A Giant Billionaire Tick in the Skies Over Davos: 'SUCK' in AR
Explaining the augmented reality intervention at WEF by Nancy Baker Cahill & me. (For some reason, media won't touch it.)
If any of my readers are at the World Economic Forum this week, here’s another item for your to-do list: check out SUCK, the augmented reality intervention that Nancy Baker Cahill and I have geolocated over the Davos Congress Centre, experienced through her free, 4th Wall app (download via the App Store or Google Play).
It’s a monumental “VIP” tick sucking the Earth dry. Subtle, I know.
We pitched it to a dozen outlets and nobody seems willing to touch it, so I want to explain our motivations for this piece. We wrote up a mini-manifesto, so I’ll start there:
Every January, Davos hosts one of the highest concentrations of the world’s billionaires, global political leaders, celebrities, and CEOs anywhere on Earth. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is the most influential gathering in shaping the global economy, with a stated mission to “improve the state of the world through public-private cooperation.” WEF is unmatched in scale, influence, and ambition; no other convening hosts anywhere near this amount of cross-sector power.
Despite grandiose lip service to “[improving] the state of the world,” at each yearly WEF, necessary change—be it political, economic, social, ecological, or technological—doesn’t happen. The greatest wealth transfer in history continues to impoverish billions in the Global South, and increasingly, even the majority of people in the Global North—all in service of making a handful of corporations unfathomably rich and “too big to jail.” Tech companies race to get to AGI before the so-called “AI bubble” bursts—all while they express concern in public that AGI poses an existential risk to human survival. In pursuit of “winning” this race, they steal data and plunder water sources and energy systems to support rushed data center buildouts. Meanwhile, humanity continues to accelerate systems of extraction and destruction that have set Earth on a warming path of as much as 3°C above preindustrial levels by 2050—a death sentence for most living things. This tipping point will dismantle the ecosystems that support life on Earth beyond any near-term possibility of repair.
In all categories, humanity is in a state of extreme overshoot. The threat of global war and civil conflicts are mounting—inescapable externalities of protecting wealth at all costs. The emergency is inarguable. The only appropriate response is all-out global cooperation and coordination to address these polycritical harms, pivoting away from the unchecked growth imperative embodied by the ceaseless pursuit of GDP, the fundamental driver of all other systemic problems.
Instead, every year, WEF is a champagne ball of delusion and doublespeak—arguing that we can have both a habitable planet and endless economic growth. We can’t. Anyone not recognizing this, and not treating it like the emergency it is, is most charitably a useful idiot for systems of power that benefit the select few at the expense of the many.
Of course, the power class’s lip service tells us that at some level, many do know this, leaving us to infer that they must have other priorities. WEF’s 2026 theme is “A Spirit of Dialogue,” and includes several topics that overtly contradict each other.
“How can we cooperate in a more contested world?” agenda item #1 asks, while the tech billionaires engage in an algorithmic arms race, no matter the social, ecological, or political cost; while wealthy nations (which hold the greatest power in WEF proceedings) refuse to commit to the necessary reduction of carbon emissions (witnessed most recently in November’s COP30 conference), putting developing nations—already the worst victims of capitalist hegemony and extreme climate events—in grave peril.
In item #2, WEF makes its true agenda clear: “How can we unlock new sources of growth?” If any question embodies the event’s thesis—and the destruction that WEF’s status as global agenda-setter currently wreaks—we find it here. Where can we find more planetary marrow to suck? The frenzied search for new sources of growth fuels ecological breakdown and catastrophic weather. Item #5, then, becomes a special kind of slap-in-the-face: “How can we build prosperity within planetary boundaries?” It’s really quite simple: we build true prosperity—for everyone—by relinquishing the growth imperative. This is the root cause of the climate crisis and radical inequity, resource wars and systemic oppression. But this is not the “prosperity” WEF is fighting for. WEF is repackaging greed in reassuring language, while guaranteeing prosperity only for the elite. This form of prosperity is inherently antithetical to remaining within planetary boundaries.
As Maya Angelou reminds us: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.” WEF has told us clearly, since 1971, that it is here to provide a glossy veneer for toxic ideologies of power. It does so in the most hypocritical way: acknowledging pressing issues only to undercut any real attempt to address them. How can an event famous for exclusivity, embodied in an extensive color-coded badge system, proffer “a spirit of dialogue” with a straight face? What dialogue can possibly emerge when its participants are selected based on their existing power and money, many of whom arrive on private jets? To put a fine point on this, analysis by Greenpeace demonstrated that carbon emissions produced by private jets coming to Davos during WEF 2022 equaled the weekly emissions of 350,000 average cars. These are the people we’re supposed to entrust with serious dialogue? These are the people we should listen to?
If you really want change and prosperity? Learn to share. You have the resources, but evidently you lack the courage and creativity. If just a fraction of the leaders at WEF put their heads together, you could solve global problems overnight.
Until then, WEF is a con. Its job is not dialogue, or improving the state of the world. Its job is to give false hope that the billionaires and political elites care about the future of humanity, as they keep sucking our one shared Earth dry.
One thing I’ve been unable to stop thinking about is the simple fact that Luke Kemp explains in Goliath’s Curse—and that I discussed with him in a recent episode of Urgent Futures—that inequality is the root driver of collapse.
Inequality is rising all over the world, and inequality makes everyone less safe. If there’s one thing I wish the billionaire class would recognize, it’s this simple fact. They’re commitment to increasing their power is making the world more dangerous for everyone—including them.
WEF could be a place where real cooperation happens, where actionable responses to wicked problems are proposed, and where the most asymmetrically-resourced of the world invest in livable futures for everyone. Billionaires and political elites have benefitted astronomically from public investment, but evidently feel no responsibility to reinvest in those publics. This doesn’t exist in a vacuum; as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as infinite growth on a finite planet. Their accumulation is driving us toward collapse—and rising authoritarianism, global heating, biodiversity loss, and social fragmentation are just a few of the byproducts we’re witnessing in real time.
We urgently need more just, equitable systems, and they could play an outsized role in building them. It’s very simple: we need systems where nobody is able to accumulate these extremes of wealth and power in the first place. Our puckish little digital graffiti is a call for all the above.
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