The Great Reset, page 3
Mussolini and Hitler had a different idea.
Government and big business were both powerful entities. A battle between these two groups would be unproductive, as communists found out to their dismay. But instead of a fight, a cunning leader might understand that a deal could be made. Big business leaders don’t like workers who agitate for better working conditions and higher pay. As a first step, Mussolini and Hitler broke the labor unions. Once the workers were disarmed, the leaders were free to attack other countries and do what they wanted with their own dissidents.
Whenever you hear the word “public-private,” I want you to translate it into your mind as a promise that the government will not hesitate to attack the people if they protest against the plans of Big Business.
* * *
In the preface to his second book, Schwab also begins by talking about trust. The cloaked language he uses makes one wish to have been a fly on the wall among the Davos elite when Trump was elected in 2016 and the years that followed. They must have been falling all over themselves wondering whether Trump and his skepticism were the disease, or simply a symptom of something much larger that threatened to undermine their plans:
Public trust in business, government, the media and even civil society has fallen to the point where more than half of the world feels the current system is failing them. The widening gap in trust between those in the country’s top income quartile and the rest of the population indicates that social cohesion is fragile at best, and very close to breaking down at worst.
It is this precarious political and social context that we face both the opportunities and the challenges of a range of powerful, emerging technologies—from artificial intelligence, to biotechnologies, advanced materials to quantum computing—that will drive radical shifts in the way we live, and which I have described as compromising the Fourth Industrial Revolution.8
In the middle of the first Trump term, Schwab and his Davos crew must have been nervous. According to Schwab, the bottom 75 percent of the country thinks the top 25 percent is screwing them. They understood that things were very close to falling apart, which is why he wrote, “social cohesion is fragile at best.” This isn’t me talking. This was Klaus Schwab in 2018.
But Schwab is nothing if not persistent. He was still pushing this Fourth Industrial Revolution when he wrote, “we face both the opportunities and the challenges of a range of powerful, emerging technologies.” He’s like that Catholic priest who says to the parents of his parish, “I know there’s been a lot of accusations about priests being alone with kids, but I still want to take your young teenage boys away for a long ski weekend.”
Schwab freely admits that the elite of the world are not trusted by the vast majority of the population, but he’s going to keep going:
But standing at these crossroads means we bear a huge responsibility. If we miss this window of opportunity to shape new technologies in ways that promote the common good, enhance human dignity and protect the environment, there is a good chance that the challenges we experience today will only be exacerbated, as narrow interests and biased systems further entrench inequalities and compromise the rights of people in every country.9
The audacity of Schwab is genuinely breathtaking. The Davos group members are the elite 1 percent of the world. If there has been a problem with income inequality, human dignity, or degradation of the environment, it’s the fault of that 1 percent.
It’s a little like the main suspect in a murder being the detective of the crime. That might make for an interesting movie but should always remain in the realm of fiction. Those who caused these problems should not be driving the solution. Schwab lets you know that his brain trust he relies on are the very people who created this mistrust among the population:
This book is the product of many world-class experts from across the World Economic Forum’s diverse community. Section 2, in particular, synthesizes the perspectives of leading thinkers from the Forum’s Global Future Councils and Expert Network. Were it not for their generous contributions of time and knowledge, it would have been impossible to cover the breadth of subject matter to the depth required to make sense of the most impactful technology domains. I also very much appreciate the thoughtful and most relevant reflections provided by Satya Nadella in the foreword.10
These are people who don’t live in your world. These are ivory tower intellectuals, bought and paid for by the corporate titans who are upset that they don’t yet have complete control over your world.
But they don’t call it corruption.
They call it “partnership.”
While he sets out much of the same argument in the introduction as he does the preface, Schwab tells you exactly what he hopes to bring about at the end of his introduction.
The book closes with a vision for systems leadership, summarizing the critical governance issues that leaders from all sectors, along with the general public, must tackle together to create an inclusive, sustainable, and prosperous future.11
Schwab isn’t inviting you to help him create a better future. He’s inviting you to help him build your prison cell.
* * *
In his second book, Schwab seemed to believe he had to simplify his original message, so that at the end of each chapter, he provided a simple one-to-two-page summary.
The first question he seeks to answer is to define the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Here is how Schwab describes it in his chapter “Framing the Fourth Industrial Revolution”:
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a way of describing a set of ongoing and impending transformations in the systems that surround us, and which most of us take for granted every day. While it may not feel momentous to those of us experiencing a series of small but significant adjustments to life on a daily basis, it is not a minor change—the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a new chapter in human development, on par with the first, second, and third Industrial revolutions, and once again driven by the increasing availability and interaction of a set of extraordinary technologies.12
Confused?
Schwab is telling you that the public doesn’t see these momentous changes. Sure, the people notice some minor changes, but things are genuinely moving in a big way, according to Schwab. Once again, Schwab and his Davos group are just so much better at figuring out what’s happening in your life than you.
And Schwab doesn’t want you depending on yourself to figure out these changes, or any of the local or national institutions you’ve relied on for years. In a rhetorical sleight of hand that would have done the communists proud as they established their Young Pioneer program to indoctrinate the children, Schwab reveals his plan in a section titled “A New Leadership Mindset”:
These three challenges—distributing benefits, managing externalities and ensuring a human-centered future—cannot be easily solved top-down through regulation or well-meaning government initiatives. Nor is it at all likely that the current constellation of international and national institutions, market structures, organized and spontaneous social movements and incentives for individuals will lead to powerful new technologies being widely available, completely free from harm and fully focused on empowering the people that use them.13
This should strike everybody as a shot across the bow of any person who believes in a civil and peaceful society. Schwab has no interest in typical government programs. He doesn’t believe in any currently existing international or national institutions. Neither does he believe in any spontaneous social movements or individuals who rise up with good ideas or any of the typical incentive programs that might bring about positive change. Schwab and his Davos gang are interested in wiping out every one of the previously existing social structures that have guided the development of countries and nations.
I’ve always believed that if somebody confesses something disturbing about themselves, such as “I’ve never been able to be faithful,” you should pay attention. If you choose to date that person, then find your heart broken when they cheat on you, the blame should fall on you.
Schwab makes it clear he intends to wipe away the power of all our institutions and structures. In the chapter summary, Schwab lays it out again:
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a new chapter in human development, driven by the increasing availability and interaction of a set of extraordinary technologies, building on three previous technological revolutions. This revolution is only in its early stages, which provides humankind with the opportunity and responsibility to shape not just the design of new technologies, but also more agile forms of governance and positive values that will fundamentally change how we live, work, and relate to each other.14
What are these “more agile forms of governance”? A summary execution by firing squad without the benefit of a trial? Maybe the continued illegal detention of January 6, 2021, protestors, many of whom languish in jails more than a year after the event, who have been denied a speedy trial?
And there really isn’t much discussion of what these “positive values” are, except for the concern that the 75 percent of the country mentioned before doesn’t seem to trust the top 25 percent. Are the members of the Davos group or Karl Schwab going to come to your house and ask, “Why don’t you like me?”?
It’s likely that Schwab’s plan involves pledging your “trust” to the Davos group, lest you suffer the punishments made possible by their more “agile” forms of governance.
After all, how are they going to get you to accept these fundamental changes to “how we live, work, and relate to each other?”
What will be done to those who object?
Schwab is curiously silent on such subjects.
* * *
For a long portion of his second book, Schwab spends a great deal of time talking about the interconnectedness of technology, as if we didn’t realize that “The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are connected to one another in that they all require and build on the digital capabilities and networks created by the third Industrial Revolution, just as those technologies required and built on the electricity networks of the second Industrial Revolution.”15
That’s almost as self-evident as saying, “Before they could be your parents, your grandparents needed to have children.” It is at such banalities that Schwab excels.
In the next chapter, Schwab discusses the “politics of technologies,” and what he calls the mistaken twin beliefs that “technology drives history” and that “technology is value neutral.”16 In fact, he labels both beliefs “extremely dangerous.”17 If you were looking for at least one area of life where politics didn’t intrude, Schwab will give you no sanctuary. It’s Schwab’s belief that “When any technology is created, it contains the residue of values, goals and compromises. And the more powerful the technology, the more important it becomes to appreciate what these are.”18
Perhaps he’s right.
Maybe if people understood that Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook as a way for his fellow Harvard males to rate the attractiveness of the Harvard females, we’d all resign from the platform, Zuckerberg would lose all of his money, and he would end up as a homeless person sleeping on the streets of San Francisco. I understand it’s a long shot, but a person can dream.
One must be wary of how Schwab and his Davos group use language.
I think one of the most dangerous words that should concern you is “stakeholder.” This is how Schwab ends the chapter titled “Empowering All Stakeholders”:
Creating a prosperous, inclusive and equitable Fourth Industrial Revolution for society and citizens means being conscious of the choices we make in technological systems which will inevitably impact economic, environmental and social systems. This means having the courage to confront existing economic and political paradigms and reshaping them to empower individuals regardless of ethnicity, age, gender or background.19
Our country was founded on the idea of individual rights. The government is supposed to protect those rights. That’s called freedom.
But if Schwab and company come up with a way to short-circuit those rights, that would be a powerful tool. This is the definition of “stakeholder” from Investopedia:
A stakeholder is a party that has an interest in a company and can either affect or be affected by the business. The primary stakeholders in a typical corporation are its investors, employees, customers, and suppliers.
However, with the increasing attention on corporate social responsibility, the concept has been extended to include communities, governments, and trade associations.20
Whenever you hear the word “stakeholder,” you should think of it as a weapon Schwab and company will use to deprive a person of their rights.
* * *
Section 2 of Schwab’s second book is titled “Technologies, Opportunities and Disruption” and contains a great deal of unrelated material such as this gem:
The rising importance and applicability of machine learning has created the demand for new types of customized computing architectures. Google, one of the world’s largest purchasers of chips, designed large numbers of tensor processing units, application-specific integrated circuits designed for deep learning algorithms.21
One might be tempted to discount the importance of such a bland paragraph, except for how it slips in the idea of “deep learning algorithms.” Remember all those science fiction machines you saw as a kid where the robot went crazy, killing people, and the climax of the film was when the hero discovered it wasn’t the robot that was at fault, but the psychologically deranged developer? Yeah, this is one of those kinds of problems. Except that instead of the robot going on a killing spree, the algorithm will simply declare your well-reasoned policy disagreement to be “hate speech” or, even worse, “racist.” Yes, the problem is not the machine; it’s the person who programmed it. Which is why the radical leftists of Silicon Valley are so distrusted by the rest of America. The next section is titled “The Internet of Things” and comes to the shocking conclusion that much of our world is interconnected. Another section, “Cyber Risks,” comes to the inspired realization that there are “cyber risks” involved in technology and we should spend money to defend against these risks. Final chapters on artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, drones, advanced materials, and virtual reality are similarly unenlightening. It’s only when we get to the conclusion of Schwab’s second book that he starts to reveal how he and his Davos Group are going to restructure society. Don’t worry, he tells you. We won’t just have governments or corporations coming after you; there will be other sources of pressure:
Governance, however, is not just government: the formal structures we have for creating laws and regulations. Governance includes the development and use of standards, the emergence of social norms that can constrain or endorse use, private incentive schemes, certification and oversight by professional bodies, industry agreements and the policies that organizations apply voluntarily or by contract in their relationship with competitors, suppliers, partners and customers.22
In this world that Schwab wants to create, you’ll have to worry about more than just government. In truth, it doesn’t seem as if Schwab has much use for government, unless it does exactly what he wants. Instead, Schwab is counting on the big corporations to function as de facto governments, possibly through their terms of service. Does it make sense how the Big Tech companies were able to censor conservative viewpoints in the run-up to the 2020 election? How did they do this when this violated the spirit of our First Amendment? How did these tech leaders justify it to their conscience? Possibly because they’d been brainwashed by Klaus Schwab at all those Davos Conferences?
And did you notice how Schwab pushes the “emergence of social norms” probably by the use of his beloved “conversations,” which are nothing more than scripts developed by Schwab’s chosen actors, as if we were watching a Broadway play? But with Schwab’s scripts, the fiction becomes reality.
If you’re wondering how these new standards are going to be developed, don’t worry. They’ll be developed by the “experts”:
Communities of professionals are essential for establishing the right standards—especially standards that reflect a consensus of values and stakeholder priorities. The IEEE, for example, draws on 423,000 members to build consensus among organizations and deliver safety, reliability and interoperability in a range of electrical and digital systems. Their guidelines for AI show that they are thinking through the broad impact of technologies and not just focusing on the technical requirements or compliance.”23
Is it becoming clear there’s never going to be an actual vote? Instead, there’s going to be a managed discussion with a predetermined outcome, amenable to that of Schwab and his Davos friends.
In his advice for governments, Schwab tells governments they must adopt “agile governance,” which he defines as:
[A]n essential strategy to adapt how policies are generated, deliberated, enacted and enforced to create better governance outcomes in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Inspired by the Agile Manifesto and a report by the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Software and Society, the concept of agile governance seeks to match the nimbleness, fluidity, flexibility and adaptiveness of the technologies themselves and the private-sector actors adopting them.24
Just in case you wonder what all that means, it means that Schwab wants to act with all of the ethics of our largest corporations, who have polluted our air and water, the pharmaceutical companies who clamor for complete financial immunity for their vaccines, and the Big Tech who never seem to suffer for violating American values of free speech and free competition. Schwab goes on to detail what some of these models might look like when he writes:
