How the elite network now: in remote locations out of the social media spotlight

I’m sitting in a tent on a beach somewhere in Greece, with 150 complete strangers, about to discuss the future. During the next three days we will cook up midnight feasts, practise meditation, run along the sand barefoot, dance sober and drink lots of cocktails. For now, I know none of this, just like I know no one here. I’ve been invited to Stream, a secret tech and media gathering, laid on by ad guru Martin Sorrell and his co-conspirator Yossi Vardi, the Israeli tech investor. Vardi calls it an ‘un-conference’, and if you wanted to pay to come, you couldn’t. This one, like a growing number of influential gatherings, is under the radar, offline and invite-only.

You can see why when you look at what came out of Davos. The same old schlebs (George and Amal, Shakira) and unattractive bureaucrats banging on about the same old things, getting nothing done, peacocking around in helicopters and jets, leaving Oxfam to wring its hands over the fact that the top eight billionaires have accrued half the world’s wealth. Or Burning Man, which was the coolest secret party on the planet until the arrival of social media and every wannabe caner in the land, and is now the most over-exposed festival on the calendar.

No, if you want to meet really interesting people these days, have really meaningful conversations and network among the really ingenious, then there ain’t no ticket that’s going to get you there other than your own personal currency. And that does not mean your social-media following. Social media, you see, is very common (as Nicky Haslam used to say). In a world where we have instant access to everything, all the time, exclusivity has become a private affair.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin currently host the most coveted event of the year: Google Camp. It’s invite-only, and last year it was held in Sicily and comprised luminaries such as Malala Yousafzai, Pharrell Williams, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel and Diane von Furstenberg. It was only an indiscreet post on Karlie Kloss’s Instagram feed (well, it was her 24th birthday) that gave the game away — she was there with her techpreneur boyfriend, Joshua Kushner, founder and managing partner of the investment firm Thrive Capital and brother-in-law to Ivanka Trump.

Then there’s MaiTai, the kitesurfing festival that roves around the world in locations as far afield as the Dominican Republican and Perth, Australia. Only 100 attendees are invited by the kitesurfing nut Bill Tai, who also happens to be a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. The net worth of his tight community is estimated at around $7bn (£5.6bn), according to Forbes. Twitter, among other ‘unicorns’, was famously birthed on Bill Tai’s waves.

But beaches aren’t mandatory for this new below-the-radar scene. One of the most thrilling events of the year is in London. Founders Forum is the network of start-ups that Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com, began 11 years ago. Back then it was just a bunch of ambitious Generation X kids trying out this relatively new thing called the internet, now it’s a hive of power and ideas. Over three days it pulls in the likes of Jimmy Wales, Arianna Huffington, Sean Parker and Peter Gabriel. For its 10th birthday party, former American ambassador Matthew Barzun welcomed everyone into his throbbing Regent’s Park fun palace, Winfield House, and laid on a feast. Last year the numbers had certainly swelled, but the crowd was no less exclusive — at any one point you could find yourself discussing the finer points of virtual-reality hardware with artist Jonathan Yeo, while Natalia ‘Supernova’ Vodianova explained her new charity platform.

And then in December Imran Amed, founder and editor-in-chief of increasingly influential The Business of Fashion, hosted Voices, an exclusive gathering for just a handful of insiders at Soho Farmhouse. Fashionistas not in the inner circle were left gnashing their teeth. ‘It’s just a reflection of how a huge amount of power is held in the tiniest number of hands,’ said one grimly. ‘Really, there probably are only 100 people who make the world go round.’ While a Peruvian feast one night honoured Mario Testino, the aim, says Amed, was to bring wider global issues into the fashion arena. So Will.i.am, Joan Smalls and John Galliano mixed with leaders from Quilliam, the counter-extremism think tank. And to complete the piquancy of the mix, Amed plucked 10 rising talents from obscurity — and paired them with power-brokers such as Dame Natalie Massenet for the three-day duration.

The intriguing thing about all these gatherings? There’s barely a post on social media. It’s a reflection of how, increasingly, the best things are now happening offline. Posing while on board someone’s private yacht is just a bit, well, naff. And where Gisele used to strut her stuff in a crystal bikini for Facebook, Myleene Klass treads those boards now. Glamour has gone private. It’s low-key (all those beach conferences are conducted in flipflops and T-shirts), and casual. The truly powerful people just don’t need to prove it.

Indeed, if you ignore the power behind some of these names, what they are actually doing is creating communities — communities around the way people think and the way they want to innovate, which is exactly how rave evolved. It’s no coincidence that many of today’s tech titans and captains of industry hail from Generation X — the generation that graduated in the early days of rave, a world before digital, when secret gatherings in fields and warehouses took place entirely illegally and away from the gaze of the police and the public. Organised through word-of-mouth, pirate radio or simply at service-station meet-ups, these gatherings were all about joining up people with similar mindsets, forming communities of individuals who emerged intent on changing the way everyone said we should live our lives. Rave may have reached a dead end in festivals, but its principles haven’t gone away — they’ve just mutated.

An annual gathering that happens at an estate in Oxfordshire (so secret you are not allowed to know its name) comprises five days of camping in the summer, for a very select group of families and friends. It sets out to explore consciousness, the spiritual, plant medicine and shamanic leadership. People bring their skills and hold or attend workshops — from drumming sessions to tree knowledge, and it is, according to an insider, ‘really quite serious, but not at all pretentious. It’s smart, brainy people exploring different ways to live’. The only qualifier for entry is ‘no one who is too high-maintenance. Basically someone who doesn’t mind washing up for five days’.

There were no washing-up responsibilities in Greece. But after volunteering myself for PowerPoint karaoke (funnier than it sounds), finding a willing audience for my ceviche-making skills, and conducting a long and involved discussion about the sustainability of Twitter, I think I’ve got some better ideas about the future. But of course, I couldn’t possibly share those in public.

‘Now We Are Forty, Whatever Happened to Generation X?’ by Tiffanie Darke is published by Harper Collins, £16.99.