What Was the TED Talk?
15th March 2022
The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories — hence Gates’s opening anecdote about the barrel. In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn’t to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED’s longtime curator, puts it, “We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something.” And yet, TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned.
I have always looked on TED Talks as entertainment, an actualization of the progressive fetish for talk over action. “If we all just wish really really hard, unicorns will exist and everybody will sing Kumbaya and live in peace.”
March 15th, 2022 at 16:57
Have you ever noticed that every TED talk (or presenter) runs exactly the same? There’s a format that seems to make them happy and everyone follows it. I’ve never seen any other kind of seminar or training situation do that. Makes me believe that the most important thing is that you feel all warm and fuzzy about the future.
For an alternative, look up a YouTube video of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter giving a talk. The former guitar player for Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers became a self-taught expert on missile defense systems. Smart dude, and he follows his own style.