In The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of Wilde’s characters – I forget which – tells us that everything useful is ugly because it expresses a need.

There’s something profoundly beautiful in the form of Web Summit.
What could be more useless than the alpha startup searching for speculators to invest in their game where a player speculates on imaginary real estate? What need could that imaginably express?

What could be more self-defeatingly worthless than a carbon-trading platform that simultaneously deploys the incredibly energy-intensive technologies of both blockchain and AI?

Yet here it is at Web Summit: a Beta Startup searching for further investment.
It’s only the second full day of Web Summit and I already feel like I’ve seen it all before.
A speaker at the AI Summit stage reminds us once again that AI is a gimmick, currently being shoehorned into everything without regard for efficacy.
I pass a stall for the hilariously named startup “Aikido Security”.

A Centre Stage talk called “Did Elon Musk Destroy Twitter” predicts a future character-clash between Musk and Trump, and ends with the conclusion that Elon Musk has “escaped the gravitational pull of accountability.