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While I share your frustration with TEDx, it's important to note that the article is criticizing TED itself as being useless. It's not like TED has been a succe
by smnrchrds 5y ago
While I share your frustration with TEDx, it's important to note that the article is criticizing TED itself as being useless. It's not like TED has been a success, weighed down by the its association with TEDx. TED itself, according to the article, has been a disappointing failure.
- junon 5y agoWell yeah, TED hasn't been relevant in a long time. The way I see it, it failed years ago. It turns out, even seemingly smart people have a lot of sensational garbage to say.
- camillomiller 5y agoI think you’ve stopped reading the article too soon. If anything, the article says the opposite. TED has been an amazing success, just not in the way we think of it. >> TED of course can’t be held solely responsible for the increasingly eschatological pronouncements of this cohort [the tech elite]. That would be, in a way, to buy into its hype too much. But as the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy. It helped refine prediction into a rhetorical art well-suited to these aspiring world conquerors — even the ones who fail.
- smnrchrds 5y agoYou are right. I read the first part and added the article to my reading list to finish later. But the conclusions of the first part mirror how I personally feel about TED.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoWait, is that supposed to be uplifting? The Silicon Valley version of the future has turned out to be a dystopian nightmare.
- fknorangesite 5y agoNo, it is not. It is supposed to point out that TED has succeeded at its actual purpose - just not the purpose we were led to believe.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoAh I see. Yes I’d agree with that.
- ImaCake 5y agoI stopped before this point. Thankyou heaps for reading further and sharing this quote. I think it really nails it.
- pjmlp 5y agoLike many things TED was fashion. For a while it was cool for people to do such talks, the problem is that those people don't have unlimited things to say, so naturally when all important stuff is said and done, only lower quality content is left, with the expected spiral to the bottom until it doesn't matter any longer and is time to move on.
- ghaff 5y agoI think your first sentence captures it better than the second (though there's some truth to that as well.) TED talks tend to have a certain style and pattern. And, like a given TV show, there comes a point when the particular style and pattern starts to get repetitive and tiresome. Once you've seen 50 TED talks, even if the 51st would be fairly compelling in isolation, it maybe feels like more of the same in context. The fashion has mostly moved to other things.
- CPLX 5y agoHe’s not saying TED was a failure at all. He’s saying TED was and is a propaganda tool of a newly ascendant branch of the ruling class and its fans, at the time, were marks.