Post-Captialist Utopia
March 2009 | 156 » Science and technology » Post-capitalist utopia
Is the exclusive TED conference intellectual nirvana—or just a return to high school?
Jaron Lanier
It is strange to be an elder, a museum piece exhumed from the past, at the tender age of 48. But that’s what happened to me in early February when I went to the 25th anniversary of TED, perhaps the world’s most exclusive conference.
At $6,000, tickets to TED—which stands for technology, entertainment and design—are surprisingly hard to come by. The event gathers some of the most clever and powerful people on the planet to give 18 minute talks on their specialism to an audience of peers. It attracts everyone from Bill Gates to Daniel Libeskind, creating a gathering comparable to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
TED talks, filmed at the conference, have taken the online world by storm. I was an early practitioner and innovator of the format—mine was an exaltation, an almost evangelical cry of optimism, for science, technology and the future. (In truth, I was emulating the rhetorical style of Alan Watts, a mid-20th century British philosopher of eastern religious ideas.)
I found, however, that TED has been transformed in the two decades since I last attended. What was once an intimate gathering of artists and scientists in an out-of-the way part of California has become an extroverted celebration, in Los Angeles, where intellectuals entertain and court philanthropists—something of a laboratory for post-capitalist motivational psychology. Instead of pampering the rich, the conference aims to challenge them. Participants are asked to commit publicly to do something, applying their own time and skills rather than merely opening a chequebook.
The new TED made me recall a dinner conversation I had with Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, almost 30 years ago. Marvin felt that an aversion to elitism was killing a great many people: that if we allowed the very rich to fund experimental replacement hearts for themselves, a good artificial heart design would appear reasonably soon, which would then quickly become cheap enough for everyone else. He wanted the rich to be guinea pigs: an experimental population to hasten the future.
The new TED seems to take Marvin’s idea into the realm of personality and the psychology of fulfilment. The TEDsters have all “made it” to the very top. Indeed, it was almost impossible to remember that a recession was going on; such things don’t touch TEDsters. And yet, instead of lolling about redecorating their mansions, they still seek relevance and meaning. That TED exists at all is a remarkable sign that even the rich and powerful want to be engaged in conversations of consequence.
One of the best talks this year was given by behavioural economist Dan Ariely (see picture, right). He described an experiment in which students cheated more often after they had seen a successful cheat wearing their own school sweatshirt. His point: people are profoundly clan oriented, more so than we yet know.
A dispiriting tribalism can be discerned at TED, too, relating to trends in the world of technology. When the conference began in the 1980s, nerds were on the rise. Brilliant young innovators, often shunned at high school, were making millions with computers. But now the tables have turned, with a new crop of Web 2.0 businesses—Twitter, Facebook and so on—all run by handsome, pleasant, popular guys. Their projects—mostly about small improvements in user experience—require little technological prowess. They certainly don’t make money. They are the business equivalents of popularity contests, in which entrepreneurs get rich by selling the large audiences that they have attracted to older nerds at Google and Microsoft, who hope that someday a business model may appear.
At TED the ideals of “conversation” and “networking” are exalted as practical deities. But there is little real mixing of ideas. This year one woman, who had been sucked into the Moonies cult, gave an impassioned plea: neuroscientists must help her understand what happened to her. Later, a TED regular named Seth Godin demanded that everyone at the conference learn how to start a movement and gain followers, because we were all destined to be leaders. He even asked each of us to practise by trying to create a minor online cult that very evening.
The two talks expressed obviously contradictory ideas. But the audience admired each equally. Traces of dispute—debate, even—seem unwelcome at an event trying to woo the world’s richest. As a Chinese official was recently quoted telling Americans: “You should be nice to the people who finance you.”
Karl Marx once imagined a post-revolutionary future, foreseeing people living in comfort made possible by technology, with time for reading the classics and practising archery. Maybe TED is, oddly, a fulfilment of Marx’s dream. The cycle of Hegelian churn gives way to nirvana. Unfortunately, utopia, unchecked, often resembles a return to high school.
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