A painting of a camp meeting by J. Maze Burbank from 1839. Read the history of camp meetings here.
I've been meaning to blog this -- I've been surprised at hundreds of visitors coming to my blog from a discussion on the TED site about whether or not TED is a cult.
Of course it's a cult, as I wrote back here -- and somebody in that discussion linked to my article and that's why I got all those visitors.
I didn't want to bother to have to join the site, post content on TED.com and then only have them delete it if they felt like it. But I really had nothing more to say. TED is a cult. I started analyzing at length Grace McDunnough's TED talk (she's one of the Feted Inner Core in Second Life) but then I just got tired of it. I will come back to it some day. It reminded me of one of my favourite forgotten hippie songs from the Ultimate Spinach. That is all:
I felt bad that such a slight article -- short (for me) and hardly substantive -- could get so much readership and linkage. It just states the obvious: that TED talks sit squarely in the American tradition of the camp meeting, the revivalist religious movements in the 1800s which were famous in upstate New York, where I'm from, which is even called the Burnt-Out Place because the Holy Spirit passed over it so many times. (We have the Mormons' Hill Cumorrah, for example, too, where the Angel Moroni appeared). I even went to camp meetings myself 40 years ago and somewhere around here I even have a cassette tape of Brother Cornwall. So the tradition is all very familiar -- the only thing is that I don't mind if a religious meeting selects its doctrines and doesn't let people ask questions during the meeting and doesn't present conflicting points of view -- I do resent it when a tech meeting does that.
That's my main critique of TED:
o the selection process is arbitrary and secretive and it's just a "gut feeling" of the organizers without any sense of accountability or transparency
o there are never conflicting points of view represented in a panel format with a debate
o there are opportunities for the audience to ask questions
This is not going to change, so somebody else has to make something different and call it FRED or DRED, FOR REAL EDUCATION or DAMN REAL EDUCATION or whatever.
And then there's this odd thing. You can still see the Google cache of the critical "conversation" on the TED site itself linking to my blog, with the title "Are TED Talks becoming a kind of weird technology & religious cult ..." but if you go to the site you now get something else -- "TED is evil and here's the proof" (citation of a lot of Transhumanists among its speakers). You also see a lot of the comments were deleted. Oh, well. That was my instinct from the beginning -- don't waste time there, they'll just delete it. So hurry to see that Google cache if you care.
Still, it's good to keep up with the critique of TED and someday I may take more time to critique individual videos -- there are so many horrible ones (gamification).
Nathan Juergensen has done what he calls "an epistemic" critique of TED which is good -- most people stop at the juncture where they realize its elitist or costs too much, and then the TED zombies shut them up by explaining how they have free meetings and free videos now and invite People of Colour and all the rest. Juergensen explains what's really wrong -- not the corporativism, but the pretense that it isn't corporativism:
Perhaps the biggest complaint I heard was that TED smells of corporatism. With the Facebook IPO around the corner, we are all well aware of the big venture-capital sums floating around Silicon Valley (the new Wall Street?). What’s infuriating is how Silicon Valley capitalism consistently attempts to sell itself as outside or even above corporatism. In announcing Facebook’s IPO, Mark Zuckerberg, whose company has consistently violated user privacy in the name of profit, stated that “we don’t build services to make money.” He actually said that.
Yeah, Zuckerberg did say that, I blogged about it at the time, it was so telling, the awful socialism of these people making billions from others socializing. You can't help thinking if there were less of that technocommunist glitz, Zuckerberg might have had a better IPO for his investors, geez. For Juergensen, TED is like the medicine show, another historic American social phenomenon:
“Consumers” are savvy, and they know when they are being sold to. So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery. Each new “big idea” to “inspire the world” and “change everything” pitched from the TED stage reminds me of the swamp root and snake oil liniment being sold from a wagon a hundred years past. As Mike Bulajewski pointed out in a Tweet, “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”
And there is the religious framing which he noticed as well:
The conferences have come to resemble religious meetings and the TED talks techno-spiritual sermons, pushing an evangelical, cultish attitude toward “the new ideas that will change the world.” Everything becomes “magical” and “inspirational.” In just the top-ten most-viewed TED talks, we get the messages of “inspiration,” “astonishment,” “insight,” “mathmagic” and the “thrilling potential of SixthSense technology”! The ideas most popular are those that pander to a metaphysical, magical portrayal of the role of technology in the world.
I don't mind capitalism the way these folks do, but I agree that the medicine show is the archetype, since the gadgets they're selling are always supposed to make you "better". Who doesn't doubt that SixthSense, this augmented reality thing, is coming soon to a Google Glass near you?
Another critic of TED I've found is in the New Statesman, a journal I have been coming back to more to read critiques of technology.
This piece by Martin Robbins is hilarious:
I’ve long been amused by the slogan of TED, makers of the ubiquitous TED talks. TED’s slogan is this: ‘Ideas worth spreading.’ Apparently TED has some ideas, and we should spread them. What ideas? Ideas that TED in its infinite wisdom has picked out for us, ideas which are therefore implied to be true and good and right. What should we do with these ideas? We should build a message around them - slick presentations by charismatic faces captured in high definition - and we should spread that message far and wide
The genius of the format is that nobody really watches them: we play them on iPods or we run them in our browsers while working on other things, but it’s rare that people put one on the television and sit down and really focus on them. They come at us from the side of our vision, sneaking past our preoccupied neural circuitry and planting little seeds in the nooks and crevices of our minds, like mould spores on a damp window frame. In the darkest hours of countless nights I’ve woken convinced that a solar-powered cup holder will end third world debt, but not really knowing why.
Whimsley, who is one of my favourite bloggers also critical of tech excess calls out the lack of women in TED.
If you want something really cringe-worthy about TED-as-a-cult by somebody who thinks that's a good thing, read this about TEDXWomen.
There were over 70 speakers from over dozens of countries, ranging from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright to a 20-year-old college student who founded a nonprofit at the prodigy age of 15.
The event kicked off with the candid acknowledgment that the idea of having a women-specific conference is controversial.
The First Lady of Malawi led a Conga line of CEOs, founders, visionaries, and entrepreneurs while Beninoise singer-songwriter (and UNICEF ambassador) Angelique Kidjo started a dance party on stage.
Okay, I've had enough, take it away, please.
At least I've done my civic duty now so that anyone coming to this page wanting more about the TED cult now has more meat on the bones from people who have written it up better than I could.
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