In Tokyo I met a colleague for dinner and she had mentioned that Friedman was around and she had inquired casually if he would be interested in speaking at her campus. He dismissed her saying her university couldn't afford to pay his fees.
Incidentally, there is a special issue taking Friedman's flatness to task in the Cambridge Jour of Regions, Economics and Society. I had planned to write such an essay but someone else beat me to it, although I would have something something quite different, more empirical rather than theoretical. Anthony On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 11:01 PM, ravi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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/ > > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Anthony P. D'Costa Professor of Indian Studies Asia Research Centre Copenhagen Business School Porcelænshaven 24, 3 DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark Email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Ph: +45 3815 2572 Fax: +45 3815 2500 http://uk.cbs.dk/arc www.cbs.dk/india xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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