TED Finally Gets Its Very Own Sokal Hoax

In 1996, the journal Social Text published an essay by physicist Alan Sokal titled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Purporting to connect emerging physics and future-math with postmodern theory, it was actually a hoax. The paper is a bunch of nonsense designed as a mockery of the whole jerk-off of deconstructionism (speaking as someone once mildly obsessed with deconstructionism), intended to demonstrate that a leading journal in the field would take a bunch of garbage if it sounded enough like proper postmodernism and if “it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions,” in Sokal’s words. Indeed it did.

TED culture isn’t stuck in quite the infinite loop as cultural studies/lit theory, but it often involves similar amounts of excruciating privilege, jargon, and self-congratulations. In the year 2013 it’s not hard to find a TED takedown, yet not so much a Sokal-esque parodic infiltration, at least until sketch comedian Sam Hyde made his way into a TEDx program a couple of weeks ago at Drexel University with a program titled, “2070 Paradigm Shift.”

Hyde billed himself as a filmmaker just back from “Mogadishu, the most dangerous city on earth, where he shadowed the heroic al-Mahamud women on their quest to clean up their streets and restore humanity to their war-torn country.” His actual presentation was bullshit, a joke. It’s actually pretty annoying and much too over-the-top, but the actual presentation was less the point than Hyde having gotten access to the stage with just some total garbage cloaked in TED appeasement.

A Philadelphia magazine post that’s otherwise pretty ripped at Hyde has this to say:

One wonders if the organizers of TEDx whiffed on vetting Hyde, which wouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes of Googling. [TEDx organizer Dhairya Pujara] was not immediately available to comment afterward, but Hyde allegedly fed them a good story. Hyde said: “I told them I had just returned from Mogadishu where I was shooting war journalism following this group of women cleaning up the neighborhood, and by picking up trash, they had lowered crime rate. So it’s like broken window theory there, or whatever the fuck. A little Malcolm Gladwell. [They] wrote back and said, ‘Wow, that’s exciting. We got some real hard hitting stuff here.’”

Likewise, it would have taken the Social Text editors just a few minutes to verify that the science of Sokal’s piece was nonsense, but the point in both of the stunts is that sense is less important to the respective organizations than playing the part well. This is usually a good indication that you’ve hit a dead end.

@everydayelk