Davos, Cairo, and Rome - a #collapsonomics tale of three cities

This morning (Friday 28th) I had two twitter streams going - one looking at Davos/World Economic Forum and the other about the events occurring in Egypt. It was a sad but fascinating contrast, and I can't sum it up better than Umair Haque did:

#Egypt: the young desperately fighting for a better future. #Davos: old rich dudes fighting savagely against it.

One stream was full of political and economic posturing and fairly empty promises, of PR and Meedja people excitedly hawking the latest personality on their cameras, of "tweets to let you know I'm here* ", and the 'Neterati spatting about who is more right about whether Twitter or Facebook is actually leading the revolution in Egypt (it's not the Egyptian themselves you see....). The other is about a historical wave of social change across the Arab world, not (yet) led by islamic fundamentalism, and the Egyptian government trying to stem this by shuttting down as much of the comms as they can; of riots, beatings and shootings, of young, secular people trying to architect a different future for their generation. (Update - by this evening, the revolution was in full swing - televised, not tweeted by the way)

Did I see anyything in the Davos stream about, say, protesting the US Senator Joe Liebermann's plan to introduce similar laws to shut down the Internet, or Vice President Joe Biden's support of the Egyptian regime. They may have been there, but I didn't see them in the flood of pimps, primps and blatant pumps (Linked In IPO anyone?).

The other city one is therefore minded of is Rome - as in Nero fiddling while it burned..... the Rich, as they say, are different, but to the extent that they seem to be living in a different world? (Update - this piece by the BBC says it all - enthusing about how hyperconnected Davos was - without a mention of Egypt (this is written a day after the street revolution) - and ironically not realising that self-same hyperconnectness was showing the Rest of Planet what a self-referential bubble the Davos lot were all in)

The thing that really, really worries me though is what we learned from the Wikileaks affaire in December - that one can Tut about the Egyptian government, but the activity of the US Government vs Wikileaks shows you that the reaction of an OECD Government may not be that different.

An update - CNBC summarised the huge gulf between Davos and the "Rest of Planet" well:

The WEF was started as a retreat, which is why the ski resort town of Davos is its home. Later it morphed into media event crossed with a festival. But it recaptured much of its original spirit this week. Maybe it was the weather, with overnight snow and then spectacularly sunny days. It was hard to find much doom, let akin gloom.

Some participants even felt they had to search for something negative. As one central banker told me: "People at [the WEF] are convinced they have to find something to worry about."

And as they descend the mountains from the retreat, they may find a toppling Egyptian government is what was needed to be discussed the whole time.

I suspect we will find that ignoring Egypt has probably done more to discredit Davos than a decade of protesting crusties have managed (Update on my update - looks like Esther Dyson thought the same).

Final update, I promise - UK Sunday Times had only 2 small articles on Davos in the Business section (nothing in the main papers), and this is a marvellous satire on above topic by Reuters' Felix Salmon

An aside, not a lot to do with Tech but a lot to do with #Collapsonomics:

For years, with my system dynamic modeller's hat on, I have been fascinated by the systemic forces behind the paths history takes (apparently this branch of study now has a name - Cliodynamics ) and my instinct - not provable yet, but bear with me - is that we are potentially moving towards a situation last seen before the 1930's move to Totalitarian states. To explain - the West has been moving to a point of income inequality last seen in the late 1800's (the Robber Baron era) that essentially gave birth to the Labour movement, and has for two years shown an unwillingness to tackle the worst of this New Robber Barony's excesses to date - the Banking Crisis - in fact going the opposite way and squeezing money out of the Ants to pay the Grasshoppers. Now (at Davos) they are all visibly balking at the reforms that the politicians in the 1930's were actually able to make. In 1931, the solution to "Banks too Big to Fail" was to make them smaller, in 2011 it's to double-tax the population to guarantee their continued existence. In other words, so far we are probably heading into a worse place than in the 1930's. To find those "Worst Places" you have to start looking at other times when there is:

- massive income disparity
- a political process largely in hock to the rich and powerful
- economic policies "robbing the poor to benefit the rich" (the selloff of publically owned forests in the UK for a pittance of their true value, probably to the very people the public is already bailing out, being the latest poignant example)
- and something more, a sort of "let them eat cake" ignorance that there is a problem from those insulated from it.

The #Collapsonomics group looked at the impact of >20% reductions in public spending and wealth, and the inescapable conclusion is it usually a spark to large-scale unrest and the arrival of repressive, despotic regimes who brutally leverage the general public unrest to seize power (Germany, Spain, Italy, Soviet Union in the 1930's). At the time of course (2008/9) we were scoffed at, as neither Government nor Opposition would contenance a >5% spending reduction - ridiculous, No? But I suggest y'all read a good history of the state of the Ancien Regime and the conditions leading up to the French Revolution, or the fall of the Weimar Republic for an evening's amusement.

You read it here first..... (and here second - nice post by Umair Haque on said issues)

*Sour Grapes re not being at Davos, I hear you cry! Maybe, but read the streams yourself and make your mind up.