Before 2026, Davos had been losing its position as the meeting place of the Masters of the Universe, but its most recent edition made it interesting again. The man who runs the world showed up to shower insults on the people who think they run the world. The main highlight was a long confession – or perhaps suicide note – by the former hardcore globalist and Canadian premier Mark Carney, who delivered the immortal line, “We knew that the international rules-based order was partly false, and that international law was applied selectively depending on the identity of the accused and the victims.” The audience tried their best to look shocked. “No shit, Sherlock!”

Meanwhile, Jared Kushner delivered a PowerPoint presentation on the Trump administration’s plan for Gaza, snappily titled the Board of Peace. The board, which has a billion-dollar joining fee, bequests Gaza to Trump personally – not just as president – in perpetuity, and does not include any Gazans, as they clearly can’t afford the joining fee. The presentation was not in the language of diplomacy but all too familiar to the folks at Davos. It’s certainly not the first time that real estate speculators are using a PowerPoint presentation to raise money for buildings that they will never build, on land they do not own.

PowerPoint is to corporate capitalism what the stained-glass window was to Christianity: a magical medium of communication and communion. PowerPoint was conceived by American software developers Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, who were working on oneof the first graphic interfaces for computers when they hit on the idea of software that could digitise the laborious process of creating acetate sheets for overhead projectors.

PowerPoint’s 38-year journey to its being installed on a billion computers makes it one of the most successful software products in history, now sadly succumbing to AI. But for more than 30 years, it was so ubiquitous that “PowerPoint” itself became synonymous with corporate culture. In 2001, the writer Angela R. Garber popularised the expression “death by PowerPoint”, signalling its impact on the wider culture of dissatisfaction and irritation with corporations.

As it became widespread, creatives and artists began to play with it. Conceptual architecture practices like OMA and design magazines like Wired and Monocle began to embrace infographics, albeit with trendier colours and sans-serif fonts. Jennifer Egan’s 2011 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, was set in a future where kids wouldn’t write diaries but would record their lives in PowerPoint slides, replacing literacy and numeracy with colourful eye candy that poisons the brain. Form does not need to follow function; the form can be the function, and the medium the message. Without a shred of irony, today’s leading infographics firm is called Visual Capitalist, creating an impression of knowing that can – like a fog – obscure knowledge itself.

Together with Excel, PowerPoint came to represent the essential tool of the ideological stormtrooper of the new globalised capital: the management consultant. From the early 1990s onwards, a new class of polished professionals began striding the business lounges of airports from Lagos to Los Angeles, stroking the keyboards of their Blackberry Messengers – often two at a time – and purposefully staring at the screens on their laptops. They were there to tidy up the loose ends of the end of history. Their hallmark was an obscure and indescribable expertise in, well, everything. Like a universally adjustable spanner, to tackle any aspect of management in every business that could afford their rates. Business class travel and 4-star hotels were extras. Large- and medium-sized organisations – public or private, in every industry – could dial “M” for Management Consultants.

This mystical expertise was dispensed by institutions like Harvard Business School, the London School of Economics or the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, in the form of an MBA. Thus armed, the consultant could offer “advice” on everything, from grand strategy to troubleshooting for HR to product development. “Adding value” like priests offering blessings, “streamlining” as they went and never ignoring the “low hanging fruit”, they spread “synergies” like cholera and would always offer to “circle back” in 18 months – if retained for a fee, of course.

If you were too lazy (or too much of a wimp) to sack your workers or shutter a factory, you could pay Bain or McKinsey to send in fresh-faced butchers in tight grey pencil skirts and navy Boss suits to do the slaughtering for you. Of course, in the all-too-likely event that their advice turned out to be wanting, they could be blamed. One well-researched catalogue of such misdeeds, When McKinsey Comes to Town (2022), by Michael Forsythe and Walt Bogdanich, outlines a litany of the damage done by McKinsey recommendations.

On a recent trip to the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt, I learnt that Julius Caesar had conquered Egypt not on behalf of the Roman Republic that he served, but as a personal chattel for himself as the emperor. Any resemblance to the arrangements of Trump’s Board of Peace for Gaza is purely incidental. The monuments in the Valley of the Kings, as well as the earlier Great Pyramids, are propaganda etched in stone. The hieroglyphic writing system, too, is perfect for communicating blind faith. Words may be subject to interpretation, but images present a version of events as self-evident. Ramesses II is pictured smiting prisoners with their arms bound; president Maduro is kidnapped, handcuffed and driven through New York in an open van. Representation isn’t to inform, but to impress. The priests at the temple were united by a cast-iron faith in what they considered the latest scientific knowledge about life and afterlife, something we might call theology. Today, we have the so-called science of economics that few dare to call a theology, lest they be cast out of the temple of academia.

The rulers of Ancient Egypt used monuments and hieroglyphics to interact with the pre-literate masses, just as today the language of images and infographics shapes the vibe culture of the post-literate era. At its core, sublimation relies on shifting the audience’s focus from the particular and physical to the universal and spiritual, especially if it’s addressed to an audience that speaks different languages. They are the propaganda tools of persuasion – they don’t illuminate information so much as aestheticise it. A sexed-up PowerPoint is like an accountant dressed up as an Elvis tribute act.

Another notable PowerPoint-related news story was the announcement by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that the much-hyped Neom project, launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al-Saud in 2017 as the centrepiece of his Vision 2030, is to be massively scaled back. Neom was conceived as a $500bn initiative to
create a futuristic, 100% renewable-energy-powered metropolis in the northwestern Saudi desert. By 2025, internal audits and reports from the Wall Street Journal suggested the total cost for the “end-state” (then projected for 2080) had ballooned to an astronomical $8.8 trillion.

As much an effort in reputation-laundering project as it was a physical manifestation of “innovation culture”, Neom captured the imagination of Wallpaper* types everywhere – from architects salivating at the potential commissions, to futurists and assorted pundits – with its vision of an urbanism that might truly “solve” the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s problems. It is no surprise that behind the curtains of this Wizard of Oz-like con trick stood some familiar faces. McKinsey was a key advisor on the project since its inception, providing strategic planning, feasibility validation and even conceptual design. Neom made a great deck and could only ever truly exist in the form of 3D-rendered virtual reality, the very latest of our era’s version of a rhetorical device for sublimation.

The intended audiences for the cartouches adorning the burial chambers of the Valley of the Kings remains puzzling, given that their locations are deliberately hidden and permanently sealed. They cannot serve a living audience, nor can they logically benefit the deceased, since on their resurrection, the dead will presumably already been vindicated in their beliefs.

All that effort seems to create an aid de memoire in the form of hi-res VR circa 1500BC. A record and a simulation to insure against the risk of being forgotten. The Ancient Egyptians backed their theories about the afterlife with a massive expenditure of energy and resources, employing thousands of intricately precise practices associated with burial rites, and capped them all off with pyramids of sandstone piled higher than mountains. To be fair to them, they did acquire a kind of immortality, just not the one they had hoped for. Surely having armies of retired American dentists dressed in baggy shorts and fake Panama hats exclaiming loudly over your final resting place isn’t anyone’s idea of a perfect afterlife. In Washington DC, an American pharaoh and his anointed son-in-law are putting the final touches to a similarly enormous tomb for their civilisation. This national memorial is made of debt, which in the US runs to some $34 trillion, as close as you can get to a near-infinite amount of money. An appropriate monument for scammers and pyramid-sellers of all times.  Masoud Golsorkhi