A Trip Behind the Spectacle at Davos | Hacker News Reader

A Trip Behind the Spectacle at Davos

palladiummag.com

96 pointsgtt17 comments

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.

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.

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...

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.

the part on traditional banking may sound like a clever soundbite, but the safety of personal banking is actually quite high, at least compared to the crypto space.

And a more general note after perusing the website because the edgy tone seemed somewhat off. While it's quite easy to deride the pretentious Davos crowd, a magazine that describes itself as 'exploring the post liberal future' and puts an oddly positive spin on Chinese internment and policing of minorities, is there some ulterior motive in the reporting here?

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.

My google-fu failed me. What do you mean by white badge?

Edit: A bit more searching and it seems to be a euphemism for a person that has full access to a conference. Right?

Yes, all access. As the article states journalists are often not privy to the most interesting conversations, that's true pretty much anywhere though.

I enjoyed https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/05/magic-mountain

Cool! That was indeed a good read!

> 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

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 (short version of Mr Bregman's points from a twitter video: https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1090045108064579584) TL;DR: we need to discuss tax and stop talking about philantrophy.

In some respect the people who are showing up to the blockchain party long after it ended are lucky. They could have learned about this stuff in late 2017 and been wiped out.

Blockchain hype has definitely decreased over the past few months and as someone who definitely believes in cryptos future, this is a good thing. Get rid of the ICO scammers so that people can focus on building.

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

I beg to differ: https://youtu.be/7rL6gJkdlNU

nice. refreshing to see this

"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.

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