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Where Were You When You Realized the World Is Flat? (Or Have You?)
A Conversation with Thomas L. Friedman
By Tom NissleyI believe the flattening of the world that I wrote about is just at the beginning. It will take many years to play out, but as it does it is going to change EVERYTHING–from economics to politics to technology. As Carly Fiorina put it, everything we called the “IT revolution” these past 20 years was just the warm-up act. It was just the sharpening and distribution of the tools of horizontal collaboration. Now you are going to see the real IT revolution. So fasten your seatbelt and put your seatback and tray table into a fixed, upright position, because the world is flat!
When the world is flat, all these global institutions are really exposed to any kind of global or Internet campaign that affects their image or brand. It actually gives individuals a lot more power (which sometimes can also be abused). But there is no question that if a critical mass of consumers got together and said we are only going to shop at big box discount stores that cover all their employees with health care, and we are prepared to pay five cents more per product on average, we could get a lot more Americans covered.
The way to make engineering cool again is through a concept I call “Geo-Greenism.” As I say in the book, the moon shot for our generation, and the Sputnik wake-up call, are both energy independence. We need to become energy independent or at least aspire to that. We need the president to use his bully pulpit to get every young American excited about going into science to make our country energy independent, which would be great for our geopolitics and great for our environment. Whenever I write about this in my New York Times column, I get lots of email, often from young people, who want to be enlisted. In China, Bill Gates is a Britney Spears–they scalp tickets to hear him speak. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. That’s the problem. I would have loved to have been an innovator. I think Steve Jobs, Meg Whitman, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Marc Andreessen are very cool–but, hey, I’m 51 and I still listen to Simon and Garfunkel.