Alpha Dogs on the Catwalk
[An essay based on reflections first written a decade ago (2016), revisited today.]
Davosian Man. These words do not express a consecrated anthropological concept; rather, it is an exploration. We are not speaking of a missing link from some prehistorical past, but rather of a relic of the future. This Man legitimizes himself, in a burst of ad hoc anthropology, as a resident of a suite of concentric worlds: the world of those who attend the plenipotentiary and masterminded environment of the World Economic Forum; then the world of those concerned with the purposes and mechanisms of the globe, including those situated at a greater distance than those who pay the minimum USD 25,000 “socializing fee” to attend the respectable conclave; finally, the whole world, which is ever born from the interplay of representations and resolutions produced by those who make the world revolve around their own axes. In this sense, we are all “Davosians,” even if we do not chat directly with the trendsetters but only with their ideas or, more passively, submit ourselves to them.
The First World, the one inhabited by the makers and breakers of civilization, is, before anything else, profoundly dense in “capital”: both intellectual and financial. What has been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, prophesied and professed by a critical mass of this elite at the 2016 meeting in Davos, is a formidable synthetic product of capitalism.exe. And this special synthesis manifests itself simultaneously: between inherited accumulations of wealth and providentially blessed creative destruction; between an aristocracy of productive intelligence and a democracy of interconnected consumers; between a technology that offers us ever more useful things and one that might render us useless; between proximity achieved through frenetic clicks and a morbid alienation embedded in various cold screens. This revolution appears to be initiated and negotiated within a hard-to-penetrate entourage of alpha males (and females) marking their territories and parading audiovisually among stages and tables.
The Second World is the one that realizes that the first world does not exhaust the debates whose outlet is the third, the world as a whole. The self-aware intellectual community possesses (or needs to) a degree of ease and detachment that surpasses the inhibitions and peripheral feelings that the lack of direct interaction with the armies of global gurus may induce in cultures on the margins. We can revisit problems just as we can anticipate solutions; we can circulate them through our own networks of relationships; we can build feedback loops to the governance frameworks in use, both private and public; and we can take part in civilizing or domesticating any revolution. The World Economic Forum in Davos can be internationalized mentally precisely because it is constructed as a global format for dialogue; and it must also be nationalized or “translated” for no genetic engineering has yet succeed to atrophy the feeling of otherness. The “difference” is the ultimate sources of both our flourishing(s) and our fading(s) as a species.
The Third World, the world in its entirety, includes equally those who make revolutions happen, those who understand how they happen, and those to whom they simply happen – revolutions of the type displayed at Davos – including what has been labelled as the Fourth Industrial one. The success of a revolution lies in calibrating it so as to soothe the expectations of a critical mass, while the success of each revolution-prone individual lies in becoming his or her own revolutionary, intelligently joining that self-calibrating critical mass. The Davos phenomenon and the type of Man associated with it invite reflection across various arenas of inquiry, some explicit, others more discreet. Among the many possible lines of thought, at least three questions stand out, passing the test of (recent) time: what kind of business relationship will develop between humans and their complementary or competing robots?; will technologies help us govern ourselves better, or simply be governed more efficiently?; and why is it that at Davos hardly a word of Romanian is spoken?
Post Scriptum (2026)
A decade later, the questions have not faded; they have multiplied. The conversation about artificial intelligence, human agency, and governance has intensified across the sessions of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, where discussions now revolve as much around geopolitical fragmentation and technological sovereignty as around innovation itself. For Romania, the challenge remains similar to the one implied ten years ago: not merely to listen from the margins of the Davosian amphitheatre, but to translate its themes into national strategies – and, ideally, to contribute ideas that travel back into the global conversation. In a (triad of) world(s) where the boundaries between the makers, interpreters, and objectualized subject of revolutions continue to blur, the real test is whether smaller intellectual and policy communities can transform presence into voice, and voice into influence. Davosian Men, it seems, remain a work-in-progress.
