What does the flat world mean?
08/12/2009 21:26
Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat talk at MIT, May 16, 2005
This is an interesting talk, given by an evangelist of globalism (and foreign affairs writer for the New York Times), to an audience of MIT true believers. The talk is mostly about the “incredible new forms of collaboration” available across vast distances, as a result of the proliferation of the fiber-optic backbone during the dot-com boom.
That’s true, of course. The video itself, offered as part of MIT’s OpenCourseWare portal, which is a free portal of over 600 MIT video lectures. It’s like TED, and other free portals that offer a more selective menu of videos than YouTube. And it’s cool (of course, so’s YouTube). But (like George Gilder, Ray Kurzweil, and lots of other tech prophets) Friedman seems to see only the coolness, and none of the weirdness technology brings.
Friedman describes (beginning about 14:55) a pilot program begun by MacDonalds around Washington DC, “where if you go up to the drive-in window…you’re not actually speaking to that MacDonalds. You’re speaking now to a MacDonalds call center in Colorado Springs, that’s taking down your order, and taking your picture, and then zapping your picture and your order electronically back to that MacDonalds, where your picture and order are matched up when you drive up to the drive-in window. So the world is being flattened,” Friedman goes on to explain, without reflecting anymore on the meaning of what he just described. But it deserves reflection, before we rush to embrace Friedman’s thesis that “flattening” is the next great event in the inevitable evolution of technological culture.
Why is it better to have people in suburban Colorado Springs taking your MacDonalds order? What’s the ratio of white to black customers at these “pilot” locations? What’s the ratio of white to black call center operators in Colorado Springs? What’s the average educational level of MacDonalds employees in Washington? What’s MacDonalds’ contribution to the educational infrastructure in Washington?
Seems like there are a lot of unacknowledged assumptions lurking beneath Friedman’s flat earth. Corporations are free (and should be free, it seems) to evade any responsibility for the communities in which they do business. Used to be, corporations were viewed as a “fictional persons” – Friedman seems to have upgraded them to sovereign nations.
Walmart, Friedman announces, would be China’s 8th largest trading partner, if it was a nation (29:30). That puts Walmart “ahead of Canada and Australia” in terms of trade volume with China. But what does that mean? “Walmart’s the biggest company in America --- and they don’t make anything.” Dang! So, are we being invited to think about interacting with Walmart, as if it was a sovereign state? Robert Reich said (or implied) something similar in Supercapitalism. In both Reich’s and Friedman’s discussions, we seem to be invited to step away from any idea of having a one-on-one relationship with anything so immense and complex. After all, little people like us don’t manage our own relationships with smaller entities – like Canada or Australia. So how could we expect to do so, with Walmart?
There are other interesting stories, like the one where HP tries to “do business” with people in rural India who have no money (about 55:00). Again, I’m not sure the message he sees in these examples is the only possible one. Or the most important. Connect the dots for me, Tom. How are micro-payments going to make HP’s business model work in places where people make a dollar a day, and have no discretionary income? Another example at about 1:12: EBay is “the closest thing to a virtual country there is: $100 billion economy, 38 million people…” But that’s where the analogy falls flat. What else about EBay is like a country? They provide no services to “their people” beyond facilitating purchases and sales. Is that all countries do in Friedman’s mind?
I think it’d be interesting to look at Friedman’s audience and fan-base, and try to understand whose agenda he’s pushing. He brings up a lot of interesting technological change, but the direction he takes this discussion seems like an attempt to evade an awful lot of hard questions about the implications of a flat world. Maybe there’s more of that serious stuff in the book (which I downloaded from Audible on 4-26-2005, and haven’t finished listening to yet)…
