About this time last year I went on a little day-trip to Birmingham with my friend Steven Johnson. It was grey and miserable and we had to go and buy umbrellas from Boots to keep dry. It was a fantastic day though.
We were on the trail of Joseph Priestly tracking down the places he hung out for Steven’s book The Invention of Air which is out today in the UK and is very, very good. I think you’ll hear quite a lot about it next week on the radio and in the papers and so on. Steven is also doing a number of talks including this one at Nesta on Monday.
The thing that got me was Steven’s description of Priestly as a relentless optimist. And when you look at all the things he did you can’t help but be impressed. There’s something about him that just makes you smile.
[This is a slightly adapted version of a short talk I gave at MASS LBP on 10 March 2009 in Toronto, Canada]
It feels a bit unfashionable in tumultuous times like these but there’s something you should know about me before we start. I’m an optimist - a practical optimist in that I like making things happen and changing things for the better. I’m a great believer that the direction of human progress is towards greater and greater ability to solve problems. People are getting more intelligent individually and groups of people are getting even smarter because of new tools for collaboration and new ways of co-ordinating activity.
This talk stems from some things I’ve learned over the last five years about what’s possible when you try to take ideas that could change the world and put them into action using web technologies. It’s also about a quote that I made in a film called Us Now that got me in a little bit of trouble with my political friends:
“Representative democracy is based on the assumption that people are thick. And that’s just not true.”
It was one of those things that just came out of my mouth without much thought beforehand. The advantage of saying it on film is that I’ve had to think about it afterwards. What I meant was that by putting decisions and the provision of public services in the hands of a small group of elected representatives we miss a massive opportunity to tap the power of people to solve their own problems.
So, as previous TEDsters had warned me, TED 2009 did blow my mind. That many amazing talks one after the other interspersed with constant caffeinated/slightly drunken conversation with some of the best minds in the world on tech and design was just brilliant.
Everything at TED is done to such high standards. The talks are just so much better than your usual conference fare. The TED Commandments sent to the speakers beforehand give you a flavour of what is expected. And then to have some of the best music and film on top of that….
The talks have already started trickling out including Liz Gilbert’s brilliant one on genius. My favourites to look out for on ted.com over the coming months: Willie Smits on how he learned how to regrow rainforest, Aimee Mullins on what disability means in the 21st century, Patty Maes unveiling MIT’s sixth sense and Liz Coleman on Liberal Arts Education.
The parties were glitzy to say the least and you could argue that the lavishness of the whole thing was in opposition to current economic gloom but I think that misses the point. What struck me was that amongst the group of people there, almost universally, everyone I met was a practical optimist. Sure there was lots of conversation about the problems, especially about the environmental challenges of both climate change and the disappearing oceans (”It’s too late for pessimism” was one quote I’ll remember on climate change), but even these massive problems were treated as challenges.
And I walked away pretty confident about our future. These are also people who have done massive things before. People who have built revolutionary businesses and social movements, done amazing things in their respective fields. If anybody is going to have the kind of experience we need to turn our ship away from the rocks in this storm, it’s them. Mainly because they’re not people who have relied on top-down power. They’ve built things and changed things from the bottom up.
Anyway, there was no doubt about my absolute highlight, which was our video link to the ceremony in Venezuela to give Jose Antonio Abreu his TED Prize (if you don’t know about El Sistema I urge you to find out more). No video of that performance, but here’s one of the orchestra in the Proms in London.
It’s not big and it’s not clever as I point out on the Guardian’s PDA Blog today. I should also say that the idea really comes from a far cleverer person than me. Tim O’Reilly uses it in this fantastic talk.
Just sent a link by my mum to Ode Magazine and browsing around found the current issue includes a list of 25 optimists. They call them intelligent optimists, I would say they were practical optimists, but nevertheless they’re the kind of people who I think will pull us out of our current problems. The intro to the list is here.
