Davos no longer just blowing your money but now messing with your mind

While the masses of the progressive proletariat suffer it out in the loss of their health insurance, the beautiful people in Davos discuss wellness (theirs!), mental health, and “the potentially pernicious effects of technology on the brain”. What brain? we might loudly ask.

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Bloomberg points out that the 25 health-related sessions at the 2014 World Economic Forum this week is “at least a 50 percent more wellness-related presentation than in 2008”. “The theme shows how anxiety over stress and its impact on business is mounting among the Davos set, who’ve spent the last five years dealing with crises from the collapse of Lehman Brothers to the Syrian civil war--all connected 24/7 to their beeping, buzzing smartphones. Mental health-related illnesses may cost $16 trillion in lost output over the next 20 years, according to figures from Harvard University an the WEF.” (Bloomberg, Jan. 20, 2014). If it’s not enough to be burdened with what the botox-boosted bimbos are thinking in Davos, the World Post will be launched at the WEF this month. Many of its wealthy and out-there contributors include opportunist former British prime minister Tony Blair and malthusian Bill Gates of Microsoft.

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The World Post, to be launched by Arianna Huffington and billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen is a comment and news website that looks set to become a platform for some of the most powerful people on the planet, according to theguardian.com. Arianna Huffington: “You can have all those heads of state and major business people, etcetera etcetera, writing right next to an unemployed man from Spain, a student from Brazil. The great heart of HuffPo is no hierarchy.” In digital language: LOL, Arianna. Berggruen insists that the World Post will be run for profit. “I think that’s healthy,” he said. “But if we’re going to make an investment in the most exciting areas to make an investment, it probably wouldn’t be this. If it doesn’t make money, we will still support it, he said. “We’re not in it just to make money.” What’s filthy lucre, when you can own the world through the power of the digital press? “The publication’s initial editorial board has deep ties to media companies around the world. Alongside Huffington and Berggruen it includes Juan Luis Cebrian, founding editor of El Pais, Dileep Padgaonkar, consulting editor at the Times of India, Yoichi Funabashi, former editor-in-chief of Asahi Shimbun, and Pierre Omidyar, founder and chairman of eBay and backer of a new investigative reporting organisation, First Look Media, set up with former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. “The launch comes amid a wave of new money going into media ventures. Berggruen said it was clear that traditional news organisations were still struggling and that many more would fail. “I think there will be a few media voices that really have weight and will survive but fewer and fewer.” Berggruen and Company may be overzealous in predictions that many struggling news organizations will soon be falling off the cliff. It takes more than someone else’s money to run a successful publishing organization. After all, Al Gore, the last rich man to be a publisher, had to sell out to al Jazeera to recoup his losses. Besides the struggling traditional news organizations have something the World Post will never have: the readership of the proletariat.

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