I’ve been to Davos once — long before the ‘World Economic Forum’ turned it into a synonynm for nonstop ego-massaging and billionaire-worship. It was in the late 1970s and I was walking in the Alps. I stumbled on the town more or less by mistake on a day that was too foggy to walk. I remember a drab place in which I bought — of all things — a Swiss Army knife and a walking stick that I still possess.

The event itself is nauseating enough. But what is even worse is the creepy sycophancy of the journalists who manage to cadge an invitation to the event. These are creatures who have apparently lost sight of the ancient investigative principle that behind every fortune lies a crime. One expects little better from the old-media print and broadcast crowd, of course. But what’s been increasingly depressing in the last two years is that they have been joined by a tribe of bloggers and twitterers who also seem to have lost their capacity for detachment. At any rate, their schoolgirlish excitement at being allowed into the hallowed precinct seems to have lobotomised their detachment.

So it was nice to open the Guardian this morning and find Julian Glover’s lovely dispatch from the benighted Swiss resort.

Perhaps it was the party at the end of the universe. Just as a neutron bomb destroys life while leaving structures intact, so Davos goes on, while the culture that supports it is dead. As collective belief was what propelled this global elite, one person’s self-importance feeding another’s, the mood has been broken as badly as the banks.

But

Alarm is not the same as contrition, and few people here will admit to have done anything personally wrong. The boss of JP Morgan Chase, James Dimon, is an exception: “I take full blame, yes. God knows some very stupid things were done.”

There is no real sense of collective guilt, or serious consideration of what to do next, other than rebuild the world that has just been lost. Davos has the air of a crash inquiry into an airline that intends to keep on flying. One hero, alone among thousands, suggested that the bankers should simply be jailed until they give the money back.

The problem with that is that most of them have no money to return. The ocean on which the global boom floated has evaporated.

[…]

The shock is real, the grief has hardly begun, but no one in Davos seems to think that means they should be less important or less rich. Yet for many the modesty is a temporary veil, to be worn until the good times return.

It is hard to tell who has really suffered, and who is only pretending. In a dark corridor at the centre of the concrete congress building billionaire surnames still flash past on white badges. This is a town where the men have the telltale signs of the seriously rich. Their hair has been blow-dried into implausible waves and layers; coiffures disciplined, even if the markets are not.

Great stuff!

Thoughtful list by Timothy Garton-Ash.

On the evidence we have so far, the following could plausibly be asked to interrogate themselves on their share of the responsibility. With the exception of the first and last categories, the words “some of the” should be inserted before each heading. My list is, of course, merely indicative.

Crooks. Bernie Madoff was (it appears, subject to the finding of the courts) a crook, a fraudster and a confidence trickster. His like will always be with us. The relevant question is how he was able to get away with it for so long and on such a scale.

Bankers. Some highly respected and law-abiding bankers took huge gambles and made horrible miscalculations at our expense, themselves walking off with multimillion bonuses while leaving shareholders and taxpayers to pick up the tab. Others did not.

Regulators. There’s a lot of failure to go around in this category. “Is that a typo?” one official at the US Securities and Exchange Commission was said to have asked, when faced with the $50bn estimate for Madoff’s losses. “Isn’t that number meant to be $50m?”

Politicians. It’s all very well for politicians to rail against “Wall Street” and the “banksters”, but this happened on George Bush’s and Gordon Brown’s watch. “The cheerleaders of finance,” writes the Economist’s Edward Carr in his report, “were unwilling to admit that houses were too expensive and risk too cheap.” Yes, but so were the cheerleaders of British and American politics.

Economists. Here’s a guild from which we might usefully hear a little more self-criticism – especially from the quantitative economists whose mathematical models helped to lead investment bankers astray. In what sense can economics still claim to be a science if its predictive capacity is so low? Imagine Newtonian physics when apples start going upwards.

Journalists. Yes, a few warned, as did a few exceptional economists like Nouriel Roubini; but it’s only now that your average reader of the business pages is in a position to understand how risky his or her investments were. Did business journalism fail us?

We, the people. Some of us, anyway: piling up household debt, especially in Britain and America, on the back of inflated house prices that gave the illusion of security; not asking sufficiently probing questions about where our pension funds were invested.

The system. Blanket charges against some denatured, depersonalised “system” usually betray incoherence wrapped in indignation. But there is a sense here of a global financial system that had become so large, complex and untransparent that it was beyond the capacity of even the largest actor in the markets to understand, let alone control. And one in which apparently rational decisions by most individual participants produced a result collectively damaging for all.

That just about covers it. Garton-Ash’s argument is that the temptation to kick ‘Davos Man’ because he got us into this mess should be resisted. Why? because Davos Man was a globaliser — a “ruthless cosmopolitan”. But he may have been the lesser of two evils. “Now we are at a crossroads”, concludes G-A.

One road leads back to economic nationalism, protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbour policies. Another leads forward to more international co-operation, including more regulation and transparency. Without a conscious effort, the dynamics of both democratic and undemocratic politics, which remain national, will lead us down the former road. Inside Davos Man, there is his predecessor and possible successor always struggling to get out. If you don’t like what you’ve seen of Davos Man, wait till you see Nationalist Man get to work.

Nice column.

… in 1963, Robert Frost died in Boston.

Steven Levy (of Newsweek and author of that wonderful book on the history of the Apple Macintosh) has started something. In an article in Wired he wrote that he felt “guilty that I have a blog and haven’t contributed to it for seven months. Guilty that all my pals on Facebook post cool pictures, while the last shots I uploaded were of Fourth of July fireworks—from 2007. Guilty that I haven’t Dugg anything since, well, ever.”

Eh? But then he explains that the guilt comes from the feeling that he might be regarded as a free-rider. “Because of time constraints and just plain reticence, I worry that I’m snatching morsels from the information food bank without making any donations. Instead of healthy, reciprocal participation, I’m flirting with parasitic voyeurism.”

So he tries to overcome guilt by sharing. This then triggers another emotion: remorse.

It’s fun to track the digital ejaculations of selected Twitterati. But a couple thousand people signed up unsolicited to follow my tweets. And I feel guilty when not serving this hungry crowd — remorseful when I am.

Since I don’t know many in this mob, I try not to be personally revealing. Still, no matter how innocuous your individual tweets, the aggregate ends up being the foundation of a scary-deep self-portrait. It’s like a psychographic version of strip poker—I’m disrobing, 140 characters at a time.

Gosh, isn’t life complicated? Enter, stage right, Nicholas Carr, the Net’s own Stern Moralist. “Though he never names it”, Carr writes, “what Levy is really talking about here is shame”.

And the shame comes from something deeper than just self-exposure, though that’s certainly part of it. There’s an arrogance to sharing the details of one’s life in public with strangers – it’s the arrogance of power, the assumption that such details somehow deserve to be broadly aired. And as for the people, those strangers, on the receiving end of the disclosures, they suffer, through their desire to hear the details, to hungrily listen in, a kind of debasement. At the risk of going too far, I’d argue that there’s a certain sadomasochistic quality to the exchange (it’s a variation on the exchange that takes place between celebrity and fan). And I’m pretty sure that Levy’s remorse comes from his realization, conscious or not, that he is, in a very subtle but nonetheless real way, displaying an undeserved and unappetizing arrogance while also contributing to the debasement of others.

Carr’s right about the celebrity-fan relationship: it’s deeply creepy. I saw something of it in the years when I was a TV critic and became friendly with a number of people who — because of their TV roles — had become national celebrities. Being out with them in public was a revealing experience, because of the way that total strangers seemed to think that, in some way, they owned them.

In the old days of a TV-dominated media culture, broadcast media had the power to create celebrity — to transform performers into public property. What’s changed with the Net is that it has given people the capacity to turn themselves into celebrities. Think of Robert Scoble, for example — a self-made celeb if ever there was one. One index of this new kind of celebrity is one’s Twitter Index — the ratio between the number of people you follow to those who follow you. My view is that, for most people, this should be close to 1. (Disclosure: I’ve just checked and my Index is currently 84/110, which is too low. I’m pretty picky about accepting ‘follow’ requests, but I’ve obviously been too lax recently.)

If you’re still reading, you’ll have spotted the qualifier “for most people” in that last paragraph. Although the celebrity-fan relationship is pathological and unhealthy, there are some absurd Twitter Indices that I regard as reasonable. As I write, for example, Dave Winer has 17,081 followers. Howard Rheingold has 6,871. Tim O’Reilly has 27,446. Yet this doesn’t bother me in the way that old-media celebrity did. Why?

The answer, I guess, has something to do with the fact that these people are not “famous for being famous” (the definition of mass-media celebrity) but famous for being interesting. And that’s very different.