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The typical internet autist has limited understanding of how power brokering, innovation & the general spread of ideas actually happens at the highest levels. They view it from their salaried man's lens. This is where money, work and power are assets in a zero-sum transactional relationships. Your manager pays you money to gain power on you and extract work. An activist gives you free food to hold their posters. That sort of low-level thinking stops scaling pretty quickly.
First, power is never owned. Power merely flows through you like water. You wield it as a custodian by guiding it's path, but if you try to obstruct it or grab on it, you'll lose it just as quickly. Second, narrow scientific innovation can be done in a lab with sweaty dudes dark spaces. But, innovation at the grand scale often comes out organically from random physical interactions in a space. Actually, even sweaty science dudes know this. That's why the big-tier-1 conference is their favorite time of the year. Lastly, the transactional costs of work are not fixed. Will power allows you to change the cost of work. But, willpower can't be brought and it can't be hammered into you. It has to be felt in the air and built environment around you. WEF conferences organizers understand this better than most.
To normies, conference organizers can seem like low-IQ bunch to internet nerds. They don't do anything, just organize, get the logistics in order and let the smart & powerful people do smart & powerful people things, right ? Of course not. Any person on theMotte or HN can appreciate how invisible moderators who don't generate content, are still the most important people to facilitating an invisible sense of culture within a community. I'd like to think that I ended up on here organically. But, I am also certain that the mods have been careful in how their message goes out, which led to a series of mod-approved internet hops which ended with me reaching here.
The power of organic collisions cannot be replaced with something else. At the same time, it is incredibly difficult to create an environment that forces collisions, while making it seem completely organic. Your favorite bar worked really hard to make it seem like you just 'ran into it'. In the same vein, WEF has managed to sustain something really difficult : a place for the world's most important people to congregate, have organic collisions and not have every conversation leak out to the press. By slapping their face on everything, they also protect their participants. The news headline goes "WEF endorses XYZ crazy idea. Subtitle : by abc person" instead of "ABC person champions crazy XYZ idea in public. Subtitle : at wef."
What the average person fails to understand is how throwing a big party every year is any way useful towards getting work done. But, that's exactly how big decisions have been made for centuries and centuries. Even today, world leaders have video calls all the time, but physical G20 summits is where a lot of breakthroughs happen.
The WEF markets itself as a place for the important people of the world to have organic collisions. The most important people in the world find it to be valuable, so they keep coming every year. The self-fulfilling prophecy propagates itself. But, do not let the appearance of an organic meet mislead you into thinking that the WEF doesn't carefully utilize the little power that flows through them to divert it in a certain direction. It is a light touch, but on a huge base, it can have large impacts. I am personally of the opinion, that more communication among people who easily get siloed (top billionaires) is always a good thing. The WEF is far more a reflection of the content that the powerful want to consume than any agenda they might have. But somewhere in there, they are able to plant seeds that add up over the years. It is effectively run for what it is. But, a grand operation in prescriptive consensus building it is not.
edit: I guess I need to put a disclaimer here. I have a huge conflict of interest. Someone I have positive feelings towards presently works for the WEF (in a foot soldier role, but still). What limited things I hear sound fairly innocuous.
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