Words & Tricks

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.

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Tags: activism, BIL, BIL2008, conference, Controversy, free, ideas, internet entrepreneur, Monterey, TED, TED Prize, thinkers