Who Is Going To Davos? Valleywag Needs A Team Of Spies
In just nine days the world's most self-important people will descend on a tiny ski village in the Alps to rub shoulders with Nobel laureates and big-shot CEOs. They will talk about very important things like "transformational leadership," "volatility as the new normal," and "designing out poverty" at the World Economic Forum, under the protection of snipers in snow camouflage.
Who cares? As Sam Biddle pointed last year, Davos has become a boring, embarrassing, pathetic joke. Especially since Randi Zuckerberg, who now makes a living by being the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, has taken over the show.
The thing is, while Davos is now packed with buffoons and posers and hangers-on — Robert Scoble is there! — there are also many serious people there doing the serious things that serious people do. Deals are made. Rumors are spread. People get drunk and knock ski boots. Things happen!
I can't go this year, since I have important business here in the States that week, which is just as well because I doubt they would give me press credentials since I'm not important enough. Who do I think I am, Robert Scoble?
Thus we need people on the ground. Citizen journalists. Send us photos, videos, and gossip, and we will expose this ridiculous shit show once and for all.
If nothing else, we need someone who will follow Randi Zuckerberg and record everything she does. Davos is the highlight of Randi Zuckerberg's year. It's her place, with her people! The important people. The big thinkers. The people who predict the future by creating it.
My God she is unbearable. And yet I cannot look away. Imagine a demented hybrid creature made by mixing the DNA of Bette Midler and Ethel Merman, and you have Randi. She is everything that is perfect and pure about Davos. She is the only reason I would even want to go.
Last year Randi serenaded Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu at Davos Shabbat dinner:
In 2012 Henry Blodget recorded her singing "Son of a Preacher Man" in the piano bar of the Hotel Europe. I urge you to scroll to the bottom of his post about this nightmare and listen to the audio. It sounds like someone hooked live current into a swimming pool and then started throwing cats into the water.
The really cruel people line her up for a "serious" interview, like this one done by a mean prankster from the Wall Street Journal, who introduces Ms. Z as a "social media entrepreneur and tech entrepreneur" and then asks her to comment about the NSA and Edward Snowden. Money quote: "I can talk to you both as a technologist, and just as someone living in this society with children," she says.
Seriously, if you're going to Davos, share the love. Send email to tips@valleywag.com, or just write to me directly. Let's do this.
[Photo via AP.]