WEF26 · Dialogue Session (Conditional)
“Spirit of Dialogue” upheld, provided all parties arrive at pre-approved conclusions
Session: Open Forum: Which 2050 Do We Want?
Speakers: Agnes Callamard, Adam Tooze
Location: Davos, Switzerland
Format: Open forum panel (excerpted)
The session opens with a deceptively generous premise.
Each speaker is invited to describe the 2050 they would like to see. The examples offered are broad and aspirational. Electric cars. Female presidents. Futures framed as preferences rather than programs.
The openness lasts approximately nineteen seconds.
The first speaker immediately reframes the question. 2050, she suggests, should not be about preference at all, but punishment. A future in which the injustices of the past are finally paid for, by someone, somehow, on a timetable that remains conveniently open-ended.
The United States is introduced as evidence.
“Twelve months of Donald Trump in the White House… is a playbook of how authoritarian practices get embedded into every institution.”
The charge is delivered with confidence, but without specification. “Authoritarian practices” are treated as self-evident, requiring no definition, examples, or limiting principle. The term functions less as a description than as a moral solvent. Once applied, further clarification becomes unnecessary.
Authoritarianism, we are told, is now everywhere. Global. Embedded. Unchecked. Resistance is therefore required everywhere as well. Villages. Families. Communities. Davos attendance optional.
The warning escalates.
“If we don’t [resist], there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the destination will not be 2050.”
The implication is stark. Political disagreement, left unresolved, apparently threatens the continued existence of the calendar.
The second speaker widens the frame from individuals to history. Right-wing politics in the United States are described as a continuous lineage stretching from the civil rights era through the present day. The genealogy is presented as settled fact.
“We need to speak openly about the history of the Klan… Jim Crow… segregationism and its apologists running all the way through to the 90s and the 2000s.”
The rhetorical move is efficient. Entire political coalitions are compressed into a single moral through-line. Party realignments, voting records, and historical inconvenience are politely skipped.
The speaker pauses to establish credibility.
“I say this as a Democrat who lives in highly segregated cities.”
This is offered as a disclosure, not a complication.
Hope is then placed in the electoral process. Fingers are crossed. Democracy, it is assumed, will deliver a “giant, crushing rejection.” The majority of Americans, we are told, are decent people. The indecent ones are helpfully grouped elsewhere.
Later, the discussion turns to “misinformation and disinformation,” a category left deliberately undefined.
The question posed is how to combat it.
The response is not framed primarily as debate, persuasion, or even disagreement. Instead, the emphasis is placed on apprehension.
“This key literacy on apprehending what people can read on social media and the internet…”
The verb does a great deal of work here.
To apprehend is not to understand. It is to seize, to take hold of, to intercept. What, exactly, is being apprehended is left unclear. The implication is that the problem is not merely how people think about what they see online, but that they are seeing it at all.
A generational horizon is offered.
“…I’m hoping that in two generations from now we will have people far better able to tackle what they are reading.”
Education, it seems, is the long game. Control is the near one.
The focus then shifts from pedagogy to policy. The United States is cited again, this time as an obstacle.
“For the last twelve months, the President of the United States has waged a war against the regulation of social media and the regulation of AI.”
Here, censorship quietly changes uniforms.
What might elsewhere be described as restricting speech, moderating content, or limiting distribution is rebranded as regulation. Resistance to this effort is framed not as a civil liberties position, but as reckless obstruction.
America, in this telling, is not guilty of suppressing speech.
It is guilty of refusing to suppress it properly.
The distinction is noted.
The conversation proceeds to wealth.
“Why do we need trillionaires… We don’t even need billionaires.”
The question is posed rhetorically. No criteria are offered for deciding who “we” are, or who gets to make that determination.
One speaker briefly acknowledges the setting.
“Frankly, I’m very conscious of living in the liberal bubble.”
The moment passes without consequence.
The session concludes with a call to resist the destruction of the international system. Silence is framed as complicity. Leaders present are urged to act, or at least to stop not acting.
The future, we are reminded, is open.
The acceptable interpretations of the present, however, appear to be carefully managed.
Filed for archival purposes. Definitions deferred. Euphemisms logged. Panel excerpts retained above.