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Is TED a Recession-Free Zone?

Whizzing and whirring cartoons to demonstrate the way we communicate. A wrenching talk about the difference between love and porn. Ideas for using music to improve the world, and the concept of the Internet as the sixth sense.

It’s just another year at TED, the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference held every year in Long Beach, California. Years past have featured buzzy talks like a stroke survivor’s retelling of the minute-by-minute experience; Stephen Hawking on the mysteries of the universe; or Samantha Power on the moral quandries of dictatorship. All important stuff, none of it with a sense of immediacy.

Despite a dramatic change in the global backdrop, this year is no different. While Bill Gates is releasing mosquitoes on stage to make a point about deadly diseases, 500,000 more jobs are being reported lost in the month of January alone here in the U.S. While Cindy Gallop is launching the website Make Love Not Porn, the government is struggling to rescue the crippled financial system and help the economy regain its footing.

It’s almost as if TED is in a recession-free zone.

When it comes to progress and world health (in the metaphorical sense), TED probably has more impact than the World Economic Summit held in Davos (which took place just last week and was an unproductive cauldron of doom and gloom.) Ideas that come out of TED are inspiring and important, and the event is attended by some of the most influential thinkers in the world. In good times, TED offers these change agents an annual summit for long-term evolution of transformative ideas.

But this year, we need some focused effort. These are different times, full of crisis an urgency. For TED, it holds no irrelevance: The immediate problem is fraught with longer-term implications and the big brains hanging out in Long Beach could be marshaled to help figure out these problems.

Instead, it feels as if they’re escaping it all, a Long Beach vacation from the real world at a time when these folks are most needed: Today, President Obama announces the individuals for his proposed Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a group that could use TED-like ideas to solve the crisis and not just fix but evolve the economy. The board looks to be stocked with the usual suspects – representatives exclusively from labor and business, seemingly political assignments from those seeking a White House addition to their resume or given in return for a favor.

Here’s hoping that if not on stage, at least in side conversations such urgent topics are being discussed.

Tags: ideas, TED