>> TED of course can’t be held solely responsible for the increasingly eschatological pronouncements of this cohort [the tech elite]. That would be, in a way, to buy into its hype too much. But as the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy. It helped refine prediction into a rhetorical art well-suited to these aspiring world conquerors — even the ones who fail.
For a while it was cool for people to do such talks, the problem is that those people don't have unlimited things to say, so naturally when all important stuff is said and done, only lower quality content is left, with the expected spiral to the bottom until it doesn't matter any longer and is time to move on.
TED talks tend to have a certain style and pattern. And, like a given TV show, there comes a point when the particular style and pattern starts to get repetitive and tiresome. Once you've seen 50 TED talks, even if the 51st would be fairly compelling in isolation, it maybe feels like more of the same in context.
The fashion has mostly moved to other things.