Thomas Friedman is right that in many ways the world has become flatter; but in others it has grown spikier.Make what you will of this use of this recycling of Friedman's infinitely Procrustean figure of speech, especially as contrasted with what is later referred to by Mohammed El-Erian as a "global world," a delightful little tautology that I would be inclined to ignore and chalk up to the fact that English isn't El-Erian's first language were it not for the fact that Friendman himself defines "a flat world" as "a global, web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work, irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly, language." I am aware that non-Euclidian geometries exist, and some of them are very strange, but this is still a little much, don't you think?
-Chrystia Freeland in The Atlantic
The article notes in the banally plaintive language that is business journalisms native speech that "In today’s hypercompetitive global environment, we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever." Indeed, the statement is so banal, such an infinitely repeated sentiment, that it is easy to overlook just why it is complete and total nonsense. Consider its context, though, and it starts to smell distinctly like the south end of an upset stomach. Now more than ever! Except, the very thesis of the article is that today's "meritocratic" "super-elite" are a phenomena unique to the Now; even in the eighties, we learn, not yet three decades past, these übermenschen did not exist. And yet, at least in the English with which I am familiar, the construction "more than ever" is comparative; here, it distinctly implies a past in which "our" present need existed, only, less so. But in the past, they didn't exist. Hum, well, I guess any need is greater than no need; or is it that their past nonexistence implies that we needed them to appear? Well, uh, what?
Let's not get ourselves too tangled, though. In truth, we "need" the "super-elite" neither more nor less than we ever did; all multiples of zero are still zero. At the same time, the insistence here that the transcendence of national borders makes the new elite, well, new, is pretty funny and about as ahistorical as it gets, especially here in the you'll-pardon-the-expression-West. Ms. Freeland, meet European history.
22 comments:
Non-Euclidian geometries, First Contact, and El-Aurians, all in one post? Following after Martian Time-Slip and Starship Troopers references in recent ones?
Nerd.
The creative, dynamic super-elite are different from you and me.
They have more money.
~
The book's genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase, the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:
As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."
What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!
This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting, ironically, as it were, with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.
Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.
"Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.
To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman "had Lufthansa business class." When he reaches India -Bangalore to be specific - he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: "Gigabites of Taste." Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: "No, this definitely wasn't Kansas."
After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.
What would we ever do if we didn't have the aristocracy to protect us from ourselves? Turn all commie or something?
Rana, I imagine Friedman as a Briton of two centuries ago. "My goodness, they have tea in India! And whalebone corsets!" Yeah, and the Germans built beer halls in China. What's new is that there's no imperial spirit in empire today. At least the bourgeoisie and capitalists of Meiji Japan or Victorian England had panache.
Tom Friedman is the dumbest fucking thing on the face of the earth.
Ms. Freeland, meet European history.
And de Talleyrand, who personified double-dealing.
The modern allegiance to the nation-state is a 19th century invention, of the same stripe as the folk-mythological national founding myths.
la Rana, both "flat" and "level" are words with exact physical meanings. A surface is "flat" if all points (x, y, z) on the surface satisfy an equation of the form ax + by + cz + d = 0. "Level" means perpendicular to the acceleration due to gravity.
Some flat surfaces are also level. Others are not.
Just as the moon's gravitational field has obscured our warp signature (what?), you've won me over with the Loltrek graphic. Well played, sir.
apparently Mister Friedman has never peeled an orange before. or taken a geometry class.
So is LaRana really Matt Taibbi?
Ethan,
And "Culture Minds" a few posts back, but nerditry? Never. Ioz's swingin', full-spectrum-cloaked HQ is in geosynch high above our tri-river'd corner of Flatland, FYI.
Thanks for the link, I assumed everyone had seen that before. The heelarious point that Taibbi makes is that the entire concept - the world being flat as a metaphor for interconnectedness - is exactly fucking backward. We are more interconnected on a globe. I've read that piece 50 times, but the fact the Friedman's most famous metaphor is completely fucked never fails to get a laugh out of me. He is literally famous for saying something that is easily disprovable and has been known to be false for centuries. Its perfect.
Thank you IOZ for your exquisite phraseology. I now have a disturbing mental image of someone with his head stuck up "the south end of an upset stomach".
Let's not get ourselves too tangled.
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"a global, web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work, irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly, language."
oh jeeezis. ring ring ring "hello"?
"Tom freidman, its the assistant vice president for synergizing strategies and streamling concepts, from 1985,your late for the meeting"
on a positive note, even "The Atlantic" thought it prudent to include a little penultimate warning about risking "social peace".
So Chrystia Freeland is what? Christopher Lasch with the frown turned upside down?
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