Benjamin Wallace elaborates on the complaints against the speaker series:
"If you look at it primatologically," one TED attendee says, "it was originally designed like an eighteenth-century salon, where the very smart and the very rich pretend they have something in common for a very short time. But now there’s a very small cohort of smart people and CEOs—alphas—and a huge panoply of betas: senior vice-presidents. What’s fascinating is how many betas are in the room."
Wallace spoke with Richard Saul Wurman, the man who started TED, sold it and is now launching a new conference this fall:
Wurman is stripping down a form he sees as having become overly packaged. Speakers will likely not know what they’re going to talk about until Wurman poses a question. There will be no time limit. “People will have a conversation onstage until I get bored." And there will be no tickets. The only people at the conference will be the speakers, a guest each, and a few sponsors. "I’m having nobody come," Wurman says, merrily. "That’s the ultimate ‘fuck you.'"