Part 1: intro to TED, my speech at the conference
Part 2: Highlights of other TEDx Amazonia Talks, especially from Amazonians
Part 3: Critical look at the Entrepreneurially Minded TED speakers
I was so happy when tropical rains began falling on us.
Ironically, we had come to the most fecund place on earth, facing a world economy based on a logic” endless growth–that has generated one of the greatest species extinction pulses in the history of the planet. Could we explore new ways of working and living that could ensure a quality of life for all species, without addressing the elephant in the room, the economic system based on perpetual growth? Apparently that was the hope, since few of the participants took on that larger question (notably, the two economists Enrique Leff and Hugo Penteado, as well as yours truly, DID try to attack dysfunctional economic thought). Opposing capitalism and growth wasn’t the stated purpose of our gathering, to be sure. TED is an organization rooted in the quasi-libertarian high-tech boom that started with the personal computer and accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s, and as such, seems to be a self-selecting culture of a subsection of the global elite that favors entrepreneurialism as the answer for the world’s problems, including the topic of this gathering in the Amazon.
Hugo Penteado's chart put it to economics: what is dependent on what exactly?
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and it’s a very specific brand that has been spreading itself globally with enormous success, especially during the past 8 years (it actually started back in the 1980s). The x after TEDx indicates that it is an independently organized event, licensing the format and reputation of the main TED organization, which is centered in the U.S. Former WIRED magazine publisher Chris Anderson took the helm of it in the early 2000s and absorbed it within his not-for-profit foundation. Their motto is “ideas worth spreading,” and you can find hundreds of their Talks online, free to watch, and many are indeed brilliant. That said, you won’t hear a lot anti-capitalist rhetoric or thinking at a TED conference. In general, they are fellow travellers of Stewart Brand and his early 1970s Whole Earth Catalog, followed by the new computer culture that accelerated in the 1980s after the emergence of the personal computer. Ideologically they share a belief that the gray bureaucracies of government and old-school corporate giants are the problem (on their website they advertise that the TED Talks are “untainted by corporate influence”), but the answer lies in independent entrepreneurialism rather than in any kind of social or collective action. Brilliant investors and inventors will continually produce technological breakthroughs that will solve the problems humanity and the planet face. (Fred Turner’s fantastic history of this is in “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Milleniallism”” highly recommended!)
This TEDx event drank deeply from this long-running river of self-congratulatory entrepreneurialism. Let’s face it, the past thirty years has been a long nightmare (for people like me) of triumphant business ideology, and the folks at WIRED magazine, the Long Now Foundation (Brand and Kevin Kelley’s thinktank) and other quasi-libertarian tech culture types have been an important wing of that, complementing the straight-forward glorification of wealth and greed as pushed by Reagan, Bush, Wall Street, et al.
I saved a grouping of TEDx speakers for my last entry. These contributors include some of the people I made great friends with, but also represent the cutting edge of modern capitalism, in terms of their use of games, business, participation, and crowd-sourcing. I’ve been saying for the past couple of years, “better is better than worse,” and many of the efforts described here are bettering things in their own ways. But I’m interested in the way they also begin a process of renovating capitalism, of advancing this crazy, exploitative system’s capacity to capture new activities, new ways of thinking, and channel them back into the typical forms of products and commodities, markets, wage-labor, and monetary relations.
Continue reading TEDx Amazonia: Entrepreneurialism, Innovation, and Survival, Part 3
