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TEDification versus Edification

Jan 29, 2014 by Simon Sadler
Via Places Journal
By SAH member Simon Sadler

I. TED is the new counterculture. 
Stewart Brand, meet Russell Brand: Two provocateurs of conferences and consciences to which the design disciplines might pay heed. Readers in the United States are likely familiar with Stewart Brand; he is the intellectual entrepreneur who in the mid-1960s dropped acid and thus had revealed to him a vision of a Buckminster Fuller-inspired new globalism, and who then enshrined this vision in the epochal Whole Earth Catalog. U.S. readers may be less familiar with Russell Brand; he is the comedian from the United Kingdom who by his own admission drank a tad too much before addressing the recent GQ awards ceremony in London, prompting him to deliver, to a cringing audience, revelations about the event’s sponsors and attendees and the parlous state of the entire world. We would not need to pay any more attention to this stunt, except that Russell Brand has followed up with a series of coruscating interviews (in one of which he gleefully trounces the U.K.’s leading political interviewer, Jeremy Paxman [1]) and op-ed pieces, culminating in an essay for the highbrow, left-leaning weekly The New Statesman in which he asks: "Is utopian revolution possible? The freethinking social architect Buckminster Fuller said humanity now faces a choice: oblivion or utopia. We're inertly ambling towards oblivion, is utopia really an option?" 

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