It’s time to Speak Up for the world we want

Have you noticed how quickly everything seems to be happening? This year is moving at lightning speed. Among the panoply of developments so far – from the fast track to fascism to looming World War III – January 2025 turned out to be the hottest January on record. This news was of course a momentary blip on the radar of the psychotic media agenda. 

The story did catch our attention though here at Absurd Intelligence, namely for the way the mainstream headlines framed it: “Record January warmth puzzles scientists,” read the BBC. “Scientists are mystified,” reported the Guardian. What, wait... climate scientists are puzzled by this? 

Scientists may of course be surprised by record-breaking temperatures despite 2024 being an La Niña year (when global temperatures should be cooler than in El Niño years). But to be puzzled by record-breaking temperatures, when it’s widely accepted that we’re racing towards climate breakdown seems not only far-fetched; the framing felt downright irresponsible. No wonder people are casting doubt on the severity of the situation and losing faith in expert voices. Because if the media repeat a frame which centres uncertainty then people may believe that the experts don’t really know how bad it is.

An antidote to communication calamities

When we came up with the concept for a radical speaking agency last year, it was comms calamities like this that motivated us. I had recently stepped away from the climate movement where I was working closely with the mainstream media, placing activist spokespeople on the news. Back then, we were convinced that telling the truth and persuading people to ‘trust the science’ would turn the tide on climate inaction. If everyone only knew how bad it is then surely they will all take to the streets in protest. It’s since become clear that isn’t enough, that wildfires can be plastered across the front pages and still the facts will fail to drive action. 

This way of communicating the greatest crisis humanity’s ever faced has fallen well short of the mark. The language of data points and heat maps, holding the crisis in the abstract, leaves it disconnected from the immediacy of our everyday lives. Fear of the problem without clear pathways to act on it will only make people turn away from the problem. We also know that our brains are not wired to easily join the dots between our present now and the dangers of a possible future.

We also know stories like the “puzzled” example, of course, also work wonders for the dark money-funded think tanks that are taking advantage of the mainstream news failures, ‘flooding the zone with shit’ and sowing mayhem in our algorithms, leaving people overwhelmed and unsure who to trust. What chance do we have of persuading people otherwise?

We believe there is a chance – a good one. What we’ve needed for a while are new strategies to disrupt the chaos of the news cycle and piece together the fragmented parts of the intersecting crises. That means telling new stories that connect with people’s everyday lives, while also building our own infrastructure to get those stories out there and recapture the collective narrative from the far-right. 

Speak Up was born out of this desire: to work with speakers who are motivated (and motivating!) to join the dots on the issues facing us. To inspire new ways of thinking about the solutions – and our shared existence – by flooding the space with bold voices and better stories. And if the authoritarians can build media infrastructure, why can’t we? 

To begin joining the dots, we set ourselves the task of working with what we described as five “pillars”, or narrative areas: climate, the economy, democracy, disinformation and community. We thought these could help ground us as a starting point, topics we believe have obvious relation and yet are widely misunderstood, or understood independently from one another. Working with our community of expert speakers, we would pull these topics out of the abstract and make them real for people, asking two crucial questions of our work: How do media pundits communicate the issues we face while also joining the dots between them, making them relevant to people’s everyday lives? At the same time, how do we build trust in new thought leaders to motivate a new generation of politically active people, much like the brave voices of movements of the 60s and 70s did?

As we began mapping out these areas, we realised the limitations of working within them, and the ‘pillar’ frame we were using internally. We could spend hours with our speakers searching for new ways to frame the economy’s relationship to the climate crisis, and although this is needed and necessary work, it felt as though we were still starting from a place of siloed, single issues. We had fallen into the trap of fact-telling, rather than storytelling. In the end, it seemed as if we were focusing too much on the pieces rather than first figuring out what the whole of the puzzle looked like. 

So, what does it look like?

Starting as we mean to go on

I saw a social media post recently that showed a quote from Elon Musk sat next to a quote from the late, great, Hannah Arendt. They said:

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” – Elon Musk

“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism” – Hannah Arendt

I found this a useful reminder in navigating the work we’re doing at Speak Up – and the creation of the whole picture that our work is part of. We have always seen our wider work in the communication space as helping people to not simply understand the intersecting shit show we’re in, but to feel it as well. Because without that moment of realisation or revelation that has to be embodied, how can we expect to have the emotional intelligence to change the world in a caring and fair way that does not ‘fall into barbarism’? How can we embed an understanding of how siloed issues are connected to our own struggles, while inspiring a culture of kindness and solidarity at a time of increased violence globally? 

People everywhere are crying out for a vision of a better future, while yearning to know how they can be a part of the change. That doesn’t work thinking about “pillars” holding something up – that’s not joining the dots. Lots of people use the idea of mycelium, networks, webs, supporting from below – joining the dots by weaving together. 

I believe Speak Up has a role to play in binding people into a wider story, one that pieces together our fragmented problems while using narratives that ground people in a sense of belonging and shared fate with every other being on this planet. We can do this by speaking from personal experience as well as expertise, by building trust through authenticity and showing that vulnerability is a strength, not weakness. The reality is, we get more free when we better understand the world through the eyes of others. We can point out endless problems to our hearts’ content, but without spreading messages of connection and collaboration over division and competition, we will never be able to change the conversation.

Let’s face it, it’s also true that humans are a hell of a lot smarter when not stuck in siloed specialisms. The hive mind is a very real and powerful thing! We can all be limited by trying to understand our predicaments by staying within constrained disciplines. Economists are not experts on climate risks for example, nor are climate scientists psychologists or sociologists. At the same time, there’s a huge amount to learn from the woman working at your local foodbank or an artist using their work to bring people together in their communities, the kinds of voices we never hear enough from. Specialists will only get us so far, and our strength is a multi-disciplinary commitment where we learn from one another to create the conditions for wisdom to emerge. 

The root of the word religion is ‘to bind’. When we are bound together, as people, as a neighbourhood, as a country, perhaps this is when we will transform our political culture into one that can handle the crises we face. Joining the dots then is about how we bind together in hard times, and how we feel the cost of living, the climate crisis, and treating people with dignity are all one and the same, when we feel like we belong. 

So, if these were the first pieces in a puzzle we were trying to piece together, what would that whole look like? A great way of helping me visualise this is in the photograph at the top of this newsletter piece. This was taken at the Fête of Britain, a festival of belonging that Absurd Intelligence worked on with Hard Art in Manchester in 2024. Throngs of banners fill the space, their many, disparate messages hang above a large crowd sitting together. At the centre of those messages is a large screen that reads ‘We have a new world in our hearts’ shining brilliantly into the room above a choir. For me, this perfectly epitomises the direction of our work: that care, freedom and collaboration is the glue that binds together our many issues and direction of travel. 

This translates into how Speak Up operates. Not just an agency looking after talent and maximizing their platforms. Rather, part of our monthly routine is that we come together as a group and figure out how we can help support each other, listen to each other’s stories, and strengthen the bonds between us. That’s how we create what it is we want to see in the world.

So Speak Up’s mission is to support more people to speak out, build trust again in new messengers and reclaim our shared story. But this isn’t just about our speakers, it’s also about inspiring everyone else to speak out as well. Because there’s a story in all of us and we each have a part of it to tell. A new, better, kinder conversation, anchored in doing, not just telling. Our goal is to broaden people’s perspectives by offering a new vision for what the future could be.

Speak Up will officially launch on 30th April. If you’re interested in working with us, get in touch!