The Sound of TED: A Case for Distaste

TED, I think, serves as a modern version of high-brow oration as the middle letter suggests: Entertainment. It's a double-ended marketplace platform of content providers (speakers) and content consumers (paid attendees and non-paid viewers). Since the cost is high to paid attendees, the content must be as good and fresh as humanly possible. From what I've seen as a non-paid viewer, I think TED accomplishes this reasonably well. It seems hard to have perfect criterion to choose whom to select and whom to not, when there is an abundance of interesting of voices, but unselected folks can always speak and publish on other platforms.

(Forward thinking can be controversial, but in order to not offend audiences and prevent attracting the wrong elements, it seems customary that such topics are passed on because the forum (e.g., intended audience/speaker experience) is inappropriate, although the topic may be vital, insightful and have a legitimate fora elsewhere. (Blasphemy, politics, etc.))

I somewhat agree on TED, but even more I appreciate the author's "meta" point -- that it is perfectly okay to be annoyed or disgusted at something. One is not required to like everything, nor to pretend to like things in order to be "PC" or something.

"TED’s is the language and tone of the pitch. It’s a style that comes from corporate conference rooms, where product ideas are pitched to potential investors."

Someone in HN linked this in a previous discussion about TED, but especially with that quote in the piece it's even more a dead-on satire home run from the Onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s Part of a series though my impression was that it's the same basic joke over and over... still, for at least one iteration, it's dead-on, and this is probably the most pure illustration of just the form in that series, with no content, for the author's point.

> I will be crass: the most interesting thing about Bratton’s talk is that in the early minutes of the lecture, just as he has delivered his main thesis, he suddenly forgets what he is supposed to say. There is a pause. It would be perfectly natural in another format to wait and gather one’s thoughts, but the pause is strangely disturbing in this context. He loses his place, then his nerve, and for the rest of the talk he struggles under an invisible weight. He has to heave a breath into each sentence, trying to propel himself into a rhythm that he doesn’t regain until the very end. What he is struggling under is the pressure of the TED style.

Wait, what? Is the author a telepath?

They mentioned Sarah Silverman's TED talk deflating the pomposity of TED, but it is unbelievable that they didn't mention the TEDx talk "2070 Paradigm Shift". A guy made up a completely false story about himself to get on a TEDx roster, then for 20 minutes made up complete nonsense like going to Rwanda with Elon Musk to give African villages ipads so they could learn javascript.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yFhR1fKWG0