The Dynamics of the Right-Wing Critique of the World Economic Forum

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the conversation between then-Dutch PM Mark Rutte and historian Yuval Harari at the 2020 World Economic Forum, comparing their utopian and dystopian viscous about AI – and this kicked off a new round of conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum as well as the future uses of AI to subjugate global populations.

The WEF is a common target for such conspiracy theorists – its concepts and ideas, including the “Great Reset”, are frequently distorted into anti-WEF narratives, including by prominent far-right politicians and activists. There is now a vibrant market for books by such agitators, and some more mainstream public intellectuals have also bought into this rhetoric. Critiques of the “Great Reset” concept often outperform the WEF’s own publications by a substantial margin.

Some of this can be compared with QAnon, which similarly has its own lore and world-building, but anti-WEF narratives have a more significant techno-dystopian bent, focussing on a conspiracisation of emerging technological developments and buying into science fiction tropes. This also intersects with MAGA, conspirituality, and anti-capitalist narratives and communities.

In other words, there is a classic left-wing critique of the WEF as hypercapitalist, but now also an emergent far-right critique that sees the WEF itself as a tool for the establishment of a future socialist world government. This takes existing mainstream policy documents (e.g. the UN’s Agenda 2030) and conspiracises them as ‘Trojan horses’ for supposed darker purposes. How this works can be traced in the gradual change of the language markers (e.g. hashtags) attached to such agendas in public communication.

This is a vernacular critique of ‘data colonialism’ which becomes a critique of communism, and sees Big Brother in the rear-view mirror; it works through conspiracisation, and hijacks genuine policy ideas; it relies on the WEF as its opposing foil.