Little Shops of Horrors: AI and Authoritarianism at the World Economic Forum

By Rebecca Harrison.

Content note: This article discusses an occurrence of racist police violence in relation to authoritarian state infrastructures in the final section, which follows a clearly captioned photo of the author protesting.

The C3.ai shopfront on the Davos high street during the World Economic Forum. Photo: Rebecca Harrison.

​At one end of the busy shopping district, bordering the main square, an inauspicious building is tucked back from the road. It’s adjacent to a factory outlet store, and a Coop supermarket that has an in-store café with views over the sun-lit ski slopes beyond the nearby train station. Ordinarily, the inauspicious building might be a gym, or an art gallery, or a thriving coffee shop beloved by locals. Or it could be a hair salon, a restaurant, a souvenir shop full of postcards and fridge magnets that remind tourists of the cheerful, wholesome character of their Swiss winter holiday.
 
But today, the inauspicious building is none of these things. For, like most of the stores leading to the convention centre (where politicians, CEOs, government advisors, and countless SPADS, flunkies, and other hangers-on decide how best to extract planetary resources in the coming year) the space is home to a temporary, corporate tenant. Today, on the second day of the World Economic Forum, the inauspicious building is home to BlackRock.
 
Compared to the LED displays and bright-coloured banners of other shop fronts, the world’s largest asset management company has a demure presence on the Davos high street. Perhaps, given accusations that it funds environmental and human rights abuses, this is a tactic to avoid the attention of protestors (who have successfully targeted a near neighbour, with climate-justice activists dousing Amazon’s windows with paint further up the street). Or maybe, like a stalwart department store that quietly trades in socks and underpants, it doesn’t need flashy advertising to sell the essentials for pension securities – deforestation schemes, neocolonial land clearances, and arms manufacturing, for instance.
 
Further along the road, nestled between the town’s busy hotels and bars, the Amazon store is clean again. A heavy police presence, backed up by Border Control, backed up by military personnel stationed next to the helicopter landing site a few miles along the railway line, has made any form of dissent extremely challenging. Not that the authorities are moving fast: they crawl through traffic so dense it’s reminiscent of Oxford Street at Christmas time. Only instead of buses and cabs, there are bumper-to-bumper Mercedes, all inching along with blacked-out windows and mostly empty back seats. (It’s reassuring to note that once WEF attendees have flown in by private jet, they switch to cars to travel walkable distances around town. No one can say they’re not doing their bit for climate change).

The AI House, Cisco, and Meta AI shop fronts all selling AI to WEF delegates in Davos. Images: Rebecca Harrison.

​As you walk towards the convention centre—where Rachel Reeves is cutting taxes for the elite to stimulate ‘growth,’ David Beckham is collecting an award, and Donald Trump is threatening pretty much everyone—there are other familiar names advertising their wares. Meta is pushing AI. Tata sponsors a booth giving out free coffee (who has time to care about links to human rights abuses or environmental harm when they’re on the make and need a caffeine hit?). Cisco is at it with the AI again, assuring delegates that it’s ‘making AI work for you.’ Infosys talk of being ‘AI-first’ via ‘connected clouds’.
 
Then there’s the ‘AI House Association,’ located in a charming Swiss-style chalet and sponsored by the Swiss National AI Institute. At the Automation Anywhere hub, delegates are invited to use the company’s Agentic AI product to ‘build the future.’ Agentforce, meanwhile, promise global decisionmakers that the firm has ‘what AI was meant to be,’ claiming their product is 33% ‘more accurate’ and ‘2x more relevant’ than ‘DIY AI’. A cartoon robotic polar bear adorns their window as if to bolster the claims; it’s unclear whether any state or other advertising standards apply to temporary shops during the WEF.
 
Which makes it all the more terrifying that people are buying into what these stores are selling. For the governments, media, tech companies, and banks that control our daily lives are pushing AI wholesale. Yet the human and environmental costs of AI are too high. Gen-AI relies on large-language-models stealing the writing, images, and sounds that we have made freely available on the internet. Machines ‘scraping’ for ‘data’ is nothing short of corporate theft of our online publications. (Note that when US tech company OpenAI steals from us it’s ‘scraping’; when Chinese tech company DeepSeek allegedly takes from them it's ‘inappropriate’).
 
AI requires enormous extractivist activity alongside fossil power, land, and water resources; pollutants from data centres destroy communities and eco-systems. It does not, as many texts manufactured by gen-AI worryingly claim, contribute positively to environmental sustainability. And the racialised, gendered, and other biases that its programmers code into it are a continuation of earlier and ongoing projects of categorisation and discipline.
 
So when the C3.ai store promises WEF attendees that gen-AI that will undertake everything from ‘demand forecasting’ and ‘energy management’ (so far, so efficient), to ‘public benefits’ (who determines what is beneficial, and to whom?), and, critically, ‘law enforcement,’ we should be very, very worried indeed. On his first day in Davos, C3.ai CEO Thomas Siebal, a Trump donor and supporter, gave a speech praising the President at a party he hosted. Coming the day after Trump’s inauguration, attended by, among other Silicon Valley figures, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), and Elon Musk (X, xAI), AI’s proximity to authoritarian politics could not be any clearer.
 
Every AI search, I argue, reinforces an act of enclosure enabled both by the ruling class’s most recent theft of our knowledge and creative commons, and the authoritarian misuse of the state-held and other databases that we are made to digitally inhabit.

Agentic AI (with robotic polar bear), AgentForce, and Infosys AI advertising in Davos. Images: Rebecca Harrison.

​As you pass C3.ai and near the barricaded entrance to the WEF proper, where security guards check delegate passes and bags, there’s a tasteful, wooden-slatted shopfront hosting Palantir. The US-based company specialises in software that enables the collection and analytics of large data sets, and—you guessed it—AI. Amnesty International UK has accused Palantir of facilitating human rights abuses in the US, where its platforms are used by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to separate migrant children from their parents and conduct raids on undocumented people. Palantir founder Peter Thiel is a Trump backer; CEO Alex Karp has denounced pro-Palestinian protestors as having ‘pagan’ beliefs and supports the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza. They hold NHS contracts in the UK. Theirs is the last shopfront you see before entering the invite-only conference hall (or should that be mall?). It’s also the first you would see when exiting.

​In Dan McQuillan’s book on AI he stops short of claiming AI is fascist. However, what I saw in Davos lends credence to his argument that it will be—already is—being used to support authoritarian regimes.

The Palantir shop front in Davos. Photo: Rebecca Harrison.

​Sandwiched, then, between BlackRock and Palantir, and abrasively promoting AI down its length, the WEF high street strips back the complexity of global capital. Everything politicians and CEOs need is here in a single, neat shopping district. This is where the superrich come to buy and sell, to trade in labour exploitation, unethical data use, technologies of oppression, and the depletion of life on our planet. Their jets and cars and private resorts were only ever window-dressing.
 
Up close, in person, the banality of such corruption and violence fills my partner and me with dread. It is nauseating. Even when you hold up a placard in protest (which I do, under intense scrutiny from passing delegates, mild interest from passing videographers, and, thankfully, very little interest from police), it is with a feeling of impotence. At home, in activist spaces, in universities, we strive to understand the entanglements between corporations and politicians, hedge funds and arms suppliers. Yet here, the system is almost too easy for me to comprehend. It has an uncannily familiar geography: you can buy mass surveillance software like a new kettle, or pick out a law-enforcement package as if choosing an all-inclusive holiday. It’s like a trip to Bluewater, or the Arndale Centre. Rather than shopping for pleasure, delegates shop for terror.

Photo of the author holding up a hand-drawn placard in Davos. The placard reads 'Burn Dinos Not Fossils'. Photo: David Harvie.

It's the familiarity that’s horrifying. It feels like I’ve reached the end of the yellow brick road, the end of the Baudrilliardian precession of simulacra. Everything, all of a sudden, is clarified, real. The purchases I make online, or even in supermarkets (Tata, for instance, owns Tetley tea), serve the companies profiting from oppression at the WEF. Hardly a startling revelation, yet it’s as if the browser windows and websites are dissolving into the cold, sunlit air. The discomfort of my familiarity heightens as my reflection stares back at me amid the spectacular window displays of neoliberal capital’s shop fronts. I am both out and in. Complicit.
 
And I have no idea how to tear the system down; no spectacular vision of capital-ending action has so far manifested, no quick-fix for ending centuries of human-made, machinated violence has thus ensued. Getting out, on a picturesque train journey that wended its way across ravines and down mountainsides, was only ever going to allow getting away.
 
On my journey home to the UK the next day, I step outside Gare du Nord and witness the French police making an unprovoked racist arrest; they grab the man’s hair as they forcibly remove his hat, and unpin a can of mace when his friends try to help him. They take his details, use bikes to encircle him, cuff him, put him in a car. I don’t know if his friends know where’ he’s going (my French is poor), or if they understand why I give them my details to share the photos I took of the cops. The police, of course, comprehend. They refuse to let me leave, demand my passport. They photograph it, warn me (it’s illegal to share images of on-duty cops in France), lie about the arrest. Depending on the vindictive: laziness ratio of the gendarmes, my details, too, will be entered onto a database (the outcome will not be so bad for me as a white, British woman).
 
The database will, of course, be designed by a company that tells governments it can predict terror, crime, extremism, based on machine-learned predictions. These will include profiles of Black man and women, disabled people, activists, many, many others across intersections of oppression and political marginalisation. People with cameras. People without. No one will have consented. Deserved it. Or likely know that it’s happening, because the violence is perpetrated beyond the visibility and familiarity of the street.
 
What I do know, though, is that at the heart of global capital there is nothing about a shopping centre. The elite, the powerful decision-makers whom we elect (or don’t), are merely market traders in a marketplace with very few ideas. We must leverage power by refusing to buy their products, and resist their sales pitches to reject their evolving weaponisation of AI. These are stores that we must put out of business to make social and environmental justice possible. The conference mall must go, and in its place we can build a better world.