Image via Complex Original
Though TED has been around for decades, the organization as we know it today began a period of immense growth in the year 2000. In the few years that followed, TED became a YouTube favorite of college students looking to watch something a bit more sophisticated than cat videos and porn. The brief, thoughtful talks became a fixture of intellectualism in the Internet age. With TED's newfound notoriety came growth in terms audience and scope. TED eventually launched spinoffs like TEDGlobal, TEDMed, and TEDX. Next, predictably, came issues of quality control.
With so many lectures being labelled TED Talks, from those given by respected professionals at the annual TED conference to those given by far less rigorously vetted speakers at regional TEDX meetings, there were too many PowerPoints being droned to for them all to be gems. As more crackpots, propagandists, and clothesless emperors slid through the cracks, next came the predictable backlash. Though we aren't sure if the vitriol directed at TED is wholly warranted, there have been some awful talks through the years that certainly deserve some ribbing. Even those of you who spent your college days YouTubing presentations on sustainable energy will agree that some of these TED Talks are clunkers.
Terry Moore: How to Tie Your Shoes
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As metacommentary and comedy, this bit works pretty well. But, no, this lecture wasn't created by Zack Galifianakis or Andy Kaufman. This is a real deal bonafide TED Talk. We do have to give Terry Moore credit though, he keeps it brief, showing us his shoe tying method twice in three minutes. Also, you leave the video with a tangible skill, which you can't really say about 90 percent of TED Talks.
Black: My Journey to Yo-Yo Mastery
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Nothing about this is ironic: the outfit, the yo-yoing, the talk, all of it is in earnest. Even if Black was discussing a more ... traditionally admired skill, say violin or super modeling, this talk would have still ranked among the worst in TED history. The basic principle behind Black's presentation is that he found a thing he liked and worked really hard at it. We've all seen enough Republican campaign ads to have familiarity with this storyline. Work hard and succeed; it's that easy. Of course, these speeches encourage you to forget about the vast majority of people who dedicate themselves to a skill and never make a living at it. Passion drives us, but sadly, life gets in the way. Admittedly, the last half of the video, where he actually gets down to yo-yoing, is pretty cool, but we're here to evaluate this as a TED Talk not on its potential as a toy store exhibition.
Jessi Arrington: Wearing Nothing New
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"I brought seven pairs of underpants. That's it." That's a killer lead if there ever was one. Unfortunately, the follow-through is far less interesting. The thesis of this talk is that you can and should purchase all of your clothes at thrift stores. There is a class of people, we'll call them "poor people" who already know this. We're excited for the follow-up detailing how the Wendy's dollar menu is cheaper than eating at restaurants with table service.
Sugata Mitra: Kids Can Teach Themselves
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What is dumb about this TED Talk is not the ideas behind it, but the speaker's blindness to how his conclusions could be used for ill in education policy. Though Mitra's central findings are hard to argue against, the implicit conclusions of his study are problematic. At best, this TED Talk advances the idea that kids can use the Internet on their own. Great, just set up some search filters. But, at worst, this piece feels like fodder for anti-union Tea Party types who believe the Internet and time is as effective an educator as a teacher. There are some positive lessons here. Putting technology in the hands of poor children is a great idea. In the absence of good teachers, technology looks to be a great stopgap. The implication that technology is our savior from the backwardness of traditional education, however, doesn't feel very smart at all.
Tori Amason: SWAG: Even Your Grandmother Has It
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If there is one thing that Complex's readership knows about it is SWAG. Or so we thought. It turns out that SWAG means "Success With A Game-Changer." At least, this is how Tori Amason describes it as she kicks off her TEDX Talk, and from there she falls into a wide-ranging, rambling discussion filled with odd advice that touches on everything from not wearing frumpy sweaters to cultivating a team of "success partners." Personally, we would define the ability to have two nocturnal "success partners" at once as a good indicator that you have swag.
Joe Smith: How to Use a Paper Towel
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Joe Smith has a stack of stats that prove that you are using your paper towels all wrong. According to Smith, if only we could reduce our paper towel usage to one towel a day, things would be a lot better. As you sit listening to a man break down the different varieties of paper towel dispensers, you realize you've found the true shortcut to existential despair. When he goes into crowd work, this somehow gets even harder to watch. Once he's finished, you find yourself ready to cut down on PT as long as you never have to watch another similar video again.
James Burchfield: Playing Invisible Turntables
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Okay, so this one is not technically a Talk. "TED Sounds" would have been a more appropriate description. For some reason, we are prepared to credit people who have the same talent as that guy from Police Academy with some sort of philosophical depth just because they make weird noises. Human beatboxing is a cool skill and rarely done well. If you see this guy on the street drop a couple bucks in his flat brim. Just don't refer to them a a game changer.
Chen Lizra: The Power of Seduction in Our Everyday Lives
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To be taken seriously at a TED event, lead off with a dance routine. I've personally employed this strategy in job interviews and such for years, and so far so good. Lizra's main point is that she "truly believes that everyone has the power to seduce in them. You just have to unleash it." I always knew that my "Unleash Seduction" tramp stamp would come in handy someday. Just when you thought this talk couldn't get any worse, she extols the virtues of men who persist after being told "no" because there is difference between "no meaning no" and "no meaning maybe." We're going to learn from Daniel Tosh's mistakes and pass on making any more jokes about this one.
Barbara Frederickson: Positive Emotions Open Our Mind
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Often, TED Talks present hippie-dippy pseudo-science masked as intellectualism. This presentation even falls short of that. At the two minute mark Frederickson tells the audience to imagine they're a water lily, and no amount of PowerPoint slides is going to help you take that seriously. She follows this up by introducing findings about candy, including that subjects who were given candy were more likely to look at multiple pictures of babies. That being said, if this talk results in getting more candy, it's hard to complain about how we got there.
Nick Hanaeur on Inequality
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Hanaeur cried censorship when his talk wasn't officially posted to the TED website. The only problem is that Hanaeur didn't exactly make a revolutionary point. Hanaeur's central claim is that the notion that the rich are job creators is wrong-headed. We're pretty sure that everyone but the rich and your Sara Palin-obsessed aunt already knew that. Talks like this illustrate just how dominant FOX News and their compatriots have been in public discourse. Economists have told us time and again trickle-down economics doesn't work and that oligarchy is a bad thing. Yet, here we are watching the idea of relative equality once again being framed as revolutionary. The idea that the rich aren't as special as they think they are isn't revolutionary, and putting a talk like this on TED's stage is, in many ways, a step backwards. Though Hanauer and several media outlets (HuffPo and Upworthy: surprise surprise) made claims that this talk was not included on TED's site because it was "too hot for TED," watching the video leads you to conclude that the talk was really just too bland.
Jan McGonigal: Gaming Can Make A Better World
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The title of this one reminded me of a great old Farside cartoon wherein a gamer's parents daydream that playing Mario will become a marketable career. At some point, gamers decided that they were a minority group being discriminated against. Never mind that anyone with a hobby that isn't charitable or debaucherous gets made fun of. It's not like bird watchers and coin collectors don't take shit once in a while. Here's yet another attempt to tell us how gaming is so much more than just gaming. There's a reason that doctors and ambassadors don't have to give talks about how what they do really matters even though it doesn't look that way.
Eric X. Li: A Tale of Two Political Systems
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This TED Talk made the organizers look dumb. TED makes a fair effort at keeping partisan politics out of its presentations, but sometimes they are tricked and propagandists slips through. Li's 2013 talk is explicitly political and extremely biased. His talk extolled virtues of the Chinese Communist Party while glossing over many of the harsh realities of the Chinese system in the name of meritocracy. This understandably raised the ire of Chinese liberals, who, by this point, are quite familiar with Li's routine.
The linchpin of Li's argument is that communism, and particularly Chinese Communism, are defined by "adaptabilitiy, meritocracy, and legitimacy." Arguing these points would take far more time than this blurb allows, but obviously there are many people, including Tibetans, the Taiwanese, and Chinese dissidents, who would disagree with Li's point. More importantly, this isn't the kind of discourse that belongs at TED, and in fact, goes directly against their stated mission. TED has rejected talks in the past for being partisan. It seems that in this instance the Silicon Valley types behind TED were seduced by the chance to indulge the narrative of meritocracy they so often rely upon to justify their own business practices.
Jana Pallaske: Feeling Free
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Sadly, this video seems to have been scrubbed from the Internet. Why must they take away everything we love to mock? Like a legend passed down from generation to generation, we'll just have to rely upon word of mouth. Joshua Keating at foreignpolicy.com tells us that Ms. Pallaske was introduced as "Musican, Film Maker, Dancer, Philospher, Lover, Treehuger, Hoola Hoop Artist, 5 Element Yoga Teacher." Folks, that is one hell of a business card. Apparently her presentation involved "three minutes of hula-hooping accompanied by Led Zeppelin." Let's find this video people.
Jae Rhim Lee: My Mushroom Burial Suit
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According to Jae Rhim Lee, our burial practices are totally wasteful. Her argument is compelling. Pumping corpses full of formaldehyde can't be the greenest thing ever. Then she goes on to make a "modest proposal." Normally, "modest proposal" is code word for satire, but her modest proposal is all too earnest. Li suggests that instead of our current modes of burial we should all be buried in black stocking suits that foster growth of vegetation, particularly mushrooms and fungus on our bodies. To be fair, the idea itself isn't a bad one: funerals as we have them today are a way of leeching on the bereaved while taking up way too much real estate. However, the best way to deliver her message probably wasn't combining her stocking suit with performance arty babble.
