BIL and TED’s excellent philosophical differences
TED and ‘Net Controversy
I blogged, with a touch of snarkiness and disbelief, about this year’s TED Conference and TED Prizes on Friday.
The breathtakingly self-aggrandizing and expensive TED Conference is going on right now in Monterey, California. Owned by The Sapling Foundation, a private 501(c)3 nonprofit organization established by Chris Anderson in 1996, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.
In researching TED’s background for that blog post, an entire realm of controversy opened up to me. Sarah Lacy, a technology columnist for BusinessWeek based out of Silicon Valley, described her mixed feelings about the problematic relationship of money, elitism, liberalism and activism demonstrated by the structure of the conference.
I’ve been reminded of that jarring contradiction this week with the blogosphere’s blanket coverage of TED, much of it fawning. Attendees trumpet TED’s we-care-about-little-people, we-can-change-the-world ethos, writing in glowing terms of speeches and panels from the likes of Amazon.com (AMZN) Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin, and Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda, while ignoring that it’s one of the most exclusive events imaginable.
Joe Duck, self described “Internet entrepreneur and online quack” wrote
I’m still concerned that the TED and other expensive conference formats somehow create a lot of unintended biases and effectively censor people and content in a way that is akin to our problems with US politics where purchasing access to things trumps giving access to the maximum number of innovative and clever ideas and deserving people.
Before Friday I only knew TED as a blog on which some anonymous group of authors posted videos featuring big, near global, names discussing issues of the now. As I read more about the cost and the attendant elitism of the event, my initial fascination curdled into a mixture of indignation and disbelief.
I thought, wow, what kind of an answer could there be to TED’s mission of totalizing self-confidence? Was there even any room for critique on a larger scale than individual blog posts?
BIL
I needn’t have worried. Several judicious Twitter searches and Google queries later, I came across reports of the BIL Conference. An author at BoingBoing recently blogged a bit about BIL here.
BIL, which stands for, well, pick any three words starting with the letters B I and L, is TED’s poorer, mop-headed, slightly ADD afflicted, ne’er-do-well kid sibling. TED ran from Wednesday, February 27 to Saturday March 1 in the lovely seaside town of Monterey, CA (just across the bay from the University of California at Santa Cruz where I went to school. Go slugs!), and BIL ran from Saturday to Sunday at a less prestigious venue.
BIL strives to come at the “spreading great ideas” mission from the other direction. Organizers (that would be YOU) mean for BIL to be free and open-to-all (though organizers had to cap attendance at 150 this year) experience, believing that good ideas don’t always travel from the top down. A BIL conference could happen anywhere with people, folding chairs and mobile technology. It’s meant to catch an emergent idea and spread it anarchically from brain to brain. BIL believes in your ideas. BIL believes in you.
Though this year’s main BIL conference is over, you can find nearly everything you wanted to know about BIL at its pbwiki site.
To be fair, TED posts their presenters’, and prize winners’, talks online for free at their website, but that seems simply to reinscribe the power of the “gatekeepers.” TED staff continue to determine what constitutes important thought, important thinkers, and important global issues, which they then promote and disseminate to the rest of us.
My Conference
Then it got me thinking. If I were to start a conference of unimaginable importance, what would it be called? That being, of course, the most important question when planning a new conference. I came up with PIL: Procrastinators, Iconoclasts and Luddites. Will you join me?
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:47 pm
I was going to start a procrastinators conference but I never got around to it.