TEDsters
TED doesn’t have anything to prove any more. Here in Vancouver, the old complaints — of self-indulgent elitism, of a technophiliac mindset, of feel-good charitable sops by billionaires — have receded to the level of background hum. TED, the annual conference that gathers upward of 1,400 cognitive pilgrims, is a juggernaut, with over 70 well-rehearsed speakers who bring passion, data, and the occasional bullshit. To those shelling out $8,500 and up for a ticket (“donors” pay $17,000), it’s a must-attend, even though they know the hoi polloi will eventually get to see the talks free online. Nothing will get in their way.
Well, almost nothing. Because this year the Vancouver Convention Center could only be booked on this week of school closings in the States, some moguls chose to forgo their annual TED fix for family ski trips.
TED hardly missed them. After a few years of some self-doubt, and an awkwardly sited venue in the outré city of Long Beach, California, TED began to regain its mojo when it moved north of the border in 2014. (Though many speakers still address the audience as if they were Americans, leaving Canadians in attendance, “feeling like chopped liver,” as one TEDster griped.) Now TED is in full stride. David Rockwell’s custom-built pop-up ampitheatre presents an intimate and idiosyncratic space for the spoken-word performer. And TED’s CEO and curator Chris Anderson has with his team collected an army of influencers, entertainers, and wonks to lead the TED audience on a grueling mental five-day marathon, the Camino Del Santiago of conferences. What happens in those sessions — twelve on the main stage with talks, events and parties at various locations during the week — ripples all around the globe in online videos, TED books, the TED Radio Hour and other myriad efforts that reach over a billion people a year. The Onion, South Park and Colbert poke fun at the now familiar format, with that unmistakable red speaker circle — but fondly. It’s part of the culture now.
We have reached Peak TED.
It shows in Vancouver. Like Obama in his last term, TED seems to have run out of fucks to give. It’s doubling down on its TED-ness. “Something’s going right,” says Anderson. In some recent years, the team seemed to strain to provide a frame-breaking twist to the experience, coming up with odd themes or variations on the process, like drawing many of the speakers from audience submissions, or staging a main-stage session like a dinner party complete with food on the table. This year was by and large free of gimmicks. The 2016 theme is “Dreams.” Dreams? Like, when wasn’t TED about dreams? Anderson himself muses that he should change the acronym’s meaning to “The Engine of Dreams.”
TED Prize Winner — and TED Fellow — Sarah ParcakThe annual TED prize has often in the past gone to relatively well-known figures, or even megastars like Bill Clinton. This year, it stayed in the family, with the million-dollar award bestowed on Sarah Parcak, a University of Alabama “space archeologist” who for the last four years has been a TED Fellow, one of a cadre of bright scientists and performers who attend the conferences and share their work. She will use the money to launch a crowdsourced global search of satellite images for undiscovered antiquities. “We need a map of every archeological site in the world,” she told me. “We’re going to take everything that people find, and obviously we’ll be checking it on the back end and confirming it, and we’ll then be sharing that data with vetted government officials and archeologists.” (“Space archeologist,” by the way, is an extremely TED-ish job appellation. Others this year include “stranger enthusiast,” “brain hacker” and “sonic astrophysicist.”)
By and large, this year’s talks hit TED’s sweet spot of highfalutin’ intellectual rigor and weepy self-revelation. As always there are highs and lows. TED is where the presentations of accomplished PhD’s often include pictures of themselves in childhood. Serious topics like criminal justice, gun control, and gender equality alternated with first-person confessionals of discovering dinosaurs and seeking the roots of procrastination (two talks on this! I meant to find out why, but didn’t get around to it). This year, a thread of mixed-reality presentations ran through the program. In the corridors of the convention center, TED-sters waited in line for demos of The Void, a virtual-reality theme-park style immersion where you literally walked through a digitally created ancient world, as if you were sucked into the old Infocom adventure game Infidel. There were two onstage demonstrations of augmented reality, as well as a VR demo by filmmaker Chris Milk, where the audience donned Google Cardboard viewers to partake in a shared experience they were urged to download beforehand.
But in a sense, the virtual and augmented reality demos were redundant. At TED, you are already immersed in a kind of artificial reality: TEDworld, a place obsessed with climate change, where some people wear buttons urging even more talk of climate change. (Al Gore, who brought the crowd to its feet again this year, is the Elvis of TED.) It’s a place where hard scientists talk on stage, and purveyors of “natural wellness” products rub botanical concoctions on the back of your neck to get rid of your headache and bolster your immune system. Where a speaker casually mentions that there’s no need to spend much time describing CRISPR because surely the audience is already familiar with exotic gene-editing technology that didn’t exist a few years ago. Where an audience that gave a standing ovation to Ed Snowden a couple of years ago happily wears tracking devices on their badges that allows fellow attendees to know where in the facility they are within a few meters. Where a Fellow begins a talk with the words, “I study rainforest canopies,” and you think of course. Where Hollywood celebrities mingle with regular TEDsters and no one makes a big deal of it. (Though a couple of new A-listers this year severely tested the hipness factor of some attendees, whose hearts yearned for selfies.)
John Legend takes the stage, playing songs by Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley, and in between the tunes makes the case for prosecutorial lenience for young black men. An occupational therapist explains how she empowers disabled kids by helping them build fart machines. Thirty-three drones, lit like multi-prop fireflies, soar over the stage in a breathtaking swarm. (One goes awry and hits an audience member. Whoops.)
Just as impressive as the drones are the only-at-TED facts flying by. Did you know that there is a single neural cell in your brain that only fires when you see, hear, or think of “The Simpsons”? That the US government had a project to identify specific actors in the vast corpus of movie footage? That there are 33 vowels in the Cambodian language?
Sometimes the most interesting part of the talks rest in what is not said. One session featured two top executives of the sharing economy. Both Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia and Uber’s Travis Kalanick gave well-crafted talks focusing on the idealistic nature of their enterprises but gave short shrift to responding to criticisms. (Kalanick did reach into the history of the jitney to introduce a fable against regulation of innovative transportation business models.)
Perhaps they weren’t ducking the issues, but hewing to TED’s preference for the long view. At TEDworld, transitory concerns are often ignored. With a day of programming still to come, there’s hardly been a mention of Donald Trump. Yes, there is the occasional mawkishness, like mega-show-runner Shonda Rimes choking up with emotion while describing her bravery in playing with her children, instead of rushing to work as a self-described “titan.” But by and large the presentations involve actual data and are rendered with actual wit: the polar opposite of a GOP debate.
On cable television and the campaign trail, pundits and pols tie themselves up in knots about the impending Supreme Court nomination showdown. Despite those grave implications, there was no way that TED was going to hurriedly recruit some talking heads to ponder this Constitutional crisis. But the curators did move mountains so that a theoretical physicist could deliver a late-breaking explanation of the recently announced discovery of gravity waves passing through the universe. How could you send the TED-sters home without that?
Those lights are drones, swarming above the TED audienceAnother late addition was one of my favorite talks. A couple of weeks ago, a Yale post-doc stellar astronomer named Tabetha (Tabby) Boyajian got a call “out of the blue” asking to her give a TED talk about a paper she had recently published on some inexplicable artifacts she found while studying a star known as KIC8462852. While using techniques used to locate orbiting bodies, she discovered some anomalies that did not fit the known behavior of planetary transits. Outsiders confirmed her data, but no one has come up with a convincing explanation— and she reluctantly admits the possibility one possible scenario involves extraterrestrial intelligence. But the bottom line is that it’s currently a impenetrable celestial mystery. Or, as she told me afterwards, “This star is just weird.”
I had that conversation with Boyajian by looking her up on the TED app and geolocating her — a classic TED experience. Then we were off to to the session with a neuroscientist, an African comedy writer, the world’s best woman chess player, and a machine learning expert who has trained computers to tell when someone is lying.
That’s TED. But we may not have hit the peak yet. Next year the conference is scheduled for April, away from school vacations. The moguls will be back.
Photos courtesy TED
