“Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering.” So wrote Evgeny Morozov in 2012 in one of the last truly classic New Republic essays. Morozov systematically vivisects the bad ideas behind TED and the TED set, but he almost doesn’t have to. The sheer abuse of language in the passages he quotes, straining to seem clever and with-it but just coming off as word salad, exposes the fraud to anyone with an ear for language. TED, which stood for “technology, entertainment, design” before it stood for nothing, started as a conference about buzzy ideas popular among the (private) jet (to Tahoe) set, and metastasized from there into an idea-slinging media company that does what so many magazines have come to do over the same period: package political and social fads as intellectualism.
As Morozov memorably put it, TED totemized the 2012 moment’s dubious success in “marketing masquerading as theory, charlatans masquerading as philosophers, a New Age cult masquerading as a university, business masquerading as redemption, slogans masquerading as truths.” But that was then. I remember well how easily stuff about neuroscience and the optimistic promise of technology did in online publishing. Today is different.
Two big things have changed about what TED is up to. First, TED as a grift became more shameless, so it is now not just the official mothership conferences, but also licensed “TEDx” affiliate events. Now, you can pay TED to host your own knockoff. Second, throwing around a bunch of intuitively wrong marketing babble in neuroscience and techno jargon stopped being the most culturally fashionable way to sound smart without being smart. Today, the fashionable nonsense sounds like this tweet, from TEDxLondon, which was asked why it had used the hashtag #TEDxLondonWomxn:
“Why we’re using ‘womxn.’ No, that’s not a typo: ‘womxn’ is a spelling of ‘women’ that’s more inclusive and progressive. The term sheds light on the prejudice, discrimination, and institutional barriers womxn have faced, and explicitly includes non-cisgender women.”
I am not going to go into a detailed explanation of why using “womxn” is not useful or progressive. You know why. Using “womxn” signals that the conference will feature speakers and guests who use “womxn” and related jargon, and that’s all. But as a professional pedant, I can’t help noting that even if any meaningful moral change could be made by swapping out an E, it would not “explicitly” include anyone. An idea baked into a word usage by a stipulated convention that has to be explained is implicit. People who claim the world can be changed by putting huge pressure on others to observe fashions about words sure don’t seem to care about what words actually mean.
