by FERN SHEN
A pep rally for Baltimore’s Creative Class? A tent-revival for the Platform-Agnostic? A velvet rope thumb-sucker for our emerging digital elite? A cool collection of smart, good-hearted people opening their minds to challenging ideas and inspiring stories that will juice them to go forth and do something good for the city?
Direct Dimensions, a TEDx sponsor, hawked their 3-D modeling products during the breaks.
I pondered all those possible narratives as I attended TEDxMidAtlantic on Thursday, determined to come up with a better description than I did for my son when I explained why I was missing his final cross country meet to cover it.
‘Well, it’s going to be a lot of techie-ish people getting together at MICA and listening to these short talks by one of the actors from The Wire (Sonja Sohn) and a guy from NPR (Scott Simon) and that guy who started Meatless Mondays and a farm for the city schools (Tony Geraci) and people like that,’ I said.
As I sat in MICA’s glittery glass Brown Center searching for a more compelling plotline for the day-long event, speaker Tyler Cowen stopped me in my tracks and poked a big epistemological hole in my world, both cracking me up and seriously bumming me out.
Inside TED’s Head
Before we dive into what New York Times columnist Cowen (and others) said on Thursday, here’s a quick explanation of what the TED brand is all about. From the TED website:
TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year’s TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.
TED conferences (that’s TED, without the “x”) feature short speeches and performances by generally left-ish A-list stars such as Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Jeff Bezos, Jared Diamond, They Might Be Giants and many others. (TED talks are all archived and fans have their favorites.)
The fact that TED sells $6,000 memberships (giving members first dibs on seats at TED conferences) has led to so many charges of elitism that the organization has a page on its website devoted to answering them.
By contrast, the independently-organized TEDx talks are intended to be more egalitarian. They’re free, as this one in Baltimore was, and organizers buy a TED license from the New York-based company to put them on. Still, the subject has come up in Baltimore, where TEDx MidAtlantic accepted 550 attendees and had to turn away more than 200. ‘Why didn’t they get a larger venue?’ wondered social media blogger Bridget Forney, on Baltimore Examiner.com. The application process for attendees — a lengthy online questionnaire — also put some off.
TEDxMidAtlantic “organizer and curator” Dave Troy has an answer for them.
”At the end of the day, this conference isn’t just a feel-good event for people to hang out. It’s to connect people who have a track record for doing things in the world, so they can connect and continue to effect change,” said Troy (a tech entrepreneur, investor, Beehive Baltimore founder and former Toad.net founder) quoted in a piece by the Baltimore Sun’s Gus Sentementes.
Judging by the jam-packed crowd in MICA’s Falvey Hall during breaks and the scary feeding-frenzy at the quickly-drained coffee dispensers, TEDxMidAtlantic is at the very least a victim of its own success. (Ignite Baltimore, a similar but somewhat lower-key affair initially, similarly became the hot ticket in town and had to move from the funky Wind-up Space to the Walters Art Museum. Reviews on this venue appear to be mixed.).
The elitism issue aside, Troy and his network of volunteers (armed with more than $27,000 from sponsors including the Abell Foundation, a 3-D imaging company called Direct Dimensions, Maryland DBED and others) pulled off an organizational and marketing coup that succeeds as civic symbolism, if nothing else.
It wasn’t just the event’s robust attendance that is noteworthy. Bigger even than the event’s crowd was its months-long buzz, among the city’s webby and entrepreneurial crowd. The event had several live-bloggers and over 1,000 Twitter followers. (Of course, many of their tweets were literally: “I can’t wait for TEDx!”). For them, being able to boast that your town has a TEDx is like being able to say you’ve got an NFL team, “America’s Best Hospital” or, say, an Ikea.
So, how was it?
It’s hard to know whether the other attendees got whatever idea-rush, power-shmooze or hope-infusion they sought. My unscientific poll suggests many did and that the big rock-star favorites were Sohn, organic farmer Joel Salatin and Geraci. (Though some thought Geraci’s video and talk were, though both quite powerful, were a bit redundant.)
In keeping with the event’s “The Power of Stories” theme, many speakers tried to connect their big ideas with personal epiphanies. Some of these succeeded better than others — sometimes through no fault of the speakers’ own.
“Green builder” Sandy Wiggins, for instance, was trying to tell how he started out in a monastery, drifted into real estate and woke up one day and “found I was a mercenary.” Suddenly a big image of a hand holding bullet shell casings appeared behind him. (Oops. Image meant for Sonja Sohn’s talk.) Some of Wiggins’ points (like, “it’s going to take fossil fuels and lots of them to get us to that next place”) were probably a tough sell with this crowd, so he didn’t need a lot of distractions.
Others were their own worst enemies, undercutting their very interesting ideas with jargon. Aneesh Chopra, federal Chief Technology Officer, was good on the subject of reverse innovation, the idea of developing technologies affordably, in countries like China or India, and then distributing them locally. If you don’t read the Harvard Business review you might not know about the concept. If only Chopra didn’t continually reference “price points” and “game-changing innovation.”
Some speakers lost me not just because of their jargon but because they were dealing with some pretty obscure stuff, to me anyway. Marcus Ranum’s staccato disquisition on (I think) the world of trouble we caused ourselves by coding ftp wrong years ago, didn’t connect with me. (Though I liked his line: Software is not your dog. We could have taken ftp out and just shot it.”) To each his own. Rapid-fire delivery, by the way, is part of the TED shtick. Urgent, dramatic, fast-talking, intense. No loping preambles or rhetorical throat-clearing, speakers are told.)
The best moments for me? When people told really personal stories that helped you “get” what’s driving them. Geraci, who’s been on a mission to improve school lunches and kids’ attitudes to food, seemed especially indignant about the juvenile diabetes epidemic in the U.S. The reason why became startlingly clear when he told about being in a school nurse’s office four years ago with an 11 year-old boy “and we were weeping together.”
“His fingers were so sore from pricking himself to check his blood that he could no longer grip a pencil . He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand why that was happening. He uh, his legs were black and blue, his stomach was black and blue, his arms were black and blue from injecting himself with insulin four and five times a day. He didn’t understand. He was doing everything that they told him to. And I was crying because I understood. I understood that the king and the clown, even though they had promised that he could have it his way, he was not going to get his way . . . . he would not see rainbows and lucky stars and unicorns and his life was not magically delicious because of the food that he was eating. You know I fully understood that because I, at that time, was an insulin dependent diabetic and I created that in my own life. So it’s been very personal to me, about changing the way kids eat.”
Likewise, with Hopkins professor and Nobel Prize-winner Peter Agre’s talk. It started as a breezy riff on a life in science (crazy characters in his lab in the 70s, dabbling in chemistry as a kid.) Then, there was this moment when he spoke of how his family shaped him as a scientist. He showed an old photo and pointed out his two brothers who also became doctors and then observed that, one lesson you can learn from your family is, “that life is not fair.” His voice was suddenly halting and choked with emotion:
“My little sister Ruth, shown here, was born with a defect that left her with a form of Tourette’s Syndrome and severe emotional instability — she’s never had a normal life. And Paul shown here with the sweater on the far left was born learning disabled with motor diability. He’s never been able to play baseball or ride a bike very well. He reads at the first-grade level. And so growing up in this family I don’t think I was kinder than any other child. but I was aware that there are some things we can’t control, that we don’t understand, but possibly science or medicine would lead to new discoveries.”
So now the theme for the day was coming through loud and clear. Stories, that’s what matter, Scott Simon told us so, in that honeyed voice of his:
“I believe in stories professionally and personally. I believe that stories are as basic to being a human beings as is love and maybe for the same reason. Stories assure us that life is not just bare survival.”
Me too, Scott, I believe! It was so entrancing, I didn’t even notice no one was talking about the dreary subject of how to pay for people to tell these stories.
By the time Sonja Sohn came out we were putty in her hands. Her organization, ReWired for Change has been working with challenged young people in Baltimore and Sohn brought that issue right into the room.
She reminded them that the world of “The Wire” is not just a TV show. “It’s right out there,” she said pointing outside. “They’re shooting down at the harbor,” she said, reminding people of the recent incident in which ”a 14-year-old shoves a BB gun into the neck of a woman at University of Maryland hospital.” She urged the audience to “open up their hearts” and help youngsters who are going to be lost to the streets: “Those little people ae going to get snatched up.”
Well then there was Tyler Cowen
Cowen’s message? “Be suspicious of stories.” The room got very quiet. He proceeded to remind us that we tell simple stories that reduce things to good vs. evil or “my life is a journey.”
Reducing your life to a heroic narrative may help you get out of bed in the morning but it makes you prey to self-deception and manipulation by others, he said.
“As a simple rule of thumb, every time you’re telling your self the simple good vs evil story, you’re lowering your IQ by ten points or more,” he said.
“If you think in terms of stories you’re telling yourself the same things over and over again…we’re biologically programmed to respond to them, they have a lot of information that has social power.”
Well, that took the wind out of my sails. This whole enterprise to pull out some meaning to this day, a sham? Well, then it occurred to me: how smart of him, how astute. It’s an excellent message for media types, prone as we are to craft those pat on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand tales. We should check ourselves once in a while.
How extremely cool of the event organizers, I thought, to dare to include a speaker who raises the possibility that the very stuff of the event could be simplistic fantasy. This is the mark of a really classy conference.
Hmm maybe that’s the story . . .? Yeah, now I got it!
