On stage, a Swedish professor who looks like your favourite uncle bounces with
enthusiasm as his graphs come alive to rapturous applause from an audience
stuffed with celebrities and internet billionaires. Later, an eerily
youthful life coach with too-white teeth berates an audience member for
failing to achieve his greatest goal by ignoring his emotions. The audience
member is Al Gore, the failed US presidential candidate.
This is the extraordinary world of TED, the technology, entertainment, design
conference. It is temporarily leaving behind its Californian home to come to
Britain. On Monday, 700 delegates who have paid £2,776, spent more than an
hour filling an application form with their goals and aspirations and been
vetted by a panel will arrive in Oxford for a four-day intellectual jamboree.
The speakers, a diverse mix of scientists, businessmen, musicians and
intellectuals — from Stephen Fry and the journalist Misha Glenny to Garik
Israelian, the astrophysicist — have a strict 18 minutes to explore “The
Substance of Things Unseen”. On the schedule are “intense conversation
breaks”. Those who can’t make it can pay $1,000 (£610) for a live simulcast,
although the speeches will eventually be broadcast free on ted.com. About
300,000 TED speeches are watched every day on the internet. Oxford is a city
used to dry academic conferences. This will not be one of them.
But is it a festival of ideas that will change the world, as its fans claim,
or is it an odd, cultish talking-shop?
The cultish tones of TED are strong. Delegates are known as TEDsters, and are
clannishly loyal to TED and its goals. The organisers are advised by a
brains trust, populated by people with one-word job descriptions such as
“polymath” and “visionary”. Each year the not-for-profit organisation behind
TED awards three $100,000 prizes and the chance to make a TED Wish. These
vary from a plan to set up marine reserves to mobilising the collective
computer power of TEDsters to search for extraterrestrial life. Other Wishes
veer dangerously close to a wish for world peace.
The whole enterprise is infused with a breathy American sincerity, a “Yes you
can!” optimism. To start taking TED as seriously as it takes itself, you
must quell the small voice in your head that mutters, not in an American
accent, “Yeah, but you probably can’t”.
It is worth muffling the voice, allowing it to emerge only when the
coruscating teeth of Tony Robbins, the life coach, catch the light or when
TED’s ambitions to change the world become too extreme. Beyond the
hyperbole, what TED does is simple. It fills a hall with clever people and
pours clever ideas into their heads in 18-minute chunks for four days. It’s
the intellectual equivalent of a foie gras production line. If the speakers
are good enough, which by and large they are, it is little wonder the
TEDsters seem a little awe-struck and reeling.
Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired and the author of The Long Tail
and Free, says: “I’m yet another one of those TED fans. The ratio of
mindblowing ideas to promotional blather is higher than any other conference
I’ve been to. The 18- minute tell-a-story approach is a great discipline. It
brings the best out in everyone.”
Eighteen minutes may seem like a dumbing down, or sexing up, of intellectual
ideas. But the best ideas talk to half-formed ideas in listeners’ minds and
need only 18 minutes to convince or repel.
Charles Leadbeater, the author of We-think, spoke at a prototype TED global
conference in Oxford in 2005. He says: “It is meritocratic because you don’t
have much time. Everyone was very interested in each other’s ideas, which
were wide in range and very eclectic. If you’re interested in mind-bending
ideas, then it’s not hype.”
Part of the TED package is the elitism of its audience and the calibre of
those at the podium. Former speakers and prizewinners include Bono and Bill
Clinton. The masters of the Universe at TED are often in philanthropic mood.
Bill Gates famously let loose a swarm of mosquitoes into the audience to
highlight the work of his charitable foundation on malaria prevention.
Gleeful TEDsters were gifted geek jokes about the Microsoft boss unleashing
a virus.
Among the declared TEDsters are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of
Google, and Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com. American TEDsters are willing
to pay $6,000 a ticket to rub shoulders with these titans of the internet
age. Deals are struck in the corridors, contacts forged over canapés.
The other half of the TED package is the free video downloads. One of TED’s
early successes was a video of Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor, using new
ways of presenting data to confound our expectations of world poverty. It
sounds absurdly dry, but it is utterly mesmerising and was a big hit on
YouTube.
TED’s ambition is breathtaking. It wants to change the world by releasing its
live speeches on the internet and hoping that they go viral. It is not a new
formula — ideas have always changed the world, and technology has always
abetted that process. Martin Luther’s idea that salvation was a gift of God
and could not be earned by good works or cash bribes was a powerful one.
Without the printing presses, his message and that of the theologists who
followed him would not have gone viral, to use an anachronistic, but apt,
term.
Chris Anderson, the organiser of TED (and not the identically named editor of
Wired), says: “You can make a very strong case that the future will be
determined by what types of ideas win the battle to colonise human minds.
What is new in human history is that any great teacher can get face to face
with any other person on the planet and potentially inspire them. That
strikes me as a very big deal.”
He rejects the idea that TED is over-reaching itself, and that its brand of
optimism is naivety with showbiz razzmatazz. “What unites our speakers is a
belief that the future is not an independent thing that will arrive and we
are victims of it, and that our job is to sit here and moan about it. They
believe that the future is something we can shape. If you accept that, then
the optimistic stance is a really strong motivator.”
Leadbeater believes that TED feeds into a public demand for new ideas, a
hunger no longer fed by politics. “Very few politicians have anything
interesting to say, so there’s a thirst for ideas from scientists, from
social entrepreneurs.”
In Britain, in particular, where the political landscape has become
ideologically barren, there is a palpable thirst for intelligent debate and
ideas. This manifests itself in the rise of literary festivals, where
writers of diverse books draw audiences in extraordinary numbers to damp
marquees.
Perhaps we get the intellectual forums to match our ambitions and culture; we
put Richard Dawkins in a tent with tea and a biscuit, TED puts him on a
stage with professional lighting and an audience with a tendency to whoop.
The Dutch version of TED is called Picnic, and it has a laid-back festival
vibe. Norway’s Innotown is clearly modelled on TED, but has less lofty
ambitions about changing the world.
For all the rhetoric, TED is yet to introduce the world to an idea that has
the legs to alter our lives in any fundamental way. Even Professor Rosling’s
brilliant and lauded speech was about the presentation of existing data and
how to communicate it, rather than a challenge to the data itself. It was,
rather aptly, a triumph of style over substance.
But perhaps TED is justified in its optimism, and its idealism. TED has, at
its best, served up an incremental mix of small but powerful ideas. Ideas
can take time to germinate, even in a new age in which the internet
disseminates content extraordinarily rapidly.
Perhaps that small voice in our heads, crying out for TED to find a
British-tinged irony and humility, is exactly what is holding us back. All
the best, most powerful ideas are coming from the United States. The pin-up
boy of popular ideas, Malcolm Gladwell, may be British-born, but it is no
coincidence that he lives and works in the US. The land that invented the
internet and shaped the cult of the celebrity is forging a new cult: the
academic as rock star, the great thinker as cultural royalty.
Muffle the cynicism, prepare to whoop. TED is coming to town.
Antonia Senior is a visionary polymath. Watch TED lectures at www.ted.com
