“Ideas worth spreading” is the slogan of the US organisation whose TED talks have been translated into more than 100 languages and whose archived talks and related TEDx events are said to be viewed over one billion times annually.
Chris Anderson, the head of the TED organisation for the past 20 years, says that The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading (his book’s subtitle), is what he calls “infectious generosity” by which he means a virtuous contagion that he asserts could transform the world for the better.
His vehicle for transforming the world is the internet. He acknowledges that unchecked surveillance capitalism and filter bubbles have severely eroded the positive potential of the internet over the past decade, and that platforms like Facebook and YouTube use addiction techniques to boost revenues regardless of the consequences for public health and democracy, but he claims that “the internet can turbocharge generosity and generosity can transform the internet”.
He writes that the impetus for the book came from a social media experiment in which 200 people were each given a $10,000 windfall and each gave away, on average, two-thirds of the money to friends, family and outside causes. From this, and from the undoubted munificence of the not-for-profit TED organisation (it has archived over 200,000 free talks since its foundation in California in 1998 as a Technology, Entertainment, Design conference), he concludes that “generosity is a core part of who we are” and that “our deepest fulfilment comes only when generosity is a fundamental part of our lives”.
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He says that people who are generous are those who will enjoy the deepest happiness and that generous companies and organisations “will own the future” adding: “If we can find a way to nudge the Internet to a kinder, more generous, more positive place, it could have an incalculable impact on our future”.
The book is dedicated “To those who give, and to those who will...”. Its final sentence is: “We’re eager to hear from you”. The tone is frequently Pollyannaish and the goal is certainly Utopian, making it a type of self-help book for individual readers and for all humanity.
