I want to adapt a now deleted comment I originally framed as a “shortcoming”

I think more can be done with this adoptive parallelism between Manifest and Davos man, which risks being artificial. There is a risk of taking both parties too much at their own word, with the former in its pre-eminence and the latter as worthy successor. Capitalism, or the neoliberal system, or whathaveyou, is ambivalent about this kind of particular (there will always be some kind of conference, does it especially matter?), so what we really want to do is find out what independent work each of these is doing, and I think it is in their similarity to one another that the two differ.

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Regarding the essay’s closing remarks:

“Manifest Man” doesn’t differ from Davos Man in regarding knowledge as a “positional asset”. In the example given to contrast, Manifest Man’s prediction markets externalise knowledge onto markets. But this is precisely the driving vision of the World Economic Forum, where it is regularly taken into equally science fictional scenarios. I don’t have to check to know how much Ray Kurzweil malarkey was on sale at the WEF 20-30 years ago. Nor does this translate into “they’re both versions of the same old capitalism”, in fact they’re both very closely related arms of the same highly specific model for doing capitalism.

Nor is there any particular difference in preferences for and against institutional affiliation, besides the accidental. Manifest theoretically aims at more direct affiliation away from explicitly state entities, but this is only indicative of the perception that states are over - a view also promulgated most famously at Davos. Both pursue a bracingly market-first approach to statecraft, with the difference emerging that Manifest has a classically more eccentric view of the role of the state (which with deepening context disappears into the imbrication of the modern techno-state with Silicon Valley, and Peter Thiel’s shitty data-aggregation software for gullible neoliberals).

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n13/peter-geoghegan-and-lucas-amin/this-looks-absolutely-rubbish

What should emerge here is a more equivocal conclusion about any comparison: is Davos like that because it’s BETTER at courting institutional favour? Had a better start in that area? Will Manifest REALLY take over the world, or will its attendees end up at Davos or Davos 2 when they eventually grow up to be as ancient Klaus Schwab?

Davos emerged at the tail-end of the post-war consensus and the collapse of the keynesian balance of payments model of international trade. Here amongst other places around the same time the idea began to take hold that governments should voluntarily abridge their own mandate to govern in matters of the economy. As we have learned thereafter, political history is often not cyclical - it does not tend towards the mean - so much as libidinal and plural: the right kind of trend will continue until it is halted or exhausts itself into something entirely different.

Davos man seeds more aggressive children like Manifest man all over in the hope of encouraging some grim process of natural selection which will produce the most virulent next strain. What happens next is up to what people do about that