Hehe, this part had me smiling:<p>> The blockchain community, though it contains a few interesting projects, is dominated by obvious scams, and so received an appropriate amount of contempt from traditional finance at Davos, whose scams are much more subtle and institutionalized.<p>More gold:<p>> One characteristic of Davos attendees is that they love being called out in a safe and defanged manner, and they love safe and defanged activism.<p>On journalists:<p>> The private parties are very good, but journalists are kept out partly because they’re often one-timers, partly because they’re not all that socially skilled, and partly because not many people want spies roaming around their parties looking for lurid details.
This article honestly makes Davos feel like any other fairly empty industry conference (that you pay a <i>ton</i> of money for).<p>I’d be interested in seeing a white badge account of the same thing.
> Many are ambivalent about the whole compassion and help the world thing, but will mouth the words if they feel it will increase their chances at belonging in elite social circles<p>I think I've found my people
Has the blockchain hype decreased over the last months? It feels we reached peak in 2016/2017. At least within the tech community the number of critics seem growing.<p>I usually don't follow what happens at WEF since the discussions feel very <i>meta</i>. Some of the people (Michal Dell & Co) are removed from reality and the daily struggle. You won't find any representatives of the precariat at Davos, nevertheless this punchy talk resonated with me:<p>Historian Rutger Bregman berates billionaires at World Economic Forum over tax avoidance <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5LtFnmPruU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5LtFnmPruU</a> (short version of Mr Bregman's points from a twitter video: <a href="https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1090045108064579584" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1090045108064579584</a>) TL;DR: we need to discuss tax and stop talking about philantrophy.