The Drift: “…Though no longer at its cultural apogee, the public speaking platform is more active than ever. New TED talks are constantly being delivered and then uploaded and viewed on TED’s website and YouTube channel, which has 20.5 million subscribers. There are TED podcasts, a TED newsletter, a TED Ideas blog, and a TED publishing arm, which prints “short books to feed your craving for ideas.” Before the end of this year, TEDx events will be held in Barcelona, Tehran, Kabul, Hanoi, Wuhan, Anchorage, Jakarta, Algiers, Lagos, and Tomsk, the oldest university town in Siberia. People are still paying between $5,000 and $50,000 to attend the annual flagship TED conference. In 2021, the event was held in Monterey, California. Amid wildfires and the Delta surge, its theme was “the case for optimism.” There were talks on urban possibility (“finding new, smarter ways to live together”), a tech comeback (how genetic technology and NFTs “make the case for rousing the techno-optimist in us”), and climate confidence (“How we might beat this thing!”).  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?..”