May 22, 2012 |
Photo Credit: R.Iegosyn via Shutterstock.com
There was a bit of a scandal last week when it was reported that a TED Talk on income equality
had been censored.
That turned out to be not quite the entire story. Nick Hanauer, a
venture capitalist with a book out on income inequality, was invited to
speak at a TED function. He spoke for a few minutes, making the argument
that rich people like himself are not in fact job creators and that
they should be taxed at a higher rate.
The talk seemed reasonably well-received by the audience, but TED
“curator” Chris Anderson told Hanauer that it would not be featured on
TED’s site, in part because the audience response was mixed but also
because it was too political and this was an “election year.”
Hanauer had his PR people go to the press immediately and accused TED
of censorship, which is obnoxious — TED didn’t have to host his talk,
obviously, and his talk was not hugely revelatory for anyone familiar
with recent writings on income inequity from a variety of experts — but
Anderson’s responses were still a good distillation of TED’s ideology.
In case you’re unfamiliar with TED, it is a series of short lectures
on a variety of subjects that stream on the Internet, for free. That’s
it, really, or at least that is all that TED is to most of the people
who have even heard of it. For an elite few, though, TED is something
more: a lifestyle, an ethos, a bunch of overpriced networking events
featuring live entertainment from smart and occasionally famous people.
Before streaming video, TED was a conference — it is not named for a
person, but stands for “technology, entertainment and design” —
organized by celebrated “information architect” (fancy graphic designer)
Richard Saul Wurman. Wurman sold the conference, in 2002, to a
nonprofit foundation started and run by former publisher and longtime
do-gooder Chris Anderson (not the Chris Anderson of Wired). Anderson
grew TED from a woolly conference for rich Silicon Valley millionaire
nerds to a giant global brand. It has since become a much more
exclusive, expensive elite networking experience with a much more
prominent public face — the little streaming videos of lectures.
It’s even franchising — “TEDx” events are licensed third-party
TED-style conferences largely unaffiliated with TED proper — and while
TED is run by a nonprofit, it brings in a tremendous amount of money
from its members and corporate sponsorships. At this point TED is a
massive, money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism, with
multiple events worldwide, awards and grants to TED-certified high
achievers, and a list of speakers that would cost a fortune if they
didn’t agree to do it for free out of public-spiritedness.
According to
a 2010 piece in Fast Company, the
trade journal of the breathless bullshit industry, the people behind
TED are “creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education
brand in more than 100 years.” Well! That’s certainly saying… something.
(What it’s mostly saying is “This is a Fast Company story about some
overhyped Internet thing.”)
To even attend a TED conference requires not just a donation of between $7,500 and $125,000, but also
a complicated admissions process in which the TED people determine whether you’re TED material; so,
as Maura Johnston says, maybe it’s got more in common with Harvard than is initially apparent.
Strip away the hype and you’re left with a reasonably good video
podcast with delusions of grandeur. For most of the millions of people
who watch TED videos at the office, it’s a middlebrow diversion and a
source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it’s
changing the world, like if “This American Life” suddenly mistook itself
for Doctors Without Borders.
The model for your standard TED talk is a late-period Malcolm Gladwell book chapter. Common tropes include:
- Drastically oversimplified explanations of complex problems.
- Technologically utopian solutions to said complex problems.
- Unconventional (and unconvincing) explanations of the origins of said complex problems.
- Staggeringly obvious observations presented as mind-blowing new insights.
What’s most important is a sort of genial feel-good sense that
everything will be OK, thanks in large part to the brilliance and
beneficence of TED conference attendees. (Well, that and a bit of Vegas
magician-with-PowerPoint stagecraft.)
Look at
Jonathan Haidt’s talk on morality and its relation to political preference,
which Dave Weigel linked to as an example of a political TED talk.
It’s a very good TED talk, and a good précis on Haidt’s interesting
work. It’s also full of dubious assertions that Haidt doesn’t really
have time to support with relevant arguments or data (morality is an
evolutionary adaption — that is, biological?), gross flattery of the
audience (“This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much,
using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their
money, to make the world a better place, to fight — to fight wrongs, to
solve problems”), and some decidedly flaky material on the superiority
of Eastern religions. (There is, at least, no techno-utopianism to be
found.)
And Haidt is talking about politics, or liberalism, in the way it’s
commonly defined by the sort of liberal rich people who make up the
majority of the media elite and the Hollywood elite and even the (more
libertarian) Silicon Valley elite: “social liberalism.” He is talking
about moral issues, and while economic issues are also moral, he does
not mention social justice or economic redistributionism.
Because TED is for, and by, unbelievably rich people, they tiptoe
around questions of the justness of a society that rewards TED attendees
so much for what usually amounts to a series of lucky breaks. Anderson
says he declined to promote the Hanauer talk because it was “mediocre”
(that has never once stopped TED before, but we needn’t get too deep
into that), but
an email from Anderson to Hanauer on
the decision was more a critique of Hanauer’s thesis than a criticism
of his performance. Anderson cited, specifically, his concern that “a
lot of business managers and entrepreneurs would feel insulted” by the
argument that multimillionaire executives hire more employees only as a
“last resort.” (The entire recent history of the fixation on short-term
returns, obsession with “efficiency,” and “streamlining” of most
American corporations escaped the notice of Mr. Anderson, apparently.) I
can’t imagine this line-by-line response to all the points raised in a
TED Talk happening for an “expert” on any subject other than the general
uselessness and self-importance of self-proclaimed millionaire “job
creators.”
On his blog, Anderson
attempted to deflate the growing anti-TED outrage by saying that while
he supported Hanauer’s “overall stance” (a claim belied by his email to
Hanauer), the talk was not good enough to merit posting.
At TED we post one talk a day on our home page. We’re drawing from a
pool of 250+ that we record at our own conferences each year and up to
10,000 recorded at the various TEDx events around the world, not to
mention our other conference partners. Our policy is to post only talks
that are truly special. And we try to steer clear of talks that are
bound to descend into the same dismal partisan head-butting people can
find every day elsewhere in the media.
The word “partisan” or variations on it appear three times in
Anderson’s explanation. The words “Democrat” and “Republican” appear
only once in Hanauer’s talk, at the very beginning.
Anderson is using “partisanship” the same way idiotic centrist
pundits like Thomas Friedman do: as a meaningless catch-all term for any
political action or belief that they disagree with. “Nonpartisanship”
is, as always, defined as “whatever I think is reasonable and correct.”
Hanauer’s argument is certainly left-leaning, but it’s not “partisan” —
the Democratic Party helped usher in our new Gilded Age, and its leaders
do not have an anti-income-inequality platform, even if Democrats are
more likely to speak out on the subject than Republicans.
“Partisan” is the word that reveals how full of shit Anderson is,
even if he doesn’t know it. This is the blinding ideology of the
globe-trotting do-gooder billionaire class that mistakes its
self-evident dogma for a pure lack of ideology.
The people at Davos and in Aspen also think they’re saving the world,
and the majority of them are also deeply involved in making it much
worse for people who can’t afford to go to Davos and Aspen. It is no
wonder at all that a talk on how their voluntary charity can better the
lives of the unwashed is received with much more enthusiasm than one on
how a better use for their money would be for them to have much less of
it and everyone else a little more.
Hanauer’s talk
was remarkably dry —
and I am sure that was part of the reason for its burying, because TED
truly values flash and surprise over substance — and not remotely
mistakable for a pro-Democratic Party stump speech. But its central
message was incompatible with the TED ethos: that TED People Are Good
for the World.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
