That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [35]
If Flat World 1.0 was about producing goods and services on this new global platform, Flat World 2.0 is about all that—but also about generating and sharing ideas on this platform. As Craig Mundie, Chief Strategy and Research Officer for Microsoft, put it to us, what the PC plus the Internet plus the search engine did for Web pages “was enable anyone with connectivity to find anything that interests them,” and what the PC and smartphone plus the Internet plus Facebook is doing “is enabling anyone to find anyone” who interests them—or at least any of the 500 million people already using social networks. They can find anyone who shares their special interest in knitting, Ethiopian cooking, the New York Yankees, kids with Down syndrome, cancer research, launching a jihad against America, or toppling the government in Egypt, Tunisia, or Syria.
When so many people can find anything and anyone and more easily than ever, and can stay in touch more easily than ever to collaborate to make products, encyclopedias, or revolutions, you are into Flat World 2.0—a hyper-connected world. And that has profound implications.
“The people now have not only their own information access system to understand what is going on better inside their own countries or abroad, not only to discuss that with one another, but also the command-and-control mechanism to organize themselves to do something about it,” adds Mundie. “In the past, only governments and armies had these kinds of high-scale command-and-control systems. Now the people do. And the more these tools penetrate at great volumes, the more the price of making and using them goes down, then the more they penetrate and diffuse farther. And the more they diffuse the more impossible it becomes to control anything from the center.” The more impossible it also becomes to keep anything “local” anymore. Everything now flows instantly from the most remote corners of any country onto this global platform where it gets shared.
One big indication of this move from Flat World 1.0 to 2.0 can be found in the uprisings across the Arab world in 2011. Flat World 1.0 connected Detroit and Damascus. Flat World 2.0, though, connected Detroit, Damascus, and Dara’a. Where is Dara’a? It is a small, dusty town on the Syrian border with Jordan where the revolution in Syria began and from which a stream of pictures, video, and words about what was happening inside Syria have been pumped out to the world. The people of Dara’a had so many cell phones and wireless connections that the Syrian regime could not suppress information about its own brutality. Think about it: the Syrian regime refused to permit any foreign TV networks into the country—no CNN, no BBC—so it thought that no one outside Syria would know of its brutal crackdown. Out of nowhere, someone inside or outside Syria created a website called “Sham News Network” or SNN, where Syrians in Dara’a and then elsewhere began posting their cell-phone videos of the regime killing its own people. They did the same on YouTube. Suddenly, big global networks like al-Jazeera and CNN were running video and crediting SNN—a site that probably cost only a few hundred dollars to create and operate and that no one knows who runs. The people were telling their own story. In the old days, the Syrian government would have just shut down a TV or radio station broadcasting opinions it did not like. But today the Syrian regime can no more afford to shut down its cell-phone network than it can afford to shut down its electricity grid.
It is for all of these reasons that we would argue that Flat Worlds 1.0 and 2.0 together constitute the most profound inflection point for communication, innovation, and commerce since the Gutenberg printing press. In a relatively short time, virtually everyone will have both the tools and the networks to participate in this hyper-connected world. The effects of the printing