Yana Afanasieva shares her impressions from Switzerland: The music has stopped, the house is on fire, but the elites are still dancing.
Pascal Lottaz
Jan 25
Pascal’s Note: The following is an email from one of my YouTube guests, Yana Afanasieva. She is in Switzerland and strolled around Davos to “absorb how the public reacts to what's happening on the main stage.” It seems the elites—especially those in Europe—are caught in fictions of their own making. As long as they pretend nothing has changed, they can continue the little charade that the Unipolar Moment is still ruling supreme. Davos reminds me a lot of Crans-Montana, that other Swiss Ski-resort where earlier this month partygoers were still dancing while the floor was already on fire.
By Yana Afanasieva
It was very clear that many Americans and especially American media came to Davos in a very gleeful mood anticipating humiliation of the European elites. Sort ot “we are here to tell you what is going to happen and there is nothing you can do about it”. I was expecting to see some Danish or Greenland flags on the streets and I saw none.
Europeans, on the other side, kept repeating that “we need to get stronger militarily ... to be able to defend Ukraine and defeat Russia, but there is nothing we can do now”. For some strange reason, the European public has adopted a very fatalistic approach to whatever may happen to Greenland, but is refusing to accept what is about to happen to Ukraine. If I had to describe the European public vibe, it would be apprehensive and in denial, as if they know something bad is about to happen, but refuse to acknowledge this.
Many Davos visitors are from the world of consulting and various corporate services, and they are in Davos with a goal to find customers and figure out what corporations are ready to buy. I talked to a business owner who previously was offering team building events and leadership training to large companies. Now, with the cancellation of many DEI programs, the budgets for these corporate trainings have been cancelled, and this business is trying to figure out what else they can sell. ( Unfortunately, this person is not technical and unable to sell AI, and AI is still very much the only thing that most people are ready to buy and sell).
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About AI, I had the impression that the consensus in Davos is that everyone is denying the potential AI bubble, big IT and consulting companies, almost everyone from Tata Consulting to Cognizant to Deloitte to BCG want Google, Microsoft and Nvidia and others to continue investing into AI, continue the conversation that AI will bring a lot of growth, productivity, and continue riding the AI wave, because as long as AI “producers” declare that they are making progress, all other big companies continue investing into AI adoption projects and continue paying their consultants for AI implementation projects. 10 years ago big companies were investing into “digitalization”, then into “cloud infrastructure”, now it is AI adoption collusion.
Another big theme in Davos was related to “governance”. There is an admission that old governance at all levels is failing and disintegrating at all levels - international laws, demographic decline, youth unemployment, regulations around technology. Whoever is coordinating the top-down agenda for the conversations in Davos is clearly trying to convince the public that we need “more governance” to avoid the “apocalypse” of lawlessness and uncertainty. On the positive side, however, and contrary to some statements of Christine Lagarde, I do not believe they are going to introduce CBDCs in the form of government issuing wallets to people and restricting payments. I believe she was talking about expanding SEPA and other payment rails for intra-bank settlements, and was misunderstood for the purpose of creating sensation. I am not suggesting that there are no forces trying to introduce CBDCs, however, I do not see the government pushing this as an immediate project, and most people I talked to at Davos within the crypto and blockchain community agreed that CBDCs are not imminent.
I did not see any meltdown or panic or even profound sentiments within the public about the end of the global world order from anyone I talked to. I feel like this topic is only important for the puppets of the top. Americans from the media and business community still believe they rule the world and are in Davos openly celebrating their “might”, Europeans are in denial and view the world through Kipling’s poem where everyone outside of Europe is wild half-devil and half-child:
Take up the white man’s burden
Send forth the best you breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need.
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
