What’s in a name? For us, everything.

An Absurd Back Story

In November 2019, Clive and I were involved in facilitating a two-day session at Amnesty International. Their Secretary General at the time, Kumi Naidoo was pivoting the institution to an environmental focus, believing the climate emergency posed the greatest threat to human rights.

Amnesty (as you would expect from any self-respecting decentralised organisation) was pushing back, not least as there were other players who had more claim on being ‘environment NGOs’. The session we were involved in was building on the thought that tech might be a similarly existential threat to humanity. Maybe even fertile ground for the creation of a mass movement similar to Extinction Rebellion, where we were part of the Art Group responsible for XR’s naming, identity and much of the key messaging.

In two days, and with a stellar cast of workshop participants, we came to the conclusion that this was indeed the case. Tech, (and by tech I mean the 2019 variety – Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism had been published in 2018) was akin to there being no separation between God and Religion. Not only did the tech behemoths like Google and Meta know so much about us that they could accurately predict our future behaviour (God), they also knew how to exploit that behaviour (organised religion). It was an existentially rigged casino, and we had to do something about it.

But in that moment of realisation a workshop participant piped-up: ‘but people do love targeted advertising – it is useful’. It was pretty clear that Amnesty was not going to be the catalyst for the ‘anti-tech XR’.

All was not lost however. That day we met filmmaker Marc Silver. We knew our paths were somehow fused from that moment.

Over the next months, a growing crew would chew the fat on Zoom about how there was much work to be done in the creative sphere to address the intersections of tech, climate (and all the other unfathomably mind-mangling things going wrong in the world).

At some point we would definitely do something about this – like start a thing. And at some point ‘would definitely’ turned into ‘oh shit, we are doing this’.

But if we were starting a thing, we had to have a name. And this was problematic. Because if one of the things we were going to stick it to was Big Tech, we were, well… rather small. David and Goliath doesn’t come close.

Absurd Intelligence holds aloft the severed head of Big Tech, Gustave Doré (1866)

We’d been reading up by then too – Surveillance Capitalism wasn’t the half of it: there was this thing called Artificial Intelligence (remember this was two years before the launch of Chat GPT). We were in a very asymmetric conflict situation. Unless… we could find a way to look as if we were as BIG as AI, like when a threatened animal puffs itself up.

So what if we called ourselves AI?

But what did that mean, if not Artificial Intelligence itself? We passed over possibly the best name ever for a cutting-edge think-tank-cum-cultural-agitation lab, Absolute Idiots, as there was only really ever one ‘A’ we were interested in:

ABSURDITY.

And so Absurd Intelligence it was.

An Absurd Idea

There were plenty of people who thought our choice of name was, well, the definition of Absurd that’s often the only one proffered by dictionaries:

wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate; arousing amusement or derision; ridiculous

But it has always been absurdism where our heads are at. The search for meaning in a meaningless universe kind of Absurd.

The intentional Absurdity of Dada.

Raoul Hausmann, The Art Critic (1919–20) ©ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025

Whether Dada, Surrealism or The Bauhaus’ response to the First World War, or how the ‘failed’ city of 1970s New York saw the rise of genres such as punk, graffiti, hip-hop and disco that would go on to define and dominate global culture, art’s relationship to existential threat or collapse has long been fascinating us.

So too Paris ’68’s Atelier Populaire and the Situationist International. Especially as the Situationist ‘Spectacle’ critique of capitalism – the mediation of social relations through image – has gone exponential in the intervening half century. From Mad Men to Infinite Scroll.

This (from Wikipedia) too:

The SI rejected all art that separated itself from politics, the concept of 20th-century art that is separated from topical political events. The SI believed that the notion of artistic expression being separated from politics and current events is one proliferated by reactionary considerations to render artwork that expresses comprehensive critiques of society impotent.

That kind of Absurd. This kind of Absurd:

What played out on the streets of Paris and elsewhere in 1968 was redolent of André Breton’s 1935 Surrealist Manifesto, Speech To The Congress of Writers:

TRANSFORM THE WORLD, Marx said; CHANGE LIFE, Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.

They are one for us as well.

A rude word

We’ve all probably got a situationist moment. Here’s mine. I didn’t even see it at the time, almost certainly due to youthful ornithology, having to be in bed, or because my Hyacinth Bouquet mum didn’t like ITV.

It’s two minutes and 10 seconds where the world was absolutely transformed. By eight snotty twenty-somethings. You may’ve watched it many times before, but it completely bears revisiting 49 years later. Not only do Lydon and Severin and Sioux still look like they’ve beamed-in from the future, it’s almost impossible to believe that this was broadcast live into the early evening houses of millions. Less still, that something like this could happen on Love Islandised TV in the second quarter of the 21st Century.

After the Pistols on Grundy, life was changed.

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Other Grundys are available of course. There is a rich, time-travelling tradition of Absurdity. The Georgian me’s world was transformed by A Modest Proposal. Its full title, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick could’ve come straight out of two-child-benefit-cap-Westminster (and may yet be sat in Starmer’s in tray). The very best absurd/situational/surreal work effortlessly transcends centuries.

From Alice in Wonderland and Monty Python to Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam such epoch-leaping art enables us to navigate alternative, parallel worlds, different realities; it connects us with what has gone before and what is yet to come, binds us to eternal values. It protects the non-material against those who seek to extract, exploit and other. The DNA of humour, weirdness and beauty, handed-down through the generations, a collectively unconscious immune system.

Watch this video, and tell me it’s not about Grenfell, or Gaza. Squint at 04m:27s and I swear you can see Kneecap in the audience.

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To be Absurd is to stand in front of adversity and flick the V Sign. A particularly British trait.

And once one has done that, what else is possible? Mooning the child-surrounded ‘pre-paedo’ King of Pop Michael Jackson at the Brit Awards?

BTW: This News at Ten item on Jarvis Cocker’s Michael Jackson stage invasion at The Brit Awards could have been lifted straight from Chris Morris’s Brasseye.

Jarvis’s intervention is eerily reminiscent of an unbroadcast 1978 BBC radio interview with the aforementioned Johnny Rotten:

“I don’t know… I want to kill Jimmy Savile – he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about but aren’t allowed to talk about. I know some rumours…”

It was an interview that led to the Beeb banning Rotten. And while I might’ve been too young for Grundy, the talk of Middle England playgrounds in the late 70s was that Savile was a wrong ’un. And somehow we were aware that we knew this because of Rotten, broadcast or not.

How does that work?

Fools rush in

Enter stage left, The Fool. King Lear’s wise counsel –

“May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?”

– and constant source of speaking truth to power throughout history.

From Medieval Fool’s Day to modern Carnival, riotous, joyous, iconoclastic ribaldry is a thread of humanity no amount of suit-wearing, spreadsheet-wielding, know-your-placing wankery can squash.

From Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (this post’s lead image) to Joel Goodman’s legendary photo of modern Manchester we remain in thrall to the topsy-turvy.

From the terraces of football stadia to the second summer of love a sense of belonging has historically been intimately tied to (as the amazing Dr Martha Newson describes) the Four Ds: Drums, Dancing, sleep Depravation and Drugs.

Organising around things like religion, sport and music gives some sense of coherent collective meaning (and some rules), but the dirty cart-drawing secret us foolish horses all know is that it is the surrender that really matters. The letting go. The higher power, whether that’s a bloke with a beard in a cloud, or a riff, or a screamer from just outside the box.

The moment where everything Just Makes Sense as everyone loses their shit. We saw it on the streets of London in 2019: the pink boat on Oxford Circus, Greta and Massive Attack at a blocked Marble Arch; an actual Garden Bridge. An upside-down world: simultaneously fleeting and eternal. A new paradigm that makes the old instantly redundant.

The Absurd opens doors to new possibilities. What rushes through those doors is change.

Britain’s most legendary hero illustrates this perfectly. The finest film of his story is the one you probably won’t’ve seen. It’s the other Robin Hood from 1991. The one without Kevin Costner and That Fucking Song. It does have Uma Thurman as Marion though. Better still, it brims with ancient woodland and magic.

At the risk of plot spoiling (come on, you know how it goes; but also, look away now; more importantly watch the thing!) key to the story’s resolution is Fool’s Day.

As this most merry band homes in on power. The Fool / Friar exclaims:

Make way for the Ship of Fools!
I am The Captain, The Lord of Misrule.
Now winter is cracking the doors of spring,
Here come we to rejoice and sing.
To play The Fool, to laugh and quarrel,
And turn the whole world upside down.

And that’s what’s in a name.

TRANSFORM THE WORLD; CHANGE LIFE.

Absurd, isn’t it.

Elsewhere in Absurdity

A far-flung Elsewhere this week!

A Speak Up double-header! Alanna went up to the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester to see Jenn Reid talking to Blindboy on his live podcast tour. And also to Adele Walton’s book launch (with Clare and Charlie). Amazing, powerful women both. 💚

Clive and Roc have been in Nice disrupting the United Nations Ocean Conference with Ocean Rebellion.

It was in last week’s newsletter article, but Absurd Intelligence and Hard Art were out in force at SXSW London, with all manner of excellent folk: Zakia Sewell, Caroline Lucas, Hardeep Matharu, Moniqur Roffey, Andy Green, Love Ssega, Asif Kapadia, George Marshall and many more.

Daze starred at SEVEN events at the Cheltenham Science Festival; highlight: interviewing Tim Marshall.

Next week: Sophie and Maddy are off to Bristol to meet more wonderful people doing The Work!!