Falling flat: Thomas Friedman's recycled view of globalization.

• Author: Drum, Kevin
• Position: Book by Thomas Friedman Farrar - Book Review

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of The Twenty-First Century By Thomas Friedman Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $27.50

Critics have accused Tom Friedman before of being willfully obtuse, but give him this much credit: He does not actually believe that the world is topographically flat. Friedman lives his literary life in a world of endless metaphor, and in his latest book he uses "flat" in the sense of "level playing field." His thesis is that a broad set of related trends have converged in the past decade, and this convergence allows almost anyone to do almost anything these days. Indians in Bangalore can write software as well as Americans in Baltimore; small companies can do the same things big ones can; freelancers can compete with IBM, and so forth.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. Despite the fact that Friedman claims to have discovered many of these trends only recently (about which more later), The World is Flat is really a sequel: It's The Lexus and the Olive Tree on steroids. A friend of mine once referred to Lexus as "globalization porn," and World is written in the same mold. It's Friedman as evangelist to the masses, bringing an almost breath less sense of urgency and mission to his calling.

The core of the book is a long chapter about "ten flatteners," 10 trends that he thinks are changing the world. It's an odd grouping, though, and it's hard to tell if some of his flatteners are there because he really believes in them or merely because he thought his list needed 10 entries.

His first two flatteners, for example, are the end of communism and the rise of the Internet, exemplified respectively by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the initial public offering of Netscape stock in 1995.

Fair enough. Those really are big trends with big consequences, and a serious popular analysis of them would be a welcome one. But then in the next breath, he lists the open source movement as another major global flattener--something that he presumably believes is roughly on the same level as his first two.

The problem is that this doesn't make sense. "Open source" is a way of developing software. Instead of being developed by large corporations that keep their underlying source code proprietary and secret, open source software is developed by loose teams of engineers who donate their time gratis. The resulting product is distributed freely over the Internet and the source code is openly available to anyone who wants to use it...