Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The TED Conference
Charlie Rose interviewed the guy who puts together the TED conferences. This event aggregates the famous in various fields and they give short speeches — to each other, with the plebes able to view it online. The idea is supposed to be seeding — that they will in 18 minutes plant something that is worth growing.
Now maybe it is just that Rose is on late at night when skepticism seems to rise like the moon, but listening to the shtick of the event promoter, delivered in a delicate English accent, left me doubting. You are supposed to feel impressed — low key exhibitionism is the whole idea — but the content isn't.
The unexamined subtext is that the participants apparently are all so insulated that they know little about any field other than their own. If you listen to the speeches they are for the most part preening middlebrow displays. Nothing much is said — there is a convivial desire to be funny — but a narcissism pervades the enterprise, choking it. Finally harmless and banal, but not the impressive display to which it aspires.
Thorstein Veblen thought we have transferred to our economic system the barbarian need for status. The TED participants are accomplished individuals who have little in common other than their fame. This promoter, who wants to run a 19th century online salon (a wannabe Huffington), invites action movie directors and people who study DNA to a conference and thinks he has, as the philosopher George Costanza once said, “discovered plutonium by accident” — he has found a way to confer status on himself.