Where the TED brand appears, people follow. The popular nonprofit organization’s campus affiliate, TEDxUNC, is among UNC’s most visible organizations.
But TED’s unwillingness to fully embrace the role politics must play in progress is troubling.
Benjamin Bratton’s critique of the model argues that TED often glosses over the nuance of issues and that real change requires that we “slog through the hard stuff.”
At last year’s TEDxUNC event, John Wood, former Microsoft executive and founder of the non-profit Room to Read, spoke on the need for everyone to simply “GSD” or “get shit done.” While this idea and those like it seem like bold calls to action, the reality is that the oversimplified innovation and design-thinking problem-solving model fails to address the underlying structural issues that make this advice preposterous.
These simple-but-inspiring nuggets sometimes come at the expense of more challenging discussions. TED excluded billionaire Nick Hanauer’s TED talk on inequality and the myth that the wealthy serve as job creators. TED organizers said the event was omitted for its explicitly “partisan” content. Can true change come from TED if it shies away from certain political implications?
We must be moved to reframe the TED model into one that de-emphasizes the grandiosity of branding, the requirement of brevity and rhetorical polish and the spectacle of innovation for its own sake. Until then, we must agree to understand the TED brand more as entertainment than challenging discourse.
