Early Indications October 2019: Reflections on TED talks

It’s impossible to discuss online video without noting the evolution of the TED conference. As of 2017 TED talks had been viewed more than 2 billion times, an extraordinary count given that the talks can be on such cognitively challenging topics as astrophysics, clinical depression, and redesigning education. The origins go back to 1984, when the first conference on the convergence of technology, entertainment, and design was held, co-hosted by graphic designer Harry Marks and architect Richard Saul Wurman. Demos of the Apple Macintosh and Sony/Philips compact disc along with talks from early digerati Stewart Brand and Nicholas Negroponte (along with the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot) set the tone for later meetings. The event was financially unsuccessful and six years passed until TED2.


From 1990 until 2009, the conference was held annually in Monterey, California and quickly became an exclusive event with celebrity attendees from many fields: speakers have included Bono and Bill Clinton, Billy Graham and Richard Dawkins, Sergey Brin and Jane Goodall. Intellectual eclecticism combined with A-list star power to make TED a coveted invitation. Wurman sold the event in 2000 to the British magazine publisher Chris Anderson (no relation to the Wired editor Chris Anderson of “Long Tail” fame).


Anderson changed TED’s direction. Ownership was transferred to the non-profit Sapling foundation, the conference moved from Monterey to Long Beach then Vancouver, and speaker talks were posted for free viewing in 2006. By January 2007 44 talks had been posted, amassing 3 million views. In April of that year TED.com was relaunched to highlight video talks, and by 2011, TED was licensing the conference format (including its rigidly timed and tightly rehearsed 18-minute format for speakers, regardless of their pedigree) to hundreds of TEDx spinoffs. What Anderson called “radical openness” paradoxically made the physical conferences even more desirable and the admission price soared from $4400 in 2006 to $10,000 in 2018. Spinouts include TEDMED, TEDWomen, TED Global, and TED Youth.


As Anderson said in 2012,

It used to be 800 people getting together once a year; now it's about a million people a day watching TED Talks online. When we first put up a few of the talks as an experiment, we got such impassioned responses that we decided to flip the organization on its head and think of ourselves not so much as a conference but as "ideas worth spreading," building a big website around it. The conference is still the engine, but the website is the amplifier that takes the ideas to the world.[i]

TED talks have evolved as a distinct genre. The coaching and time clock impose a certain homogeneity on the talks, but global intellectual superstars have emerged from unexpected directions. They include:


Ken Robinson
Robinson was born in Liverpool, England and, in contrast to his brother (a professional soccer player) had to attend special schools on account of aftereffects of polio. His PhD from the University of London focused on the uses of drama and theater in education, and this degree led to a career in arts education. He has developed into a sharp critic of many educational practices and his TED talks, viewed tens of millions of times, stress the role of schools in encouraging – or more often killing – creativity in students.


Brené Brown
Brown was born in San Antonio, Texas, raised for a time in New Orleans, and has spent her adult life in Houston as a practitioner and later professor of social work. Her work focuses on leadership, particularly the role of vulnerability. She has written five #1 New York Times best-sellers and her 2012 TED talk is one of the top five most-viewed TED videos of all time.


Hans Rosling
Rosling was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1948, the same town where he died 68 years later. In between, however, he lived in India, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, working as a physician and public health investigator. His TED fame comes from his many talks on global health and economic development. His compelling use of attention-getting devices in the service of helping attack ignorance make his talks exemplary. In one video, he launches the Trendalyzer software built by his son Ola which presents United Nations data in compelling visuals. Google bought the software and now makes it publicly available at Gapminder.org, the website devoted to the foundation launched by Rosling and his children. In a different video, Rosling exhibits his skill as a sword-swallower, and in another, deploys plastic Ikea bins to illustrate potential paths to a nine-billion-person planet.


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie was born in Nigeria, studied medicine and pharmacy in her native country, then began college at Drexel before moving to be closer to her older sister and completing a bachelor’s degree at Eastern Connecticut State University. Master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins and Yale followed soon thereafter. She was awarded a MacArthur fellowship the same year she earned her Yale masters in African studies. A year later she delivered her TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which has been viewed nearly 20 million times as of 2019. A later TEDx talk, “We should all be feminists,” was sampled in a Beyoncé song.


These four individuals illustrate several aspects of the TED universe. Previously unknown experts in a particular geographic or intellectual area can transcend boundaries with global exposure that crosses traditional disciplinary lines. Note that traditional U.S. academics don’t attract massive viewership, except in a few cases (positive psychology as researched by Martin Seligman, Dan Gilbert, and Shawn Achor being one).


There are many critiques, and most hit the mark. Even including some of the superstars listed above, the talks can feel massively over-rehearsed, and the staging can make even minor insights and anecdotes come across as profound. The British political activist Julie Bindel notes that “The talks are so rehearsed that even the well-placed pauses and casual hair flicks look hideously false. TED-bots strut around the stage, posing, delivering well-crafted smiles and frowns. It’s like amateur dramatics for would-be intellectuals.”[ii] The cognitive authority of the speakers vary. Some are the genuine article, a truly original and rigorous thinker. Often, however, the featured points of view come courtesy of self-described “thought leaders” who convey a large portion of form and little substance; Houman Harouni, writing in The American Reader, succinctly nailed this point: “TED’s is the language and tone of the pitch.”[iii] Finally, the TED stage has become a kind of church, one where Ideas are Good and can make Good Things happen. The New Statesman’s Martin Robbins noted in 2012 that “’Ideas worth spreading’ sounds more like the slogan of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”[iv]


Statistically, the talks (as of 2017) skew heavily white and heavily male. The expected power law applies: despite there being more than 2,000 talks, the top 25 account for more than a quarter of all views. The most viewed profession is author, lending credibility to the critique of TED as a book-flogging exercise. Among nationalities, the U.S. dominates with 467 talks between 2001 and 2017. That’s four times as many as the U.K. in second with 113, which in turn is three times as many as India, with 41 in third. Canada, Israel, Australia, and France follow in low double digits, with Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Italy rounding out the top ten, all in single digits. The average female speaker is about 45 years of age, whereas men are typically about 49. 

The top ten topics, as measured by views, are as follows (numbers are rounded to the nearest million):

1. Communication 2242     
2. Technology 1973     
3. Health 1474     
4. Art 1195     
5. Happiness 1096     
6. Education 987     
7. Creativity 978     
8. Motivation 869     
9. Design 6210 
10. Politics 58

Equally enlightening are the bottom ten categories, again with views rounded to the nearest million:

1. Film .32
2. Anthropology .43
3. Peace 1.14
4. Military 1.25
5. Physics 1.26
6. Disability 1.27
7. Philanthropy 1.28
8. Terrorism 1.39
9. Privacy 1.510
10. Society 1.5

Thus it’s easy to form a stereotype of a male US author talking on communications or technology. Big, complex topics (war and peace being ready examples) don’t attract large audiences whereas gadgets and inventions do. Generally uplifting topics – art, happiness, creativity, motivation – all see lots of views.


Benjamin Bratton is a professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. His TEDx talk (this did not happen on the big stage, for obvious reasons) was about TED, and he critiqued three aspects. First, Bratton highlighted the oversimplification of complex ideas to fit into a time window and for an audience that doesn’t engage with nuance. Summing up this point, he delivers a perfect TED soundbite: “I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster.” The problem is that Chris Anderson never proposed such a venture: the straw man argument Bratton utilizes is exactly what he criticizes.


Second, and on much firmer ground, Bratton gets to the core of TED: its neospirituality. “I Think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment,” he says. “The key rhetorical device for TED talks is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony (an "epiphimony" if you like) through which the speaker shares a personal journey of insight and realization, its triumphs and tribulations.” What Bratton calls “placebo politics” oversimplifies complex problems, offers a personal testimony of hope, and ultimately leaves listeners thinking something has been conquered when in fact the intervention likely made things worse. The quasi-religious backdrop of hopeful optimism informs much of the TED narrative, leading to the third critique.


Technology, the T in TED, is in Bratton’s view accentuating and amplifying the flaws in underlying social relationships rather than exposing and correcting them. The techno-utopian thread in TED talks ebbs and flows, but it is always present, if only in the speaker’s knowing relation to the video camera.  (I say this as a one-time TEDx speaker.) A better E, he continues, would be “economics” because all economic systems promise one thing and deliver something very different. Finally, D – Design – is where those technologies are realized in actual human contexts: “the potential for [phones, drones, and genomes (what we do here in San Diego and La Jolla)] are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, and to make good futures, design as ‘innovation’ just isn’t a strong enough idea by itself.”

Bratton ends by breaking the unspoken TED talk closing: he’s not personal, not hopeful, and not exhortatory. Rather than wrapping up the idea with a bow, he expands it into multiple dimensions.

I don't have one simple take away, one magic idea. That's kind of the point. . . . [I]t's not as though there is a shortage of topics for serious discussion. . . . Problems are not "puzzles" to be solved. That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, they just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed. It's not true.
"Innovation" defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo. One TED speaker said recently, "If you remove this boundary ... the only boundary left is our imagination." Wrong.
If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.
Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration," it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualization: the hard stuff that really changes how we think. More Copernicus, less Tony Robbins.[v]

In the six years since that critique, it feels as though TED's moment at the center of the zeitgeist has passed. Civilized discourse at elevated levels of conceptual complexity is out of fashion, even (especially?) at the middlebrow tier. The world's population of superstar TED-type speakers is finite, and perhaps it's been relatively thoroughly mined out. Be that as it may, the dawn of online video brought the world its own equivalent of the Chautauqua movement, a healthy portion of uplift and cognitive exercise unable to sustain itself over time, albeit without the picturesque scenery.*****

[i] Julie Coe, “TED’s Chris Anderson,” Departures March 1, 2012. https://www.departures.com/lifestyle/technology-gadgets/ted%E2%80%99s-chris-anderson

[ii] Julie Bindel, “Why I’d never do a TED talk,” The Guardian 23 July 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/23/ted-talk-smugness-presenters-embarrassing

[iii] Houman Harouni, “The Sound of TED: A Case for Distaste,” The American Reader no date https://www.newstatesman.com/martin-robbins/2012/09/trouble-ted-talks

[iv] Martin Robbins, “The trouble with TED talks,” New Statesman 10 September 2012. https://www.newstatesman.com/martin-robbins/2012/09/trouble-ted-talks

[v] Benjamin Bratton, “We need to talk about TED,” The Gurdian 30 December 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted

Early Indications September 2019: Will designers become robots?

Earlier this month I had the honor of delivering the named Toyota lecture at the College for Creative studies in Detroit. CCS is an art and design school that has graduated many stars in the automotive, apparel/footwear, and advertising industries. It was truly inspiring to see the student work on display, and the model of hands-on instruction by working artists and creatives (as opposed to publishing academics) gave me much to ponder. For context related to the pedagogy/professoriate question, please see the article I helped write on an integrated model of university-industry collaboration.

On to the talk. My argument was that the designed environment in which North Americans live is increasingly shaped not by conscious human decisions but by algorithmic routines. The students and faculty engaged in an excellent discussion afterward, concluding that while designers might not need to be adept at running these algorithmic systems, there will be an increasing number of scenarios in which humans and machines team up, each to do what that party is best at. People can provide aesthetic guidance, potentially, while machines can do complex mathematical calculations and optimizations beyond any human’s capacity.

I found six examples of algorithms doing the work that creatives and designers used to claim as their responsibility. They are as follows:

1) Facebook has adopted a three-letter acronym (TLA) for its ad-optimization process: test, learn, adapt (TLA). Described as “A/B testing on steroids,” this approach tests a slight variation in text color, wording (“donate” vs “contribute”), photo choice, or other design elements across a carefully defined population. Performance is measured and analyzed, the layout is iterated, and the process repeated. The success of this approach can be seen in the Trump campaign’s use of Facebook advertising in the 2016 election. While the Clinton campaign spent only slightly less ($28 million vs $44 million), the Trump campaign tested a staggering 6.9 million variations of ad copy/layout, compared to only 66,000 for the Clinton campaign. According to Buzzfeed, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called Trump after the election to congratulate him on his team’s use of the Facebook toolset on a heretofore unprecedented scale. 

2) YouTube has a problem: compared to Google search, in which the properties of the web document being indexed matter significantly, videos are not (currently) converted to text. Searches only can match cursory metadata, along with a lot of behavioral data: how long do viewers watch, how often do they click on thumbnails, etc. We thus have a scenario in which our video search results are heavily conditioned by how other people have reacted to a video rather than by what’s actually in it. Video creators watch these metrics really closely and adjust underperforming content on the fly: click-through rate can be updated as rapidly as every three minutes, with titles and photos tuned accordingly. The result, as YouTuber Derek Muller explained it, is a reliance on click-bait headlines, calculated thumbnails, and cliff-hangers: the same elements of yellow journalism before subscriber models decreased the reliance on newsstand sales. The big difference is that Google/YouTube shows me what their algorithms think I want, not necessarily what I have subscribed to. Twitter can behave much the same way.

3) It’s not only social media where algorithms create our content. Persado is an e-mail marketing company whose algorithms can outperform human text by 68% on click-through ratio and 76% on conversion. It’s no wonder that the likes of Amazon (Audible), Chase, and American Express have engaged the firm, which has deconstructed the appeal into its “writing DNA”: Narrative, emotion, descriptions, calls-to-action, formatting, and word positioning. In the dozens of years I’ve taught writing and written, I’ve never formulated anything on that basis. Shame on me. The firm’s toolbox consists of a million tagged and scored words in 25 languages, once again outperforming any - any - human team of writers and editors. 

On a related note, thanks to Kevin Slavin, I discovered Epigogix a few years back. This startup runs Hollywood scripts through a scoring algorithm, predicting box office performance and helping studios hedge risks. As Slavin noted in his prescient TED talk, when these systems have bugs - as every software system does - how will we know?

4) In March McDonald’s bought Dynamic Yield, an Israeli AI startup, for $300 million. By April, more than 700 restaurants had installed new drive-through message boards (that had been piloted before the acquisition) designed to up-sell customers. Eventually the program will encompass the mobile app and in-store kiosks as well as the drive-through innovations, which are being expanded to include 8,000 stores as per a company statement earlier this month. Equity analysts are praising the move, raising their stock price and earnings targets: the tech acquisitions led by Dynamic Yield appear to be moving the revenue needle. How can the algorithm customize your drive-through purchase? Some of it is time of day, weather, and simple promotions by suggestion (“wouldn’t a cold McFlurry taste great with that burger?”). Other personalization is based on your license plate and/or the presence of your smartphone.

5) Autodeck has long sold CAD software to help designers draw electronic objects to be made through molding, milling, and assembly. More recently, it has applied algorithms to the creative process in what is called generative design. The computer operator specifies the parameters that must be met: sizes, weights, strengths, features, etc. The algorithm takes over from there, suggesting dozens or hundreds of shapes that meet the criteria. The designer goes from a creator to a chooser. Furthermore, Autodesk shows an automobile chassis that is built conventionally, instrumented with sensors, and driven hard to generate maximum loads. The algorithm redesigns the chassis, using asymmetric and much more “biological” looking shapes that would be impossible to weld. Instead, the design feeds 3D printers to make a car that no human could ever conceive or build. 

Given these developments across such a wide variety of industries and skills, what should we be teaching both the algorithm-writers and the designers about their respective domains? How do we teach students, as per MIT economist Eric Brynjolfsson, to _team_ with machines? (I’m an outsider and only speculating here, but the limited success of IBM’s Watson for health might in part relate to how hard this human-machine interaction problem really is: it’s far more than a conventional UX issue. 

I believe we will see these kinds of questions emerge in more and more scenarios: finance is old news, while fast-food menus are pretty recent, and generative design will move from wood and steel to cells and tissues. Everything from labor economics to workplace safety to information privacy to legal liability will be reshaped as a result. Given everything else happening politically, it’s not surprising but still concerning how few discussions are underway as to how we frame, invest in, and regulate these new kinds of interactions.

Early Indications August 2019: The YouTube Effect

Only five years after YouTube launched in 2005, Chris Anderson of TED gave a remarkably insightful talk not coincidentally on — and about — his online platform. He pointed first to the primacy of print for more than 500 years: to get words, still pictures, and ideas to mass audiences, face-to-face communication simply could not match the scale of print. In a blink of historical time, however, that primacy was dislodged by online video. As a medium, it conveys vocal inflection, body languages, and facial features: the cues humans spent millennia learning to discern. Even more importantly, online video conveys these nuances at often zero cost to massive audiences, nearly instantaneously but asynchronously. As of 2017, a billion hours of YouTube video were viewed every day and as of 2020, 2 billion people will be logging in at least once a month.

In contrast to print media, which is characterized by high costs and thus gatekeepers who ration scarce production and distribution capacity, online video is a big tent. The volume of contributed video that is available is simply staggering, unfathomable (not to mention uncatalogable) at human scale. This unprecedented access increases diversity of viewpoints but raises powerful questions about truth, fact, and accuracy. The lack of any cataloging system and only minimal content standards allows almost anything short of pornography and extreme violence to be allowed in. Furthermore, even though YouTube creates very little video (though this is changing), the curation process is extremely important. Since moving to new recommender systems in 2018, the YouTube algorithms that successfully keep viewers watching inexorably steer them toward videos with higher “engagement,” usually in the form of more extreme positions. The most benign query can lead to pseudoscience or worse in only six to eight auto-plays. (Zeynep Tufekci at UNC has done important work on YouTube and radicalization.) As we will see, every benefit brought by online video implies troubling downsides as well.

YouTube, Vimeo, and their kin act as a repository for everything from political speeches to standup comedians, serving as a sort of attic for many cultural artifacts, both widely popular and deeply personal to an individual or small group. As of 2018 YouTube alone streamed more songs than Amazon, Spotify, and Apply combined (while paying by far the lowest royalty rates: 48% of streams delivered but only 7% of artist revenue). For every Justin Bieber, there are many thousands of amateurs: one finds both Hollywood hits and anonymous piano practices. Self-made stars have emerged in areas from high school sports to fashion to online gaming to commentary at the same time that millions of videos get views in the single digits. 

Finally, online video is a terrific teacher, whether of piano, home appliance repair, makeup technique, or new languages. Former music professor Rick Beato has a series of videos explaining instrumental technique, composition, and dissections of “what makes this song great.” It’s hard to imagine a million people signing up to learn music theory in the physical world, but Beato is so good at his craft that he’s got a huge following. Haas machine tools does a "video tip of the day" that's incredibly engaging even if you've never come within 100 feet of a CNC machine. Along with the company's other quality content, I've never seen better corporate use of online video. 

In contrast to television and movies, the cultural ethos of online video is markedly more diverse. Wikipedia’s list of the 17 historically most viewed YouTube videos includes Brazilian soccer legend Ronaldinho, U.S. based amateur dancer Judson Laipply, the finger-biting English baby Charlie, and as I write, Luis Fonsi, a Puerto Rican singer singing in Spanish. The longest-tenured artist on the list is the Korean singer-songwriter-record producer-rapper Psy: “Gangnam Style” was the most-watched YouTube video in history for 1689 days -- more than 4 ½ years. Such cultural reach and range bring a multitude of opportunities and side effects.

Here’s one example. Content owners have a variety of available responses when Google finds videos that might include copyrighted material. One individual was accused of using the takedown process maliciously: he set YouTubers up with two notices, in preparation for a “three strikes and you’re banned” expulsion from what is for many a very profitable platform. Sometimes he asked for money to refrain from [fraudulently] shutting down the people's channels. In one case, said individual used the takedown process to obtain a real-world physical address — to which he sent police in a “swatting” raid. The entire DMCA apparatus was not designed for a planet-scale online video platform, but this is only one example of the many unintended consequences of YouTube and related services.

In line with this set of cultural functions, we have to find ways to think about online video as a medium, one bringing massive value but also putting new demands on regulators, viewers, uploaders, algorithm designers, advertisers, content owners, and others in the vast ecosystem. To take but one example, online video is a different kind of text compared to either print or broadcast TV, and new forms of literacy and illiteracy are emerging. Unlike television, where a linear schedule was the organizing principle (until the dawn of the streaming era), asynchronous online video is governed by search and recommendation, both human and algorithmic. This difference in wayfinding has many implications for what is made, seen, propagated, and imitated.

To conclude, the story of Kenya’s Julius Yego is both heartwarming and instructive. His country boasts a rich tradition of distance running but has had little success in field events such as the high jump or shot put. In 2009 Yego was frustrated by his progress with the javelin, so he spent time in the cybercafe watching every javelin-related video he could find, with particular attention to training programs. In 2011 he became the first Kenyan to win a title in a field event at the All Africa games; by 2015 he was world champion. Yego then earned a silver medal at the 2016 Olympics despite suffering an ankle injury. There is no way an athlete from a developing economy could master a technique-intensive event looking at books: Yego’s medals show we are living in the presence of not only a new medium, but a new distribution system, a new curation method, and a new scale of knowledge exchange. 

Online video has the potential to redefine human institutions from sewing to citizenship to psychotherapy. One of the challenges is finding ways to study such a vast, dynamic, culturally significant, and heterogeneous platform. DM me if you have ideas.