What Davos Looks Like When the World Economic Forum Is Cancel

For the second year in a row, the World Economic Forum scrapped its annual meeting in the Alpine resort town of Davos, Switzerland, because of the pandemic.

The gathering is an essential stop on the annual circuit for the global elite, a weeklong schmoozefest where billionaires and autocrats mingle over canapés while activists protest in the frigid mountain air. Companies make climate pledges. Economists discuss inequality. Everyone walks on the same slippery, slushy roads.

It was at the January 2020 annual meeting that many executives and world leaders first heard about the coronavirus, as news reports about a mysterious illness began to trickle out of Wuhan, China. Last year, the forum abandoned Davos and planned to hold the meeting in Singapore during the summer, but the Singapore event got canceled, too.

This year’s event was scheduled to begin on Monday and proceed more or less as usual. Multinational corporations were renting out suites in luxury hotels. Dinner party invites were being sent.

Then in December, with the Omicron variant spreading rapidly, the organizers said they had decided to postpone the gathering once more, with hopes of staging it this summer instead.

“Everyone hopes that in 2022 the Covid-19 pandemic, and the crises that accompanied it, will finally begin to recede,” Klaus Schwab, the patrician founder of the World Economic Forum, said in a statement on Thursday.

So far, however, there is little sign that the pandemic is beginning to wane. And for a second year in a row, with Davos the event on hold, the town of Davos, Switzerland, is stuck in limbo.

Before the pandemic, “Davos” came to connote not simply the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum itself, but a state of mind. Pro-capitalism, pro-democracy, pro-globalization, Davos is the spiritual home of the stakeholder capitalism movement (which encourages companies to be better corporate citizens) and a testing ground for any number of new win-win market-oriented solutions to combat climate change, ameliorate hunger and repair frayed international relations.

More practically, Davos also came to refer to an entire universe of satellite events, subconferences and loosely affiliated marketing stunts that all took place in Switzerland throughout mid-January. Facebook constructed a temporary headquarters on the town’s main thoroughfare, known as the Promenade. Salesforce held a private lunch in a giant geodesic dome.

Yet no matter what party might be going on or which company had the best off-site augmented reality installation, the inner sanctum of Davos has always been the Congress Centre, a convention space that serves as the gathering’s nexus and main stage. It is where, in 2020, you might have found Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany or President Donald J. Trump addressing a crowd of thousands while, in an adjacent lobby area, Jane Goodall took in a demonstration of Google’s new mapping technology.

Normally packed with lanyard-wearing conference goers hustling from a meditation session led by monks to a panel discussion about sovereign wealth funds, the halls of the Congress Centre are, for the time being at…