “ As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others”. Right now I truly believe it is our responsibility to create as much as possible.

Create scared, create sad, create badly. Create in the face of everyone you know, create in private. “ We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”

Every day I am attempting to let my light shine, as corny as that sounds.

Take care.

CONTINUATION

That was Volume 1 of The Renaissance Exchange.

What you just read, watched, listened to and looked at was the product of six people choosing to consume with intention, create with honesty and show up for the communities around them. That is all we ask of you. Consume something that challenges you. Create something from it - however small, however imperfect. And share it with someone who needs it.

There is no conclusion to art, only continuation. Volume 2 is on the way.

If this resonated, send it to one person. Not everyone. Just the one who came to mind while reading and make sure they tap in.

The Renaissance Exchange is here.

THE PERFORMANCE OF REFORM

There is a reason most people cannot explain what consulting firms actually do. More often than not, the firms themselves cannot either. This is not because consultants lack intelligence, but because the system rewards motion over consequence.

They produce motion, not outcomes.

This is why their most reliable clients are governments seeking the appearance of reform rather than its substance. Taxpayer money circulates through “legitimacy” and language, laundered by process, performance, and plausible deniability. No material problems are resolved. Politicians network, consultants invoice, and the choreography of seriousness continues uninterrupted. Then after this pantomime ceases each working day, spilling into the weekend, the aforementioned frolic, arms interlinked, to golf courses, padel courts, private dinners and racetracks to spend their (your) hard earned money.

A SOLUTION THAT OUTLIVED THE PROBLEM

Consultancy was once useful. Decades ago, during genuine periods of financial instability driven by deregulation and aggressive mergers, institutions needed guidance to cut dead weight and act under uncertainty. That moment has passed. Today, it is widely understood that charisma, audacity, and decks written in an invented dialect cannot fix structural problems.

Consultancy has become the dead weight it once wished to mitigate; the parasite inside the host it once claimed to heal.

NO MORE INDEFINITE DIAGNOSIS

We refuse to offer multicoloured slide decks dressed up as insight. We refuse to insult your intelligence with language designed to obscure its own emptiness. We refuse to half solve problems in order to keep retainers alive. We are not interested in indefinite diagnosis.

We want to build solutions, and then remain close enough to ensure the infrastructure exists for those solutions to survive contact with reality.

When we propel your creativity and business’ forward, we propel our wider community upward.

That is the return we seek.

Not a bag.

Progress.

This is why we chose to consult our community. The Black British creative community, and more broadly, the UK inner city community. In this country, race matters, but class remains the primary divider and unifier in how power is exercised and scarcity is distributed. We recognise one another because we were shaped by the same pressures. We read each other’s scars because we were cut by the same knife and learned how to move despite it.

This materially changes how we work. We cannot extract “insight” and disappear. We stay close enough for outcomes to exist in the physical world. Infrastructure, to us, means pathways, execution support, access to resources, and accountability that does not evaporate once the invoice is paid. If something fails, we own it and we fix it where we can. Accountability is not a value statement - it is proximity over time.

Creativity enforces this discipline. There is nowhere to hide behind AI, language, or polish because creativity demands output, end product, tangible artefacts that cannot be prompted into existence. Our mechanisms produce work that galvanises people in real life rather than impressing rooms temporarily.

The Renaissance Works.

This is a dual affirmation.

We work as a response to issues within our communities that we understand intimately, and we work with the discipline required to turn vision into form. We operate at the intersection of economic order and creative chaos, because that tension is where durable outcomes emerge.

HUMANITY AS SCARCITY

I was asked “Can’t AI can do what you do? What makes you irreplaceable?

The answer is already contained in the question. Humanity.

We are witnessing the acceleration of a counterculture, a Renaissance. People are exhausted by homogeneously generated sameness; by frictionless output that leaves no residue. Humanity has become novelty in this economy.

People do not optimise for convenience alone. In an environment saturated with generation, judgement becomes scarce - and scarcity creates value. You can see this shift everywhere. On Substack, readers favour voice over polish. Physical media is returning. Texture, imperfection, and resistance signal that something is real.

This is not a new phenomenon. History is cyclical. Japanese kintsugi articulated this centuries ago. Beauty does not emerge in spite of fracture, but through it.

The fact of the matter is, AI will make content cheaper.

However, It will not make art cheap. It will not make trust cheap. It will not make community cheap.

What remains cheap is talk.

And talk is the primary currency of both AI and legacy consultancy.

This counterculture is not emerging slowly. It is compounding. People are increasingly disillusioned with renting everything they own, including their taste, judgement, and sense of self. We are living in medieval times, and people are not asking for optimisation.

They are crying for a Renaissance.

Tap In.

There are moments where you realise, almost in real time, that you have started something. Not in a cinematic way: No swelling music, No slow-motion. Just that quiet, creeping awareness that something has left your hands and is now moving independently through the world.

For me, it was cinnamon buns.

My phone started pinging. And I do not mean the usual light buzz of notifications you ignore while pretending you are productive. I mean relentless. Back-to-back. Videos, screenshots, voice notes. People tagging me, DM’ing me, snapping (we’re too damn old for that, by the way) me, sending things through group chats I did not even know I was still in.

And the reason my phone was going mad was simple:

Because I had posted a video.

Because I had said something was good.

Because people trusted my taste.

That is important, so I am going to say it plainly.

This did not happen to me.

I started it.

People were walking into Tesco and finding entire shelves empty. Not during a supply chain crisis. Not because of inflation panic. Not because of some national emergency. Because, collectively, people had decided that cinnamon buns were the thing.

Manchester. Birmingham. London. Leicester (“Lei”, of course🫩). People sending me videos of barren shelves like they had discovered a glitch in the matrix. Tesco workers looking genuinely rattled. Some people laughing. Some people confused. Some people annoyed like “why are we like this” (you man are jarring by the way).

It was absurd. Deeply unserious. Objectively funny. But I clocked something immediately.

This was not random. This was not luck. This was not novelty for novelty’s sake.

What I was watching in real time was trust moving at speed. Taste, moving at speed. A community responding instinctively to curation.

I did not tell anyone to do anything. I did not organise a campaign. I did not incentivise behaviour. I simply said something was good, and people moved accordingly.

In a cultural economy where brands spend millions on strategy decks, trend forecasting, paid partnerships, and manufactured relevance, a completely mundane supermarket pastry became culturally desirable through nothing more than timing, voice, and resonance.

Not sneakers, not concert tickets, not a celebrity-backed launch.

Pastry.

People did not just watch. They did not just comment. They did not just like and scroll on. They moved, participated and acted.

That is power.

Not institutional power. Not political power. Cultural power. The kind that usually shows up before everything else does.

THE ECONOMIC ANTI-CLIMAX

Now, here is where the story becomes funny again, but in a much more uncomfortable way.

After all of that. After nationwide mobilisation, empty shelves across multiple cities, sustained attention, reposts, discourse, and free marketing that corporates would pay eye-watering sums to replicate unsuccessfully. Naturally, I waited to see what the numbers would look like.

I am not naive. I did not expect millions. But I expected something. Some reflection of scale. Some proportionality between impact and income. Some acknowledgement that what had just happened had value.

Instead, I watched the number crawl…slowly. Painfully, almost disrespectfully.

It ticked up.

Paused.

Ticked again.

And then I noticed something that made me laugh out loud.

While I was making basically nothing, the actual price of the cinnamon buns themselves had quietly crept up. From about £2.10 to £4.35. Eventually settling back down at £4 once people, inevitably, moved on with their lives.

So let us be clear:

1. The pastry more than doubled in price.

2. Corporates made a killing in footfall and sales.

3. Other creators, more palatable, more brand-safe, more comfortable for corporate optics, were elevated and rewarded.

And I made… wait for it…

Approximately £200.

Two hundred pounds. Bro, TWO BILLS?!

That number deserves to be mocked, so I am going to mock it properly.

£200 for national impact. £200 for empty shelves. £200 for cultural heat that brands spend years chasing. £200 while value was extracted at every other point in the ecosystem. It is almost impressive how bad it is.

Now, before anyone gets dramatic, let me be clear.

I did not lose sleep over this. I was not pacing around my room. I laughed. I screenshotted it. I sent it to my friends. Life went on - and I didn’t smell a cinnamon bun in months (thanks a lot guys).

But I would be lying if I said I was not a little butthurt.

Not devastated, not enraged. Just that very specific irritation that comes from watching value leak sideways while you are standing at the source, still broke.

That £200 was not insulting because of the money.

It was insulting because of what it represented.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME (UNFORTUNATELY)

The reason I am telling this story is not because I think my cinnamon bun moment was special.

It was not.

What was familiar was how quickly it made sense.

I have seen versions of this story play out my entire adult life, and honestly long before that if I am being real. Among creatives. Among entrepreneurs. Among people far more talented, disciplined, and consistent than me - Black creatives and Black-owned businesses build culture at scale. We shape taste and influence markets. We decide what is cool long before anyone else is brave enough to cosign it. And then, more often than not, we watch the economic upside be redistributed elsewhere.

Someone else becomes the face.

Someone else becomes the partner.

Someone else becomes the case study.

Usually someone a bit more polished, a bit more palatable, a bit more neutral. Ultimately, less likely to make white people, and therefore the “mainstream” market, uncomfortable.

This is not bitterness. Bitterness clouds judgement. This is pattern recognition.

For decades, Black cultural output has been extracted, diluted, repackaged, and resold with minimal reinvestment into the communities that generated it. We are applauded loudly and compensated quietly. Overworked, underpaid, overshadowed. Disrespected.

Economically, we were never emancipated. We were simply allowed to entertain and so the minstrel show continues.

I have felt unsettled by this for a long time. Not in an abstract way, rather, in a very practical and everyday way. Watching brilliant people take work that does not reflect their value. Watching creativity treated as disposable. Watching opportunity leak outward instead of circulating inward. Lets be clear, the cinnamon bun incident did not create that feeling:

It clarified it.

A CONFESSION ABOUT MEDIA (AND BEING A NEEK)

I should probably admit something here, properly, before this all starts sounding more intentional than it actually was in real time.

There was a period where I was consuming absolute rubbish.

Not dramatically, not consciously, not even rebelliously. Just constantly. TikTok (a dancing app mind you) in particular. Endless, frictionless, algorithmically perfect streams of content that asked nothing of me except my attention, which I gave freely because it felt harmless and because everyone else was doing the same thing.

At first, I didn’t notice anything was wrong. I was still creating, still posting, still getting views. If anything, the numbers looked healthier than they ever had. Engagement was up. Opportunities were coming in. Brands were interested. On paper, it looked like momentum.

But slowly, and in a way that was hard to pin down, what I was producing began to change.

My work became shorter, flatter, louder, less curious, less patience. I found myself chasing clicks and views instead of ideas, virality instead of intention. I was making things that performed rather than things that meant something, and the most unsettling part was that I could feel my attention span collapsing alongside it.

I wasn’t bored. I was overstimulated.

Anything that didn’t reward me quickly felt like effort. Anything that demanded sustained engagement felt heavy. I was permanently consuming, permanently producing, but rarely thinking. And somewhere in that loop, something essential dulled.

It took me longer than it should have to recognise the pattern.

We all accept, without argument, that what you eat shapes your body. Eat badly for long enough and your body will eventually force the conversation. What we resist acknowledging is that the same thing happens with everything else we ingest, just more quietly. What you watch, what you listen to, what you read, what you allow to wash over you while calling it relaxation all leaves residue.

At some point, I realised I had let an algorithm train me out of patience.

That realisation didn’t arrive during a crisis or a breakdown. It came on a late-night walk, headphones in, streets quiet, listening to Ceebo’s “blair babies”. The introduction skit, 1997–2007, caught me off guard. Not because it was loud or dramatic, but because it named something I had been circling without language.

It made something click.

We are not starved of content. We are starved of engagement. Real engagement is unpopular because placation is easier. It’s easier to be entertained than to be challenged, easier to be distracted than to be transformed. Most of what we consume is designed to soothe us just enough that we don’t ask for more.

And I realised I had been complicit in that, both as a consumer and as a creator.

That scared me more than dwindling number ever could.

So I curbed it. Not perfectly, but deliberately. I reduced the noise. I became more selective about what I let shape my thinking, because I had felt firsthand how quickly low-effort consumption turns into low-effort creation. Lo and behold, the numbers did dwindle and followers dropped like flies - and I don’t miss a single one of them.

The effects weren’t immediate, but they were undeniable.

My thinking slowed down. Not in a dull way, but in a way that allowed things to settle. I became less reactive, more structural. Less interested in moments, more attentive to patterns. Less impressed by noise, more drawn to work that asked something of me in return.

It didn’t make life easier. But it made it clearer.

And clarity, I’ve learned, is one of the few things that actually compounds.

PEAKY BLINDERS AND MISREADING THE LESSON

It was around this time that I finally watched Peaky Blinders.

Late, I know. Everyone and their mum had already decided what the show “was” by the time I got to it. Gangsters. Violence. Aesthetic bravado. Flat caps and cigarettes - men doing the most while saying very little. I went in expecting to be entertained, maybe mildly impressed, then move on.

Instead, I found myself watching it obsessively.

Not because I wanted to be anyone in it, and not because I was seduced by the surface-level fantasy. What held me was something quieter, something far less cinematic, and far more revealing once you notice it.

The systems.

I watched group after group operate with an almost boring level of intentionality. Decisions made slowly. Power accumulated patiently. Resources circulated inward. Loyalty treated not as a vibe but as an enforced condition. Nothing left to chance, nothing outsourced to hope.

Strip away the crime, and what you’re left with is organisation - and that’s the part shallow ogling glides over.

Every immigrant group in the show, regardless of origin, seemed to understand the same underlying truth. Survival might be individual, but power is collective. Social mobility does not happen accidentally. It is engineered, protected, and maintained through structure.

I want to be very clear here, because you people love to misunderstand guys on purpose. This is not admiration for criminality. I have no interest in crime, nor any desire to romanticise it. That was never the lesson.

The lesson was coordination.

The show forced me to confront how much of our lives we leave uncoordinated. How often we mistake proximity for community, visibility for power, and talent for leverage. How rarely we stop to ask whether the way we are moving is genuinely designed to produce anything durable.

Once that question lodged itself in my head, it refused to leave. Crime Pay’s infamous #nooticing exemplifies what dawned on me perfectly.

And naturally, the next thing I did was hold that lens up to home.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE MIRROR: BLACK BRITAIN

Black Britain does not suffer from a lack of talent. That much is obvious to anyone paying attention, after all that is the only currency we are paid in. Creativity, intelligence, ambition, and cultural influence are everywhere. What’s missing is not ability. It’s alignment.

We are brilliant individually and disjointed collectively.

Money circulates outward faster than it accumulates inward. Even when risk is taken, even when something “works”, the long-term benefits rarely stay where they were generated. There is little compounding, little infrastructure, little protection against erosion.

This isn’t a moral failing. It’s structural.

And it’s made worse by the same culture of placation I still haven’t finished untangling myself from. The same appetite for immediacy. The same preference for moments over systems. The same comfort with being seen rather than being organised, paid, supported.

Entertainment thrives in that environment. Infrastructure does not.

Which is why the next realisation hit as hard as it did.

DIDDY, BAD BOY, AND THE LIMITS OF ATTENTION

Watching the documentary on Sean Combs landed very differently after all of that.

There is no denying the scale of what Bad Boy achieved. It didn’t just release music. It shaped taste. It dictated what was cool. It understood attention long before most institutions did, and for a time, it held that attention with frightening effectiveness.

That kind of influence is seductive. It looks like power and it feels like control.

But the documentary made something else abundantly clear.

Attention on its lonesome is brittle.

Without ethics, without intellectual depth, without infrastructure that exists independently of any one personality, it collapses inward. The machine keeps running, but the centre rots - eventually collapsing the aforementioned machine in on itself. The art that endures often does so in spite of the system, not because of it.

What stayed with me was how one-dimensional the power ultimately was. Which offers a succinct explanation as to why its outputs were so narrow. An explanation as to how little of it translated into anything that could outlive the moment or serve anyone beyond the immediate circle.

And that’s when the question finally took full shape.

What if cultural influence didn’t stop at attention?

What if it was paired with intention, ethics, and long-term thinking? What if entertainment opened the door, but education, ownership, and infrastructure were what waited on the other side.

Not as charity, nor optics but design.

That question is where all of this has been quietly heading.

ENTER THE RENAISSANCE

By the time I reached this point, it was clear that what I was circling could not be resolved by sharper critique or better commentary alone. I wasn’t looking at a lack of talent, influence, or cultural production. I was looking at a failure of containment.

We produce culture faster than we know how to hold it. Attention spikes, meaning thins, and the people at the centre of it are left either exhausted or extracted from. I had lived that cycle personally, watched it play out around me, and recognised it immediately in the histories we praise without interrogating.

That is where The Renaissance comes from.

Not as an aesthetic revival, and not as nostalgia for previous moments of Black cultural explosion, but as an attempt to answer a call that has been ringing since long before any of us arrived. To do the work that earlier movements could not fully do, not because of failure of imagination, but because of historical constraint.

When I talk about a Renaissance “man”, I’m not talking about the romantic caricature of genius. I’m talking about someone who understands that narrowness is fragile. Someone who builds intellectual, creative, physical, and economic capacity in parallel because history has shown us, repeatedly, that brilliance without infrastructure is easily absorbed, diluted, or discarded.

That recognition deepened as I read Klāëjø’s “Literary Revolution is Bound to Subside.” it is a must read. He put sources, context and evidence to argue what I felt but struggled to articulate. Having these reference points galvanised me.

Though Amiri Baraka’s Black Art is moving, it was Marilyn Nelson’s introduction to it before she read it to an audience that stopped me cold. Not because of spectacle, but because of her refusal. She warns the reader, as she warned her students, that the poem contains language that will offend the “easily offended”. She offers them the option to disengage. Then she refuses to apologise. Poetry, she says, is supposed to provoke. To challenge. To make the reader uncomfortable.

That framing matters.

Because Baraka’s poem is not interested in being liked, or even understood at first pass. It rejects the idea that Black art exists to soothe, decorate, or be consumed politely. It insists on pressure. On consequence. On language that is inseparable from struggle and power. The violence of the poem is not gratuitous; it is diagnostic. It exposes what happens when rhetoric is allowed to float free from material conditions and that is why it resonated so deeply with me. Fuck making Dove soap commercials, I want to make art.

Reading it alongside the world I live in now, the distance was unsettling.

That unease sharpened when I read blk/rhetoric by Sonia Sanchez. Not just the words, but the form itself. The spacing. The fragmentation. The way the poem feels like it’s breaking through interference rather than presenting itself cleanly. It reads less like a performance and more like a transmission.

And at its centre is a question that refuses to age.

I realised, sitting with it, that I didn’t want to be another person repeating that question into a world already saturated with commentary. Not in a moment defined by what feels like a gormless, almost gluttonous entanglement (Sorry Jada Smith, I had to </3) with consumption and placation. We do not lack awareness. We lack translation. We lack the structures that allow rhetoric to become consequence.

Klāëjø identified The Harlem Renaissance produced an extraordinary concentration of Black brilliance. What it did not produce, at scale, was ownership, infrastructure, or durable economic power for the communities that generated it. The art endured. The rhetoric endured but the people did not benefit proportionately, at least our people didn’t.

This is where the sentiment carried by Kwame Nkrumah’s definition of “dialectical moments” in Consciencism in tandem with Duncan Green’s comments on revolution in How Change Happens becomes unavoidable.

Revolution doesn’t necessarily need to happen quickly, but its efficiency in utilising the power of the people—once/if it has it—means that momentum is crucial, but still, momentum is enigmatic.

It’s a catalyst, an incredible catalyst, but only until it isn’t.

Once/if momentum slows, so does the revolution.

Revolution doesn’t necessitate speed, but it does depend on momentum. Momentum is catalytic, powerful, and deeply unstable. It creates conditions for change, but only briefly. Once momentum slows, so does the revolution.

That observation feels painfully current.

In Black Britain, the momentum is there. The ideas are sharp. The art is fearless. The rhetoric is abundant. What remains dangerously underdeveloped is the infrastructure capable of holding that momentum long enough for it to compound.

The Renaissance is an attempt to intervene at precisely that point.

Through Renaissance House Limited, my work begins commercially and deliberately. Cultural consultancy, professional services, representation, and eventual investment (bare bureaucracy blud) designed to turn influence into leverage, and leverage into longevity. Not exposure for its own sake, but structure. Not moments, but trajectories.

This is how “blk/rhetoric” is made to mean something.

Not by softening art so it can be sold, but by surrounding it with systems that allow its makers to live fully, think broadly, and endure. Not by asking the same questions Sanchez asked, but by building answers sturdy enough to hold the weight of them.

I am still negotiating my place inside the culture I am trying to reorganise, still trying semi-successfully in resisting meaningless placation, still unlearning passivity. But I am no longer pretending that awareness is enough, or that momentum can be left to chance.