[Reader-list] Rescue the Rescue by Friedman

[TaraPrakash]

Hi all and Naeem.
Thanks for this wonderful post responding to Friedman's false claim that the 
world has become flat. Someone on a blog entry said that the world is flat 
as Friedman's head is flat.
I wrote a detailed critique of the book in the backdrop of the name change 
farce from Bangalor to Bangaluru. Both always existed, Friedman could see 
the former; Bangluru, the native Kanadigas  are feeling left out in the 
"flattened world" is ready to assert.
Let me see if I can fish the entire paper out for the list. Till then, here 
is an excerpt


The Bangalore he describes in his book has nothing intrinsically Bangalorish 
about it. In his narrative, he plays at the golf courses, attends meetings 
in five-star hotels and western-looking multi-storey office complexes. 
Friedman’s Bangalore is a debangalorized, deterritorialized, delocalized 
Bangalore, which can be found in any city of America. About this Bangalore, 
Friedman says in The World is Flat, “No, this definitely wasn't Kansas. It 
didn't even seem like India.” He further asks, “Was this the New World, the 
Old World, or the Next World?” (Friedman 13) The answer perhaps should be 
the third one. Whereas “the old world“, for Friedman, represents India, not 
developed and, due to poor infrastructure, not easily accessible to all, 
“the new world” represents very well developed American cities with very 
restricted access to outsiders. “The next world” perhaps can be said to 
exist anywhere, anytime. It is not constrained by any place or time, and 
Friedman thinks, is open to all. As self-styled discoverer of this new 
world, Friedman has absolute right to compare himself with Columbus, and he 
makes full use of the opportunity by doing so at the very outset of his 
scripture.

An avid student of history, even though one does not have to be so to know 
this, surely knows that explorers like Columbus, in order to motivate 
royalty and aristocrats to support their further voyages, did inflate their 
successes by means of concocting fabulous and misleading yarns about the 
discovered places, with one fundamental moral: the place promises 
prosperity, you must invest in it. Columbus did sell to some European 
aristocrats the idea of concentrating on the new world he discovered, for 
economic prosperity; Friedman seems to be doing the same in a different 
context. His motive is to give a favorable publicity to Bangalore, so that 
people from out of Bangalore do not mind shifting to this new world.

After reading his book (which in addition to other epithets, calls 
Bangalore, “the Silicon Valley of India”,), if one, ignorant about the real 
Silicon Valley, decides to move to Friedman’s Bangalore, as Indians from 
various parts of the country are doing for employment, one will find a very 
squalid picture of the real Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley, for him, 
will have dirty, narrow, polluted roads with lots of potholes, with traffic 
hardly moving on them. On the other hand if a resident of America visits the 
real Silicon Valley to have a feel of Bangalore, he will find Bangalore a 
sophisticated city with very well developed infrastructure. He won’t mind 
relocating to the city his boss wants him to, to manage the back office of 
his firm. Firms in the U.S. increasingly want their employees to relocate to 
Bangalore so that the management of those firms remains in “trained, 
trustworthy” hands. This trend is likely to intensify with the time. Such a 
“feel good factor” offered by Friedman helps to convince a reluctant 
American employee to move to Bangalore. Friedman is really so much like 
Columbus, when it comes to exaggeration about the newly discovered 
territory.

However, there is one fundamental difference between Columbus and Friedman 
as explorers. Whereas Columbus’s faulty calculations about the earth led him 
to a new scientific discovery that the earth is round, Friedman’s incorrect 
calculations about the new world led him to an incorrect economic discovery 
that the world is flat. This discovery is based more on faith than reason, 
therefore, requires a religious zeal to be believed.

But then there are heretics who challenge Friedman’s sermons on 
Globalization. Friedman, evidently, has not been successful in selling his 
theory of “the world is flat” to many nonbelievers. He has been criticized 
by various globalist writers. But more interestingly, he has earned a 
significant amount of bad publicity even in the blog literature. It is 
notable to read the following poem “On first looking into Friedman’s 
Flathead” by James D. Macdonald

Criticizing Friedman’s romantic ideas about Globalization, composed in the 
fashion of one of the romantic poets, John Keats. The reference, in the 
context of Friedman, to Don Juan and Jose Canseco, perhaps symbolizing 
villainy, mendacity and dishonesty undermining the flat, level playing 
field, are very remarkable. Here, interestingly, the poet is using for his 
heresy, the same medium, communication technology, which, in the first 
place, made the religion of Globalization possible, and the same as the 
auspex used for disseminating his prophesy of Globalization to the world.



Much have I travell’d in a chartered jet
And munched betimes upon a Cinnabon;
Upon my iPod listened to Don Juan
Which I downloaded from the wireless ‘Net’.
I did not understand the ‘Nineties lore
Of Windows systems and of Pizza Hut,
How one was opened and the other shut,
Till I heard Friedman speak in metaphor.
Then felt I like a steroid in a vein:
Jose Canseco on a level field,
Whose random thoughts of glory and of pain
Were like an ice-cream sundae all congealed.
The moral is, when put by words in train,
That which does not exist can’t be revealed.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Naeem Mohaiemen" <naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>
To: <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 4:04 AM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Rescue the Rescue by Friedman


>> 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.
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