
A Trip Behind the Spectacle at Davos - gtt
https://palladiummag.com/2019/02/02/a-trip-behind-the-spectacle-at-davos/
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gammateam
> Many are ambivalent about the whole compassion and help the world thing, but
> will mouth the words if they feel it will increase their chances at
> belonging in elite social circles

I think I've found my people

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Aeolun
This article honestly makes Davos feel like any other fairly empty industry
conference (that you pay a _ton_ of money for).

I’d be interested in seeing a white badge account of the same thing.

~~~
jayflux
I enjoyed [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/05/magic-
mountain](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/05/magic-mountain)

~~~
Aeolun
Cool! That was indeed a good read!

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reitanqild
Hehe, this part had me smiling:

> The blockchain community, though it contains a few interesting projects, is
> dominated by obvious scams, and so received an appropriate amount of
> contempt from traditional finance at Davos, whose scams are much more subtle
> and institutionalized.

More gold:

> One characteristic of Davos attendees is that they love being called out in
> a safe and defanged manner, and they love safe and defanged activism.

On journalists:

> The private parties are very good, but journalists are kept out partly
> because they’re often one-timers, partly because they’re not all that
> socially skilled, and partly because not many people want spies roaming
> around their parties looking for lurid details.

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yyyymmddhhmmss
Institutionalized, fine, but subtle? I think manipulative is the word for all
of this. Short of widespread consciousness to the systems we depend on, the
methods at work are manipulation, however deluded the practitioner.

For most of those living under capitalism, freedoms, like that of speech,
remain outside of their price range. This is hardly a subtle scam.

~~~
nerdponx
If people are trained to not notice something, and they fail to notice it,
would you say that the something is subtle? It's an interesting philosophical
exercise...

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yyyymmddhhmmss
Yes. I think it’s a delicate and important one. For what is the difference in
being trained and being institutionalized? Training serves the ability of the
individual and institutions serve the ability of the people, so what’s the
matter?

I think there is no shortage of paths by which an honest interrogation will
conclude that specialization is a benefit in anything but politics, and it’s
when the people ( _Poli_ translates to “people”) are reduced to services that
we have a technocracy. It’s when the people are deprived of the wealth of
knowledge and material necessary to be their greater selves, politics and
democracy has seen it’s day.

The extent that we have progressed from feudalism is absent in the divisions
of power, and ever-present in the displacement of responsibility. For any
progress, the societal trajectory is basic as can be: nowadays, the people
blame themselves.

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DyslexicAtheist
Has the blockchain hype decreased over the last months? It feels we reached
peak in 2016/2017\. At least within the tech community the number of critics
seem growing.

I usually don't follow what happens at WEF since the discussions feel very
_meta_. Some of the people (Michal Dell & Co) are removed from reality and the
daily struggle. You won't find any representatives of the precariat at Davos,
nevertheless this punchy talk resonated with me:

Historian Rutger Bregman berates billionaires at World Economic Forum over tax
avoidance
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5LtFnmPruU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5LtFnmPruU)
(short version of Mr Bregman's points from a twitter video:
[https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1090045108064579584](https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1090045108064579584))
TL;DR: we need to discuss tax and stop talking about philantrophy.

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CuriousSkeptic
> You won't find any representatives of the precariat at Davos

I beg to differ: [https://youtu.be/7rL6gJkdlNU](https://youtu.be/7rL6gJkdlNU)

~~~
lozenge
"a person chosen or appointed to act or speak for another or others."

From the speaker list, none are precariat or have been chosen by precariat to
advocate for them.

