Caitlín Doherty writes about the last days of Davos as its relevance is waning.
On display everywhere was a peculiarly confounding form of circular reasoning that ran from the top of the WEF hierarchy to the bottom-end sites of the Promenade: the best way to change the world is to create a valuable business; to be valuable, a business must change the world. Within globalized capitalism’s ongoing crisis of declining profit rates, however, new arrivals quickly hit a logical bump in the road: How to make money to change the world, through changing the world, when nothing seems to yield a reliable buck anymore? Their answer seemed to be: Go found a company whose only purpose is to claim to know how to change the world, conjure up an unnecessary crypto subcomponent, host a series of meaningless panels at Davos, and hope investors as clueless and desperate for solutions as you are turn up to throw money at it.