Business

TEDsters Smile Through Financial Meltdown

LONG BEACH, California — The first official speaker at TED 2009 was Juan Enriquez, whose biography made him a perfect choice. During his tenure as chief of staff for Mexico’s secretary of state, he brokered a cease-fire with Zapatista rebels. He founded a Life Sciences Institute for Harvard Business School. Now he’s involved in a […]

Juan_enriquezLONG BEACH, California —
The first official speaker at TED 2009 was Juan Enriquez, whose biography made him a perfect choice. During his tenure as chief of staff for Mexico’s secretary of state, he brokered a cease-fire with Zapatista rebels. He founded a Life Sciences Institute for Harvard Business School. Now he’s involved in a plan to create biofuels out of synthetic life forms. A truly TED resume.

Enriquez, a bearded middle-aged man with a placid yet authoritative demeanor, looked over the packed 1300-seat Long Beach Performing Arts Center. Quite logically, he referred to the financial crisis that is top of mind of everyone from President Barack Obama to the throngs of non-TEDsters filling unemployment offices.

“There is a great big elephant in the room called the economy,” he said, and proceeded with a brief and scary summary of the situation, warning, “If the dollar fails, all bets are off.” As in … take to the lifeboats. But then he got sunnier, predicting that as we learn to engineer cells, tissues and robots, everything will get better. Bailed out by the Singularity!

Welcome to TED. Halfway through the 4-day event, it’s clear “Curator” Chris Anderson — not to be confused with the editor in chief of Wired magazine of the same name — and his team have delivered another triumph. The TED conference has evolved into a small confab of geekery and design into an enviable engine for illuminating and inspirational talks from the well-known (this year has Bill Gates, Oliver Sacks and WWW founder Tim Berners-Lee) as well as undiscovered gems like last year Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who documented her own stroke in real time. (Her TED appearance led to a book contract and an Oprah appearance.)

It’s also a schmooze-fest of cosmic proportions, where scientists and business folk mingle with artists and Hollywood celebrities. My favorite moment so far: Cameron Diaz seeking Blackberry tech support from Walt Mossberg.

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Some longtime attendees were concerned about TED2009's move from its beloved Monterey, California, venue to a less-intimate setting in Long Beach that could accommodate all but 200 of the 1500
who signed up for the event crowd (at Monterey, the cozy auditorium held only half the attendees with the rest dispatched to posh “simulcast rooms”). But the bigger space works fine, good news to those who paid
$6,000 for their badge. The good feelings extend to 400 more virtual
TEDsters participating remotely from a hotel in Palm Springs, California, and 200
“TED Associates” who pay $1,000 to watch via the web and share the link with up to 10 friends. (Egalitarian note: the hoi polloi can watch the talks later on TED.com.)

Some of the hit talks in the first two days have included an amazing demo of an MIT project to make the web into a “sixth sense” by wearable devices, including a projector that makes every surface into an interactive touchscreen desktop; a fascinating description of how the digital effects work in “Benjamin Button”; and a boffo performance by Regina Spektor, who momentarily forgot how to play one of her own songs. And there’s been no lack of social issues. Speakers are addressing problems that include climate change (a TED biggie, and, as usual, Al Gore is in the building), infant mortality, Latin American poverty, killer robots, education system failures and the difficulty of writing a follow-up to a book that sold 5 million copies. (Apparently this is a burden, though one I’d volunteer to take on.) The annual TED prizes, which involve cash grants and helping hands from powerful TEDsters, went to SETI-leader Jill Tarter, ocean preservationist Silvia Earle and a Venezuelan educator who recruits barrio kids to play in a top-notch youth orchestra.

But what about the great big elephant — the biggest financial crisis since the Depression? Up to this point in the conference, at least, it’s been stuffed into a closet. There’s a weird disconnect from the vibe that permeates the collective consciousness outside the Long
Beach bubble — not to mention the collective pocketbook. Don’t
TEDsters have 401(k)s? Even Bill Gates (who did touch on the crisis briefly in his talk) admits that his foundation’s coffers have dropped.

Compare this to the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The so-called “Davos Man” has been universally celebrated as an globalist defined by optimism, but this year’s conclave was a gloomfest of epic proportions. The TEDizen, though, seems to be defined by a continually soaring spirit. Even a fierce rain squall in Long Beach on Thursday didn’t put a damper on the upbeat tone. Though TEDsters still love to be engaged with slides that dynamically chart the progress of the AIDS
epidemic, and flutter with empathy at the mere mention of the word
Africa, the surest ticket to a standing ovation in Long Beach is a stirring personal narrative of obstacles overcome.

Quizzing fellow conference goers about this gap, I got mixed responses. Some agreed that it was odd that the conference hadn’t taken on the issue more squarely. Others thought that the long-view approach taken by TED is perfectly appropriate. “Who wants to hear some economist tell us what we already know?” one said to me. “I come here to hear new ideas.”

So why not some new ideas about the mess we’re in? Obviously, TED
planning goes on many months before the event, and Anderson’s team hammered out the speaking schedule well in advance. But it’s not like the economy imploded just last week. One of the great moments of TED
came when a last-minute addition, Tienanmen Square dissident Li Lu, gave a stirring — and timely — talk. This current catastrophe seems to call for a cadre of brilliant thinkers to explain and reframe a disaster that seems to engulf the entire world — but maybe not the
Long Beach Performing Arts Center.

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