The downswing in Davos parties

Felix Salmon

Andrew Ross Sorkin has placed himself on the party beat at Davos: since nothing has happened yet, the main thing to report is that everybody’s Friday-night dance card is looking pretty forlorn. The Google party being canceled we could live with, but the cancellation of the Accel party is bigger news—people really loved that one. Yahoo’s cocktail party early in the evening isn’t going to make up the difference, and Sean Parker’s nightclub event, while surely hard to get in to, is certainly going to turn into the kind of loud and overcrowded sausage party that makes you wonder why you even wanted to go there in the first place.

Sorkin’s headline asks whether the Davos party is over. The answer is no, of course—but it can be interesting to keep an eye on the permanent tension between the World Economic Forum, on the one hand, and Davos more generally, on the other. The two are generally considered interchangeable, which annoys the WEF no end: the vision of Klaus Schwab is for a pretty austere conference taking place at the Conference Center, with little or nothing going on in the rest of town. But of course no self-respecting global organisation is going to pass up this annual opportunity to impress thousands of plutocrats by any means necessary.

The result is endless and futile overt and covert strong-arming

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