[Reader-list] Rescue the Rescue by Friedman

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

> 1. Rescue the Rescue by Friedman (NY Times) (TaraPrakash)
...
> The world really is flat.

Good old Thomas Friedman, never ever miss the chance to plug your book!

For shits & giggles, here's some excerpts from Matt Taibbi's skewering
of Mr. simple_analysis.  From a 2005 review called "Flathead: The
peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman" (NY Press, 4/20/05)

:-)

"On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most
boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities
could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would
appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the
kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought
in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of
his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five
minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet
to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes
the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He
actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.)"

...


"In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for
people like the president and the country's most important columnist.
You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the
process ends when you make the case. Things are true because you say
they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you
say it. In politics, this allows America to invade a castrated Iraq in
self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is now probing the
outer limits of this trick's potential, and it's absolutely perfect, a
stroke of genius, that he's choosing to argue that the world is flat.
The only thing that would have been better would be if he had chosen
to argue that the moon was made of cheese.

And that's basically what he's doing here. The internet is speeding up
business communications, and global labor markets are more fluid than
ever. Therefore, the moon is made of cheese. That is the rhetorical
gist of The World Is Flat. It's brilliant. Only an America-hater could
fail to appreciate it."

...etc etc you get the idea, here's more from Taibbi's review

"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."

...

"Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on
top of the other, so that by the end—and I'm not joking here—we are
meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae
that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into
his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with
a mostly good special sauce."

...


"According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your
offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from
eating with lions to devouring with them. Although these 10 flatteners
existed already by the time Friedman wrote The Lexus and the Olive
Tree—a period of time referred to in the book as Globalization 2.0,
with Globalization 1.0 beginning with Columbus—they did not come
together to bring about Globalization 3.0, the flat world, until the
10 flatteners had, with the help of the steroids, gone through their
"Triple Convergence." The first convergence is the merging of software
and hardware to the degree that makes, say, the Konica Minolta Bizhub
(the product featured in Friedman's favorite television commercial)
possible. The second convergence came when new technologies combined
with new ways of doing business. The third convergence came when the
people of certain low-wage industrial countries—India, Russia, China,
among others—walked onto the playing field. Thanks to steroids,
incidentally, they occasionally are "not just walking" but "jogging
and even sprinting" onto the playing field.