3 posts tagged “ted2009”
I'm in Chicago looking out over the vast runways (II count at least four). It's sunny and just over zero degrees. I left TED early this year to make it home to the family.
My TED participation is wonderfully explained by people like Micael Dahlén whose book Nextopia is currently doing the bestseller rounds in Sweden. The book's chief argument is that people value things in the future greater than things in the present or past. TED is something I look forward to all year and it's a chance to blow off some steam, reflect and learn a new thing or two. Most of the 6,000 dollar membership fee refers to the value I place on TED before it happens. Once I'm at the actual conference, some of the shimmer disappears and is replaced by.... disillusionment. Every year since my first TED in 2005, something I call TED Blues has set in somewhere around day 2 or 3. This year, I decided to get to the bottom of this feeling. After all, I haven't spent five years in psychoanalysis for nothing. The Inisght hit me somewhere around the same time that Eat, Pray, Love author Elisabeth Gilbert was on stage. She received standing ovations for a speech that was in essence a very clichéd rant about not romantisizing the image of the tortured artist. Her speech was the kind of speech that tends to get standing ovations at TED. Optimistic, personal and funny in a mild kind of way. As people stood up to applaud her speech, I realized what was missing not only from her speech but most...nay, all other speeches at TED: The anger. There is no anger at TED. People sweep by difficult topics without any sense of anger and outrage and shoot directly for the solutions. There is no sense of rebellion. There is no sense of the unpredictable. A fellow German TEDster also made a good point when he said that TED is highly "self-referential". There are as many uses of the word "TED" on stage as you would have corporate endorsements on the Home Shopping Channel. The resulting situation for a sometime cynic, continually angry person like myself is that there's a sense of hopeless wholesomeness at TED not unlike the spirit fostered at high school pep rallies and in Paolo Coelho books. This spirit may work wonders for some people but I grow frustrated when anger is absent. We need anger. We need a zone of anger before we arrive at solutions. We need to incubate certain insights in a state of anger, despair, fury and rebellion. That's why I admire punk rock, street artists, demonstrations, citizen uprisings and anarchy. They are inconvenient, uncomfortable and sometimes even rightfully unlawful but they force us to look in a certain direction and understand the views of the other. That is an "idea worth spreading". More anger at TED!
