Curiosities

TED is Dead

By posted at 11:00 am on March 11, 2012 2

It’s fashionable to hate on TED all of a sudden. In the span of a month, we’ve got this piece by Nathan Jurgenson in The New Inquiry, this one by Benjamin Wallace in New York Magazine, and this one by Megan Garber in The Atlantic.

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2 Responses to “TED is Dead”

  1. Too a
    at 11:41 am on March 11, 2012

    Nice song

  2. Patrick Murtha
    at 5:50 pm on March 11, 2012

    As these glamorati yap and network their way from conference to conference, getting off on their personal branding, I don’t see the world becoming a noticeably better place from all the hot air being expelled. Years ago, Thomas Merton wrote of the danger of becoming associated with, and therefore the representative and inevitable defender of, any particular set of ideas; he felt that it could only limit him as a thinker. Before the concept of personal branding was branded, he was wholeheartedly against it. And that is one reason why Merton is a profound, unpinnable thinker (just as Freud is not a Freudian, and Marx is not a Marxist), while Richard Saul Wurman, Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, and David Brooks, for all their occasional virtues, are not. Rather, they are mainly pseudo-intellectual opportunists for whom the conference world (along with the obligatory appearances on Charlie Rose, etc.) is just another way of growing their bottom line.

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