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Comment by LarryMullins | Hacker News Reader

WEF are either completely tone deaf, or they're playing the role of the heel.

"You will own nothing and you will be happy."

> "You will own nothing and you will be happy."

This is not a goal and not a plan. It was a prediction, a possible scenario of where we could be headed. An extrapolation of current trends.

Using the full quote would make it far clearer that that's what it was: > “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. What you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone.”

From https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wef-idUSKBN2AP2...

> Danish politician Ida Auken, who wrote the prediction in question (here), said it was not a “utopia or dream of the future” but “a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse.”

Those crazy conspiracy theorists thinking "life has never been better" was a marker that this was a utopian vision.

https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-ow...

You should read past the headline. The article contains more quotes you can use!

It's also a pretty dumb over-simplistic extrapolation of some current trends. But not an evil plot to change the world into her utopia.

Did you read it?

> All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realised that we could do things differently.

> Did you read it?

Obviously I did, or I wouldn't have said what I said.

I think that quote fits "a pretty dumb over-simplistic extrapolation of some current trends" pretty well. It's pretty dumb to select some trends to extrapolate, and ignore the ones that are not trending correctly. I'd call it "over-simplistic", but I already did...

What it doesn't describe is a plan to make the world this way. It's a prediction. A dumb prediction.

Fair enough, I'd encourage anyone else reading this to read the original piece and not just her damage control as well. Cause to me it reads like a thought experiment, the express purpose of which is to make the case that the western world's problems (western world = capitalism via property rights) are due to said property rights and the freedom to use that property as one wishes. I know that might seem like a shocking conspiracy theory argument if you are westerner, but the idea that property rights don't exist is standard operating procedure in the eastern world, and a idealized view of such a scenario where property rights are no longer a hinderance to economic/state activity might not be considered an outlandish position in the World Economic Forum, where I believe Ida Auken was just trying to score clout, without realizing what exactly she was saying.

Once people noticed, the damage control spin started. That's my take, disagree all you like.

I love the idea that the secret goal of the World Economic Forum is to subvert capitalism. Again, bringing us back to the question of whether the modal critic of the WEF knows what the WEF is in the first place.

To me it just comes off as apologetics for more extractive/rent-seeking arrangements. Of course capitalists would like you to pay a subscription for everything you use.

Yeah fair enough, a rationalization for the ownership classing owning more and more it being great for everyone. In any case I don't take her at her post-hoc word.

People with strong opinions about the World Economic Forum tend not to know (let alone understand) what it is. It isn't the Stonecutter's Lodge; it's something closer to the TED Talks organization. It's random executives networking and trying to make themselves seem more important than they are. Fun fact: companies that participate in the WEF underperform the S&P.

> it's something closer to the TED Talks

This is blatantly not true.

TED doesn't make official agreements with governments:

https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2015/01/canada-joins-w...

https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/recgen/cpc-pac/2021/vol3/ds6/i...

https://ktdi.org/

> It's random executives networking and trying to make themselves seem more important than they are.

And government officials. Schwab bragged about "infiltrating" governments around the world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhHmy9AQLBA

And when the government officials are asked about it they do not want to answer:

https://summit.news/2022/02/21/video-canadian-mps-audio-feed...

> Fun fact: companies that participate in the WEF underperform the S&P

That's irrelevant. What is worrying is that they are among the biggest and involved in all critical industries and have a quasi monopoly on their industries and as a whole. By collaborating together over political goals they form a plutocratic autocracy.

The links you've pasted here make my case for me. Canada sponsored a series of TED talks, for a pittance relative to what they send to other NGOs. Therefore: the WEF has "infiltrated" governments around the world. This is lizard people stuff.

Important people show up at Davos because it's a networking event and an easy way to get publicity. Important people have attended TED talks, too. That doesn't mean TED is a shadowy extragovernmental puppetmaster.

> The links you've pasted here make my case for me. Canada sponsored a series of TED talks

The links I've posted are not talks...

Show me where the Government of Canada has actual agreements with TED to enact, decide or orientate policy.

> Therefore: the WEF has "infiltrated" governments around the world.

My source is the head of the WEF.

> Important people show up at Davos because it's a networking event

This doesn't make sense, important people do not need networking events, the are already public figures.

> Important people have attended TED talks, too. That doesn't mean TED is a shadowy extragovernmental puppetmaster.

You're making a straw man argument, I didn't say that.

If the head of the TED Talks organization claimed he had infiltrated world governments, I'd take it equivalently seriously.

The head of TED doesn't invite government officials around the world every year to make official agreements on policy.

Citation needed.

Matthew Yglesias probably has more impact on policy than the WEF does. That's not a compliment to Yglesias.

> Matthew Yglesias probably has more impact on policy than the WEF does

Citation needed.

TED is a cult.

This is what I don't understand. How is this and other public WEF content not guaranteed bad press/fuel for social unrest? Or is that the intent?

Trial/trolling balloons drive engagement and data analytics for group/individual sentiment analysis and message calibration.

They're just a few tens of thousands of ops away from deploying the HypnoDrones.

Social media is cheaper, faster and widely used, https://www.statista.com/statistics/539395/smartphone-penetr...

I don't think they care. They can just shrug and say "Misinformation" and "You need to stop letting the alt-right scare you." And ten years later when you're squeezing the last of the bug-paste ("New Crunchy style!") out of your pre-third shift meal supplement packet and reading on the telescreen how the chocolate ration has been increased to five grams, well, you won't want to do anything rebellious in your safe little pod, lest your social credit scores sink enough that Amaflix and Marv-Ney deplatform your connection, and your options are twiddling your thumbs hoping another gig job makes itself available or you're reduced to leaving your head in the Satisfaction Tracker for one Hertz sampling of "engagement" as a nameless studio shows you pre-vis dumped out of MediaGPT-7 in between ads. Between your worries, your woes, and the relentless twenty smash cuts per second delivery of anything, your attention will be so atomized you won't be able to think back to how it all started.

> Amaflix and Marv-Ney

What's Marv-Ney?

Marvel + Disney?

MARV-el, dis-NEY

Maybe I'm reading too much into it - whether by design or not, their public statements are serving them very well. They have a strong following (no doubt here, and on LinkedIn all the time I see people "liking" the pap they post), so they are playing to their base.

Second, if your enemy had a choleric temper, antagonize him. The people most sensitive to their stuff (eat bugs, personal carbon budget, whatever insane crap) get bent out of shape, and are still on the fringes enough that they look like the ones who are "conspiracy theorists" (they often are) and make it easy to dismiss criticism as crazy, while out in the open they do their thing.

Like I said, it's probably not intentional, but there is no countervailing force to prevent them from pushing their stuff, and plenty of upside, so they keep doing it.

Could simply be false or misleading reporting. LifeSite doesn't seem to be a very reliable news site. According to Wikipedia:

> LifeSiteNews (or simply LifeSite) is a Canadian Catholic conservative anti-abortion advocacy website and news publication. LifeSiteNews has published misleading information and conspiracy theories, and in 2021, was banned from some social media platforms for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.

It’s a favorite source of /r/conservative, which should really tell you all you need to know.

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