It is precisely this affective excess which stains our responses to the book’s title, this sense of an aberration before such an averment that Thomas L. Friedman – three times Pulitzer Prize awardee journalist and the author of such international bestsellers like From Beirut to Jerusalem and The Lexus and the Olive Tree – capitalizes on. The book however is not all rhetoric; indeed far from it. This rhetoric is used as the hook by which to bait the reader, to mark their point of entry into a world of intergirded reality where the literal, the metaphoric and the factual emerge seamlessly, where the world is flat.

But what does this claim mean? The knot is elucidated by transforming the elusive adjective into the labouring participle, a static and finished attribute into a quality in the process of being achieved by human action and intelligence, by reading ‘the world is flat’ as ‘ the world is being flattened’. The puzzle then unfolds as: “The global playing field is being leveled… It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world – using computers, e-mail, fiber-optic networks, teleconferencing, and dynamic new software.”

This ‘flat world platform’ in imposing virtually no other condition of entry on its users than that they should be able to access it and have the knowledge necessary to navigate it, opens up an enormous range of possibilities for mankind. The singularity of this phenomenon is that whereas the previous eras of globalization had been driven by colonial or national trade and later by multinational corporations, the drive has now passed over into the hands of the individual user who can now engage with the world on their own, and even on their own terms.

It is not that goods have been supplanted by services or that manufacturing has been substituted by information, but that the changing technological context, wherein intellectual capital can be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and reintegrated from any where in the world much more easily, freely and efficiently than material capital, has enabled and even necessitated the subtle displacement by which knowledge now comes uppermost. This flattening, by providing information about everything to everybody, by doing away with any discrimination in availing of and publishing knowledge, creates the circumstances where demand automatically reaches its supply, where participation of itself tends to confer empowerment; not only the power to gain economically and thereby to improve one’s lot but over and above this the power of self-representation, the power to receive and disseminate recognition, the power to initiate and be involved in communities, all of which, literally, make real the idea of democracy.

Friedman charts this fascinating realization of human potential by ranging in a great depth of detail across what he identifies as "the ten forces that flattened the world". These include among others the coming down of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 (11/9 to use his sign-post), the making public and the standardization of the internet, the world-wide web and of the web browser, and the evolution of various work processes like uploading, outsourcing, off-shoring, supply chaining etc. These sections are a high point in the book, presenting case studies and an invaluable wealth of information spanning the current state of technological advancement and trade links in and between Western Europe, India, the United States, China, Japan, and the Middle East, to name a few. It is difficult to meticulously present such an extensive set of facts in all their minutiae and to simultaneously preserve the narrative interest: Friedman succeeds brilliantly.

He next undertakes to set out carefully the parameters which made possible what he calls "the triple convergence" – an inflationary self reinforcing loop which when once set in motion causes all such flattening factors to converge and work in conjunction, breeding novel mind sets, habits and skills among individuals and businesses to optimize the returns from these burgeoning conditions and in the process ensuring that more and more groups of people could and would join in the new flat world to connect, compete and collaborate more directly, more cheaply, more efficiently and more powerfully than ever before.

In propounding and championing such a convergence, Friedman firmly stands on the side of traditional ideals associated with the European Enlightenment, an ethos which privileges expansionist commerce and expansive science - both technological and political; an ideational structure which is securely defined by the assumption that the whole of humankind, indeed each individual, must ultimately seek economic and rational profit. It is this fundamental premise, which permits and even makes obligatory the putative identity and translatability of such disparate notions as opportunity, competition, collaboration, progress, pluralism, tolerance, exchange, (in-) dependence and validation, with each other. This set of inter-animating values in turn founds a world-view, which accepts that when the forces of world trade can be so fine tuned as to acknowledge and deal with demand at the level of its specific individual instances, the result must be summarily positive for all concerned. It is such a vision of essential optimism, of liberty and growth, of the self (re-) generatibility of human innovation, of a human selfishness which admits that the pleasure of the self must take into account the well-being of the neighbour, in a word, a vision of enlightened self-fulfilment that permeates and guides this work.

The idea of the flat world thus represents the scenario of a perfected and evened globe, where all the points on the inhabited surface are equidistant from the centre and are therefore at the same starting potential, with advantage accruing to none merely by dint of their position. This makes excellence and well-being a direct correlate of effort and intellection and not an accidental fall out of discriminatory circumstance.

If the book had stopped here, with this message of a flat and sunny earth where top-down hierarchies are being challenged from below into becoming more horizontal and egalitarian, where the operative principles are less ‘command and control’ and more ‘connect and collaborate’, it would have been a good book, but hardly intriguing enough to make it the ‘best selling non-fiction book in the world today’. To Friedman’s credit, he does not stop with the convincing reclamation of a past conceptual figuration of the world made relevant once again by changing human reality but takes his argument and his model to their logical and factual utterness, to the dark obverse beyond the sun and the light. The refinement and rehabilitation of a past security thus proceeds along with the exhumation of fears and doubts long interred: What would happen if we ventured too far out and fell off the edge of the flat earth? What would our state be if we somehow were to be consigned to the other side, the nether world of demons and of night? What could we do if these demons were to infiltrate our world through some infernal fissure?

It is at this stage, then, that Friedman poses the most challenging and vital questions in the book:
“Given that the leveling of the playing field makes the same resources available to both the honest businessman and the terrorist, how do we ensure that the forces of 11/9 - that brought down the Berlin Wall, that stand for constructive and peaceful human achievement – are able to operate without the disruptive intervention of the forces of 9/11- the forces of devastation that brought down the Twin Towers? How do we ensure that the leveling set in play would aim to raise everyone up to the same stature and not raze everything down to the same dejection?”

Again, granted that flat world trade thrives on the principle of the greatest good accruing to the greatest number through the most efficient mediation and resolution of demand and supply simultaneously on a global and on an individual scale, what does one do if one is identified in one’s present situation as being not efficient enough? How is one to guard against being marked off as redundant if one’s value-add is not considered optimal? Is it acceptable that this mechanism, which works by reducing friction in the domain of trade, would produce in its turn a substantial quantity of human friction, tension and attrition? Is this mechanism, then, a voracious and compelling automatism, another Frankenstein’s monster?

And to give a final example: if we accept that the difference between the sum of our hopes and our fears, between dreams and nostalgia, between tolerance and hatred is a useful index to mark out the adaptive and the progressive from the orthodox and the stagnating; and further that in a world where the power to create one’s virtual content is easily available, what is more important than the content itself is the imagination that creates the content, we are faced with the ultimate question – what determines human identity? What moulds the shaping of the human imagination? What necessitates that the joys of creation and morality are more at home in the human than those of destruction and death dealing? Is all friction, then, wasteful, and is no alterity required for idealism or even selfhood?

Such and many more disturbing questions are raised, honestly grappled with and in most cases effectively answered. The governing design is human through and through - the harmonious balance between the maximization of benefit and the minimization of casualty before a chain of causality set in place by human desire and striving.

Early on in the book Friedman asserts that the great trial of our times will be to identify and accommodate ourselves to all these cha[lle]nges so that they do not overwhelm us or leave us behind, and that the ambition of this book is to offer a framework for how to think about this task and mange it to our advantage. He fulfils this ambition and more. The book is simply a must-read for anybody who wants to stay ahead, stay abreast or even just stay on with satisfaction and dignity in a world, which does not permit the option of opting out of it.

	Thomas Friedman is one of the world's most respected and influential journalists, renowned for his expertise on international affairs and economic issues. Educated in Boston, Jerusalem, Cairo and Oxford, he joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1981. Since then he has won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work there and has traveled all over the globe. Friedman is also the author of the international best-selling books, From Beirut to Jerusalem (the winner of the US National Book Award, now used as a basic textbook on the Middle East in many schools and universities), The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his first acclaimed book on globalization, and Longitudes and Attitudes, a
collection of reportage and reflections following 11 September 2001. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family.

Review by Samya Seth
Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee