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Falling flat: Thomas Friedman's recycled view of globalization
Washington Monthly, May, 2005 by Kevin Drum
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of The Twenty-First Century By Thomas Friedman Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $27.50
Critics have accused Tom Friedman before of being willfully obtuse, but give him this much credit: He does not actually believe that the world is topographically flat. Friedman lives his literary life in a world of endless metaphor, and in his latest book he uses "flat" in the sense of "level playing field." His thesis is that a broad set of related trends have converged in the past decade, and this convergence allows almost anyone to do almost anything these days. Indians in Bangalore can write software as well as Americans in Baltimore; small companies can do the same things big ones can; freelancers can compete with IBM, and so forth.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. Despite the fact that Friedman claims to have discovered many of these trends only recently (about which more later), The World is Flat is really a sequel: It's The Lexus and the Olive Tree on steroids. A friend of mine once referred to Lexus as "globalization porn," and World is written in the same mold. It's Friedman as evangelist to the masses, bringing an almost breath less sense of urgency and mission to his calling.
The core of the book is a long chapter about "ten flatteners," 10 trends that he thinks are changing the world. It's an odd grouping, though, and it's hard to tell if some of his flatteners are there because he really believes in them or merely because he thought his list needed 10 entries.
His first two flatteners, for example, are the end of communism and the rise of the Internet, exemplified respectively by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the initial public offering of Netscape stock in 1995.
Fair enough. Those really are big trends with big consequences, and a serious popular analysis of them would be a welcome one. But then in the next breath, he lists the open source movement as another major global flattener--something that he presumably believes is roughly on the same level as his first two.
The problem is that this doesn't make sense. "Open source" is a way of developing software. Instead of being developed by large corporations that keep their underlying source code proprietary and secret, open source software is developed by loose teams of engineers who donate their time gratis. The resulting product is distributed freely over the Internet and the source code is openly available to anyone who wants to use it. Linux is the best known example. The Firefox browser is another.
But open source is something of a cult movement, born from the same roots as the "information wants to be free" Internet utopians--and while open source has had several successes in the past and will likely have more in the future, even its most ardent fans would be hard-pressed to keep a straight face while putting it on the same list that includes the century-long ideological battle between capitalism and communism.
This is what makes it hard to take Friedman seriously. Sure, his list includes plenty of genuinely important trends. The fall of communism and the rise of the Web are important, and so are the growing roles of China, India, and wireless communication.
But open source isn't even in the same league. Neither is Wal-Mart's supply-chain management or the fact that UPS has branched out into businesses beyond shipping packages.
What's worse, Friedman as much as admits that he was unaware of many of these things until a few months before he began writing the book. About the core convergence of trends that's the cornerstone of his book, he says, "Until I visited India in early 2004, I too was largely ignorant of it, although I was picking up a few hints that something was brewing."
This lends his venture a sense of shallowness and ahistoricity that it never overcomes. Because he doesn't have a deep understanding of the trends he's talking about (most are illustrated by a single big example, like Google or Wal-Mart), he seemingly doesn't realize that a similar list could have been written in pretty much any decade of the 20th century. His point about globalization could have been made 40 years ago by substituting Japan for China, Telstar for wireless communication, and mainframe computers for PCs.
The book also suffers from one of the worst features of The Lexus and the Olive Tree: its naive dotcom cheerleading. Depending on how you count, seven of his 10 flatteners are tech trends, and although he takes care in World to warn his readers that the success of globalization doesn't depend on the success of the dotcom revolution, he undermines that warning by spending almost the entire book evangelizing technology. He reprints entire PR messages from eager CEOs without any apparent sense that of course these guys think their companies are doing world--shaking things. I spent the decade of the 90s as a marketing executive at a software company, and these kinds of breathless paeans are sadly familiar to me.
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