{"id":25891,"date":"2015-01-25T01:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-01-25T06:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25891"},"modified":"2015-01-18T20:52:32","modified_gmt":"2015-01-19T01:52:32","slug":"qotd-ted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/25\/qotd-ted\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: TED"},"content":{"rendered":"

Take the curious phenomenon of the TED talk. TED \u2013 Technology, Entertainment, Design \u2013 is a global lecture circuit propagating \u201cideas worth spreading\u201d. It is huge. Half a billion people have watched the 1,600 TED talks that are now online. Yet the talks are almost parochially American. Some are good but too many are blatant hard sells and quite a few are just daft. All of them lay claim to the future; this is another futurology land-grab, this time globalised and internet-enabled.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Bratton, a professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, has an astrophysicist friend who made a pitch to a potential donor of research funds. The pitch was excellent but he failed to get the money because, as the donor put it, \u201cYou know what, I\u2019m gonna pass because I just don\u2019t feel inspired … you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.\u201d Gladwellism \u2013 the hard sell of a big theme supported by dubious, incoherent but dramatically presented evidence \u2013 is the primary TED style. Is this, wondered Bratton, the basis on which the future should be planned? To its credit, TED had the good grace to let him give a virulently anti-TED talk to make his case. \u201cI submit,\u201d he told the assembled geeks, \u201cthat astrophysics run on the model of American Idol<\/em> is a recipe for civilisational disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bratton is not anti-futurology like me; rather, he is against simple-minded futurology. He thinks the TED style evades awkward complexities and evokes a future in which, somehow, everything will be changed by technology and yet the same. The geeks will still be living their laid-back California lifestyle because that will not be affected by the radical social and political implications of the very technology they plan to impose on societies and states. This is a naive, very local vision of heaven in which everybody drinks beer and plays baseball and the sun always shines.<\/p>\n

The reality, as the revelations of the National Security Agency\u2019s near-universal surveillance show, is that technology is just as likely to unleash hell as any other human enterprise. But the primary TED faith is that the future is good simply because it is the future; not being the present or the past is seen as an intrinsic virtue.<\/p>\n

Bryan Appleyard, “Why futurologists are always wrong \u2013 and why we should be sceptical of techno-utopians: From predicting AI within 20 years to mass-starvation in the 1970s, those who foretell the future often come close to doomsday preachers”, New Statesman<\/em><\/a>, 2014-04-10.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Take the curious phenomenon of the TED talk. TED \u2013 Technology, Entertainment, Design \u2013 is a global lecture circuit propagating \u201cideas worth spreading\u201d. It is huge. Half a billion people have watched the 1,600 TED talks that are now online. Yet the talks are almost parochially American. Some are good but too many are blatant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,28,41,15],"tags":[686,428,810],"class_list":["post-25891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-media","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-futurism","tag-marketing","tag-skepticism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6JB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25891"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25900,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25891\/revisions\/25900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}