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The last days of Davos

Collages by Mark Harris. Source images, clockwise from top left: the town of Davos © Olaf Protze/Alamy; world map, c. 1975 © Hum Images/Alamy; a ski jumper © akg-images/De Agostini/Biblioteca Ambrosiana; national flags at the Davos Congress Centre © Andreas Nägeli/Alamy; the World Economic Forum logo © World Economic Forum; a mountain peak © Makasana/iStockDavos; a meeting at the World Economic Forum © Ukraine Presidency/Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/Alamy

Last January, along with all but three thousand members of the global population, I was not invited to attend the World Economic Forum. This was a disappointment, as I had hoped to cover the event for this magazine. I wanted to travel to Switzerland during those five early days of the year to see whether globalization was dying, dead, or might yet recover from the blow delivered to it by a concatenation of historical events: the rearmament of the world, the return to an age of state industrial strategies, and the reassertion of national borders in the aftermath of a pandemic that had locked each of us, for a while, in place. As the cradle of the doctrine that had governed the world economy for the past fifty years but was now, according to numerous reports, threatened by an apparently terminal “polycrisis,” the annual meeting of business and state leaders seemed to be the place to take globalization’s pulse. Locked out, I wondered whether it might be enough to spend the week of the conference in the small Alpine town with which the event had become synonymous: Davos.

Davos is a Gemeinde, or township, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, the easternmost and largest in the country, a region whose very heterogeneity mirrors that of the nation, earning it the nickname die kleine Schweiz (“little Switzerland”). Graubündners are renowned for their independence and resilience. The canton has long been at the very heart of Europe’s trade networks: its mountain passes facilitated the medieval exchange of English wool for Italian gold at the dawn of the Continent’s banking system. Its economy today is driven mostly by tourism (it is astonishingly beautiful), pastoral agriculture, and a mixture of biomedical research and chemical manufacturing. And Davos itself is a microcosm of this microcosm: a landscape of Burkean sublimity whose rarefied air brought tuberculosis patients to its slopes for decades before the development of streptomycin began to empty out the sanatoriums, which over time refashioned themselves as hotels. In the wake of this heyday, Davosians sought never to rely so heavily on a single source of income again.

Davos epitomizes two vying images of Switzerland: that of the global financial hubs Zurich and Geneva, upon which international business and the world’s wealthy have long relied, and that of vertiginous dairy-farming landscapes, from which civic-minded cowherds descend from Alpine peaks to cast their votes in referenda before returning to their butter churns. Both nations exist. The vast sums of capital that flow through the former provide the financial basis for the localism of the latter, helping to preserve the image of a land unspoiled by the vampiric thirst of capitalism and the homogenizing cultural pressures of globalization. For decades, this “neutral,” unchanging national character has attracted a legion of global businesses and institutions that have headquartered themselves there. And for fifty years, alongside the ascendency of globalization, the country did experience an extraordinary period of political and economic stability. But lately even Switzerland has shown signs of increasing disturbance: the precise meaning of neutrality is up for grabs (ought it allow, for instance, the Swiss Army to participate in NATO defense exercises?); the country’s two largest banks have not so much merged as one has collapsed into the other; its decision to unpeg the franc from the euro has stymied trade; and its most recent federal election saw a nationalist far-right party grow its plurality in the National Council. It seemed increasingly likely, as the forum approached, that the fate of the disintegrating liberal order might be divinable from the town that had long been its epicenter. Were their fates entwined? There, in the local paper, printed alongside a letter from Klaus and Hilde Schwab, the WEF’s patriarch and its matriarch, praising Davos as a “place that naturally stimulates reflection, promotes dialogue, and supports the thorough, productive engagement that is essential to managing the challenges of our age,” was the headline is this the last davos wef?

No one I spoke to before my trip, however, not even attendees of the previous year’s forum, could tell me whether I’d be able to visit the town during the conference without some sort of clearance. Inevitably, most reports of Davos’s character are made during the week of the forum, and thus, after a customary name-check of The Magic Mountain, employ a vocabulary situated somewhere between that of a Pentagon briefing and an ad for an all-inclusive ski vacation: “fortress” appears frequently, as do “sniper,” “checkpoint,” and “piano bar.” I read in the Times of India that nearly five thousand Swiss Army personnel were deployed to secure the area, and on the website of the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation that air traffic for some fifty kilometers around the center of Davos would be restricted even to hang gliders.

The night before the forum began, I met Michael, a Swiss friend, for dinner in Zurich. Now a Gymnasium teacher, he had been a teenage participant in the 2003 demonstrations against the WEF, at the height of the country’s anti-globalization movement, when the police had prevented him and fellow activists from demonstrating at the airport. I asked him how long he had been detained. Swallowing a bite of Zürcher Geschnetzeltes—veal simmered in cream sauce—he clarified: the cops hadn’t arrested him; they had just forced his group to return to the central train station. Then he’d had to wait a little while for a connection home to Bern. Security might have tightened somewhat since, I reasoned, but that such an episode constituted an act of civil disobedience within modern Swiss history was a calming thought. The next day, after receiving similar assurances on the midmorning Rhätische Bahn from a fellow passenger and kinesiologist named Cäcilia—who was dressed in a Graubünden Tracht-style duck-egg-blue frock and a small lace cap, and who was on her way, uninvited, to show off her traditional costume to WEF attendees—I alighted at Davos Platz without being shot.

In the history of capitalism, 1971 was the pivotal year that Richard Nixon ended the U.S. dollar’s convertibility into gold, collapsing the postwar global monetary system and inaugurating an era of financial deregulation. In Switzerland, it was the year women won the right to vote in federal elections and the nation began to overturn constitutional provisions from the nineteenth century that had been designed to limit the incursion of “foreign” actors. And in the midst of this tumultuous moment of reform and liberalization—when financial instability was becoming a new norm that required economic “governance” at a global scale—1971 was the year Klaus Schwab hosted the first “Davos.”

Schwab was born in Ravensburg, Germany, in 1938, to a German father and a Swiss mother. During the war, his father managed a factory that drew upon the forced labor of Nazi prisoners to produce military equipment. An engineer-cum-economist who studied in Switzerland, Schwab decamped, at age twenty-eight, for a sojourn at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he found a mentor in Henry Kissinger. Upon his return, he oversaw a merger of Escher Wyss (the Swiss industrial company where his father had worked and that had supplied flamethrowers to the Third Reich) and the Sulzer Group (a diesel-engine manufacturer that had been blacklisted by the Allies during World War II for refusing to limit exports to the Axis powers). He thus turned to the obvious next project for a man of his professional expertise: writing an ethics manual for European businessmen. The first European Management Symposium, as the gathering was then called, was set up to promulgate his book’s philosophy of “stakeholder” capitalism. It was a moderate success, enough to be repeated the following year, as the world teetered from the “Nixon shock,” and then the next, when a band of Arab countries, retaliating against the United States’ decision to resupply the Israel Defense Forces, established an oil embargo on a slate of Western nations that spiked the price of American barrels by some 300 percent. It was in this year, 1973, that participants signed “The Davos Manifesto,” a clarion call for a new world order. The manifesto held that businesses not only were responsible for turning a profit, but also ought to, in the manner of governments, “assume the role of a trustee of the material universe for future generations.” It was therefore in the interest of society to ensure optimal conditions for the free market to flourish. By this point, the modern world—whose population had heretofore lived in distinct nations with their own economies, cultures, and customs—was merging into an increasingly integrated system, though one in which profit was still liable to be undermined by geopolitical scuffles. Schwab’s event was where wealthy businessmen were beginning to assemble to make sense of this development. “To cope with structural changes, genuine top executives must act as politicians,” he wrote in 1975. “That is to say as foreign affairs and not as domestic affairs politicians.”

In the ensuing years, Schwab’s symposium enticed representatives from more and more countries and larger and larger companies. As Western markets spatialized in search of cheaper manufacturing conditions, Davos expanded to include delegates from new continents, too: Schwab invited Deng Xiaoping to the 1979 meeting, though the Chinese Communist Party’s vice chairman had the good sense to turn him down. (A growing Chinese presence has since become a staple of the event.) Driven by an inflated sense of his own prophetic powers, Schwab became increasingly interested in diplomacy as things took off at what eventually became the World Economic Forum. Early on, he endeavored to ease embargo-related tensions between the Arab world and the West by inviting several hundred business leaders from each side to Montreux for a few days. In 1988, he persuaded the Greek and Turkish governments that war was perhaps not in their immediate interest when there were trade deals to be struck. Over the next decade, he welcomed Helmut Kohl, Nelson Mandela, and Hillary Clinton to the Davos stage, while also making the occasional stab at bringing peace to the Middle East. The concepts of what would become cornerstones of the economic world order—the World Trade Organization and NAFTA—were said to have been developed at WEF-affiliated events. By 1998, when Lewis H. Lapham filed two reports on the WEF for this magazine, globalization and its political sister, Third Way politics, were at their acme. The new economically integrated system had wobbled but withstood its first major shock, the Asian financial crisis; the euro zone was a fait accompli, hovering on the calendrical horizon; and the electoral triumphs of figures such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair meant that, in most major Western states, even governments no longer claimed to be in the business of government; instead, they were partners in “governance” with business. The global economy had been freed from the netting of politics—an antiquated pastime riddled with laws, parties, and voters—thereby enabling goods and capital to move freely toward new frontiers of profit opportunity for the betterment of all.

Source images, clockwise from top left: Klaus Schwab © Markus Schreiber/AP Photo; map of Asia and Europe, c. 1975 © Hum Images/Alamy; a gold bar © fStop Images GmbH/Alamy; Henry Kissinger © Ian Dagnall Computing/Alamy; a gold coin © imageBROKER/GmbH & Co. KG/Alamy/Michael Weber

By the turn of the millennium, optimism about this project had dimmed. Multinational corporations were reaping ever-greater windfalls, but there was little sign of the promised solutions to the lingering problems of hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, and the like. An assemblage of conspiracy-worthy material had begun to amass around the WEF. Keynote speeches by Kissinger, Bill Gates, and George Soros; Michael Jackson’s talking about “children’s rights” in an address at a spin-off event in Namibia; and the presence of such famous mediocrities as Bono and Lionel Richie and literary brownnosers like Paulo Coelho and, later, Ben Okri all gave the impression that a cabal of wealthy elites was gathering in the Swiss Alps to run the world according to their own design. An image of “Davos Man”—a term popularized by Samuel P. Huntington in 2004 that referred to members of a transnational upper class who sought to disentangle themselves from the nuisance of national borders, a class for whom being a citizen of the world meant the freedom to move wealth from one offshore account to another with ease, people who talked big but said little—was curdling; Davos Man had become a victim of his own success, too visible in the background of state and corporate handshake photos to hide from public criticism.

A quarter of a century after Lapham’s visit, we no longer live in Schwab’s world. The rebounding consequences of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the burst of the asset-price bubble, the re-eruption of continental European warfare, and the emergence of China as an economic threat to American hegemony (to name but a few developments) have (to use a term beloved of WEF attendees) “fractured” the world. Every year since roughly 2008, but with increased enthusiasm since the pandemic and the WEF’s misguided pivot to distributing degrowth lifestyle insights to the plebs (own nothing, eat bugs, etc.), the consensus from Davos seems to be that the party is over. And yet, as the editor of The Economist pointed out on a WEF podcast in 2020, the safest thing to assume about the Davos consensus is that it is wrong.

Davos is an archetypal Swiss mountain town. With its smattering of church spires rising above a low skyline of blocky, pastel-colored condominiums and its pyramidal structure of councils (large, small, and school), for fifty-one weeks of the year it seems the very model of a self-contained Alpine community. But on the first day of the forum, as I made my way toward the Congress Centre (the cuboid wooden structure, opened in 1969, where the official meetings take place), signs of the command of global capital—however subtle—accumulated quickly.

Droves of delegates arriving for the WEF were disembarking from their trains via a temporary railway platform that had been built halfway between the permanent Davos Dorf and Davos Platz stations that bookend the town. A secondhand shop was shuttered, with a note in the window reading wef: geschlossen. Next to a pair of billboards advertising discount ski gear was another bearing the image of Narendra Modi inviting you to immerse in indias vibrant culture through technology. A Methodist church displayed a banner of Christ washing a disciple’s feet, inscribed with the words wirtschaft soll menschen dienen! (“the economy should serve the people!”); several streets away, its Evangelical counterpart had rebranded for the week as a crypto “sanctuary.” Pinned up at bus stops all over town were inkjet-printed flyers reading stop wef. A few meters past a building marked blackrock, which looked as though it was normally occupied by a local coffee chain, the registration queue for the forum snaked around the entrance to a Coop supermarket. Behind it, the mountain light flowed over low-lying clouds, irradiating ski pistes on the facing valley wall. The slopes, for the moment, were empty, the gondolas halted, scattering a little snow as they swayed in place.

The allure of the WEF (“weff” to business-English speakers, “veff” among Schweizerdeutsch locals), and the source of the conspiracy theories that continue to surround it, has always been its twin promises: discreet facilities for an expedited schedule of private meetings, and a high-profile lineup of speakers from across the public-private divide. If the crafting of “cross-sectoral” policy is the focus, the old guard of politics is still supposed to show up to burnish the forum with the aura of state power. And yet, on the political side, few major heads of state had bothered to attend: none showed up from the BRICS; only Emmanuel Macron did from the G7. Instead, panels were filled with senior cabinet ministers and the leaders of small nations, each of whom mingled with the real stars, the names whispered in reports of sightings on the Promenade, the town’s main street: people like Marc Benioff (the CEO of Salesforce, which hosted the week’s most anticipated party), Julie Sweet (the CEO of Accenture), and the headliner, Sam Altman.

Exceptions to the strengthening rule of political nonattendance could be found among the Gulf States, and the United Arab Emirates in particular, something that became particularly evident to me on account of the fact that I spent a great part of the week following the proceedings to which I’d not been invited from the lush confines of the UAE lounge, one of the state-run biennialesque pavilions that line the rim of the WEF proper. With its free hot chocolate and platters of dates, it became a natural meeting spot for insiders and interlopers alike. It was the right place, I would realize, in which to register Schwab’s observation, in his welcome address to the WEF congregation, that “geopolitically, our world is more interconnected, yet paradoxically, more divided than ever.”

The theme of the meeting was “Rebuilding Trust.” The lack of a grammatical subject served, if anything, to obscure the nature of the “unprecedented” challenges facing leaders of all stripes. Whose trust? In what? Was the problem the eroding trust between the Global “North” and “South”? (During one panel, Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, observed that this might be a consequence of the former’s vaccine hoarding and the post-COVID interest-rate hike that “many in the South are still paying a very high price for,” a suggestion that was summarily dismissed by the then Dutch prime minister, now the secretary-general of NATO, Mark Rutte.) Was it trust in technological innovation and its capacity to deliver humanity from its self-imposed climate disaster? (If so, the line of questioning chosen by WEF hosts was perplexing: Fareed Zakaria, after announcing that a panel he was about to chair would “try to solve the problem of AI” in forty-five minutes, became fixated on learning from Altman why it could not yet drive his car.) Or had trust been lost in institutions like the WEF itself—and in the sorts of premises that were espoused on its stages, namely, that the “complexity” intrinsic to “multipolarity” was something that could be “manage[d]” by participants (U.N. secretary-general António Guterres), or that the crises of this “unique juncture in human history” might be overcome if only WEF attendees could reestablish “trust in each other” (Schwab). One had to wonder if the reason the WEF’s relevance had so diminished was because top brass couldn’t justify time spent answering questions as asinine as WEF president Børge Brende’s about the Houthis’ motivations for drone attacks on commercial shipping lanes in the Red Sea (“How connected is this with the war in Gaza?”). Or, perhaps, they could no longer truly buy into the notion that the frictionless movement of goods and capital was a sufficient bulwark against such economic disruptions, let alone something that could solve as protracted a crisis as Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, which, as the finance minister of Qatar reminded participants, was slowing down the economy of the entire region. “A year ago, this forum coined a word, ‘polycrisis,’ ” Colombian president Gustavo Petro declared (erroneously) on day three. And yet, somehow, “the situation has become worse.”

In 2024, “fracturing” could describe not only the world outside but the state of “dialogue” within the forum itself. The only premise that most of the headline speakers could agree upon was that the world the WEF had been born into was gone. It had not been held together, as planned, by “cross-sectoral partnerships,” “stakeholder engagement,” multilateral diplomacy, or the holistic economic system of profit-seeking spatialization hawked by Davos Man. “We are between orders, so we don’t really know what the new order will be,” said Brende. “Hopefully,” he added, it would not be “the jungle growing back, but something based on international law and the U.N. Charter.”

“Davos is in recession,” Mark Malloch-Brown told me over the phone, from within the securitized conference center on the WEF’s second day. At the time the president of the Open Society Foundations and overseeing the leadership transition from Soros père to fils, he was blunt about the present state of affairs: “For many years now, you’ve had, almost back-to-back, Davos and then the Munich Security Conference”—the security-policy gathering that would be held the following month, just a stone’s throw away over the Zugspitze—“and for a long period, Davos was seen as the much more contemporary event.” Munich harked back to “a Cold War world,” while Davos, “with globalization and market integration, in partnership with liberal values, seemed to have the zeitgeist.” But now, he said, “an awful lot of people prioritize Munich, because suddenly security has jumped to the top of the line. Ukraine, Gaza, also conflicts in Africa, in the Middle East.” Elite anxiety was now much more fixated on that geopolitical agenda than on “the more corporate one here.”

Indeed, none of the participants I spoke to could explain the relationship between the political headline acts and the lazy Susan of corporate meetings. Only one event seemed illuminating on the subject: the address of Volodymyr Zelensky, who refrained from asking for more weapons and instead talked about the need for investment in his country (something he has endeavored since the start of the war to make more attractive to international companies by suppressing unions and promoting corporate land ownership). This plea seemed quite obviously linked to the presence of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase and an assiduous pro-Ukraine hawk, who met with Zelensky for a closed-door conversation that same afternoon, along with asset-management executives from Blackstone, BlackRock, and Bridgewater Associates. For this part of the schedule, I stationed myself in Ukraine House, a building a short walk from the bakery that served as Russia House until 2022, when the WEF was forced to comply with E.U.-led Swiss wartime sanctions and excised the Kremlin and many of its associated billionaires—longtime fixtures of the Davos party circuit—from the proceedings. The speech was screened across the back of a stage set up for panels later in the day, and the room was sparsely occupied. When Zelensky finished, it began to fill for the next event, “Women at War: Redefining Strength and Resilience,” during which Ukrainian veterans and medics described overcoming gender stereotypes to participate in their country’s defense. “Love will save the world,” concluded one speaker; the crowd applauded and the Canadian executive of a vodka brand turned to her neighbor to declare that “we have to get Ukraine in front of the right people.”

For Christy Hoffman, the head of UNI Global Union, an international labor federation, the purpose of the forum was clear: networking. “There’s no more efficient way than to come to Davos and meet with four CEOs in the course of two days, you know. We can’t do that in any other setting.” Arnoldo André Tinoco, the foreign minister of Costa Rica, disclosed to me an ongoing case in his country’s constitutional court brought by Huawei after President Rodrigo Chaves signed a law blocking the Chinese tech conglomerate from supplying 5G infrastructure to the country (two days earlier, the government had announced a new CHIPS Act partnership with the Biden Administration). But despite reports that the scale of the Chinese delegation to Davos was ruffling feathers on the Antony Blinken–led American side, this proxy scuffle did not seem to have any bearing on Tinoco’s presence at the WEF, which he, too, characterized as mostly good for “meetings.” Later that evening, at an LGBTQ event, the then taoiseach of Ireland, Leo Varadkar, entered without any of the revelers seeming to notice. Were people here really so nonchalant about the presence of world leaders at Eurodisco ski-chalet parties, or did he lack the star power of a middle-aged Arizonan called Stan, around whom all the guests seemed to orbit? I took the chance offered by Varadkar’s social neglect to ask what benefit his presence at Davos might afford to Éire. There were lots of Americans present, he observed, so it was a pretty convenient way of “having meetings.” The day after, on the benches inside the local Migros cafeteria, an exhausted British journalist on her third tour of the forum summed up her impression of events inside the Congress Centre: “Speed dating for CEOs.”

Would no one make a principled stand for the enduring strength and importance of frictionless international trade? There was one obvious candidate to ask to testify in its defense, the author of such titles as Why Globalization Works (2004), Fixing Global Finance (2008), and, more recently and reservedly, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2023): Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, who joined me before dinner on the forum’s fourth day in the curiously empty restaurant bar of the Cresta Hotel, whose only other customers were a contingent from the Chinese fast-fashion brand Shein. Does globalization still work? It had been “a big business story,” Wolf conceded, one in which the WEF had played a large role, by presenting itself “as contributing to the solution of global economic problems. . . . But interestingly, that’s clearly gone. Obviously, that’s not the world.” A sign reading shein meetings had been placed in front of the lobby’s drooping palm tree. (Per a post on LinkedIn, the company—whose business model depends, reportedly, on seventy-five-hour workweeks in Guangzhou factories, the emission of several million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, and an American tax loophole that has thus far enabled it to elude U.S. import duties—was at Davos to “engage” public- and private-sector partners on how “responsible fashion can empower our communities and contribute to a more sustainable future.”) I turned back to Wolf. What role, if any, did the WEF have in this “emerging order”? “These meetings are very, very valuable. That’s not nothing. Again, it’s a part of the convening power that people can get together in this informal way,” he explained. “But I don’t know that there is something you could point to in the world today that is clearly valuable, that everyone would agree was valuable, and that wouldn’t have happened without the WEF. . . . It’s difficult for me to see a way in which the WEF brand has, actually itself, in some profound way, changed the world.” He paused and looked around the deserted lobby. “But then neither has the Financial Times.

The Congress Centre lies in the middle of Davos. To reach it from the Platz side, one must walk half the length of the Promenade. One’s first impression of the task might be that it is merely a way to commute to the real event, but this is wrong. By the time you are on the Promenade, you are already at “Davos.” Last January, one found a caravan of startups and slick self-promoters whose prevailing concern—unlike those inside the forum—appeared not to be for a stable new order but to secure a position from which to catch the profitable scraps scattered by the chaos of the transition.

Most shops on the Promenade had, for that week only, been stripped and transformed into pavilions that were rented and temporarily refitted by countries, regions, and companies enormously varied in name recognition and stature. Meta’s pavilion (seemingly always closed to the public) was down the road from Karnataka House (seemingly always open, its staff reliably confused as to why anyone would come inside). The UAE pavilion occupied a prime spot right atop the hill that crests over the Congress Centre, between Meta and Palantir. Potent and gritty drip coffee was permanently available, and if you stalled for too long by the trays of fruit and pastries each residence offered, the risk was not of being booted out but of being pounced on, having your phone plucked from your hand and its LinkedIn app opened in a flash to your profile’s QR code so that you could “professionally connect” with your assailant before you’d had a chance to wipe the crumbs from your fingers and shake hands.

Early in the week, I’d wandered into something called House of Trust, drawn in by the mystery institution’s seeming bastardization of the WEF’s 2024 motto. The pavilion’s perplexing parent company, yeswetrust, seemed to offer everything from crypto to Thai real estate to daily incentives to meditate, drink water, and breathe. Membership was advertised on one page of its website for 4,400 francs (roughly $5,000) per annum, and elsewhere for 88 euros. Over the course of our rapid-fire interview, the company’s CEO, Stefan Kanalga, explained to me that he had spent a decade in Swiss finance, and the problems had been plain to see. “It’s not sexy,” he said. “Not diversified, not brandable, and it doesn’t create a positive impact.” The solution was to be found in a company that could help those “with a beautiful idea” bring their “valuable projects alive” through “an ecosystem with components of real estate, education, venture-building platform, and events and the members’ club” and that also promised to allow investors to purchase a Trust Share token on the Polygon blockchain. There were five goals, he said, then went on to name six: “Feel more alive, personal development, find your purpose, bring your vision to life, achieve financial freedom, create impact.” All signs pointed to this being a scam, but who was the target?

Later that day, I found myself at the lounge of a U.S. “stablecoin” cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar that boasted that users could send money to “the unbanked” in other countries for them to hold or cash out in their local currencies. I asked one of the company’s representatives—who had told me that it made no money from regular financial transactions—how this was different from standard currency trading. “Humanitarian strategy is a key part of our model—our founders care deeply about justice,” she responded. This kind of disconnection between question and answer, context and content, or simply words and meaning, was one of the most unsettling parts of the Davos experience. It was what allowed someone, somewhere, with an apparently colossal lack of awareness regarding the Davos image, to approve the hanging of a banner reading world child forum across the middle of the Promenade. It was what led a branding expert responsible for an “Equality Lounge” to paste on a window the motto: ai wont take a womans job. a woman in ai will. Language, that week, as spoken by a monoglot community of polyglots, was a form of lorem ipsum. All that mattered was that you were there and talking.

To understand what these operators were doing at Davos, one has only to consult the WEF’s self-aggrandizing statement of selflessness—“committed to improving the state of the world”—which encapsulates the trickle-down promise of the Schwabian vision of global justice emanating from investments made by “conscious leaders”—“conscious” being another one of the terms beloved by those in this setting. (Its antonym is not “unconscious,” but something closer to “old-fashioned,” and it is utterly democratic in its meaninglessness: “If you’re using the word ‘unconscious,’ you’re conscious,” as one conscious leader, the founder of the Equality Lounge, has explained.) On display everywhere was a peculiarly confounding form of circular reasoning that ran from the top of the WEF hierarchy to the bottom-end sites of the Promenade: the best way to change the world is to create a valuable business; to be valuable, a business must change the world. Within globalized capitalism’s ongoing crisis of declining profit rates, however, new arrivals quickly hit a logical bump in the road: How to make money to change the world, through changing the world, when nothing seems to yield a reliable buck anymore? Their answer seemed to be: Go found a company whose only purpose is to claim to know how to change the world, conjure up an unnecessary crypto subcomponent, host a series of meaningless panels at Davos, and hope investors as clueless and desperate for solutions as you are turn up to throw money at it.

At around five o’clock, the mood on the Promenade shifted; samovars were replaced with trays of chilled white wine, and the street became an Ibiza of startup nightlife. It would, in theory, be possible for anyone in Davos to walk into one of these events and down several glasses of sauvignon blanc and a few mini quiches before hitting the road, but I was glad to learn that I would be able to access a ticketed party at the Evangelical crypto sanctuary, co-hosted by the Financial Times and IMAGINE (“supporting CEOs from across their industry’s value chain to take the bold action that is only possible by working together” . . . dolor sit amet). Inside, guests could help themselves to plushie foxes embroidered with the Filecoin logo. I drifted over to a table at which a bored pair of American management consultants were scrolling through their X feeds. Did I know when he was arriving? one of them asked me. Who? A flicker of disbelief. “Al Gore.” It was ten o’clock, and the former vice president was nearly an hour late. I stationed myself by the stage, in front of the Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett. A recent piece of hers had called for WEF attendees to discuss “positive risks” in the world, rather than hawking only doom and gloom. What had the reaction been? The worst she’d ever had, she said with a sigh.

Our conversation was cut short by a sharp blow to my calves: a smiling Gore had bumped into me from behind. “I’m Al Gore,” he said, which, while not formally an apology, could, in world-historical terms, be understood as one, and shook my hand. There was an atmosphere of reverent jubilation in the church as he took to the stage: “I know why you’re here. Not just why you’re in Davos, but why you’re at this event. You’re part of the rebellion. . . . You are the ones who are going to bring the change that our world and our civilization so desperately need. You are part of this emergent, interlocking web of grassroots, ecologically based movements that together make up the largest movement of its kind in the history of the world.” The room roared; someone threw a Filecoin fox into the air. Twenty minutes later, the crowd was flagging, but Gore was still going: “Adolf Hitler’s book was entitled The Triumph of the Will. Triumph over what? Triumph over the authority of knowledge. . . . Okay, let’s make our decisions on where we’re going, how we’re going to get there, on the basis of what we’ve agreed is the best available evidence on what reality is. We have an epistemological crisis. I had to look that word up. Embarrassing . . . ” I left for the last train to Zurich.

I returned to Davos the day after the forum ended. As the sun went down, the cold air cut so cleanly through the world as to sharpen all of its edges. The snow had turned to ice underfoot, and to be outside felt a little deadly; few were in the streets. Davos seemed lunar, like an abandoned space colony, an outpost of some broader system that had briefly thrived before news of a gold mine on a new planet started circulating and the caravan moved on, leaving only aspirational detritus behind. The signs of Meta, Circle, and AI House, and the logo of the Mohammed bin Salman Foundation were being taken down from the fronts of the buildings, revealing a bakery, a massage parlor, a schoolbook shop, a hotel. It was as if the town had been bunkering belowground for a week, hiding, and was only now resurfacing, shaking itself off from hibernation.

As the importance of the WEF itself has waned, the scale of the event known as Davos has swollen, draining more and more of the town’s resources every year. During the forum, the population increases from twelve thousand inhabitants to around thirty thousand. It is nearly impossible to drive around town, take your children to school (the kids are packed off, in fact, to the ski slopes for the duration of the forum), eat in a restaurant, or go shopping. Leases—commercial and residential alike—are sometimes available only for an eleven-month period. In January, many tenants leave so that landlords can earn a year’s income in four nights. A few years ago, Schwab demanded that the town build more hotels to accommodate forum guests, or he would take the forum elsewhere. The town agreed, and locals told me that the new luxury hotels have since driven smaller ones out of business by slashing prices during the 360 days of the year when virtually the only visitors are Swiss holidaymakers.

But over time, the rewards of a few extra catering or bed-making shifts or—at best—several thousand francs for abandoning your home have become less enticing when weighed against the time it takes for the town to recover in the aftermath of the forum. There are strict local regulations governing when construction work for the event can take place, but the WEF has managed to dodge these, leaving roads and public spaces unusable long after the guests have gone home. (At the end of March, a temporary construction in one of the town’s parks was still being disassembled, weeks past the deadline.) The economic benefits for the conglomerates that run the upscale hotels are hardly reliable either: in the past five years, at least two of the largest hotels have gone on the market. The irony of a failing free market in a town that is a byword for the deluxe promises of globalization was not lost on Jürg Grassl, a leading voice of Davos’s anti-WEF movement, who pointed out that pressure to distort equilibriums of supply and demand is always applied by “those claiming that the invisible hand will regulate everything.”

I’d managed to get in touch with Grassl, a born-and-raised Davosian, after leaving pleading notes with my email address on it in every letter box of a building draped with a bright anti-WEF banner that read ihr besetzer, wir bewohner (“you occupiers, we inhabitants”). Speaking one week after the forum, he was focused on an impending springtime window during which the residents of Davos might have the opportunity to oust the institution from town, via a veto of the wonky cost-sharing arrangement between the WEF and the local and federal government. (The bill for the WEF’s security measures comes to more than nine million francs per year, around a million of which has, for the past quarter century, fallen to Davos.) The last vote on the issue took place in September 2018, with 63 percent approving the costs. In the meantime, however, it seemed that the Davosians might have finally had enough; the Besetzer, Grassl thought, had finally overstepped the mark. But others, including Barbara Gassler, an editor at the Davoser Zeitung, were skeptical that Davos, by this point so ensnared by the rhythms of the WEF, so beholden to its profits, was ready to boot out the institution.

Where, in all this, was the local government? I had already caught a glimpse of the mayor, Philipp Wilhelm, after wandering into the third annual ceremony of the Swiss AI Award, which he had presided over during the forum. (The ceremony concluded with Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, playing a jazz tune on an enormous set of cowbells to demonstrate something about the “creativity” inherent in AI.) A rising star of Swiss political life once described as the “author of the Graubünden Green New Deal,” Wilhelm had political aspirations grounded in eco-modernist principles of sustainability and infrastructure investment. In his youth, he had demonstrated against the WEF alongside Grassl, but his views were now tempered by a liberal belief in the need for public-private partnerships. In a video call with me, Wilhelm did not dispute the charge that conditions in town during the forum had deteriorated, but he insisted the organization was “getting more and more involved in solving the problems we deal with during the WEF period” and rerouted our conversation toward discussion of the WEF’s new climate strategy, which he claimed would aid—via a million-franc investment into a heat-pump system for the Congress Centre—his plan to make Davos a net-zero carbon emitter.

During the forum, I had set up an ad hoc office in an evacuated Irish bar, whose owner, I was told, had hoped to rent it out as a pavilion for an unnamed African nation that never arrived, and whose barman had advised me to come back during the weekend if I wanted to find out what locals really made of the WEF. Upon my return, I found that the drinks, which had previously been gratis, now cost money, but the pub was more crowded than I had seen it all week. Older men gathered on benches around the edges of the small windowless room, while groups of younger people chatted and played games at the bar. I took a stool and ordered a drink; the barman nodded at me but didn’t want to talk. I felt like an intruder: those who come for the WEF aren’t supposed to linger; the town is no longer ours.

As I drained my first glass, a young man sat down beside me and introduced himself as Stefan. In his mid-thirties, with a round, smiling face and the dregs of a pint of Guinness in his hand, he signaled the bartender to top us both off, and we fell into conversation. Where had he been all week? Keeping his distance, he said. He worked delivering drinks to pubs and bars in the area, and those jobs dry up during the forum, when large catering companies replace the local trade. Having a flat of his own a few miles away, he had spent the week sitting on his balcony and smoking shisha, waiting for it all to pass.

Stefan introduced me to his friends, who were around the same age: a Polish plumber and a local woman who worked at the Migros. As a group, they all hated the WEF, but none of them had faith that a vote would dislodge it from town: they’re too connected now, Stefan told me; the one name means the same as the other. And there’s too much money involved, the three agreed, even though the locals don’t see much of it beyond a few weeks of higher wages. As the bar wound down for the night, we moved to a club that was so full that we waited twenty minutes in the freezing air to get in. It was a party to celebrate the end of the WEF, joked the security guard, who had picked up shifts at the Congress Centre that week. The door swung open onto a wall of warmth and strobe lights and young people congregating for the sake of being around one another, drinking vodka with maté and embracing their friends.

By the next day, the usual patterns of life in Davos had reasserted themselves. At an open-air ice rink behind the Congress Centre, children had hockey practice. Just before catching the afternoon Rhätische Bahn service out of town, I made a trip up the funicular to the Schatzalp, the former sanatorium from Thomas Mann’s novel. From high on the mountain, the only sounds I could hear down below were the scrape of skates on the rink’s surface and the puck’s low thwack ricocheting through the crystalline air out into the valley.

Stefan and his friends had been right, in the end, to be skeptical that Davos would so easily wriggle free from the grip of such a powerful institution. In March, the large town council approved a new settlement for security costs. The WEF had offered to increase its share by just over a million francs, a move that conveniently skirted the need for a vote in which residents might have been able to make their frustrations known. The forum will remain, for the foreseeable future, in Davos. The day after the meeting, Grassl emailed me to register his disappointment, ending his message with a climate report: in his childhood, the local saying went that there is “no bad weather” in the winter, but the past few months had been mostly rainy and gray. This, along with so much else, he wrote, is “totally different now.”

In May, some half a century after the inaugural symposium, the WEF announced that the now eighty-six-year-old Schwab would be stepping down from the helm of the organization, with full executive responsibility to be assumed by Brende. Schwab had been correct in his last opening sermon: the world is both more divided and interconnected than ever. But he was wrong to conclude that this is a paradox. For some at Davos, the “fracturing” of the global economy has been an unrivaled opportunity to better integrate with the great states of old and the icons of multinational capital. Such has been the path of the United Arab Emirates, whose pride of place on the Promenade last January feels, in retrospect, neither coincidental nor surprising. Not coincidental because representatives of the Emirates—a federation born at the very end of that auspicious year, 1971, when it cut loose from the ailing British Empire just in time to get rich from the embargo-instigated spike in oil prices—were the darlings of the forum, praised throughout for being among the few winners of the multipolar polycrisis. And unsurprising because, if the WEF is an event designed to expedite commercial connections between business and government while remaining bland and noncommittal on matters of world affairs, then this has also been the exact model through which the United Arab Emirates has thrived in recent years: court American and Chinese investment; allow Russian oil to flow; throw money at tech unicorns; establish numerous semiautonomous, corporate-friendly “zones”; and above all, keep goods moving.

Brende’s search for a new world order on the basis of the U.N. Charter is off to a false start. A new habitat for Davos Man is already forming in the model of the Emirati free zone—the natural consequence of the project to safeguard the private accumulation of profit from political interference. As this magazine arrives on newsstands, business and state leaders gather, once again, in a small town at the heart of Europe, to try to divine the future of globalization. The program was mooted in October at an even more restricted gathering, the WEF’s Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils, held in that desert oasis where capital moves freely, unencumbered by income taxes, trade unions, or democratic processes: Dubai.

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February 2025

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