Techniques Used by the "Self Appointed Decision Makers" at the WEF
Written in 2021. Revised and reposted here.
Image Source: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/
This is a follow up to the two previous posts on rhetorical devices, propaganda techniques and the like (here and here). Two years ago, it occurred to me that the CEO of the World Economic Forum, Professor Klaus Schwab, was using a number of such techniques in his writing. I selected one chapter from his publication “Covid-19. The Great Reset” and used it as a sample text, trying to see how many of the techniques I would be able to identify. Others may find more techniques and identify them more accurately, but I am putting my attempt at this out there simply as an awareness excercise -AND because as time goes by, it is even more important for us all to know what those once designated by Chrystia Freeland as the “Plutocrats” actually believe and were writing about in late 2019-early 2020.
But first some background:
What is the World Economic Forum, aka WEF?
And what is the “Great Reset” all about? Why has our Prime Minister publicly stated that Canada supports the “Great Reset”? And why does anyone who brings it up gets called a “Conspiracy Theorist”? Who is behind the organization? Given that the principal authour, of this document, Klaus Schwab, has been closely involved with the World Economic Forum (previously under different names) for decades, one needs firstly to understand what the World Economic Forum is, that body of the rich and powerful that typically meets in Davos, Switzerland. Their website explains: The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. So, this is where government representatives meet with industry representatives to plan future joint ventures, P-3 projects, and the like. Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is even a member of the Board of Trustees of the WEF. Two of our party leaders (Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh) appear on the WEF website as former students of a WEF Leadership mentorship program, as do a few other MPs across parties. Various other Canadian members of Parliament are included in the list of attendees at the annual meeting of the WEF in 2020.
(NOTE - this was publicly available information when this post was first written in 2021. Today, this information appears inaccessible. Now, someone wishing to do some digging might start with the work on this topic done by the Malone Institute.)
A quick peek at the platforms of the WEF shows that its members are involved in shaping the future of what appears to be every dimension of life from Artificial Intelligence through Consumption and Cybersecurity to Data Policies, Energy, Health, Investment, Manufacturing, Media (& Entertainment and Sport), Mobility, Trade, the New Economy, Technology Governance, Global Economic Interdependence and more.
(NOTE, in 2021 this link led to the “platforms” listed above. Today it shows “Centres.”)
Membership in the WEF is “by invitation only” and consists of over 390 firms from over 60 countries. (NOTE: this count no longer shows at this link.)
“Forum Members are mid-sized global enterprises that have been selectively sought by the World Economic Forum for their innovative business models, market influence, industry disruption, regional impact, corporate citizenship and visionary leadership.”
When ‘selectively sought” top executives come together through the various platforms to shape directions for our everyday lives on our behalf, is it not crucial that we as citizens have access to and input into their discussions?
Looking at the platform members, one wonders where the “public” representation is. The platform “Shaping the Future of the Digital Economy and New Value Creation” lists among its membership financial mega-corporations (Blackrock & Bloomberg), digital giants (incl. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft & Zoom) along with companies from the media, energy, pharmaceutical (Astra-Zenica), transportation (VW) and other sectors.
NOTE: this was the link used in 2021: https://www.weforum.org/platforms/shaping-the-future-of-digital-economy-and-new-value-creation
Today it leads to:
Yet one needs to question by which means voices representing small and medium sized businesses as well as local producers are to be represented in these obviously far-ranging discussions. If our politicians are invited to the annual gatherings, are they also privy to the day to day committeework underway through these platforms throughout the years? And are these platform members in any way accountable to the citizenry of this planet?
Looking at the platform “Shaping the Future of Health and Healthcare” one notes that the Mayo Clinic and the American Heart Institute sit alongside of Edelman, a leading global communications and marketing firm working to protect its clients’ brands, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (who of course have been funding vaccine development for years, not to mention buying up agricultural land. See this link. On a side note, as of 2014, Bill Gates had a large stake in Canadian rail lines. With his interest in “synthetic beef” rail lines and cropland for pulse products might make interesting sense. It is chilling to imagine the agricultural market dominated by a single interest, given what is known about market dominance in the pharma industry.)
It then should be of little wonder that news from doctors such as Peter McCullough and the Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance that COVID-19 can be treated without vaccines would be suppressed in public discourse. When billionaires George Soros and Bill Gates each are listed as an ‘Agenda Contributor’ at the World Economic Forum, (formerly here and here, now WITHOUT the term “Agenda Contributor” that still appeared in 2021) and when these people then provide grants and donate financially to a long list of foundations, think tanks and media outlets (see here), it may be of no surprise that they have the financial wherewithal, the social capital and a myriad of connections to shape the global narrative in the directions that are most beneficial to platform members. Squelching any news stories on the successes of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is just one tiny example of the clout that this alliance of global mega corporations has in order to pave the way for “innovation” and profit over the backs of the ill and dying.
Instead of labelling those expert voices who question the mainstream pandemic/vaccine narrative as “conspiracy theorists” one can just as well flip the lens and examine instead what those with the means, motive and opportunity to drive change and profit handsomely from that change are “conspiring” behind closed doors. Short of direct conversations with these members of the corporate elite, the next best way to get familiar with their way of looking at the world and the opportunities it may hold for them, is to read their writing. (See below, with my commentary added in.)
The Risk of Dystopia – excerpt from The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab
Not wanting of violate copyright provisions, I am linking readers to section 1.6.3 THE RISK OF DYSTOPIA (at the bottom of page 126 here: https://straight2point.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/COVID-19_-The-Great-Reset-Klaus-Schwab.pdf.)
But order to highlight and analyse the rhetorical devices or propaganda techniques used, key sections are included below:
1.6.3. The risk of dystopia
Now that information and communication technologies permeate almost every aspect of our lives and forms of social participation, any digital experience that we have can be turned into a “product” destined to monitor and anticipate our behaviour. The risk of possible dystopia stems from this observation.
NAME IT TO TAME IT - before critics can be upset that this professor’s vision is dystopian, he puts that word out there, taking away its strength. Plus he lists various novelists who have previously presented fictional dystopian worlds.
Over the past few years, it has nourished countless works of arts, ranging from novels like The Handmaid’s Tale to the TV series “Black Mirror”. In academia, it finds its expression in the research undertaken by scholars like Shoshana Zuboff. Her book Surveillance Capitalism warns about customers being reinvented as data sources, with “surveillance capitalism” transforming our economy, politics, society and our own lives by producing deeply anti-democratic asymmetries of knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge. Over the coming months and years, the trade-off between public- health benefits and loss of privacy will be carefully weighed, becoming the topic of many animated conversations and heated debates.
LIMITED HANGOUT - Where Schwab chooses to mention LOSS OF PRIVACY as the main concern, that is just one major concern of many serious concerns. Schwab stops short of listing the many other concerns people have with his vision of a Great Reset, including potential loss of free and independent choices as to how to live their lives, loss of income, moblility, freedom of association and more.
Most people, fearful of the danger posed by COVID-19, will ask: Isn’t it foolish not to leverage the power of technology to come to our rescue when we are victims of an outbreak and facing a life-or-death kind of situation? They will then be willing to give up a lot of privacy and will agree that in such circumstances public power can rightfully override individual rights.
SLIPPERY SLOPE - jumping straight to catastrophic events - few faced a “life and death situation”
Also REDUCTIONISM - The fallacy of deceiving an audience by giving simple answers or bumper-sticker slogans in response to complex questions (Source)
Then, when the crisis is over, some may realize that their country has suddenly been transformed into a place where they no longer wish to live. This thought process is nothing new. Over the last few years, both governments and firms have been using increasingly sophisticated technologies to monitor and sometimes manipulate citizens and employees; if we are not vigilant, warn the privacy advocates, the pandemic will mark an important watershed in the history of surveillance. (Here Schwab cited this article by Yuval Noah Harari.)
The argument put forward by those who above all fear the grip of technology on personal freedom is plain and simple: in the name of public health, some elements of personal privacy will be abandoned for the benefit of containing an epidemic, just as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 triggered greater and permanent security in the name of protecting public safety.
It is very interesting that Schwab used this parallel, particularly for those who recognized 9/11 as the fulfilment of the need for a “Pearl Harbour like event” to galvanize the support of Americans for military action as called for years earlier by the authors of Project for a New American Century: Building America’s Defences.
Then, without realizing it, we will fall victims of new surveillance powers that will never recede and that could be repurposed as a political means for more sinister ends. ... the pandemic could open an era of active health surveillance made possible by location- detecting smartphones, facial-recognition cameras and other technologies that identify sources of infection and track the spread of a disease in quasi real-time.
Given its 2020 publication date, it appears that Prof. Schwab either had excellent predictive skills, or his association with the futurists at the World Economic Forum gave him insight into coming developments. Here again, he connects the new surveillance powers of the technology companies with governments using them “as a political means for more sinister ends” — LIMITED HANGOUT - focus on only ONE part of the problem to detract attention away from something potentially more sinister —- the use of new surveillance powers by technology mega-corporations that pull the strings over government policy (aka corporatism/fascism).
Despite all the precautions certain countries take to control the power of tech and limit surveillance (others are not so concerned), some thinkers worry about how some of the quick choices we make today will influence our societies for years to come. The historian Yuval Noah Harari is one of them. In a recent article, he argues that we’ll have a fundamental choice to make between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. It’s worth exposing his argument in detail: Surveillance technology is developing at breakneck speed, and what seemed science- fiction 10 years ago is today old news. As a thought experiment, consider a hypothetical government that demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet that monitors body temperature and heart-rate 24 hours a day. The resulting data is hoarded and analysed by government algorithms.
Do you see a “LIMITED HANGOUT” being developed here again?
The algorithms will know that you are sick even before you know it, and they will also know where you have been, and who you have met. The chains of infection could be drastically shortened, and even cut altogether. Such a system could arguably stop the epidemic in its tracks within days. Sounds wonderful, right? The downside is, of course, that this would give legitimacy to a terrifying new surveillance system. If you know, for example, that I clicked on a Fox News link rather than a CNN link, that can teach you something about my political views and perhaps even my personality. But if you can monitor what happens to my body temperature, blood pressure and heartrate as I watch the video clip, you can learn what makes me laugh, what makes me cry, and what makes me really, really angry. It is crucial to remember that anger, joy, boredom and love are biological phenomena just like fever and a cough.
The same technology that identifies coughs could also identify laughs. If corporations and governments start harvesting our biometric data en masse, they can get to know us far better than we know ourselves, and they can then not just predict our feelings but also manipulate our feelings and sell us anything they want — be it a product or a politician.
More SLIPPERY SLOPE and LIMITED HANGOUT
Biometric monitoring would make Cambridge Analytica’s data hacking tactics look like something from the Stone Age...
We will have been warned! Some social commentators like Evgeny Morozov go even further, convinced that the pandemic heralds a dark future of techno-totalitarian state surveillance. His argument, premised upon the concept of “technological solutionism” put forward in a book written in 2012, posits that the tech “solutions” offered to contain the pandemic will necessarily take the surveillance state to the next level. He sees evidence of this in two distinct strands of“solutionism” in government responses to the pandemic that he has identified. On the one hand, there are “progressive solutionists” who believe that the appropriate exposure through an app to the right information about infection could make people behave in the public interest. On the other hand, there are “punitive solutionists” determined to use the vast digital surveillance infrastructure to curb our daily activities and punish any transgressions.
What Morozov perceives as the greatest and ultimate danger to our political systems and liberties is that the “successful” example of tech in monitoring and containing the pandemic will then “entrench the solutionist toolkit as the default option for addressing all other existential problems – from inequality to climate change. After all, it is much easier to deploy solutionist tech to influence individual behaviour than it is to ask difficult political questions about the root causes of these crises”.
(Here Schwab cited this article: Morozov, Evgeny, “The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level”, The Guardian, 25 April 2020, now archived here.)
Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher who resisted oppressive authority all his life, famously said: “Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.” This is a good guiding principle to conclude this chapter, along with the thought that nothing is inevitable and that we must be symmetrically aware of both good and bad outcomes. Dystopian scenarios are not a fatality.
NAME IT TO TAME IT - Here again, he is beating readers to the punch - already recognizing that critics will call this techno-totalitarian state surveillance a dystopian scenario. Now he blatantly tries to make us believe that such a future is actually not all that bad!!!
It is true that in the post-pandemic era, personal health and well-being will become a much greater priority for society, which is why the genie of tech surveillance will not be put back into the bottle. But it is for those who govern and each of us personally to control and harness the benefits of technology without sacrificing our individual and collective values and freedoms.
This entire chapter has the feel of one extended PSY-OP (an attempt to control our minds.)
Suddenly it is for “each of us personally to control and harness the benefits of technology How are we to do that individually? without sacrificing our individual and collective values and freedoms. So if we end up powerless and caught up under the control of techno-surveillance, by this statement, the fault will be our own. We did not manage to “control and harness” this technology and have therefore lost all that we hold dear. The blame has deftly been shifted to us individuals with nary a criticism of the technological and other companies that are enabling this dystopian existence to become a reality!
What is with “Solutionism”?
The problem with information access
One of the early critics of Silicon Valley mega-corporations was Evgeny Morozov. More recently he has been thinking about how most of us access information these days. In 2018 the Correspondent editor Maurits Martijn summarized some of Morozov’s thoughts.
"There is something fundamentally problematic about the way information is discovered and disseminated, Morozov explains. The largest information companies depend completely on advertisements: Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. The result? A certain type of information is rewarded online. Information that can sell adverts, that generates clicks, that’s easy to package, that can be standardized. That means important, relevant information disappears into the background. It is not easy to package, is not retweeted much, and doesn’t get any "thumbs up". "Such information doesn’t meet the dominant criteria for success," he says. Morozov wants to demonstrate that things can be done differently. At The Syllabus, relevance is not determined by popularity, and "clicks" don’t play a role.
"I also see this as hijacking the way the attention economy works. Instead of all those celebrities posting things on Instagram, we hope that intellectuals can turn the attention of their followers towards more serious content." ..."The fact that the information based on the greatest amount of research, which is of the highest quality, remains completely inaccessible is absurd. Large scientific publishers are not at all interested in disclosing this research, even though it has been paid for with tax money! Imagine people seeing what research has been carried out using their taxes. They might demand that this knowledge be made public for free. Changing the way scientific publishers work would be a nice side effect."
The rest of the solution...
We saw above that Klaus Schwab selected only certain quotes by Evgeny Morozov to highlight his main points.
However, in the same article, Morozov also went on to say much more that Prof. Schwab neglected to reference…. CHERRY PICKING!
The solutionist mandate is to convince the public that the only legitimate use of digital technologies is to disrupt and revolutionise everything but the central institution of modern life – the market. The world is currently enthralled by solutionist tech – from a Polish app that requires coronavirus patients to regularly take selfies to prove they are indoors, to China’s colour-coded smartphone health-rating programme, which tracks who is allowed to leave the house. Governments have turned to companies such as Amazon and Palantir for infrastructure and data modelling, while Google and Apple have joined forces to enable “privacy-preserving” data- tracing solutions. ... One function of the solutionist state is to discourage software developers, hackers and aspiring entrepreneurs from experimenting with alternative forms of social organisation. That the future belongs to start-ups is not a fact of nature but a policy outcome. As a result, more subversive tech-driven endeavours that could boost non-market, solidarity-based economies die off at the prototype stage. ... Without reclaiming digital platforms for a more vibrant democratic life, we will be condemned for decades to come to the unhappy choice between “progressive” and “punitive” solutionisms.
And our democracy will suffer as a result. The feast of solutionism unleashed by Covid-19 reveals the extreme dependence of the actually existing democracies on the undemocratic exercise of private power by technology platforms. Our first order of business should be to chart a post- solutionist path – one that gives the public sovereignty over digital platforms.
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We can see here the wisdom of Evgeny Morozov's recommendation - the part that was NOT quoted by Klaus Schwab -- "giv[ing] the public sovereignty over technology platforms."
Thank goodness for Substack - a tech platform that appears to be doing just that!