Notes from the edge of civilization: December 28, 2026
Davos is back; globalist gobbledygook decoded; RIP to conspicuous consumption?
The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting — everyone’s favorite globalist gabfest and itself a massive annual contributor to climate-change-inducing hot air (not to mention an odious stench!) — is set to take place in Davos from January 19-23. This year’s theme is predictably eye-bleeding: "A Spirit of Dialogue," which roughly translates to: everyone talks, nothing changes.
Officially, the 3,000+ self-important delegates will ask how we cooperate in a contested world, unlock new growth, re-skill workers, deploy innovation responsibly, and build prosperity within planetary boundaries. The unofficial answers will sound familiar: more technology, more surveillance, more depopulation — and fewer hard limits on the people designing the systems. You know, a continued bloating of the peon class for the exploitation of these sinister overlords.
So utterly loathsome is the WEF that we don’t just have one, but TWO updates for you to consider. That’s because the WEF just dropped a video featuring “Five trending terms you might hear in Davos” this year.
Our decoder is as follows:
“Triple bubble”: Three speculative systems — AI + crypto + debt — stacked on top of each other like Jenga bricks expecting the other to collapse first.
“Resilience economics”: How normal people struggle to absorb shocks created by elites, without elites changing anything about themselves.
“The quantum economy”: We don’t fully understand it yet, but it sounds expensive, centralized, and excellent for defense contractors.
“Inclusive AI”: Some people’s lives haven’t been destroyed by artificial intelligence yet, and that’s just not fair.
“SupTech”: Supervisory technology for regulators means using algorithms so regulators don’t have to understand what they’re regulating.
Oh boy, does this year’s Davos confab promise to be a real barn burner! We’ll watch the space and report back.
According to the UK style press, some of the hottest symbols of ostentation will start feeling a bit tacky in 2026. Hope you have your grain of salt at the ready, because this comes from Metro UK — not exactly a hotbed of reporting — but since it’s a holiday Sunday, we wanted to keep it light.
Here’s what lifestyle reporter Charlie Sawyer says are the five most unfashionable things to spend your money on right now: Personalized license plates, engraved everything, celebrity sinks, smart-home gimmicks, and pandemic-era hot tubs.
When it comes to personalized license plates, we have to agree with young Ms. Sawyer, although our ‘use by’ date was somewhere in the mid-1990s. Our favorite pop culture prophet, Mike Judge, called it in Office Space (pic below)!
Every time we see one we can’t help but think, “Didn’t that person have anything better to do with their hard-earned cash?”
Thankfully, the stylized sinks trend escaped our attention while we were busy doing other things, so we had no idea that celebrities are spending ridiculous amounts of money on bespoke basins made of hand-carved natural stones, rare metals, and crystal accents. Good riddance to that one.
Likewise the voice-activated kettles, wifi toasters, and motorized window blinds that no one needed. As for hot tubs? Well, nothing says ‘mid-life crisis’ like a bubbling plastic vat slowly leaching regret into your pores and onto your deck.
What a year it’s been. This is the final notes for 2025. See y’all on the other side!
The Office Space reference nails it, personalized plates were always pure cringe. What's interesting here is the signal shift, conspicuous consumption going out of fashion suggests either cultural exhaustion with flexing or (more likely) people running out of disposable income to waste on engraved nonsense. Celebrity sinks and wifi toasters are just Veblen goods taken to their logical absurdity. The hot tub callout is perfect, nothing broadcasts 'I made a poor decision in 2021' quite like a neglected tub full of regret water. The real question is whether this marks actual taste evolution or just a temporary pause before the next wave of stupid status purchases.