Cult of personality

"It’s like a cult," someone said to me. No, wait. Several people said that to me. It’s actually something I heard quite a bit from new attendees to the conference — and certainly something I thought more than once during my week at TED.

And it is like a cult; an atheist cult, an idea cult. But the rituals are vague, genuflection a social interaction and not a subjugation. There is an undeniable religious air to the thing, not just the rules and and the isolation, the exclusivity — but the tone of thinking, a pathological pressure to remain open-minded. If Judeo-Christian religions operate effectively by empirically answering questions and avoiding inquisition, TED works in the reverse, shunning the very concept of knowing — asking only that you bring an open mind. That your mind remains forever open, questioning. Questioning, but never quite judging.

The rituals are vague, genuflection a social interaction and not a subjugation

Part of that feeling is driven by the fact that there really isn’t debate at TED. Debate amongst attendees, late at night, over drinks, certainly — but even those debates feel guarded, protective of the speaker’s ideas. Scared to offend, the debater perhaps worried that they will be identified as closed minded, or that they’ll appear to have missed the point. Someone told me that at one point their "bullshit detector" went off. It was a journalist, you know, with the black label.

One of the more glaring demonstrations of this particular TED tweak came during session five on day two of the event. Chris Anderson invited Elon Musk to join him on stage for a kind of fireside chat, discussing the future of space travel, Earth travel, and probably most importantly, the future of renewable energy on the planet. Musk spoke passionately about the need for solar power use to rise to a plurality on the planet (equal to that of other sources, such as natural gas or oil). "If we don’t," he told Anderson, "we’re in a big trouble."

Musk, a wildly intelligent and successful businessman and inventor was followed by 18-year-old wunderkind Taylor Wilson. Wilson had been on the TED stage previously at the age of 14 to discuss the homemade fusion reactor he’d built. The TEDsters eat this kind of thing up.

Wilson touted the fact that he would not be going to college, instead opting to take his new company to market with a striking energy concept: smaller and safer nuclear fission reactors. His talk was littered with vague references to terrorism, and felt more than a little driven by a right-wing agenda. Just moments after Musk, a man who has been to college not once but twice, vigorously extolled our need for a clean, renewable source of energy on this planet, here’s an adolescent, uneducated, extremely junior nuclear "scientist" essentially shitting on his ideas.

Only at TED would two such divergent concepts (and people) be given equal time and weight. It’s a laudable quality of the talks, but frightening when you realize that the billionaires in the audience could be just as inclined to invest in smaller nuclear reactors as they might in solar.

There are other small controversies. This year, Eddie Huang, a member of TED’s Fellows program, was kicked out of the Fellows group (and TED altogether) for leaving the event to participate in a podcast in Los Angeles. Eddie — author of the recently published autobiography Fresh Off the Boat, owner of NYC restaurant Baohaus, and television host — is not the kind of guy who keeps quiet about these things. He took to Joe Rogan’s podcast following his dismissal and — you guessed it — basically called the Fellows program a cult.

"I just went through a whole week of people telling me what to do and where to be. It was like being at a fucking Scientology summer camp. It was horrible," he told Rogan. "I gave them four or five days of my time. Thirteen hours. Every day they have thirteen hours of fucking activities they have mapped out for you. Some days like fourteen or fifteen hours if you go to their after-hours events."

The commitment to be present at TED throughout all of the sessions and events is kind of astonishing

TED, on the other hand, saw it as a simple disagreement about the commitments Fellows make to the organization. Tom Rielly, head of the Fellows program, sent along this statement:

"When Eddie accepted the Fellowship … he also agreed to a stipulation that he would not arrive late to the conference nor leave early. Despite agreeing, Eddie Huang spent two days offsite during the conference without letting us know he’d be gone. So out of respect to the other fellows onsite and to the person who could have had his slot, we felt had no choice but to release him from the program. We wish him nothing but the best."

According to TED, 1200 people applied for the 20 Fellows slots, so they’re a little touchy about how seriously the chosen few take it. On the other hand, Eddie is right — the commitment to be present at TED throughout all of the sessions and events is kind of astonishing. You have to want to be there, really and truly. You have to commit to the T.A.Z.

TED doesn’t hold all of the attendees to quite the same standards as the Fellows, but the organizers certainly do everything they can to keep everyone inside the snow globe. Of course, almost everyone I spoke to who was attending TED wanted to be in the snow globe pretty badly.