Peter McLeod talking at TEDx Toronto 2009 about Canada's 150th birthday in 2017 and we should do about it.
Does it matter that this year’s TEDxToronto was full of an almost alarming number of attractive people? By any reasonable measure, it shouldn’t. The cultural phenomenon of the TED is all about inspiration and hope, and the events and their semi-official ‘TEDx’ offshoots have become perhaps the populist source for the new, innovative ideas. What difference could people’s appearance make?
And yet there it was all the same. On a grey morning, in the gorgeous glass-filled atrium of the Telus Centre for the Performing Arts, there stood hundreds of unusually beautiful, well-dressed people. One could be forgiven for confusing the whole scene for a multicultural, science-fiction future in which all the world’s problems have already been solved.
But then, the Technology Education and Design talks have always been full of interesting, utopian weirdness. Around since 1990, the official TED events held in the U.S., Europe and Asia are influential things, marking out what is—or at least, what soon will be—possible. Tickets also now run up to $6,000, and it’s no coincidence that both the speakers and the crowd are the wealthy and the privileged. TED, in part, is about the best and brightest.
On the other hand, TedxToronto was free to attendants, and since 2006 talks from TED proper have been made available for online for no charge. Though we constantly hear about the decline in both erudition and a faith in expert knowledge, these clips have now garnered half a billion views. It’s all a mass of rather fascinating, promising contradictions, exclusivity and intellectualism together with democracy and populism. So what gives? What is this TED phenomenon?
At least part of it has to do with the ‘redefinition’, the theme of this year’s TEDxToronto event, and it mostly meant that people need to challenge what they believe is possible. The day opened with Bilaal Rajan, a 14-year-old UNICEF ambassador who has raised over $5 million for various causes. He exhorted his audience to say “no to no”—to resist the urge to give in to feelings of futility and instead dedicated themselves to a cause, something that continued throughout the day.
It’s true that some of the sessions weren’t as great as others. Dr. Jordan Peterson’s otherwise interesting talk on meaning needlessly skirted around his obvious and well-reasoned theism. But most of the day was surprisingly interesting. Ted Sargent, Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology, suggested that his work may help create a future in which solar panels are printed with ‘nanoparticle ink’, and he painted a picture of what a world with cheap, clean energy might look like. Awe-inspiring was 17-year-old Nicholas Schiefer, who described how he created a new type of search engine that works through the relations between words rather than words alone—something he did for a high school science project.
Similarly remarkable talk continued throughout the day, and it culminated in a fiery, passionate, deeply cathartic talk by former Mayor David Miller. He argued that the rhetoric of ‘taxpayers’ robs citizens of their voice, framing government as a service people consume, rather than an institution that protects and builds. He also, in no uncertain terms, argued for the resurrection of Transit City, suggesting that it was a crystallization of all his values: urbanism, environmentalist, social justice and quality of life.
And it’s then, after sitting through talk after talk from quite genuinely brilliant people that the purpose of TED and TED-like events becomes clear. They are a concentration of ideas constructed to incite action. After all, in the information age, there is no shortage of the former, but there can be a lack of the latter. What we often need is a catalyst, some coming together of circumstance, emotion and drive that pushes us to act, to finally say, “okay, I’m going to do something about this idea I have.” Thought of one way, then, TED is a platform that galvanizes and enables personal tipping points, using what on the surface appears to be naive hopefulness to actually act as ideological counterweight to pessimism and the discourses of the past.
The successful and the privileged have always gathered to speak to and encourage each other. That’s just the way of things. But in 2011, when things go as they should, those same people use that privilege and success to help others. It’s about the interconnections of how people speak and how people act. Yes, it’s true that TEDx events can occasionally seem too caught up in the overblown rhetoric of techno-futurist utopianism—and the fact the crowd looks like a recruitment ground for a Benetton ad probably doesn’t help first impressions. But in an age where the two major competing strands of history seem to be the selfishness of consumerism and enormous challenges of environmentalism and development, it’s hard to look at the event’s innocent optimism and its privileged crowd as anything but a good thing.
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Navneet Alang is Toronto Standard’s Technology Critic.
