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21st Century Wire says…

TED has an endless supply of catchy strap-lines by which it markets itself, or its brand – like, “Ideas worth spreading”. Are they really?

TED stands for ‘Technology Entertainment Design’. For many people, TED provides a safe, middle of the road platform for speakers and audience alike, to hang out and “exchange big ideas”.

For others, TED is much more. It is a cult, and one which captures the middle and university educated classes into a ‘safe’ environment where men like Al Gore and Ray Kurzweil, or digital barons like Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Honeywell and Facebook, and defense industry R &D giants like DARPA can easily ply their wears and bump their shares. Few see it, and even fewer dare to ask: Does TED really achieve anything, or is it merely a corporate talking shop?

One in a million TED speakers will ever challenge the intellectual viability of TED. Here is one of them…

Benjamin Bratton, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, takes TED apart piece by piece, exposing many of the shallow, pseudo-intellectual aspects – and the dangers, of this popular utopian forum…



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