The tuberculosis sanatoria of the Magic Mountain at Davos fill every year with the business leaders who, ill of their tarnished images, want to put themselves into the spotlight of the media and tell the world that they are better than the world thinks.
This year, this involved luring Google/YouTube into the "Davos Question": ask the world to post 1 minute videos outlining solutions to the world's problems, and have the leaders watch them. You might be able to spot two problems with the formulation already: a) if you get each person to describe a solution in 1 minute, you can expect something pretty reductive, and b) what if 10 million people did upload their views? How would you filter them? How would the business leaders, with their valuable time measured in the $millions per hour, ever be able to come good on their promise to watch them?
In the end, the problem didn't have be faced. 200 videos were uploaded, with quite a few being from the Davos organising group itself. The YouTube exercise was a damp squib in business populism, as I argued on BBC Radio3's Nightwaves (listen to the second item, minute 12 or so). Davos is trying to set itself up as the Court of King Corporate, and its methods are remarkably medieval.
