A Marrs Barrs A Day Helps You Bla, Bla and Bla

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Monday 2nd March 2026

Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dirndal Barr, you gleaming beacon of LockedOut futurism, you’ve done it again. March 2, 2026, the snow’s still settling on the Davos chalets, the private jets are queuing for takeoff like taxis at a funeral, and here you are, posting your pre-packaged “What Are The Real Questions Leaders Will Be Asking At Davos 2026?” like it’s some brave exposé rather than the world’s most expensive press release. You’re not a futurist, Benny. You’re a futurist-shaped content mill with 5 million followers who all clicked “Follow” in the hope you’d one day say something that wasn’t sponsored by the ghost of McKinsey.Let’s start with the official theme: “A Spirit Of Dialogue”. Beautiful. Nothing screams authentic conversation like locking up 3,000 of the richest, most insulated people on earth in a Swiss village so they can talk about how the rest of us should talk better.

The five headline questions they slapped on the programme? Pure corporate haiku. “How can we cooperate in a more contested world?” , i.e., how do we keep the Global South from telling us to piss off while we hoard the lithium? “How can we unlock new sources of growth?” , code for “where’s the next unregulated market we can asset-strip before the locals notice?” “How can we better invest in people?”, invest, Bernard. Like they’re index funds. “Deploy innovation at scale and responsibly”, responsibly meaning “until the quarterly earnings call gets awkward”. And my personal favourite: “How can we build prosperity within planetary boundaries?” Oh mate, the planetary boundaries are already red-lining while your Davos crowderati are busy building prosperity within the boundaries of their own gated après-ski parties.

But you’re too clever for the press-release fluff, aren’t you? You’ve got the “real” questions. The gritty ones. The ones that make the billionaires nod sagely over their third espresso martini while pretending they give a toss.First up: Automation Vs Human Trust. Christ alive. AI’s moving so fast, even the regulators are getting whiplash, and the Davos lot are terrified, not of the tech, but of the moment some algorithm starts deepfaking their mistresses or hallucinating their tax returns.

You list the horrors: privacy erosion, IP theft, disinformation, nudification (nice touch, Barnie, very 2026). The danger, you say, is “erosion of trust”. No, the danger is that the same people who broke trust with Cambridge Analytica and endless data breaches are now the ones promising to fix it with more AI governance panels. They’ll tut about black-box problems, then go back to feeding ChatGPT their board minutes and wondering why the machine keeps suggesting war crimes as “optimal resource allocation”.

Then there’s Global Cooperation Vs National Interests. Davos is literally built on the fantasy that borders are passé, except when it comes to your passport, your profits, or your ability to bomb whoever’s sitting on the rare-earth elements you need for your Tesla.

You mention fragmentation: NATO wobbling, EU sanctions backfiring, everyone hoarding everything from chips to gas. The “big question” is whether cooperation can survive in a world of intensifying resource wars. Spoiler: it can’t, and it won’t, because the people in that room have spent decades teaching the planet that cooperation means “you do what we say, and we’ll call it multilateralism”.

Economic Growth And Enrichment Vs Planetary Limits. This one’s comedy gold. Growth is sacred, the economy must expand forever, but oops, the planet’s on fire and the ice caps are doing the backstroke. So the question becomes: how much are we prepared to sacrifice today for a future that might not arrive? Answer from Davos: nothing that inconveniences shareholders. They’ll bang on about “transition capital” and “green investment” while quietly ensuring the transition money ends up in the same pockets that caused the problem. Sacrifices? Sure. You’ll eat cricket flour and cycle to work so their superyachts can run on hydrogen made from coal.Efficiency Vs Human Jobs. The WEF’s own report says AI will be net-positive for jobs… eventually.

After the mass layoffs, the riots, the “reskilling” programmes run by the same companies that sacked everyone. Should the trillion-dollar AI winners be forced to retrain the displaced? Or is it rugged individualism all the way? You know the answer they’ll land on: “empowerment through personal responsibility”, which is billionaire for “tough shit, learn to code or starve”. They’ll phrase it beautifully, though. Maybe throw in a slide deck with pastel colours and the word “resilience” seventeen times.

And the wrap-up? Davos won’t solve anything. It never does. It’s not designed to. It’s a pressure valve for the global elite: let them vent about contradictions over raclette, pat each other on the back for “raising awareness”, then fly home to carry on exactly as before. The hope, you say, is incremental progress in a polarised world. The reality is incremental PR for the people who already own the increments.

Bernie, you’ve written the Platonic ideal of a Davos think-piece: concerned, balanced, utterly harmless. It’s like serving vegan caviar, looks posh, tastes of disappointment, and everyone claps because they’re too embarrassed to admit it’s bollocks. Keep churning them out. The algorithm loves you. The shareholders love you. The planet? Not so much. But who needs a habitable future when you’ve got a combined following of 5 million and a newsletter about “The Intelligence Revolution”?

Subscribe now, or the robots win.

Many thanks for reading.

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