Eddie Huang, former member of TED’s Fellows program, was kicked out of the Fellows group (and TED altogether), Joshua Topolsky reports:
“I just went through a whole week of people telling me what to do and where to be. It was like being at a fucking Scientology summer camp. It was horrible,” he told Rogan. “I gave them four or five days of my time. Thirteen hours. Every day they have thirteen hours of fucking activities they have mapped out for you. Some days like fourteen or fifteen hours if you go to their after-hours events.”
TED is absolutely cultish. But it’s a cult for the sustenance of beneficial ideas. Elitist, morally unsound, isolated, self-congratulatory, and tone deaf? Yes. All of those. But useful and, in some respects, daring?
Every good movie ends at the right time, while bad series would drag its ending long enough until there’s no juice left to milk.
Stages like TED are necessary platforms to share knowledge, but TED needs to stay back, invisible, neutral and politic-free in order to keep the number one destructor of ideas, of technology, of entertainment, of design, …, of mankind, at bay: ego.
One key element that is missing from TED is an “off” button, and someone who has enough guts to push it before it turns into cancer to the bodies of great ideas and self-sustaining construct that it has helped spread throughout the years.