In the old days, a reporter, columnist or statesman could get away with thinking of his "market" as City Hall, or the Statehouse, or the White House, or the Pentagon, or the Treasury Department, or the State Department. But the relevant market today is the planet Earth and the global integration of technology, finance, trade and information in a way that is influencing wages, interest rates, living standards, culture, job opportunities, wars and weather patterns all over the world. It is not that the system of globalization explains everything happening in the world today. It is simply that to the extent that one system is influencing more people in more ways at the same time, it is globalization.
-- Thomas Friedman
Conflicts between Serbs and Muslims, Jews and Palestinians, Armenians and Azeris over who owns which olive tree are so venomous precisely because they are about who will be at home and anchored in a local world and who will not be. Their underlying logic is: I must control this olive tree, because if the other controls it, not only will I be economically and politically under his thumb, but my whole sense of home will be lost. I'll never be able to take my shoes off and relax. Few things are more enraging to people than to have their identity or their sense of home stripped away. They will die for it, kill for it, sing for it, write poetry for it and novelize about it. Because without a sense of home and belonging, life becomes barren and rootless. And life as a tumbleweed is no life at all.
-- Thomas Friedman
Of course, for millions of people in developing countries, the quest for material improvement still involves walking to a well, subsisting on a dollar a day, plowing a field barefoot behind an ox or gathering wood and carrying it on their heads for five miles. These people still upload for a living, not download. But for millions of others in developed countries, this quest for material betterment and modernization is increasingly conducted in Nike shoes, shopping in integrated markets and using the new network technologies. The point is that while different people have different access to the new markets and technologies that characterize the globalization system, and derive highly unequal benefits from them, this doesn't change the fact that these markets and technologies are the defining economic tools of the day and everyone is either directly or indirectly affected by them.
-- Thomas Friedman
Put all of this democratization of information together and what it means is that the days when government could isolate their people from understanding what life was beyond their borders or even beyond their village are over. Life outside can't be trashed and made to look worse than it is. And life inside can't be propagandized and made to look better than it is. Thanks to the democratization of information, we all increasingly know how each other lives - no matter how isolated you think a country might be. The minute you think you have devised a new, higher, thicker wall to hide behind, you discover that technology has found a way to lower it. And the minute you think you have drawn a new line in the sand to protect you, technology finds a way to erase it. Raul Valdes Vivo, the rector of the Cuban Communist Party's Nico Lopez school for advanced studies outside of Havana, put it so well in an interview with National Geographic (June 1999). He was asked about the difficulties Castro's Cuba faced in maintaing socialist principles, even as it was increasingly being forced to adopt capitalist means to survive. "Cuba is no longer an island," he mused. "There are no islands anymore. There is only one world."
-- Thomas Friedman
Microchip Immune Deficiency Syndrome is the defining political disease of the globalization era.
-- Thomas Friedman
MIDS [Microprocessor Immune Deficiency Syndrome]: A disease that can afflict any bloated, overweight, sclerotic system in the post-Cold War era. MIDS is usually contracted by countries and companies that fail to innoculate themselves against changes brought about by the microchip, and the democratizations of technology, finance and information - which created a much faster, more open and more complex marketplace, with a whole new set of efficiencies. The symptoms of MIDS appear when a country or company exhibits a consistent inability to increase productivity, wages, living standards, knowledge use and competitiveness, and becomes too slow to respond to the challenges of the Fast World. Countries and companies with MIDS tend to be those run on Cold War corporate models - where one or few people at the top hold all the information and make all the decisions, and all the people in the middle and the bottom simply carry out those decisions, using only the information they need to know to do their jobs. The only known cure for countries and companies with MIDS is 'the fourth democratization.' This is the democratization of decision-making and information flows, and the deconcentration of power, in ways that allow more people in a country or company to share knowledge, experiment and innovate faster. This enables them to keep up with a marketplace in which consumers are constantly demanding cheaper products and services tailored specifically for them. MIDS can be fatal to those companies and countries that do not get appropriate treatment in time.
-- Thomas Friedman
Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist now teaching at Harvard, once remarked to me that "the Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside East Germany - it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future. We could not think globally about the world when the Berlin Wall was there. We could not think about the world as a whole." There is a lovely story in Sanskrit, Sen added, about a frog that is born in a well and stays in the well and lives its entire life in the well. "It has a worldview that consists of the well," he said. "That was what the world was like for many people on the planet before the fall of the wall. When it fell, it was like the frog in the well was suddenly able to communicate with frogs in all the other wells... If I celebrate the fall of the wall, it is because I am convinced of how much we can learn from each other. Most knowledge is learning from the other across the border."
-- Thomas Friedman
...for a complex software platform to be sustainable - that is, to be constantly freshened, debugged, and improved - there has to be an economy around it. Talented open-source community software developers have only so much time, inclination, energy and resources to put into developing code for free. At some point, the work won't go on at the highest level if there isn't some economic incentive for someone in the community.
-- Thomas Friedman
There is an iron law in U.S. politics: The party that most quickly absorbs and adopts the latest technology, dominates politics. FDR dominated the radio and fireside chat, JFK televised debates. Republicans talk radio, and Karl Rove direct mail and computerized databases. The next technological political model will revolve around the power of community and individual uploading. In this model, the public officeholder will no longer be the one who talks to the many or tries to listen to the many. Rather, he or she will become a hub of connectivity for the many to work with the many, creating networks of public advocates to identify problems, solve problems, and get behind candidates who get it.
-- Thomas Friedman
I like Wikipedia. I have used it in writing this book. But I use it with the knowledge that the community is not always right, the network doesn't always self-correct - certainly not as fast as its errors can get spread. It is not an accident that IBM today has a senior staffer who polices Wikipedia's references to IBM and makes sure everything that gets in there is correct. More young people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in coming years than from IBM itself.
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