We need to talk about TED by Benjamin Bratton: An Edit
For my written response to the third brief, I chose to restructure Benjamin Bratton’s ‘What’s Wrong with TED Talks?’ into the style of ‘Why we should really be concerned about the visual identity for the Tokyo Olympics’, a lecture given by Ian Lynam, edited down and formatted with images from the presentation in order to be readable. A quick disclaimer: I chose Bratton’s TED talk due to the irony of his subject material, and not because I agree or disagree with what he said. This exercise does not reflect my personal feelings about this topic one way or another.
I couldn’t help but be struck by the irony of Bratton giving a TED talk about why TED talks don’t work. The lecturer points out how oversimplification of a subject material, “fails to meet the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront”, while simplifying his own thoughts and research and asking the audience to engage with it in a meaningful way (i.e. to change their behaviors in some way). While this contradiction may have been intentional, I wanted to challenge his thesis by simplifying his material even further, cutting out unnecessary anecdotes and stories and adding in pictures (similar to the formatting of Lynam’s lecture) in an effort to streamline the information even more.
This is an edited transcription of a TED talk given by Benjamin Bratton in San Diego, 2013.
Have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? I, like many people, think it’s time to ask questions about the intellectual viability of things like TED. So this TED isn’t about my work but about TED itself, what it is and why it doesn’t work.
(image: wellphoto)
The first reason is over-simplification. I ask the question: does TED epitomize a situation where someone is told that their work is not worthy of support because the public doesn’t feel good listening to them?
I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster.
So what is TED exactly?
Perhaps it’s the proposition that if we talk about world-changing ideas enough, then the world will change. But this is not true.
TED of course stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and I’ll talk a bit about all three.
The key rhetorical device for TED talks is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony through which the speaker shares a personal journey of insight and realization, its triumphs and tribulations.
(image: Dilok)
What is it that the TED audience hopes to get from this? A vicarious insight, a fleeting moment of wonder, an inkling that maybe it’s all going to work out after all?
I’m sorry but this fails to meet the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront. These are complicated and difficult and are not given to tidy just-so solutions. Also, it just doesn’t work.
Recently there was a bit of a dust up when TEDGlobal sent out a note to TEDx organisers asking them not to not book speakers whose work spans the paranormal, the conspiratorial, new age “quantum neuroenergy”, etc. Instead of these placebos, TEDx should instead curate talks that are imaginative but grounded in reality. But the corollaries of placebo science and placebo medicine are placebo politics and placebo innovation.
You should be as skeptical of placebo politics as you are placebo medicine.
T – E – D
So first technology. We hear that not only is change accelerating but that the pace of change is accelerating as well. The future on offer is one in which everything changes, so long as everything stays the same.
(image: Malambo C/peopleimages.com)
This timidity is our path to the future? No, this is incredibly conservative.
Part of my work explores deep technocultural shifts, but TED’s version has too much faith in technology, and not nearly enough commitment to technology. It is placebo technoradicalism, toying with risk so as to reaffirm the comfortable.
So our machines get smarter and we get stupider. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Both can be much more intelligent.
(image: sdecoret)
E and economics
A better ‘E’ in TED would stand for economics, and the need for imagining and designing different systems of valuation, exchange, accounting of transaction externalities, financing of coordinated planning, etc.
(image: tadamichi)
Worse is when economics is debated like metaphysics, as if the reality of a system is merely a bad example of the ideal.
Communism in theory is an egalitarian utopia.
Actually existing communism meant ecological devastation, government spying, crappy cars and gulags.
(image: robertharding)
The most recent centuries have seen extraordinary accomplishments in improving quality of life. The paradox is that the system we have now –whatever you want to call it – is in the short term what makes the amazing new technologies possible, but in the long run it is also what suppresses their full flowering. Another economic architecture is prerequisite.
D and design
Instead of our designers prototyping the same “change agent for good” projects over and over again, and then wondering why they don’t get implemented at scale, perhaps we should resolve that design is not some magic answer. Design matters a lot, but for very different reasons.
(image: Chaosamran_Studio)
Phones, drones and genomes, that’s what we do here in San Diego and La Jolla. In addition to the other insanely great things these technologies do, they are the basis of NSA spying, flying robots killing people, and the wholesale privatisation of biological life itself. That’s also what we do.
The potential for these technologies are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, and to make them serve good futures, design as “innovation” just isn’t a strong enough idea by itself. We need to talk more about design as “immunisation,” actively preventing certain potential “innovations” that we do not want from happening.
As for one simple take away … I don’t have one simple take away, one magic idea. That’s kind of the point.
But it’s not as though there is a shortage of topics for serious discussion. We need deeper conversation. TED today is not that. If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff. Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us.
(Image: THANANIT)
At a societal level, the bottom line is if we invest in things that make us feel good but which don’t work, and don’t invest in things that don’t make us feel good but which may solve problems, then our fate is that it will just get harder to feel good about not solving problems.
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