The disconnect of Davos Man

You may have missed Ursula von der Leyen’s big speech at Davos last week. Most people did. Perhaps because Davos was a more low-key affair than normal this year.

Ordinarily the annual summit of the World Economic Forum allows various world leaders to jet into the Swiss Alps in order to lecture the rest of us on the virtues of zero carbon. But this year the head of the Forum — Klaus Schwab — greeted his guests virtually and alone. Welcoming the President of the European Commission down the line, the two reminisced about last year’s summit and such pleasures as being lectured by Greta Thunberg.

Although they tried to pretend that last year’s meeting in some way foresaw the era we are now in, of course it did no such thing. It never does. For while Davos man (and woman) imagine themselves staring steely-gazed into our long-term future, the short-term future keeps on happening. And that rarely if ever includes anything that Davos man warned about — which is quite the accomplishment, given that an average Davos insight is to say that the challenges we face in the years ahead are global and must therefore have global solutions. Davos is packed with insights hardly worth the bus fare, let alone the private jet fare.

In any case, the Davos desire to retrofit such blandishments into our current reality was nowhere so evident as in von der Leyen’s remarks about big tech. In her ‘Special Address’, the President of the EC said that Davos had warned about ‘the business models of big tech companies and the consequences for our democracy’. This year, believing that such extraordinary foresight had been vindicated, she said that the storming of the US Capitol last month was an example of ‘the darker sides of the digital world’.