"Middlebrow megachurch infotainment"

February 3, 2022 2:07 PM

"I recently watched some of the talks from this conference on my laptop. They hit like parodies of a bygone era, so ridiculous that it made me almost nostalgic for a time when TED talks captivated me. Back then, around a decade ago, I watched those articulate, audacious, composed people talk about how they were building robots that would eat trash and turn it into oxygen, or whatever, and I felt hopeful about the future. But the trash-eating robots never arrived. With some distance, now, from a world in which TED seemed to offer a bright path forward, it’s time to ask: what exactly is TED? And what happened to the future it envisioned?"
posted by Lycaste (64 comments total)

I feel like if most of these problems were easy, they would have been solved years ago. Hence, it's going to be hard to summarize in a 10 - 20 minute talk what any actual solutions are going to be with any real depth or meaning. I've always felt like most TED talks would be better labeled as PEP talks.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 2:18 PM on February 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

When Anderson purchased TED, it was in the Sapling Foundation’s name, and at the 2002 TED conference, he sketched out a plan through which TED would further its ambitions. On stage, leaning forward in his office chair, he affected a kind of conceited chumminess distinctly reminiscent of David Brent from the British version of The Office. He began with an anecdote about his “eighteen months of business hell” in the late 1990s, but claimed that the experience had given him new insight into the future. The coming decades would not be about gatekeeping or rigid disciplinary boundaries or exclusivity, Anderson said. The future was about openness, connection, democratization of knowledge, collectivity. Ideas were there to be spread. Through this spreading,​ a better world would materialize.

Hm. That went well.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:29 PM on February 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

This article is a great summation of not just TED but a lot of the technofuturist nonsense that emerged in the past 20 years. Everyone wants solutions to problems, but the commoditization of "solutions" has been harmful in many ways.
posted by chaz at 2:30 PM on February 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

"And what happened to the future it envisioned?"

Gone the way of the Dodo, the flying car, and the hoverboard...
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:38 PM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

In the brilliant future, we'll all only ever use one towel
posted by chavenet at 2:42 PM on February 3, 2022 [18 favorites]

^ I was expecting a parody

that really was a TED talk.. wow.. there's nothing wrong with someone demonstrating how to reduce paper towel consumption but somehow this presentation feels like we're closer to, not further away from, Idiocracy
posted by elkevelvet at 2:52 PM on February 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

“The speaker’s work and words move you and fill you with an expanded sense of possibility and excitement,” Anderson writes of the successful TED talk. “You want to go out and be a better person.”

I've only ever made it through one TED talk. (The one about tying shoelaces. Afterwards I quickly figured out that it was easier to fix my tying by reversing the crossover than by, as suggested in the talk, reversing the loops. Overall, though, it sent me in the right direction.)

The others always gave me too much of a church sermon vibe and I quickly noped out.
posted by clawsoon at 3:05 PM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think the paper towel talk is the McDonalds Hot Coffee Lawsuit of TED talks. As in, it is held up as an egregious and ridiculous example, but upon examination turns out to be entirely reasonable.
posted by Horkus at 3:05 PM on February 3, 2022 [32 favorites]

Incomplete, of course, without Onion Talks.
posted by clawsoon at 3:11 PM on February 3, 2022 [13 favorites]

I was half remembering that Bill Dube had his Killacycle electric drag bike crash outside a Ted talk, and was going to make a stupid crack about that future arriving a little faster than he was expecting, but it was Wired NextFest...
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 3:12 PM on February 3, 2022

but upon examination turns out to be entirely reasonable

People used to carry handkerchiefs around a lot more, my partner still does, she eschews using up dead trees to blow her nose/wipe her hands. I often use my slacks, or waste dead trees. The TED Talk about using less paper towel is a great example of taking 4-5 minutes to make very reasonable noises about something, when a person could just shift their frame of reference slightly and come up with simpler and obvious alternatives.

Paper towel is available, people will use and waste the stuff.
posted by elkevelvet at 3:14 PM on February 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Hang on - I think Reggie Watts revealed this to us a while back... in a TEDtalk.
posted by kmkrebs at 3:21 PM on February 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

All of the TED talks I've seen are about making changes -- big or small -- within the systems we have. The problems, however, are with the systems themselves. I'd like to see a TED talk called "dismantling capitalism from the inside" or "how to defund the police, a success story" or "this five minute conversation will turn your MAGA uncle into a Jainist monk." Stuff that would be actually useful.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:43 PM on February 3, 2022 [36 favorites]

Back in the TED talk heyday, I liked Evgeny Morozov's work on technosolutionism a lot (whom the author cites as well).
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:45 PM on February 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

I forgot about this catchphrase somehow! From the article:

On Tumblr and Twitter, there was a meme where you’d write some incredibly banal or absurd observation and then add: “Thanks for coming to my TED talk.”

posted by spamandkimchi at 3:45 PM on February 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

Anand Giridharadas's Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World has an excellent chapter on TED.
posted by HeroZero at 3:47 PM on February 3, 2022 [8 favorites]

*whispers* I still like the bacteria lady's talk.
posted by maudlin at 4:04 PM on February 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

TED talks are like the Frankie Goes to Hollywood of discourse.

“The speaker’s work and words move you and fill you with an expanded sense of possibility and excitement,” Anderson writes of the successful TED talk.

“The speaker’s work and words jerk you off,” Anderson writes of the successful TED talk.
posted by snofoam at 4:10 PM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

I did that paper towel thing for ages. But lately I have to admit I’ve creeped back up to two towels. But I tell myself it is wrong to make environmental problems the fault of the individual rather than the billionaires, megacorps and factory farming that are maliciously destroying the planet as fast as they can profit off it. Dammit I came here to stick up for Ted Talks and now I’m just all pissed off again.
:/
posted by Glinn at 4:13 PM on February 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

TED talks have always come off to me as incredibly corporate and inauthentic, and I have never trusted anything said in them. They're a lot like keynote speeches at tech conferences, where the speaker feels very out of place and most of the content is bullshit. Many smart people with important things to say have given TED talks, but I prefer the information in almost any other form. I don't think I'm alone in this, I feel like many people who grew up on the internet have an inherent distrust of this presentation style because it is completely different from how we we actually learned things. Long rambly videos on YouTube with lots of details and a good amount of stock footage are much more comfortable and understandable to many people than TED talks.
posted by JZig at 4:28 PM on February 3, 2022 [12 favorites]

"Predicting is hard. Especially about the future."
posted by rhizome at 4:28 PM on February 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

Whether and whatever the circumstances and subject of the speaker, one of the itchy things about Ted talks is/was that it seemed obvious that the audience were rich/privileged, rendering the whole thing as almost a charity VC pitch. "Please clap. Please care."
posted by rhizome at 4:30 PM on February 3, 2022 [13 favorites]

TED talks are like the Frankie Goes to Hollywood of discourse

Far more talented than those only familiar with their major hit give them credit for?
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:32 PM on February 3, 2022 [24 favorites]

The obviously privileged audience reinforces that the primary goal of TED talks was to signal high status and expertise. They reinforce that someone is a credentialed and trustworthy Expert that you could probably hire as a consultant. The information ends up being secondary to that goal. The last decade of American culture has been devoted to tearing down Experts (and destroying useful scientific and social progress along with it), and I wonder if the TED era increased the strength of that backlash.
posted by JZig at 4:39 PM on February 3, 2022 [5 favorites]

Remember that TED talk about power poses? About how doing a Superman pose in the mirror before your big meeting was supposed to fire off a bunch of endorphins and shift you into kick-ass mode? But then people actually researched it and found out it was bullshit?

I think about that a lot.
posted by neuracnu at 4:41 PM on February 3, 2022 [19 favorites]

I love TED talks (I admit it, I ain't ashamed), but I think seanmpuckett has it right: "All of the TED talks I've seen are about making changes -- big or small -- within the systems we have. The problems, however, are with the systems themselves."

Much like my job: those who are affected by the problems don't have the ability to do anything about the problems. Those who would have the ability to do anything very frequently don't wanna do anything about them. It's one thing to do shoelaces or paper towels or whatever on your own, but hell, even Bill Gates can't fix pandemic. I can have all kinds of awesome ideas, but I don't have the power/leverage/money/people on board/everything to get 'er done, so nothing's going to get done. TED talks can think of great ideas, which might work well in their sphere, but once confronted with reality...there you go.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:44 PM on February 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

mRNA vaccines feel like they would've been a perfect subject for a TED talk a decade ago.

I have a half-formed thought about how our elites and the systems they ride on top of still deliver enough good things - like mRNA vaccines - that most of us have complicated feelings about whether we'd want them to be replaced wholesale, especially given that the most likely replacement at the moment seems like it would be fascist populism.

It's only half-formed, like I said.

Anyway, twenty years into my adult working life, the opening lines of "First We Take Manhattan" keep running through my mind.
posted by clawsoon at 4:52 PM on February 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

*whispers* I still like the bacteria lady's talk.

Oh, there, are good ones!

And Stella Young's I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much is a great one.

But then there are tons of them that are the very thing that Young was critiquing.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:08 PM on February 3, 2022 [8 favorites]

Glad that This American Life got a mention. This week's episode wraps up with an anecdote about new software that is better at tracking which cops are bad cops, so maybe if more police departments just start using that we won't have to worry about racism in policing!

Except that anecdote is coming at the end of a story about a city that knew they had a cop that was serially abusive to people of color and they did nothing about it.

And when it came out that he had a house full of white supremacist paraphernalia they didn't think it was that big a deal and hoped it would blow over.

And when it didn't blow over and they did have to fire him, they didn't publicly acknowledge the years of abuse, instead producing a 400-page report that rehashed the officer's account of the incidents he had been involved in without contacting anyone else.

And the family who brought the paraphernalia to light has gotten a whole lot of threats and is living in fear.

But software!

I get that it's demoralizing to tell people about ills of the world without suggesting that something can be done, but I feel like apolitical "don't worry, machine learning is going to fix racism by telling authorities what they already know!" techno-utopian bullshit is not really helping.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 5:33 PM on February 3, 2022 [40 favorites]

Back when Ted talks were the thing, there was a short-lived other thing called Ingite talks. 5 minutes, 20 PowerPoint slides that auto advance every 15 seconds. They were much more grassroots, often held at a club that had a stage. I gave a talk at one in DC - audience of about 300. Still my largest in person audience for a presentation. Getting your timing down to auto advancing slides is much harder than it seems. Probably practiced that presentation more than I ever have any work related deck.
posted by COD at 5:38 PM on February 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

I think that format is called PechaKucha.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 5:47 PM on February 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

COD, I think you mean Ignite Talks, which were a spinoff project from O'Reilly Media, whose conferences and events have been much more practical and impactful than TED, but certainly have a whiff of techno elites talking to each other.

Ignites are similar to and based off PechaKucha, and the main difference is Ignites are 15s / slide vs PK's 20. The shorter time length definitely makes it more stressful, but the way that I usually approached Ignites was to decouple my scripts from the slides and really make the slides more visual and less text based. The typical presentation sin of just talking through the text in your slides will be a severe handicap in an Ignite.
posted by bl1nk at 5:55 PM on February 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO at TEDMED 2014, 470,122 views, Sep 12, 2014.
You never know what the future will bring until you get there, but until then speculation is great fun.
posted by cenoxo at 6:07 PM on February 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

I think there's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of TedTalks and the reporting of Malcolm Gladwell.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:12 PM on February 3, 2022 [15 favorites]

It depends on the specifics. Futurism often self-owns.

There were plenty of half baked presentations, but present it in an appealing way and authoritatively, and you'll get lots of people on board, and even willing to defend them, on the basis of the sell. I think that's just the way people work. Hell, that's half the posts on metafilter!

The TED talk was a forum with a construction where style was the big sell, not the idea being presented. Which is why they are so identifiable, and so easily parodied. The big problem the talks have is the poor curation. So you'd end up with a handful of good, credible talks, a whole slew of kind of maybe-interesting, non earth shattering talks, and some bullshit talks. And they all had the same apparent gravitas and polish. I found it frustrating. The TED talk seemed to appeal to a certain kind of credulity. Which is ok if the gatekeeping can be trusted and the audience versed in the field. But the gateeeping couldn't be trusted. And the lay audience, as sincere as they may be, was in for a style of generally inspirational infotainment. A shiny presentation carried a lot of weight for many of the speakers but ultimately undermines much of the reputation of the forum as a whole.
posted by 2N2222 at 6:17 PM on February 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

Technocrats Executing Disasters (not my joke, sadly)
posted by Stilling Still Dreaming at 6:20 PM on February 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Dare I say it? A 5 million death toll from covid is a huge improvement over what might have been without a rapid rollout of vaccines, thanks to "warp speed."

Warp speed wasn't Trump's idea (duh..). Nor was it Bill Gates's. But someone out there, someone who doesn't care about putting his or her name in lights, explained to Gates that the way to address a pandemic is for governments to pre-order mass production runs of any vaccine that's a likely prospect, so that if it turns out to be effective, it can be rapidly deployed (and if not, meh, it's only money.) Gates helped make sure that the right people among Trump's lackeys understood the concept (and that they could get away with giving credit to Trump for it.)

So in one particular case there really was a clique of tech-adjacent people with the right idea for addressing a major problem.
posted by ocschwar at 6:30 PM on February 3, 2022 [14 favorites]

This essay needs the STOP HE'S ALREADY DEAD Simpsons gif.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:43 PM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

The best "TED" talk there will ever be.
posted by perhapses at 8:59 PM on February 3, 2022 [8 favorites]

I feel like apolitical "don't worry, machine learning is going to fix racism by telling authorities what they already know!" techno-utopian bullshit is not really helping.

That scenario is a perfect setup for my argument that AI & ML are best at generating excuses. In the future, the family will be the only identifiable humans in the decision process besides the official/officer accused, and the only people to experience changes to their daily habits because the government can't fire police without the police's permission. So we'll get accusations against police -> accused's reaction -> [machine goes whirr] -> no change. No elected seat has to stick their neck out. Thank you for coming to my
posted by rhizome at 9:21 PM on February 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the bacteria lady - Bonnie Bassler! I'd like to give you one of the best TED talks I've heard.

Here's James Howard Kunstler. He's not happy to be on stage with his new, smart idea. He's angry. He shows that the cities we are building are not fit for human life. The title of his talk is The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs. After listening to him, I look at architecture - especially bad architecture - in a new way.
posted by Termite at 10:07 PM on February 3, 2022 [5 favorites]

From the piece:

The criticism leveled at TED foreshadowed a backlash against the technocratic elite that would continue to pick up steam in the following years.

Or people like to hype things up and then other people backlash to the hype?
posted by pelvicsorcery at 11:10 PM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

The one where comedian Sam Hyde does a parody TED talk.
posted by theorique at 3:06 AM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

My Stroke of Insight is genuinely worth more than the time spent watching it. Much of the rest has indeed been covered better by The Onion.
posted by flabdablet at 3:28 AM on February 4, 2022

I still invoke the wisdom of the paper towel talk several times a day...often right after watching someone in front of me at the roll dispenser take a couple of feet of PT and wad them up to ineffectually smear water all over their hands and then, about a quarter of the time, wipe hands on pants anyway.

I feel pretty strongly that the key to it all is simply to take a few seconds to shake your hands off over the basin.

I feel like I have gained from a lot of the TT I have seen over the years but recently I was thinking "man there just can't be that many good original ideas out there" and it seemed like every talk started with the speaker making some insanely disruptive statement and then explaining that they just made an insanely disruptive statement.
posted by hearthpig at 5:20 AM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Are TED talks "thoughts and prayers" for smart people? You get a positive feeling of being part of helping and progress that's all out of proportion to your actual contribution?
posted by clawsoon at 5:54 AM on February 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

There's an NPR show that's, like, a lightly-curated TED Talks Greatest Hits, and I think they might just keep airing it forever, like they tried to do with Car Talk, even after one of the hosts was dead and nobody had cars with carburetors any more.

There might be a metaphor in there somewhere.
posted by box at 5:56 AM on February 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Here's James Howard Kunstler.

We regret to inform you...
posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:16 AM on February 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Underwater Astonishments David Gallo
TED2007 March 2007 16M views
posted by cenoxo at 7:23 AM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Are TED talks "thoughts and prayers" for smart people?

Never deprive someone of hope: it may be all they have left.
posted by cenoxo at 7:37 AM on February 4, 2022

Remember that TED talk about power poses?

You know who else liked power poses?
posted by cenoxo at 8:14 AM on February 4, 2022

Dare I say it? A 5 million death toll from covid is a huge improvement over what might have been without a rapid rollout of vaccines, thanks to "warp speed."...

So in one particular case there really was a clique of tech-adjacent people with the right idea for addressing a major problem.

Respectfully this seems mostly like a nonsequitur, apparently motivated by feeling personally attacked by criticism of techo-utopianism? Yes in that one case the technocrats won. Too bad they seem wholly incapable of addressing actual systemic problems. (As has been pointed out multiple times upthread.)
posted by viborg at 8:48 AM on February 4, 2022

The one where comedian Sam Hyde does a parody TED talk.

this sam hyde?
posted by i used to be someone else at 9:08 AM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

There might be a metaphor in there somewhere.

There’s nothing new about Techno-Futurism? Popular Science covers 1917-2008.
posted by cenoxo at 11:14 AM on February 4, 2022

Is there a word for this? A thing that seems really cool and everybody talks it up and there's so much buzz and then, upon the merest inspection, it reveals itself as hollow? Sigh. I'm very easily converted and sold on things, I've fallen for every fad ever probably. BEFORE that closer inspection, that is. It's a life of constant disappointment.

Pretty much the only TED Talk I've liked is Vexillology - but I haven't checked out the bacteria lady one yet - hope springs eternal!
posted by MiraK at 1:28 PM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Illustrated Guide for TEDx Speakers is my go-to for lightning-brief tech talks. It is, of course, its own parody.
posted by k3ninho at 1:33 PM on February 4, 2022

From the article (emph. added):

The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories — hence Gates’s opening anecdote about the barrel. In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn’t to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED’s longtime curator, puts it, “We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something.”

Oof. It seems like this kind of technofuturism suffers from an enormous blind-spot when it comes to power and politics. That somehow they imagine a world where everyone's desires and objectives and incentives all align so closely that when this world hears about whatever grand new ideas you have that the world would have no choice but to adopt it. Of course there wouldn't be any powerful, organized, and/or dedicated opposition to these great new ideas because, well, why would there be? We're all on the same side, aren't we? Aren't we all just wanting to make the world a better place?
posted by mhum at 2:56 PM on February 4, 2022

The criticism leveled at TED foreshadowed a backlash against the technocratic elite that would continue to pick up steam in the following years. Twitter had failed to bring democracy to the Middle East. It became clear that social media was only free because our personal data was being mined and sold to advertisers. Obama was not the political savior many had hoped him to be. The banks had been bailed out, but most regular people were still suffering from the fallout of the financial crisis. For a generation coming of age, upward mobility, social equality, and the utopian promises of technology were revealed as mere fantasies. Inspiresting content in general was becoming less relevant, more cringe — a signifier of liberal ineptitude. On Tumblr and Twitter, there was a meme where you’d write some incredibly banal or absurd observation and then add: “Thanks for coming to my TED talk.”

Meanwhile, the TED talks continued, endlessly re-articulating tech’s promises without any serious critical reflection.

For the first time, I think I see how the shift I always was expecting to happen, has already happened. Huh. Yeah. Things make more sense in this context.
posted by rebent at 7:14 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

You know who else liked power poses?

Oh, so they do work?
posted by flabdablet at 7:23 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I do think there are many great talks. There's lots of folks with great stories who never got the chance to tell them, and Ted became a great medium for that.

I also think there is value in recognizing how *bad* many people are at producing a compelling argument. There are more highly-educated people than ever before, and we all want to learn from other cultures about other ideas. What once were neich fields now have an audience. Specialities that never existed now have the interdisciplinary network has become dense enough to support very focused specialities. Like a mycelium network.

I don't think it's speculation at all to say that there are as many humans as ever that want to tell stories, and Ted definitely became the oratory style for my generation.

OK besides that and a bunch of other stuff, Ted is probably trash for sure
posted by rebent at 7:38 PM on February 4, 2022

... that when this world hears about whatever grand new ideas you have that the world would have no choice but to adopt it.

Well, we have William Blake's proverb that: “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not to be believ'd”, he certainly no technofuturist.
posted by Chitownfats at 7:41 PM on February 4, 2022

When I was 18, I spoke at the flagship TED11 conference Monterey in 2001. I argued for the human exploration of Mars, a talk which in retrospect wasn't anything special other than for the relative youth of the person delivering it.

At the time, TED was practically unknown outside because the founder clearly had little interest in publicising it very widely, and because we didn't have broadband and streaming video yet. As a result, my university was extremely unimpressed by me taking time off to visit it; of course, there's a TEDxCambridgeUniversity. It also meant there was less incentive to play to the crowd, so while there were still some "inspiresting" talks like mine, you'd also see Matt Groening show off a preview of the Futurama pilot and complain about the laughable notes he received from Fox executives.

But that didn't mean there was no incentive. I arrived to the conference a day early and didn't have anything to do, so I wandered to the lobby and spotted Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were already pretty famous at the time. We went out to get a sandwich with a couple of other people and talked about games and shit. Then when we walked back we saw Jeff Bezos in a Subway. And if I recall correctly, my talk was after a Nobel prizewinner and before Herbie Hancock. The point is that with such an influential audience, it almost seems wasteful not to hype up your shit in the hopes of getting investment or making connections or whatever.

I was too young to realise any of this; if I had, I should've just begged Brin and Page for a job and rode that rocket ship to the moon. But what I did get out of the experience was something far more valuable: the realisation that even the richest and most famous people are just people. And events like TED? They're fun, in a way. I wish everyone had the chance to see what it's like. But there's no point in organising your life around trying to get in, as many people seem to do. It's just not that worthwhile compared to the other things you can do with your life.

I barely remember any of the talks at the conference. Maybe that's because I was knocked out by a deadly combination of jet lag and my first and only ever migraine, but frankly, they just weren't that impactful. What's had a more lasting effect on my life was the thing that got me to the conference in the first place: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and then his later books, which converted me into a confirmed socialist. Of course, there weren't any 18 minute talks advocating for socialism at TED11.
posted by adrianhon at 3:26 AM on February 5, 2022 [7 favorites]

Back when TED and/or TEDx was on the exponential rise (probably most noticeable around 2006 for me) it was a lot cooler and more reliable than watching random talks on YouTube. The curation and "formula" meant that there was going to be a certain baseline of making you think. I learned a lot of interesting things from TED talks. Over the following 10 years and beyond, it became kind of formulaic. But it was pretty original at the time.

There might be an analogy with Citizen Kane. If you watch that film nowadays, it looks pretty cliche, not to mention dated. But at the time that it came out, it pioneered several ways of storytelling in film that would become canonical. It looks cliche because it created the things that would become cliche over time.
posted by theorique at 7:07 AM on February 5, 2022

But it was pretty original at the time.

Yeah, but that originality involved a lot of half-baked and often incorrect statements presented as fact.

Short-form video edutainment might be a pioneering method of storytelling, but it also allowed a whole lot of grifters to get rich off of shit that was fundamentally wrong, and conned a whole lot of people into adapting their worldview to smart-talking YouTube videos, which has not panned out well.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 2:02 PM on February 9, 2022