The Naked and the TED

I liked this article a lot, even though I don't have as much experience with the TED community as the author does. Applying a acerbic wit and cynical eye to what we do as technical people is sorely needed.

And the author has a point: at some point the language gets so conceptual and fuzzy that it becomes more of a performance than a knowledge-sharing exercise. It's like a carnival for the wannabe Bill Gates of the world.

For a couple of years I've been fascinated with the idea that as intelligent people many of us are drawn to activities and consumption that makes us look more intelligent, whether or not we actually learn anything of value from them or not. So we listen to the right music, have the right opinions, and banter on about the right topics in the right way, all the while doing more than just a little social posturing and signalling. Vast segments of intelligentsia are little more than echo chamber. We are giving up independent analysis for pre-digested bits of feel-good junk food.

Good to see that argument gaining more traction. Healthy communities require introspection and honest conversations.

The thing about TED is, wild-eyed though it may be, it's not a political agenda. It's (trying to be) beyond that, about technology and science and understanding, and while the result is often pretty technocratic it is actually often reflecting the benefits of self-organisation through tech. Stuff like Wikipedia, for example, is perfect TED-fodder because it shows demonstrable ways of doing things better.

People who do not understand that idea (of which they are many) criticise it on their own terms, and so miss the point. If you are used to seeing life through a political lens (as we might hazard the New Republic does) then TED looks like an agenda by a different name. However that's like religious people insisting that atheists must believe in something, even if that's belief in an idea. It is outside their framework of understanding to consider a person who does not hold any kind of belief.

So, personally (and I think the popularity of TED and RSA etc reflect this) this whole article reads like some venting from someone who doesn't really understand the concept, and so can only think of it in terms of politics. These Teddites must have a political view of some kind, right? No.

It's trans-political because it's about applied informational learning to solve problems. Politics itself being one of those problems.

What he doesn't get to the heart of is, aside from the fact that the book may not be very good (which I can easily accept), why the central systems-and-data-driven plank that comprises much of TED-esque thinking is bad.

To take one example, he seems to find the whole notion of a hybrid age, or the singularity, as dangerous technocratic political thinking, something to be stamped out. Whereas look at the actual smart-device search-engine semantic-social world we're creeping toward and the post-political person understands that those are just inevitable outcomes. It's not whether the singularity might happen (or could be prevented) but when, and so the forward-looking thinking person should be trying to figure out the best uses of that.

He's also missed the pointed examples of Signapore and China by a country mile, mistaking older ideological associations (which, again, every forward-thinking person understands need to be resolved) for the efficiency argument. The reviewer's point is that efficiency leads to brutality, which is a very old-school political idea, but the TED-esque view generally looks for efficiency to promote/empower humanity.

Again, like Wikipedia, both more efficient and much better (but let's instead get distracted by talking about Jimmy Wales and how he named his children).

So, you know, like that. Morozov seems to want to make a middle-20th century argument about early 21st-century ideas, and it shows. He writes passably well (though this review could have been cut in half with no loss imo), but the core conceit (this TED stuff is techno-politics) is just fundamentally wrong.