World Economic Forum Davos 2020

The World Economic Forum in Davos marks a jubilee in 2020: for the fiftieth time, heads of state, corporate leaders and researchers are gathering in the Swiss Alpine resort. What nobody in that week of 20 to 24 January could yet foresee: it would be the last large in-person WEF before the Covid pandemic. Reports of a new virus in the Chinese city of Wuhan are already reaching Davos, but almost every guest underestimates the scale of what is coming.

The dominant topic in the conference rooms is something else: climate. Greta Thunberg, then 17, arrives with a delegation of young activists and sets the agenda so powerfully that even US President Donald Trump’s appearance is overshadowed. Her mantra “Our house is on fire” dominates the headlines more than Trump’s provocative counter-performance, in which he tries to dismiss the climate debate as “catastrophism” before hundreds of journalists.

In parallel, the conversation in Davos is shifting on the technology industry. Companies including Microsoft, Google and Salesforce are calling more openly than ever for regulation – specifically for artificial intelligence. What long seemed like lip service is becoming a strategic manoeuvre: better to help shape the rules now than have them imposed later from Brussels or Washington. I summarised my impressions in a video blog for Handelsblatt.

The week begins at temperatures well below minus ten degrees. It is often the small things – a warm glove, the right route between two hotels, a free table in a restaurant that has not just been converted into a brand showroom by a corporate sponsor – that make the difference between a productive and a wasted day. I kept a daily video blog during the week: short scenes capturing the particular character of this gathering.

One of those scenes: a hands-on test of a deepfake generator that a start-up is demonstrating on the Promenade. The result is disturbingly realistic and raises the question of which moving images we can still trust. Five years later, with the US election campaign and the deployment of generative AI in disinformation operations in full view, those scenes from Davos look almost like a trailer for what was to come.

The four videos in this collection are clips from that week: the opening day, the Greta moment, the economics of Davos advertising space and the deepfake test. Together they show a WEF that in hindsight marks a turning point – between the old globalisation optimism and what was about to follow.