Thought Leaders and Geek Gurus are a self-declared elite of people who, as well as doing some clever things, talk themselves up incessantly at things like TED, the Technology Entertainment Design conference - a rather shitty conference in California that everyone seems to be irrationally amazed by ever year (TED is so shit that even the shit-peddlers in chief over at TechCrunch have noticed!). The Geek Guru crowd have taken conference-going and turned it into a profession.
I have yet to figure out how me becoming a better philosopher or a better open-source hacker involves Bono or $6,000 conference tickets. The whole thing is such a load of cock and it makes me sick. Why would any sane person want to fly to something like TED and pay through the nose to have some showman tell you what you can read in an academic journal (or, indeed, in blogs, newspapers, magazines and so on) for virtually nothing. Oh, right, for a giant egotistical circle jerk.
The process
Here's the process in a nutshell: some actual important scholarly, scientific or cultural advance is made by an enthusiastic amateur or some academic back-room boy (a junior professor or whatever). Maybe some clever teenagers or programmers in some big company write some open source software. Then some douche with a big ego half-reads the paper, goes up on stage and talks to a room full of other annoying cocksure thought leaders who, lacking much in the critical faculties, lap that shit up. This is just the grown-up version of the nerdy kid being forced to do the bully's maths homework.
In government, they call it "blue-sky thinking". In Silicon Valley, they call it TED. To reasonable people, it's called bullshit. The people who attend these idiotic conferences where they masturbate to the idea that they are changing the world, could actually change the world by not paying $6,000 for a fucking ticket and giving that money to Oxfam so that some third-world village has fresh water. But actually making sure people don't get cholera isn't fun. The fun is coming up with the idea of how one would save the world, then setting up a group of one's fellow thought leaders where you can discuss how awesome it would be if someone were to implement the idea.
Examples of this crap
- Singularity U - charges $25,000 to spend nine weeks with 'thought leaders' (a couple of University of California and Stanford professors, some Google employees and Ray Kurzweil). Hold on. Nine weeks at Singularity U costs $25k, but a year of Master's studies at Harvard costs $35,000. Singularity U sounds like a special Silicon Valley-branded cross between a diploma mill and a love-in, only more expensive.
- Davos: formerly an economics conference, now seems to be an elaborate A-list bloggers meetup.
- A while back, I saw this piece of futurism about libraries, and wrote up my alternative vision. A LiveJournal comment sums it up when it says he should have to work on a library reference desk for a month before he's allowed to make any of these idiotic suggestions to the government.
How to avoid this utter shite
- Don't buy any management books.
- Unsubscribe from the blogs of people who start spouting off about economics or social science having read only Freakonomics or the work of Malcolm Gladwell.
- Use your common sense.
- Once you start using your common sense, you'll start seeing conference prices differently. There's actually an inverse law when it comes to conference price/crapness. The really awesome conferences cost nothing: BarCamps and the like. The next tier are those that are up to about two hundred pounds. Above that, you get into serious douche territory, with things like TED and Davos at the top-end. I say this as someone who has gone to conferences costing over a thousand euros. The few times I've been to expensive conferences, it has only made me stricter about my "twenty rule" - no more than twenty euros, dollars or pounds for entry. In fact, as it seems to be a recession, I'm going to lower it to fifteen.
Pulling the gurus back down to reality
Mitch Kapor on Ray Kurzweil's theories: "It's intelligent design for the IQ 140 people. This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different - it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me, no matter what numbers he marshals in favor of it. He's very good at having a lot of curves that point up to the right." source
Nice links
- The Hub Magazine: Thought Leaders
- "We've seldom seen so many meandering, cliché-ridden attempts at a definition"
- 45% of respondents (marketing agency executives) thought of themselves as thought leaders. If half of Americans just decided they were President, that'd be thought of as a mass delusion.
- Sarah Lacy, Business Week: Why I'm Fed Up With TED
- "Later, a different image came to mind, this one of a courageous woman describing her efforts on behalf of some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country to a roomful of celebrities and Internet millionaires, with the real world locked outside."
- "There's just something about TED that's exceedingly smug, and it's particularly troubling given the conference's proximity to, and enthusiastic support from, normally egalitarian Silicon Valley."
- Peter Glaskowsky: Singularity University: Hope or hype?
- "I've been to two of Kurzweil's Singularity Summits, including the most recent, in October. I didn't write about it here because I simply didn't see anything worth writing about. Most of the conference wasn't even about the Singularity in any meaningful sense."
- "It will be nice if the Singularity University can achieve useful results for society, but I suspect that it will just be a longer, more labored version of the Summit, a painful muddle of science and science fiction identifying no clear path to a future we might not even want."
- Donald Clark: Singularity University - the twilight zone
- "Looks like a get rich quick scam."
- There's some skepticism in the comments on this BoingBoing post.
- PZ Myers: Futurists Make Me Cranky
- Richard Posner's review of Malcolm Gladwell's ''Blink'' is pretty awesome. I've archived it at Posner on Gladwell's Blink
- Joseph Epstein's review of Gladwell's ''Outliers'' is pretty good too.