IASK: Legacy

Ripples from Davos…

—

by

senseiken
in


This is an interesting situation for a number of reasons. It brings up all
sorts of issues, from the ultra wealthy to global economics, pithy commentary
and how private email spreads itself around the world. All very amusing, and
something to think about. More importantly maybe, the spread of this discussion
and the original information is a good way to look at how self referential the
emerging free flowing information web is – and how it can also spread
information. There is lots more so follow along…

Anyway, the story apparently goes like this:

  1. Laurie Garret
    attends the [[wp:World_Economic_Forum|WEF]] at [[wp:Davos]] and sends off an
    ‘informal’ email to a few people… how many is unknown.
  2. The email makes it’s way to a

    Topica list     discussing [[wp:psychohistory]] in a post by Adam Davis a
    ‘friend of a friend’ separation from Laurie. The link to the

    specific message     may be broken by now.
  3. A link to that post

    finds it’s way to MetaFilter    .
  4. Insanity ensues as people comment and the story spreads…
  5. Laurie then

    responds angrily to the MeFi thread     in an email to ‘beagle‘.
  6. All hell breaks loose again.

From here on, the exact order is hard to keep track of, so I’ll just list the
places you can continue gathering information or participating in discussion.

My thoughts on the topic of email privacy are simple. I fully believe that I
have the right to expect email sent in confidence to remain confidential. I also
realize that the odds that that will actually happen negatively impacted as the
number of people who I send it to grows.

<[[wp:ianal]]>
In legal terms I fully believe I have a reasonable expectation of
privacy even in situations where as a practical matter I probably won’t
get it. Nothing in this post is intended as a waiver of my expectation of
privacy 🙂
</[[wp:ianal]]>

Some examples:

  • If I send a note to one or two people specifically, I do not expect it to
    "leak".
  • If I send a note to a small group of close friends, I still expect it to
    remain private.
  • If I send a note to 20 or 30 people from my address book, including people
    I do not have ironclad trust with then I won’t be too shocked to find it
    slipped out from someone.
  • If I drop a note on a "private" [[wp:BDSM]] mailing list with 250 people,
    I do not really believe that it won’t ever get forwarded, leaked or posted
    someplace else.
  • If I post something on a "private" forum system on a website I don’t
    control, I do not really expect it won’t ever show up someplace else.

I have copied the original email here since it looks like some places
are taking it down. I did NOT correct the spelling, though I did re-format it a
bit.

Hi Guys.

OK, hard to believe, but true. Yours truely has been hobnobbing with the
ruling class.

I spent a week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. I was
awarded a special pass which allowed me full access to not only the
entire official meeting, but also private dinners with the likes the
head of the Saudi Secret Police, presidents of various insundry
countries, your Fortune 500 CEOS and the leaders of the most important
NGOs in the world. This was not typical press access. It was full-on,
unfettered, class A hobnobbing.

Davos, I discovered, is a breathtakingly beautiful spot, unlike anything
I’d ever experienced. Nestled high in the Swiss Alps, it’s a three hours
train ride from Zurich that finds you climbing steadily through
snow-laden mountains that bring to mind Heidi and Audrey Hepburn (as in
the opening scenes of "Charade"). The EXTREMELY powerful arrive by
helicopter. The moderately powerful take the first class train. The NGOs
and we mere mortals reach heaven via coach train or a conference bus.
Once in Europe’s bit of heaven conferees are scattered in hotels that
range from B&B to ultra luxury 5-stars, all of which are located along
one of only three streets that bisect the idyllic village of some 13,000
permanent residents.

Local Davos folks are fanatic about skiing, and the slopes are literally
a 5-15 minute bus ride away, depending on which astounding downhill you
care to try. I don’t know how, so rather than come home in a full body
cast I merely watched.

This sweet little chalet village was during the WEF packed with about
3000 delegates and press, some 1000 Swiss police, another 400 Swiss
soldiers, numerous tanks and armored personnel carriers, gigantic rolls
of coiled barbed wire that gracefully cascaded down snow-covered
hillsides, missile launchers and assorted other tools of the national
security trade. The security precautions did not, of course, stop there.
Every single person who planned to enter the conference site had special
electronic badges which, upon being swiped across a reading pad,
produced a computer screen filled color portrait of the attendee, along
with his/her vital statistics. These were swiped and scrutinized by
soldiers and police every few minutes — any time one passed through a
door, basically. The whole system was connected to handheld wireless
communication devices made by HP, which were issued to all VIPs. I got
one. Very cool, except when they crashed. Which, of course, they did
frequently. These devices supplied every imagineable piece of
information one could want about the conference, your fellow delegates,
Davos, the world news, etc. And they were emailing devices — all
emails being monitored, of course, by Swiss cops.

Antiglobalization folks didn’t stand a chance. Nor did Al Qaeda. After
all, if someone managed to take out Davos during WEF week the world
would basically lose a fair chunk of its ruling and governing class
POOF, just like that. So security was the name of the game. Metal
detectors, X-ray machines, shivering soldiers standing in blizzards,
etc.

Overall, here is what I learned about the state of our world:

– I was in a dinner with heads of Saudi and German FBI, plus the
foreign minister of Afghanistan. They all said that at its peak Al Qaeda
had 70,000 members. Only 10% of them were trained in terrorism — the
rest were military recruits. Of that 7000, they say all but about 200
are dead or in jail.

– But Al Qaeda, they say, is like a brand which has been heavily
franchised. And nobody knows how many unofficial franchises have been
spawned since 9/11.

– The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year
when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it’s bad, but
recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word
never uttered. Fear was palpable — fear of enormous fiscal hysteria.
The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of
the dollar". All of this is without war.

– If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a
quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were
all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot
market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with
resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries
whose currency is guaranteed agains the dollar (which is just about
everybody except the EU), a near cessation of all development and
humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or
ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic
funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.

– Not surprisingly, the business community was in no mood to hear about
a war in Iraq. Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit
Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry
anti-American mood. Last year the WEF was a lovefest for America. This
year the mood was so ugly that it reminded me of what it felt like to be
an American overseas in the Reagan years. The rich — whether they are
French or Chinese or just about anybody — are livid about the Iraq
crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial
fortunes.

– Plenty are also infuriated because they disagree on policy grounds. I
learned a great deal. It goes FAR beyond the sorts of questions one
hears raised by demonstrators and in UN debates. For example:

– If Al Qaeda is down to merely 200 terrorists cadres and a
handful of wannabe franchises, what’s all the fuss?

– The Middle East situation has never been worse. All hope for a
settlement between Israel and Palestine seems to have evaporated. The
energy should be focused on placing painful financial pressure on all
sides in that fight, forcing them to the negotiating table. Otherwise,
the ME may well explode. The war in Iraq is at best a distraction from
that core issue, at worst may aggravate it. Jordan’s Queen Rania spoke
of the "desperate search for hope".

– Serious Islamic leaders (e.g. the King of Jordan, the Prime
Minster of Malaysia, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia) believe that the Islamic
world must recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means
finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places
of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means
freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations.
And, most importantly to the WEF, it means flourishing free trade and
support for entrepeneurs with minimal state regulation. (However, there
were also several Middle East respresentatives who argued precisely the
opposite. They believe bringing down Saddam Hussein and then pushing the
Israel/Palestine issue could actually result in a Golden Age for Arab
Islam.)

– US unilateralism is seen as arrogant, bullyish. If the U.S.
cannot behave in partnership with its allies — especially the Europeans
— it risks not only political alliance but BUSINESS, as well. Company
leaders argued that they would rather not have to deal with US
government attitudes about all sorts of multilateral treaties (climate
change, intellectual property, rights of children, etc.) — it’s easier
to just do business in countries whose governments agree with yours. And
it’s cheaper, in the long run, because the regulatory envornments match.
War against Iraq is seen as just another example of the unilateralism.

– For a minority of the participants there was another layer of
AntiAmericanism that focused on moralisms and religion. I often heard
delegates complain that the US "opposes the rights of children", because
we block all treaties and UN efforts that would support sex education
and condom access for children and teens. They spoke of sex education as
a "right". Similarly, there was a decidedly mixed feeling about
Ashcroft, who addressed the conference. I attended a small lunch with
Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed and other prominent Christian
fundamentalists working the room and bowing their heads before eating.
The rest of the world’s elite finds this American Christian behavior at
least as uncomfortable as it does Moslem or Hindu fundamentalist
behavior. They find it awkward every time a US representative refers to
"faith-based" programs. It’s different from how it makes non-Christian
Americans feel — these folks experience it as downright embarrassing.

– When Colin Powell gave the speech of his life, trying to win
over the nonAmerican delegates, the sharpest attack on his comments came
not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative — it came
from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands!

I learned that the only economy about which there is much enthusiasm is
China, which was responsible for 77% of the global GDP growth in 2002.
But the honcho of the Bank of China, Zhu Min, said that fantastic growth
could slow to a crawl if China cannot solve its rural/urban problem.
Currently 400 million Chinese are urbanites, and their average income is
16 times that of the 900 million rural residents. Zhu argued China must
urbanize nearly a billion people in ten years!

I learned that the US economy is the primary drag on the global economy,
and only a handful of nations have sufficient internal growth to thrive
when the US is stagnating.

The WEF was overwhelmed by talk of security, with fears of terrorism,
computer and copyright theft, assassination and global instability
dominating almost every discussion.

I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need
to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but
preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a
campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."

The mood was very grim. Almost no parties, little fun. If it hadn’t been
for the South Africans — party animals every one of them — I’d never
have danced. Thankfully, the South Africans staged a helluva party, with
Jimmy Dludlu’s band rocking until 3am and Stellenbosch wines pouring
freely, glass after glass after glass….

These WEF folks are freaked out. They see very bad economics ahead, war,
and more terrorism. About 10% of the sessions were about terrorism, and
it’s heavy stuff. One session costed out what another 9/11-type attack
would do to global markets, predicting a far, far worse impact due to
the "second hit" effect — a second hit that would prove all the world’s
post-9/11 security efforts had failed. Another costed out in detail what
this, or that, war scenario would do to spot oil prices. Russian speakers argued
that "failed
nations" were spawning terrorists — code for saying, "we hate
Chechnya". Entire sessions were devoted to arguing which poses the
greater asymmetric threat: nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Finally, who are these guys? I actually enjoyed a lot of my
conversations, and found many of the leaders and rich quite charming and
remarkably candid. Some dressed elegantly, no matter how bitter cold and
snowy it was, but most seemed quite happy in ski clothes or casual
attire. Women wearing pants was perfectly acceptable, and the elite is
sufficiently multicultural that even the suit and tie lacks a sense of
dominance.
Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel
room of the President of Mozambique — we were viewing it on closed
circuit TV — I got juicy blow-by=blow analysis of US foreign policy
from a remarkably candid head of state. A day spent with Bill Gates
turned out to be fascinating and fun. I found the CEO of Heinekin
hilarious, and George Soros proved quite earnest about confronting AIDS.
Vicente Fox — who I had breakfast with — proved sexy and smart like a
— well, a fox. David Stern (Chair of the NBA) ran up and gave me a
hug.

The world isn’t run by a clever cabal. It’s run by about 5,000
bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who
are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal
power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive —
especially about science and technology. All of them are financially
wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock
investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy
if the global political system behaved far more rationally — better for
the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to
nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis
to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They
have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global wearming, AIDS
pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are
comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white
caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech
gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.

Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders.

Ciao,
Laurie

And the reply she passed on in response…

My name is Laurie Garrett.

I am astounded by what I’ve read here.

A few days ago I received an e-mail from a stranger, who asked if I was the author of a letter from Davos, regarding the World Economic Forum. The e-mailer implied that the letter was a hoax, and directed me to this URL.

Though I did, indeed, attend the WEF and wrote a personal letter afterwards to a handful of friends, I never typed a word that was meant for public consumption.

That is what I told the stranger. And then I went back to work, covering the latest sad news from the trenches of the war on HIV.


Yesterday, however, I opened this URL and—with considerable humiliation — read the remarks, paranoid fantasies speculations, derisions, insults and Internet din herein.

Let me as clear as possible about this: The letter you are all clamoring over, parsing, deriding and fantasizing about was a personal note. It is a private letter that someone among my friends thoughtlessly, yet I am sure without any malice, forwarded to a couple of people who are strangers to me. And they, in turn, passed it on to more strangers, and so on. Now, to my deep embarrassment, and acute sense of invaded privacy, all of you— thousands of strangers—are dissecting my personal letter. I would never have written for public consumption in such a sloppy, candid, opinionated flip tone. This was never intended for your eyes.

I want you, please, to imagine something. It’s 1979. I penned, in longhand, a letter to a friend describing my rather individual, admittedly biased take on attending the SALT II talks between Carter and Brezhnev. I placed that letter in an enveloped, sealed it, stamped it and posted it to my pal. (So far, I am recounting an event that actually occurred when, in my post-adolescence, I covered the Vienna Summit.)

Now, imagine my recipient found the letter amusing or insightful and photocopied my handwritten note, posting it to ten friends. And so on. Snail mail hell? Doubtful. In those seemingly ancient days we all respected privacy, and the time and money required to photocopy and post missives prompted all of us to pause and question whether we had a right to forward a personal letter without the author’s permission.

But in 2003 few of us pen letters anymore, and the number of seconds it takes to forward an e-mail to a dozen people is too few for ethical reflection. We have erased privacy. And, remarkably, we have all come to believe that it is our right ? our privilege ? to read and analyze the personal musings of complete strangers. We don’t want the government reading our mail, but we se no problem with reading other citizens’ letters.

This saddens me deeply, and I have learned a sorry lesson. I shall no longer deliver such personal musings to friends and confidantes via the Internet. No one can be trusted in this CLICK-FORWARD electronic world.

But well outstripping the angst I feel over the loss of my personal privacy is my despair over your responses to the note. As I scanned the correspondence on this URL I found myself imagining tens of thousands of reasonably intelligent, energetic souls wasting precious moments of their lives n collective brainpower over n extraordinarily silly exercise. I saw an enormous web of cross-referencing and communication herein—of wasted “community”.

Ten years ago, before the Great Dot Com Crash, Silicon Valley pundits waxed eloquent about the great “community” of the internet, and the “new global democracy” it represented. But People, this is a fraud. Do you imagine for a moment that the participants in the WEF—whether they be the CEOs of Amoco an IBM of the leaders of Amnesty International and OXFAM—waste their time with Internet chat rooms and discussions such as this? Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world?

I beg of all of you—the Internet addicts of the world—to turn off your TVs and computers now and then and engage the world. Go have actual eye-to-eye conversations with your family, friends and neighbors. Read a great book. Argue politics over dinner with friends. Go to City Council meeting. Raise money for your local public library. Teach your 12-year-old algebra.

Climb a mountain.

Execute a dream.

Be a citizen of the real world.

As I read through the electronic conversation on this URL I was reminded of documentary I saw years ago about “Star Trek” fans. In it, William Shatner (AKA Captain Kirk) stood before hundreds of people dressed as Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans and assorted other imagined aliens. Somewhat bemused, Shatner looked at the sea of masked and oddly dressed humans and said, “People, I have only one thing to say to you: Get a life!”

Please.

Laurie Garrett (www.lauriegarrett.com)