The spirits of Cyber Polygon & the Great Reset live on with sessions like ‘Riding Out Cyber Storms’ & ‘The New Cyber Order’: perspective
For the first time, the World Economic Forum (WEF) will publicly livestream its Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity, as the event will be combined with the Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils.
From October 14-16, the joint WEF Annual Meetings of the Global Future Councils and Cybersecurity will be held in Dubai, UAE.
While previous editions of the Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils have been livestreamed to the public, the same cannot be said for previous editions of the Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity.
But that’s all about to change with the merger of the two meetings.
For those who remember the WEF warning about cyber pandemics back in 2020 and 2021, the Cyber Polygon spirit lives on.
However, instead of talking about cyber attacks with COVID-like characteristics, we see sessions in the program like “Riding out Cyber Storms,” “The New Cyber Order,” and “Inside the Cyber Criminal Mind.”
With “The New Cyber Order” we also see glimpses of the great reset agenda to restructure societal contracts and the global economy powered by technologies emerging from the so-called fourth industrial revolution.
Other sessions of note include, “Liberating Food,” “Accelerating Divides in the Race to Intelligence,” and “Neurotechnology: Striking the Right Balance.”
The Neurotech session will feature Duke University’s Dr. Nita Farahany, a regular at the WEF for many years, and author of “The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.”
During her presentation at the 2023 WEF Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Dr. Farahany said, “We can pick up and decode faces that you’re seeing in your mind — simple shapes, numbers, your PIN number to your bank account” thanks to non-invasive devices that act like a “fit-bit for your brain.”
The neurotech session will also feature Synchron founder and CEO Thomas Oxley, who had some mind-blowing things to say about brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and consciousness at this year’s WEF Annual Meetings of the New Champions, aka “Summer Davos,” in China last June.
There, Oxley said that the fusion of AI with BCIs would give humans and robots the ability to decode people’s emotions, stating, “We’re talking about parallel expressions of ‘domains of consciousness’ occurring on a subliminal subconscious level.”
In this BCI future, “You’re no longer having to use your body to engage with expression of your internal experience.”
But in order to get there, “We need to get the aggregated [neural] data in order to train the models. So, if you block any sharing of neural data, you will block innovation,” Oxley added.
The WEF doesn’t not mention the 2024 edition Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity on its events page, but Fortinet global VP of threat intelligence Derek Manky gave a rundown of his experience at the 2024 meeting on the Fortinet blog here.
According to his bio, “Manky orchestrates global threat intelligence initiatives with Fortinet, including the World Economic Forum Partnership against Cybercrime, Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), NATO NICP, INTERPOL Expert Working Group, and the Forum for Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST).”
The WEF Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity is normally held each November in Geneva, Switzerland, and you can find the landing pages for the 2023, 2022, and 2021 editions, but none of them show any livestreams or even the names of the sessions.
The Dubai-based WEF Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils, on the other hand, has been livestreamed since 2022.
At last year’s meeting, WEF founder Klaus Schwab said that “deep transformations” were taking place, such as:
- A transition from a unipolar, stable world to a multipolar, very unstable, very conflictual world
- The need to move into a green world that’s not just about climate change, but about a “new relationship with nature — preserving our oceans, preserving our soil, preserving our forests”
- A move from the “Industrial World” into the “Intelligent World”
Schwab would go on to regurgitate his “Great Narrative” talking points about crafting a narrative for humankind’s future that weaves social, economic, political, environmental, and technological issues.
“If we want to believe in the future; if we want to have hope for a better future, we have to decide this future, and this group is ideally mandated to help to do so,” said Schwab.
“And when we decide the future, we should not forget that today, political, economic, social, environmental, and technological issues are interrelated,” he added.
On April 21, 2025 Klaus Schwab resigned from his position as the WEF chairman of the board of trustees after previously resigning as the executive chair the year before.
The 2016 Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils gave us the inspiration for the phrase, “You’ll Own Nothing. And You’ll Be Happy,” and it was where the push for eating insects and fake meat started taking off.
Among the “8 Predictions for 2030” are: you’ll own nothing, humans on Mars, the end of US dominance, reduced meat consumption, and a global price on carbon.
“Our diets may be more veg and fruit, whole grains and vegetarian food or new alternatives (soya products, or perhaps insects or artificial meat), and less fried and sugary things. We’ll still eat meat, but, perhaps more like our parents and grandparents, see it as a treat to savor every few days”
WEF Global Futures Council, “What will we eat in 2030?” November 2016
Fast-forward nearly a decade and “Liberating Food” is back on the menu for this year’s meeting.
With the special joint session of the “Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils and the Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity,” the World Economic Forum will convene more than 500 experts from business, government, civil society, academia and media, alongside 150 of the world’s foremost cybersecurity leaders from October 14-16 in Dubai, UAE.
Dubai is also where the WEF launched the Great Narrative Initiative in November 2021 to serve as a sequel to the Great Reset, which was announced in June 2020.
Image Source: World Economic Forum/Thibaut Bouvier on Flickr
