The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

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review by Bill Vanderbok <Vanderbok@socal.rr.com>

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
Thomas L. Friedman
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN – 13:978-0-374-29288-1

Thomas Friedman argues that the economic world is rapidly changing from a hierarchical to a vertical form of organization under the impact of abundant fiber optic cable laid all over the world during the Dot Com Bubble of 1990s.  It happened “While I Was Sleeping” (chapter one).  This claim of snoozing makes perfect sense given the dicey nature of his observations and understanding.  He says that he wrote the book without use of a library, that he gleaned information via Internet searches and interviews conducted in his role as an op-ed commentator for the New York Times.  I believe him.  The book is considered nonfiction yet does not contain a single footnote or URL in support of any fact statement or claim.  Backup is nearly always in the form of selective recall from conversations with nouveau riche captains of industry.

With that none too encouraging background, Friedman identifies “The Ten Forces That Flattened the World” (chapter two):

  1. “When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went UP.”  The fall of the Berlin Wall presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of Eastern Europe to economic integration with the West.  At the same time a critical mass of users coalesced around the IBM PC and Windows 3.0 while CompuServe and AOL became Internet service providers.  Not!  At that point in time the driving powers behind the PC were VisiCalc, dBase II and Word Star.  Windows did not take off until 3.1.  CompuServe and AOL were national bulletin board services (BBS), not at all the same thing as the Internet.
  2. “When Netscape Went Public.”  Friedman credits Netscape with popularizing the Internet.  No is credit given to Cisco Systems, whose routers powered the Internet’s architecture so that web servers could talk to each other; no credit is given to the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which created the Internet in the first place.  And, possibly the egregious omission of all, there is no mention of Tim Berners-Lee (except incidentally in an uninformative comment from one of his interviewees), who invented hypertext, HTTP, the first web browser, and the first web server!  There is no mention of Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center’s (PARC) invention of the mouse and the graphical user interface (GUI).  Taken together, these critical innovations made the creation of a Netscape-like product a matter of time.
  3. “Work Flow Software -- Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to Mine.”  From the section heading you might think Friedman was planning to talk about structured query language (SQL) but no, Friedman discusses various protocols to extend World Wide Web functionality, things like XML and SOAP.  He is apparently unaware of, or at least he never mentions, Ray Ozzie, the inventor of the work flow concept and its implementation in the form of Lotus Notes!  And SQL is never mention in the book.
  4. “Open Sourcing: Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities.”  Friedman is impressed by the ability of volunteers to create things like the Apache web server (actually an extension of Berners-Lee’s HTTPd server) and Linux, developed under the leadership of Linus Torvolds.  There is no discussion of the Open Source Movement, the free software movement or the GNU license, which protects these initiatives.  Folks central to the enabling of these collaborative communities, people like Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, go unmentioned!
  1. “In-forming.”  Here Friedman’s central observation is that Google is a great leveler of the information age.  Alta Vista and Northern Lights, among many others, were predecessors.  While Google is best of the current generation but it wasn’t first and didn’t create the industry.

10.“The Steroids.”  Friedman’s final leveler is the mobile phone, Blackberry and as yet unspecified telecommunications technologies.

Having discovered the Internet, Friedman shifts gears and talks about recent economic changes attendant upon WTO agreements.  These are categorized as:

  1. "Outsourceing.”  In a more competitive world manufacturing takes place where the costs are lowest.  Economic development in the Third World means that they become competitive with the West.  Wasn’t this the purpose of the WTO treaty?  Hasn’t that been the central premise of American foreign policy ever since Truman initiated economic development aid to Greece in 1947?  What Friedman is impressed by are the industries now capable of outsourcing due to technological change – the Internet.
  2. "Offshoring.”  See number 5 above.
  3. “Supply-Chaining.”  Friedman is impressed by the vertical integration of Wal-Mart.  It wasn’t that long ago that Sears impressed commentators with its vertical integration and Toyota was viewed as unstoppable because of its “just in time” manufacturing process necessitated by a lack of warehousing capability.  All of these are actually just extensions of “time and motion” studies first identified by Fredrick Taylor in 1911.
  4. “Insourcing.”  Friedman is impressed by the extension of services offered by UPS.  See Fredrick Taylor in number 7 above.

That’s just chapter 2.  In the next 300 pages Friedman tries to work out the implications of these changes for the world.  He is impressed by the technological accomplishments of India but overwhelmed by the size and manufacturing prowess of China.  Unfortunately, he fails to make much of several important developments in these two emerging giants.  First, in about 20 years India will overtake China as the most populous country in the world, yet, strangely he does not see India as a potential market for the companies of the world.  China, however, is a potential market.  Second, he acknowledges that China has adopted capitalism as the way to organize its economy yet ignores the obvious implications this has for regime legitimacy, one-party rule and long-term political stability.  Third, he proclaims the superiority of unfettered, liaise-faire economics of an idealized John Stewart Mill variety as the way for Third World countries to modernize and achieve the good life.  He finesses sluggish development in South America and Africa.  His recommendations for the USA boil down to more extensive New Deal regulation of social and economic life, something hardly consistent with his prescription for the Third World.  How he manages to reconcile these positions is hidden from the reader if not himself.  If only he had spent a bit of time thinking about the arguments advanced in this muddle of a book instead of rushing to put pen to paper – or, more likely, fingers to keyboard -- Tomas Friedman might have been totally immobilized by cognitive dissonance.

The target market of The World is Flat seems to be the shallow chic.  Those interested in a reader-friendly account of technology induced change would be better served spending a few hours with Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.