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I have upvoted / liked / thumbs up my share of WEF memes to the effect, "doesn't stakeholder capitalism sound quite much like dystopia" but not the overt conspiracy stuff. Call it mildly conspiratorial anti-WEF position and a form of protest.
hcnzosdu in a sibling thread argues otherwise, but I always assumed your take was correct: it was a message misinterpreted by some (incompetent / daft) social media manager for the WEF. Which was also the part I find troubling: that the WEF is (1) an important organization, (2) large enough to employ social media managers whose messages are seen by non-insignificant amount of people (3) the said managers think such visions are optimistic and utopian. It epitomizes the values and vision of those aligned with the WEF: I disagree with those values and vision.
I for one never believed the WEF is a dark Illuminati presided by Dark Lord Schwab who possesses detailed, itemized, decade-spanning agenda "how to take over the world". Nevertheless, it is not an insignificant thing either: many politicians go there, network which each other, discuss and share ideas ... and afterwards, those politicians tend to propose policy and legislation that is often more aligned with the WEF values than not. Some of those politicians have continue to have nice, elite careers if they lose elections and retire from political life. The WEF is not a conspiracy in the sense it is an instrumental coordinating nucleus, a critical piece of infrastructure without which nothing would exist. If Davos didn't exist, there would be other conferences and other networking opportunities that could be made appear equally sinister or equally banal and boring. Before the WEF, I recall the Bilderberg meeting was the famous conference that attracted attention of a conspiratorial mind. Everyone who attends such events has their boring informal professional networks which are probably much more important to each individual. However, the WEF exists.
I don't think it is a conspiracy theory to think conferences like the World Economic Forum have similar value as any other networking events and conferences attached to an agenda / set of ideas (I suppose you could call it a memeplex). Take NIPS/NeurIPS. It would be very weird to argue that NIPS is totally irrelevant or not worth looking at, especially would have been when it was the 2010s, it was still called NIPS, and neural networks were becoming an superbly interesting thing (again). It would be silly to claim that the NIPS Organizing Committee was a conspiratorial cabal with a project to install particular AI algorithm paradigm. But it was founded with the intention that the scientists interested in neural information processing systems could meet each other, share valuable ideas and knowledge, and have some prestigious fun (which may be more important than it sounds). All those people going to same place and talking to each other and having not-bad-time together is important: humans are social animals, it is how people organize themselves, and organized effort is more effective than one without organization.
I do think it makes sense to note that the WEF is an organization important enough to attract the members of "elite class" (point 1 and bit of 2) and it posts social media PR (Facebook posts, Instagram stories) about owning nothing, substituting meat with vegan products, the Great Reset like they are the most cheerful thing ever (points 2 to 3).
Speaking of the Great Reset, it sounds a bit more ambitious project / campaign / attempt to seed a memeplex (?) than a simple tax reform. Archival link
That is much more than a global minimum corporation tax. In fact, it is not explicitly mentioned at all, taxes are a throwaway line! However, most of the index funds I had invested to have turned to applying ESG indexes. Are ESG screened indexes dystopian? Not so sure, but some stakeholder capitalist somewhere has their thumb on the scales in a different place than previously.
The World Economic Forum is a conference but also a vision. it is a thing worth paying attention to and a thing one can disagree with. How one does disagree with a vision on the internet? One can write long posts arguing against it in obscure internet forum. But if one wants to be efficient and have impact, one should share funny memes against the WEF and the vision it represents.
I am genuinely unsure if the overtly conspiratorial stuff helps or not. (I have not met genuine conspiracy theorists in non-internet social sphere. I have had some success getting reactions like "WEF is a bit weird/tacky".)
I would like to draw a comparison to the standard multinational corporate bullshit jargon. This genre of writing should be familiar to most people (think of HR and PR departments of large Western companies and other organizations). Collections of banal, unsophisticated, trivial statements. Many a corporate document is like Schwab's book, "a poorly written text that says little." Generally co-workers will agree the jargon is often silly and sometimes difficult to take seriously. Nevertheless, such jargon-laden, poorly written documents are how the generic Western corporation function, and thus they have tremendous effect in yearly performance reviews, project launches, funding decisions, real stuff in the real world. Poorly written text that says little can be important.
Sure, the Communist Manifesto had an evocative opening and said much (not all of it good nor true), but our age is less romantic.
EDIT. This comment here puts it better than me.
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