Greetings --
Over the next eleven weeks, in serial installments posted every other day, Autonomedia will publish on-line a translation of a new novel in 34 episodes written by the Swiss author Daniel de Roulet.
The novel "Davos: Everyone is Coming Down" is set around the resort town in the Swiss Alps that hosts the annual World Economic Forum, and involves a tactical plan to strike against the mobile telephone relay station for the 2002 meetings of the WEF, leaving participants and the media without a primary communications infrastructure.
In reality, the 2002 WEF will start at the end of January, not in Davos but in New York City, a change of venue announced in early November. There are surely many reasons for the re-location of the Forum. It may be that many American corporate executives don't trust the airlines over the Atlantic. And someone in the Davos civil government, or in Zurich or Geneva, may have decided that after Genoa and Quebec, their beloved Alpine village was no place for the confrontations which have become the hallmark of globalization talks in recent years.
But there is perhaps yet another reason for leaving Davos. After this novel was already written, a Zurich Sunday newspaper published front-page reports of an alleged terrorist plan to attack the mobile telephone relay station to be used by the upcoming meeting, a story published on the same day as the other announcement. So the question occurs: did somebody take the fiction of Davos for reality? You can judge for yourself...
In any event, "Davos" will be posted to the Autonomedia web site at http://www.autonomedia.org/davos beginning November 14, and will continue on a Monday - Wednesday - Friday schedule through the beginning of the actual meetings, January 31, 2002.
bests, Ben at Autonomedia