JA WestenbergJun 23, 2024

TED offered a vision of the world where complex societal issues could be solved with a lightbulb moment and a well-designed PowerPoint presentation.

Climate change? There's an app for that.

Poverty? A social entrepreneur with a TED talk has it figured out.

It was a worldview that flattered millennials' sense of ourselves as changemakers while conveniently ignoring the systemic barriers to real change.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/ted-talks-the-picotop-of-millennial-pop-intellectualism

How TED talks became the Picotop of millennial intellectualism

One after another, scientists, artists, and salesmen took to a red-tinged stage.They shared freeze-dried, groundbreaking concepts, heartfelt and trau...

Show threadRobert Link
@Daojoan Thank you, thank you, thank you. Never actually saw a single TED talk that didn't seem ultimately reductionist and counter-productive. I'm sure they're out there, but they aren't the ones that "went viral" in my circles.
Jun 24, 2024 at 12:32amWeb
Show threadOblomovJun 24, 2024
@phaedral @Daojoan there have a few talks that were in counter-tendence to this, more on the provocative side and without pretending to have a solution at all to the issue, just elaborating on aspects of the problem that aren't typically “mass discussed”. But yeah, not the most common form.