Davos 2025 At Future House: Leaders Gather To Take On Social Media’s Impact On Gen Z

I need to tell you about something that just happened in Davos — and no, it’s not what you’re reading about in the mainstream press. While the main congress center was wrestling with AI regulation and climate urgency, I found myself in a parallel universe called Future House, watching something I honestly never thought I’d see: tech pioneers, business leaders, and the generation they’ve been exploiting all coming together to tackle the digital crisis hiding in plain sight.

God, was it refreshing.

Future House isn’t your typical Davos sideshow. The mission statements hit you the moment you walk in: bold blue letters declaring Project Liberty’s promise to “help people take back control of their digital lives.” Next door, Human Change cuts straight to the chase about “reshaping the global narrative on children’s mental health.” And for once, these aren’t just empty words echoing off alpine peaks.

Here’s the moment that stopped me cold: A 16-year-old named Katherine Choynowska De Lubicz takes the stage. The room is full of power players — you know the type, the ones who usually can’t be bothered to look up from their phones. But when she starts speaking, you could hear a snowflake fall. “This cycle of dependency is not something that most parents can fully understand,” she tells us, her voice carrying the weight of an entire generation. “That’s because we’re growing up in a different world than our parents did.”

And there it is, the truth we’ve all been dancing around: We built a digital world that feeds on teenage anxiety like it’s a quarterly earnings metric.

Then something even more extraordinary happens. Frank McCourt — yes, that Frank McCourt, the kind of capitalist who usually defends the free market like it’s his firstborn — stands up and says something that probably made Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms tingle: “I’m all for making money. That’s not the issue. It’s just at what expense.” When a businessman like McCourt starts questioning the cost of profit, you know the tectonic plates are shifting.

But it’s Leanda Barrington-Leach from 5Rights Foundation who drives the stake through the heart of our digital status quo. “Children are saying we’re fed up of being not only surveilled by our parents, but we’re fed up of being bullied and manipulated by these companies.” No PowerPoint, no buzzwords, just the brutal truth about what we’ve built and who’s paying the price.

Katherine returns to the mic later, and this time she’s not just describing the problem — she’s holding up a mirror to everyone in the room: “We face internal conflict. I can tell you that many of my peers struggle daily with controlling how much time they spend behind their screens, and feeling down on themselves when they know it’s too much.”

Everyone in the room squirms. They should.

But here’s what makes Future House different from the usual Davos hand-wringing: These people aren’t just talking about the problem. McCourt and Tim Berners-Lee are building actual solutions. Project Liberty and Solid aren’t just more tech initiatives — they’re escape hatches from the digital panopticon we’ve built around ourselves.

Let me share the most dangerous idea I heard floating through these halls: We don’t actually have to choose between human connection and human dignity. As McCourt puts it — and I want you to really let this sink in: “We don’t have to choose between community and privacy.” Imagine that. An internet that doesn’t demand your soul as the price of admission.

After a week of these conversations, I’m sitting here in the Swiss snow with a realization that’s keeping me up at night: This isn’t just another Davos circle of performative problem-solving. This is different. This is a generation that’s been digitally exploited finally finding allies powerful enough to do something about it.

The revolution isn’t being tweeted, shared, or monetized. It’s being plotted right now in places like Future House Davos. And for once, it’s being shaped by the very people who’ve been paying the price for our digital sins.

I was proud to be invited to speak to a room of educators, activists, and parents. The energy was electric — every session packed to the rafters with people who’ve moved beyond hand-wringing to actual action. You could feel real change being planned in every conversation, every coffee break, every late-night strategy session.

McCourt’s words keep echoing in my head, and they should in yours too: “The vision of the early founders was one of a very democratic, small d decentralized, empowering internet, not the surveillance-based extractive scrape people’s data.” It’s time to return to that vision, but this time with the battle scars and wisdom to get it right.

Mark my words: You’re going to want to be on the right side of this one.