Digital Society Admin Guide
Digital Society Admin Guide
"To contrive the circumstances of a global system reset, follow the steps presented in the public agenda."
In today’s dystopian clown show, the World Economic Forum (WEF) annually convenes in the picturesque town of Davos, Switzerland. Here, an international sampling of business, political, academic, and cultural personalities gather to shape global agendas and foster public-private cooperation surrounding today’s pressing issues—ranging from economic development and environmental sustainability to technological advancements—in the interest of advancing a technocratic globalism that benefits an international elite.
The WEF articulated its current aims under the “Great Reset” agenda that it proposed and popularized as a response to the 2020 pandemic, during which the organization came to greater public prominence (enough to catch my attention, anyway). Envisioned as a comprehensive shift of global economies and societies toward a model it calls “stakeholder capitalism,” the initiative promotes the accelerated adoption of technologies associated with “the Fourth Industrial Revolution”—a transformative era during which artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation revolutionize the economies of the developed world, and biotechnology revolutionizes the food industry and healthcare—as a proactive approach to navigating the profound societal impacts of technological progress.
(Last month’s dispatch on social engineering and the cultural marketplace gestured in the direction of that Fourth Industrial Revolution in its reference to the field of information security to define “social engineering.”)
The Great Reset emphasizes global cooperation in implementing its public-private collaborations, and relies on the concerted activities of states, businesses, and other “stakeholders” like NGOs to accomplish them. That the organization and its agenda should have gained public prominence during the pandemic, and that it co-sponsored (with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) the Event 201 pandemic simulation exercise held in October 2019, of course represents only an innocent coincidence.
While returning customers will recall last month’s dispatch delved into present-day tensions in the Republic of Panama stemming from the 21st-century recurrence of the same imperial resource extraction that the people of the Panamanian isthmus have endured for half a millennium, those few (if any) who might have glimpsed inside the Radio Free Pizza kitchen would know too that the original inspiration for featuring Panama in a dispatch here had been the country’s resurgent popularity in an American traditionalist-reactionary discourse that, today, seems especially interested in implicating the WEF in the perceived decline of American geopolitical eminence. For, as Ann Vandersteel wrote in a post on 26 September, along with a purported picture of a World Economic Forum (WEF) flag:
The U.S. government abandoned Panama [...] The UNITED STATES MILITARY compounds are either totally run down or worse, occupied by globalist psychopaths [...] The first ship to transit the canal after we gave it to Panamá was from China [...] Today China has a massive presence all over Central and South America. Your government let that happen [...] This is the old SouthComm base known as Ft Clayton and today the WEF flies their flag [...] Are we going to let the CCP and WEF take it all?
Sounds like a scandal, right? But, community notes soon appeared explaining that “the flag hanging next to Panama’s is the ‘World Food Program’ flag and not that of the WEF.”
In fact, that’s pretty clear when you view the photo. For comparison, here’s one of the WEF flag from the “Davos 2020” collection on its website:
Unfortunately, these community notes weren’t added quickly enough to keep Vandersteel from reporting the same day, on her Right Now podcast (at ~9:38), about the flag that clearly, even in her own video stream, doesn’t match the WEF’s:
These flags you see? That’s right, the World Economic Forum flag flying overhead of the old USSOUTHCOM which was Fort Clayton in Panama […] The U.S. government has abandoned Panama, which is the American crown jewel of Latin America. The United States military compounds are either totally run-down, or, worse, occupied by, as I said, globalist psychopaths. We, the Americans, built the canal, and we—our government, I should say—gave it away. Jimmy Carter, remember? The Panama Canal treaty? [...] Did you know that the first ship to transit the Canal after we gave it away to Panama was from China? [...] Today China has a massive presence all over Central and South America. Your government has let that happen. Panamanians love Americans and they’re asking, “Where are the Americans?” So just remember that, the old SOUTHCOM base known as Fort Clayton, today flies the World Economic Forum flag on top of it. Are we gonna let the CCP and the WEF take it all?
(I find it interesting to note how many of the phrases she speaks match the text of her post, and how closely. I believe they must have been written ahead of time, since Vandersteel posted at 12:07 a.m., but her videos stream live at 8:00 p.m. Again, too bad the community notes didn’t appear quickly enough.)
Try to imagine my disappointment! Traveling to Panama, I’d been excited to fold my first investigation into the WEF into that dispatch. But that’s not to say either that the WEF hasn’t had some dealings in the country: for example, Javier Milei (who on 19 November won the 2023 presidential elections in Argentina) spoke at the WEF’s “Investing in Human Capital” session at the group’s regional conference almost ten years ago (1–3 April 2014) in Panama City, Panama.
Besides that session to discuss Latin America’s demographic changes, another covered the use of online learning models into public education: undoubtedly a reflection of the WEF’s agenda for their Fourth Industrial Revolution. Yet another session still covered the potential for new multilateral agreements in global trade—in which those like executives with the Dow Chemical Company would seem to have a prominent voice: it was part of a “multistakeholder dialogue” series, after all—and the need for institutional reforms to increase transparency and accountability.
(On that last item, I’d say from the Cobre Panama contract that the Republic of Panama must have missed the memo.)
Of course, I’d hardly need to travel to start reporting on the WEF. Indeed, the organization appears often as a subject in the independent media. As an example of how it’s considered from a starkly contrasting outlet, I offer the May 2023 coverage from Mad Crab (Greg) and Bread & Circuses (Chris) for their Alternative Angle show airing on the Indie News Network.
Certainly the duo seems to sympathize with Vandersteel’s apparent animosity toward the WEF: it “represents like this para-state entity where it’s not really a state at all, it’s all corporations,” Chris says (at ~12:59). Accordingly, they find it suspicious that, when Elon Musk (previously covered as a background element in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and his successor as Twitter CEO discussed their plans for the company at an advertising event, their emphasis fell on payment processing, AI integration, and content moderation. All that, of course, is a far cry from the supposed commitment to free speech that purportedly inspired him to purchase Twitter, and lays the infrastructure for further censorship on the platform.
Chris argues further (at ~25:11) that Elon Musk’s stated goal of using his purchase of Twitter as a springboard to launching an “everything app“ for Western markets align closely with the WEF’s Great Reset agenda for the Fourth Industrial Revolution:
So we know that Twitter, he renamed it to X. So that means that Twitter really is a DBA. It’s not actually Twitter. It’s X doing business as Twitter […] One of Elon Musk’s first companies was “X dot com” […] Almost twenty years ago he had a company called X dot com that was a bank slash payment processing, okay, FDIC-insured. Now I don’t know if there’s some overlap, if there’s some old like intellectual property or some patents on “X dot com” […] but I think it's notable that one of his first companies was named “X dot com”, was a payment processing slash bank and he wants to make Twitter [into] X […] he wants Twitter to have payment processing included into it.
Certainly, Musk and Yaccarino’s plans to develop Twitter as a platform for digital payments dovetail nicely with the WEF’s support for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). which dates at least to the organization’s first Digital Currency Governance Consortium convened in 2020 and the “Central Bank Digital Currency Policy-Maker Toolkit”—released in January of the same year—from the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. (Surely the WEF would also look approvingly on any plans to develop further the infrastructure for digital censorship.)
On that Fourth Industrial Revolution, Chris gives us his gloss (at ~38:30), explaining that the WEF aims “to make us all kind of live in boxes, live in freaking the Metaverse and give away our biometric data so they can sell it to advertisers and they can basically control all of our habits.”
While Musk’s payment-processing ambitions for Twitter still unfold—telling employees at the end of October that he expects them to transform the app into a payment-processing service in one year—the ongoing rollout of CBDCs continued: a mere four days after the above episode of Alternative Angle premiered on YouTube, the Digital Currency Monetary Authority (DCMA) announced the launch of Unicoin, an international CBDC for transacting cross-border payments, at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meetings 2023.
Knowing (first) that the IMF has taken such a keen interest in CBDCs—keen enough to publish a virtual handbook advising global policymakers that “a strategy to guide engagement with stakeholders should be developed early on”—and (second) that the IMF acts as an imperial apparatus to aid the capital order in the global extraction of wealth, the WEF certainly seems to share interests with suspicious company.
So, what do we really know about the WEF?
Founded by Klaus Schwab in 1971 as the European Management Symposium, the Swiss-based international organization has found renown in the mainstream corporate media for its annual meetings in Davos, Switzerland, which bring together a diverse array of government officials, business executives, academics, and other prominent figures to discuss global policy—characters whom Peter S. Goodman casts in aggregate as the Davos Man, belonging to a billionaire class that has so thoroughly plundered both their homes and the globe that Western liberal democracies have become destabilized.
As Johnny Vedmore reports for Unlimited Hangout, Klaus Schwab was born in 1938 in Ravensburg, Germany to Eugen Schwab, a mechanical engineer with Escher-Wyss, a Swiss firm that manufactured Nazi warplanes and part-operated the only hydroelectric plant capable of producing heavy water for the Nazi atomic weapons program. For his part, Eugen managed the Ravensburg factory recognized as a “National Socialist Model Company” that employed some of the 36,000 prisoners whom the Nazis forced into labor.
Klaus Schwab would follow in his father’s footsteps, joining Escher-Wyss in 1967 as an assistant to the chairman, following a substantial academic career that includes a degree in mechanical engineering in 1962, a license in economic and social studies in 1963, and a doctorate in engineering in 1966. The same year he joined Escher-Wyss, he gained both a doctorate in economics from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and, perhaps more notably, a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University. His studies for the latter involved instruction under Heinz “Henry” Kissinger, dead on 29 November 2023 at age 100, whose own long and notorious list of accomplishments includes (returning readers will remember) arranging the petrodollar monetary system.
Indeed, 1967 proved a pivotal year in Schwab’s life: he helped manage a merger that would lead to the launch of Sulzer Escher-Wyss AG the next year; and that December, he spoke at a conference of Swiss mechanical engineering organizations where he correctly predicted the imminent significance of computer technology.
The year of 1971 seems similarly significant in Schwab’s life. He organized the first European Management Symposium in collaboration with Hilde Stoll, whom he would marry the same year. Among the more than 400 of the event’s first attendees one also would have found (as Simon Kennedy reported for Bloomberg in 2020) Wilfried Stoll of Germany’s Festo Holding GmbH, “present at the inception and scheduled to attend again this year.” Both Stolls stood side-by-side (as Schwab said in an interview with Carlye Adler for Fortune in 2010, now available here via Archive.org) with such luminaries as John Kenneth Galbraith, at an event funded with “a 50,000 Swiss franc ($11,434) loan from a German industrialist. The condition was either to pay him back or join his company.”
(For now, we’ll have to wait and see if any evidence appears of a relationship between Hilde Stoll and Wilfried Stoll, or between Wilfried Stoll and the unnamed “German industrialist” whom Schwab credits with funding his organization. Ditto for the particulars on Festo Holding’s operations in Nazi Germany, though having been founded in 1925 in Esslingen, how deep do you think we’d need to dig? But so far, I haven’t found any link between Schwab, either of the Stolls, or Festo Holding while searching the Panama Papers, so I guess that’s something.)
In 1973, what would become the WEF released its original Davos Manifesto, under which “sufficiently profitability” in “the economic enterprise for which it is responsible” allows “professional management” to serve:
Clients, by “[translating] new ideas and technological progress into commercial products and services”;
Investors, “by providing a return on its investments, higher than the return on government bonds”;
Employees, by “[ensuring] the continuity of employees, the improvement of real income and the humanization of the work place”;
Society, by assuming “the role of a trustee of the material universe for future generations” and using “the immaterial and material resources at its disposal in an optimal way” to “continuously expand the frontiers of knowledge in management and technology” and, meanwhile, guaranteeing “that its enterprise pays appropriate taxes to the community in order to allow the community to fulfill its objectives.”
Interestingly, the WEF’s own account of its 1973 conference lists the drafting and approval of this “code of ethics” as second among that meeting’s notable developments, behind a speech by the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei “summarizing The Limits to Growth, a book that had been commissioned by the Club of Rome, the global think tank that he founded.”
Half a century later, addressing that report’s concerns about “the sustainability of economic growth” and “the choices that society had to make to reconcile economic development and environmental constraints” seems to have remained top-of-mind at the WEF, which in December 2019 released its updated Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Here, the aforementioned economic enterprise exists “to engage all its stakeholders”—“employees, customers, suppliers, local communities and society at large”—“in shared and sustained value creation” responsibly managed “in pursuit of sustainable shareholder returns that do not sacrifice the future for the present” with performance “measured not only on the return to shareholders, but also on how [an enterprise] achieves its environmental, social and good governance objectives.”
Note, of course, the introduced language of scarcity. Don’t miss either the reference to the fulfillment of ESG objectives (previously explored on Radio Free Pizza as a vector for cultural austerity, though at that time we didn’t have this term for it) as a fundamental measure of value creation. But beyond this, it catches my eye that, in the manifesto’s 2020 update, multinational corporations themselves have joined the ranks of the “stakeholders” that Schwab’s professional management serves:
A company that has a multinational scope of activities not only serves all those stakeholders who are directly engaged, but acts itself as a stakeholder—together with governments and civil society—of our global future. Corporate global citizenship requires a company to harness its core competencies, its entrepreneurship, skills and relevant resources in collaborative efforts with other companies and stakeholders to improve the state of the world.
That, I’d say, represents the fascist ideology of technocratic globalism required to sustain the prevailing capital order. Fitting, of course: in fact, Schwab’s personal background (with his origins among Nazi industrialists), his career trajectory (including mechanical engineering, economics, and even public administration under Kissinger’s tutelage) and his lifelong work with the WEF (developing a platform for statesmen and unelected industrialists to coordinate policy worldwide) all work in concert to produce that fascist ideology, which is the only one according to which the WEF could conceivably justify itself.
Discussions at each Davos conference shape economic and policy agendas globally, as one must necessarily conclude from Schwab’s own evaluation (starting at ~17:49) at Harvard University—where Schwab studied under Kissinger—acknowledging that graduates of the WEF’s Young Global Leaders program “penetrate the cabinets” of governments around the world, including “half of [Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s] cabinet”—including, of course, Chrystia Freeland, current deputy prime minister and finance minister of Canada, who sits on the WEF’s board of trustees, and who (returning customers will recall) descends from a Nazi collaborator.
That board of trustees also includes Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, who also serves on the board of the infamous Council on Foreign Relations, which the aforementioned Kissinger joined in 1956 and on the board of which he served 1977–1981. Longtime customers of Radio Free Pizza will recall BlackRock from our slice in July 2023, when we reported on one of its corporate recruiters estimating at $10,000 the cost of purchasing the legislative influence of a U.S. senator.
Between these two examples of Fink and Freeland, we have a snapshot of the WEF as a “public-private cooperation”: the chief executive of an international financier, and a Western politician who, as a Young Global Leader, was ideologically groomed to practice the stakeholder model of governance that the WEF champions, under which industry seems to negotiate the public policy that elected officials implement.
So, like I said, it’s easy enough to see why someone wouldn’t like the WEF. In that regard, I certainly share an affinity with Right Now’s Anne Vandersteel, mentioned at the start of today’s dispatch. She seems also to have an animosity (which I find agreeable) toward Fink’s BlackRock and other wealth management firms, as detailed (at ~11:28) in her reporting on Panama:
BlackRock and Vanguard have a strong foothold in Panama. That’s right, if you like your Big Mac with special sauce, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, blah-blah-blah, you can find that too. Don’t worry, the Americans are here with their fast-food, Persian-bazaar, get-’er-done-yesterday mentality. BlackRock and Vanguard, represent right here with McDonald’s. They're gonna shove it down your throat one way or the other.
Here, Vandersteel seems to present BlackRock and Vanguard as embodying the practices responsible for U.S. imperial decline—also evidenced for her in Panama’s nominal sovereignty over the canal zone—through the shares they control in international brands like McDonald’s (represented here as one forced on consumers) that she stages as emblematic of a particular American shortsightedness. That, she seems to suggest, is the same flaw of national character to blame for what challenges have arisen in operating the Panama Canal, such as saltwater intrusion, an El Niño drought reducing water levels available in Gatun Lake for the canal’s lock system (which also supplies drinking water to Panama City), and the increased demand for that same reduced freshwater from Panamax supertankers.
Meanwhile, Vandersteel also seems to suggest (at ~50:38) that while the international elite represented in the WEF posture as environmentalist or humanitarians, they in fact take advantage of the challenges resulting from that characteristic American negligence for the sake of corporate profits:
While all of these non-governmental organizations pretend to be do-gooders, and we gotta protect the species, and the water, and the blah-blah-blah, they’re also the very same globalist psychopaths that are behind the funding of these things to increase the profitability for their global corporations. Let the consequences be damned if environment is harmed, if humans are harmed, etc., etc.
On the face of it, I can’t disagree with her: I’m sympathetic, for example, to an analysis of ESG finance and of identity politics as progressive liberal substitutes for wealth redistribution—a socially engineered bait-and-switch in the discourse of the professional-managerial dialect. But in saying all this, Vandersteel seems to do little more than encourage U.S. imperialism and the exercise of the Monroe Doctrine, lest “the CCP and the WEF take” Panama and Latin America. I believe that is, ironically, the precise course of action which (I hypothesized in our last slice of Radio Free Pizza) has historically served the capital order and its beneficiaries, the same psychopathic globalists whom Vandersteel excoriates.
For some time now, journalists in independent media have worked to track the WEF agenda as emblematic of international trends toward technocratic fascism in the globalized neoliberal economy. The suspicions surrounding the WEF expressed on both Right Now and Alternative Angle both provide examples of those efforts, and serve as a credit to those commentators’ instincts for locating the sphere of global governance, where power dynamics and agendas often operate beneath the surface.
If recent years are any indication, the WEF—with its modern-day involvement in shaping public policy, its messaging surrounding changes to society’s institution that it says the Fourth Industrial Revolution will demand, and its promotion of the Great Reset for the global 2020 pandemic response—has situated itself at an important intersection between geopolitical forces, economic interests, and global monetary mechanisms. Accordingly, it remains crucial for observers to critically engage with the WEF’s actions and objectives. Understanding the true nature and impact of organizations like the WEF is an ongoing challenge, one that demands continued investigation and analysis. But, sadly, I’d say Vandersteel’s mistaken coverage—and the ideology that her coverage serves to promote—show that, this time, she failed to meet that challenge.