On Nov 14, 2008, at 4:29 PM, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
oh, man, this just makes me miss all those great friedman rants from
matt taibbi. his gutting of "the world is flat" (or whatever) was
positively heart-warming.
For sure!
http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
[...]
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.) That's the whole plot right there.
If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further,
because that's all there is.
It's impossible to divorce The World Is Flat from its rhetorical
approach. It's not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called "the
most important columnist in America today." That it's Friedman's own
colleague at the New York Times (Walter Russell Mead) calling him
this, on the back of Friedman's own book, is immaterial. Friedman is
an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of
emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he's in the reality-making
business. 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.
Start with the title.
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.
[...]
--ravi
--
Support something better than yourself ;-)
PeTA => http://peta.org/
Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/
If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/
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