The Ministry for the Future

39

Davos is one of my favorite parties. The World Economic Forum, held every year at the end of January. It’s touted as an international gathering of power-brokers, those “stateless elites” who come to congratulate themselves and talk about how their plans for the future will make everything all right, especially for the elites themselves, who sometimes get called “Davos Man,” that newly emergent subspecies of Homo sapiens, eighty percent male and in the top ten percent of the top one percent when it comes to personal wealth among other attributes. All true! And thus of course a great party. Even though some people think the partying itself is kind of sedate, despite the great liquor. Once some years ago Mick Jagger was spotted dancing by himself to a juke box in the corner; he was bored. But most of the people in attendance are happy just to be there and get seen by all the others.

Davos meets for a week, though few stay for the whole thing. About 2,500 businessmen and political leaders, with a few entertainers added for entertainment purposes; thus Jagger. The days of the conference are devoted to panel discussions and long meals, and all the problems of the day get discussed, mainly variations on the theme of riding herd on an increasingly fractious world by helping those most in need. Charity Inc.! With immense effort the percentage of women there has gone from six percent to twenty-four percent, we were told, and the organizers congratulated themselves on this progress and promised to keep working on the problem, which was difficult to solve, as most wealthy people and most political leaders are just by coincidence male. This may be one reason Jagger was bored.

Security costs for the conference are shared by the organizers and the Swiss canton of Graubünden, plus the Swiss federal government. Some in Switzerland criticized the cost of this, but then again, if the annual meeting of the rulers of the world wants to be in Switzerland, this probably helps Switzerland hold on to its weird position as one of the wealthiest countries on Earth despite having nothing at all to base that on. Maybe the beauty of the Alps and the brains of its people, but I’m dubious about both. Call me Doubtful in Davos.

There used to be protests at Davos, but not now. For one thing, the town is hard to get to and easy to defend. For another, the conference is more and more regarded as irrelevant, just a bunch of rich guys partying; which is true, as I said. So protests had mostly gone away. This perhaps represented an opportunity, or so people said afterward.

At this particular meeting, we had just gathered and gotten down to the serious business of eating and drinking and talking, when the power went off and we were left in the dark. Generators! we shouted merrily. Turn on the fucking generators!

But not. And the security people were suddenly seen to be not the same security people, these new ones were in masks guarding us in a different sense than we had been guarded before. We all said what the fuck and they ignored us, we all tried to get outside and see what was happening; no luck. Doors all locked. The whole town was physically closed. After a couple of hours, word spread that the Swiss road stoppers, installed the century before to foil Nazi or Soviet tank invasions, had popped up out of the pavement like giant shark’s teeth, all over the valley and up in the few road passes in and out of the valley. And the airport and heliports in the area were all dark and similarly studded with shark’s teeth. Even the Alpine mountain trails into the valley were said to be foamed with some kind of instant concrete that made the trails temporarily impassable. And the security on hand was there to guard us in this new way. They would not respond to us. We could hear the airspace over the town humming with circling drones, and people said they had clustered on a few approaching helicopters and forced them away, including a couple of crashes.

This thing is finally getting interesting, someone said. But most of us thought it was getting too interesting.

Announcements over loudspeakers were made to the effect that we would not be harmed, and would be released to the world at the end of the week. Only the schedule of events was being hijacked, we were told, not we ourselves, although obviously this was not true, as we were all quick to point out. But to no one, as all the guards on hand were helmeted with visors down, and not responding to us in any way, unless someone assaulted one, in which case the response was decisive and unpleasant, in the usual fashion seen on news clips. Clubs, pepper spray, dragged off to small rooms to chill; people stopped trying that. And the loudspeakers were not replying to our objections.

Then the services starting breaking down. In particular the plumbing stopped working, and we had to improvise a system for relieving ourselves. Shit! Poor Davos! There was no recourse but to head out into the woods and do it. So a fair amount of shit was distributed around the town, but quickly we created a system of impromptu sort-of latrines, and made do as best we could.

Then the taps stopped running, which to tell the truth was kind of scary. You can always shit in the woods, but you can’t live on whisky, much as some people try. Some were pleased to stay hydrated entirely on four-thousand-dollar bottles of wine, of which there were many on hand. But turned out there were also two Alpine streams crashing down through the town in stone-walled channels, sometimes tunnels under streets but often just deep stone-walled channels, so we made use of some buckets someone found, and drank from these streams, either boiling the water or not. It looked clean to me. Snow just hours before.

Food was provided in boxes, and we were allowed into the town’s various kitchens to cook for ourselves. We coped with that and were proud of ourselves for doing so. It beat just sitting around. Some of us were excellent cooks.

On the third day we found the town square filled with pallets of chemical toilets, which we assembled and placed in the bathrooms, now re-opened for use, even though there was still no running water. That was a relief, so to speak, as we could go back to relieving ourselves in more or less the usual manner, although it was nasty. It was like being trapped at Woodstock but with no music.

Water came back on the fourth day, and the boxes of food were never deficient. When we weren’t cooking or cleaning up for ourselves, we were asked to attend what we called the reeducation camp. We figured we must have been captured by Maoists, that only Maoists would have such a naïve faith in propaganda lectures. These bounced right off us, and in fact were a considerable source of mirth, as we were already educated and knew what was what. Still, it was either attend or get locked in rooms where nothing at all happened. So most of us were willing to listen to the propaganda of our captors rather than spend the day stuck in an empty room.

The educational materials we were exposed to got universally bad reviews. So many clichés! First films of hungry people in poor places. It wasn’t quite like looking at concentration camp footage, but the resemblances were there, and these images were of living people, often children. It was like looking at the longest charity advertisement ever made. We booed and made critical comments, but really the 2,500 most successful people in the world did not get to that status by being stupidly offensive. Often some diplomatic skill had been required and acquired. Also we were pretty sure we were being filmed in order to be later packaged into some kind of reeducative reality TV. So most of us just sat and watched the show and muttered to each other like you do in movie theaters.

And it was despite all a sobering sight to see how the poorest people on Earth still lived. Time travel to the twelfth century, for sure. That we ourselves had no bathrooms and were a bit hungry no doubt added to the effect of this footage, even when it was completely obvious that this was why they were doing it to us, the intended point of their pointless exercise, some kind of sick aversion therapy.

Often statistics appeared on the big screen; yes, PowerPoint shows, a true punishment. That a tenth of one percent of the human population owned half humanity’s wealth—that was us, yay! That half the human population alive at that moment had no assets except their own potential labor power, which was much weakened by poor health and education, that was definitely too bad. But blaming this on capitalism was wrong, we told these non-listening boring people; there would be eight billion poor people if it weren’t for capitalism! But whatever. The figures kept coming, graph after graph, repeated in ways that were not even close to compelling. Bored, sleepy, hypnotized, we tried to figure out which ideological or ethnic group had assembled such a stew. And the soundtrack! Sad music, jaunty music; horribly unforgettable earworms destined to stick in your head forever; tragically depressing music, like dirges played at one-third their intended speed; and so on.

By now the stresses of living rough and watching PowerPoint were getting to a lot of us, we were about to go into full Lord of the Flies mode. I encouraged people to suck up and deal, to enjoy it as a kind of vacation, it was still glamping I told them, who cares about this shit? But turns out quite a lot of them did care.

These people are communists, they declared loudly. So what, I said. We were in a fucking commie glamping reeducation camp, it was going to be a story we could tell in the bars for years to come.

The finale to all the propaganda was a long lecture telling us that the current world order was only working for the elites, and even for us it wouldn’t work for long. We were simply strip-mining the lifeworld, as one Germanic voice from the screen put it, sounding like Werner Herzog to a lot of us, and I have no doubt he could have been involved, and that in German words like lifeworld would be real words already. Those of us with some German had fun making more examples of this Herzogian English, backtranslating so to speak, Ich bin zu herzgerschrocken! Ich bin zu rechtsmüde! Ich habe grossen Flughafenverspätungsschmerz! which last, for the unGermanic among us, was explained to mean “big airport delay sadness,” a word every modern language should definitely have.

An hour of film was then devoted to young people with wealthy parents. Earnestly apologetic or brashly arrogant, these made a sad fucking crew. It had to be a skewed sample, they had selected for awfulness no doubt about it, and the crowd around me murmured objections, My kids aren’t like that, no way. Although as it went on and on, all kinds of pathetic angry supercilious kids, the room got quieter, and actually it became clear somehow that some of the whining faces onscreen had an actual parent right there in the room. And the graphed statistics charting these rich kids were disheartening as well. If the various kinds of anti-depressants used by them were aggregated, it could be made to look like well over one hundred percent of them were on anti-depressants. Which though clearly artifactual was indeed depressing.

Another chart graphed individual happiness in relation to personal wealth, and as so often that week, and in life generally, it was another damn bell curve. This one showed that poverty made for unhappiness, duh, then people got quickly happier once adequacy was reached; then, at a high middle class income, the very income that scientists usually demanded for themselves—having studied their own graphs maybe, the guy next to me muttered darkly, as if to imply they were rigging either their study or the system of compensation, or both—you got the highest happiness; then, as wealth rose, happiness decreased—not to the level of the poorest people, but far below the happiness of the middle peak. That middle income was the Goldilocks zone, the happy median ha ha, or so the PowerPointers claimed, but we shook our heads knowingly. Statistics can “prove” anything, but they could never beat the obvious truth that more is better. The soundtrack here toggled between “All You Need Is Love” and “Can’t Buy Me Love,” to add ridiculous Beatles wisdom to this part of the show.

It was actually getting pretty annoying at this point. How could it go on for so long? Where were the fucking Swiss police? Were they in on this? Was this a Swiss plot, like the Red Cross or something?

You are one of the Davos Hostages, a voice said at the end of this income comparison film. You will have been a participant at the Captured Davos. What will you do with that? We will be interested to watch you live the rest of your lives.

With that the incarceration ended. The drones in the airspace overhead flew away, our helmeted guards were suddenly nowhere to be seen.

We cheered when we realized this, and told each other that our indoctrination had been a complete failure and a sad example of bankrupt leftist notions that couldn’t get purchase in the great marketplace of ideas. It had been like getting flown in a time machine back to 1917 or 1848 or 1793, though few of us knew why these years in particular were named by those with history degrees. 1848?

The real Swiss police finally appeared, to loud boos. Interpol was ordered to find the perpetrators, and the Swiss government came in for huge amounts of criticism, not to mention lawsuits for personal damages and emotional distress. They did their best to defend themselves from all this, saying it had been an unprecedented new form of hostage taking, which could not be defended against in advance of knowing it could exist. A new thing! And none of us had died, nor even been hurt much, except in our feelings. So much criticism of our lifeway! But we all had a lot of practice ignoring that kind of yelling, the dogs bark the caravan moves on, and indeed we all caravanned away as fast as we could. Back home we found ourselves minor celebrities, and opportunities to tell our story would last forever. Some of us took that opportunity, others slipped back into comfortable anonymity. I myself decided to decompress in Tahiti.

So, effect of this event on the real world: zero! So fuck you!