The World Is Flat: Chapter 13–Conclusion

Many people around the world argued that unless we took serious steps to strengthen cultures—and protect the environment—the juggernaut of globalization as Americanization could, in just a few decades, wipe out the cultural, ecological, and zoological diversity that took millions of years of human, plant, and animal evolution to produce.

In an interview with Felix Soh of The Straits Times of Singapore (September 11, 2005), Banerjee explained that he coined the term to describe the phenomenon that allows diaspora communities around the world to use today’s global media networks to cling to their local mores, news, traditions, and friends—no matter where they are living.

To listen to some of the critics, though, you would think that globalization was only about the spread of crass capitalism, global brands, fast food, and consumer values all crowding out warm, cozy, thriving local communities, industries, and cultures.

Worrying about the pulverizing effects of globalization is very legitimate, indeed very important, but ignoring its ability also to empower individuals and enrich our cultural cornucopia misses its potentially positive effects on human freedom and diversity.

Using a visit to his mother in Kumasi, Ghana—the town he grew up in—he adduced a variety of examples to make the point that people in Africa today, even villagers, are not just objects that the West or the modern world inscribes itself upon.

It’s true that the enclaves of homogeneity you find these days—in Asante as in Pennsylvania—are less distinctive than they were a century ago, but mostly in good ways.

What is the message when the largest buyout in history is made contingent [by the buyers] on winning praise for its greenhouse-gas plan? It tells us that the markets are ahead of the politicians.

If you have an entrepreneurial bent, a passport, a little cash, and a lot of gumption, you can go off and start a small business just about anywhere—and create better jobs for people who are making only $1 a day rather than just protesting on their behalf at the next World Bank meeting.

Endeavor’s chosen beneficiaries—people with small to midsize businesses hoping to strike it rich—didn’t always elicit sympathy from donors.

We occasionally take on pure start-ups, but we’ve found that the true inflection point comes after the entrepreneur has taken the company to a certain point but needs mentoring and strategic assistance to go to scale.

It gave instant publicity to Google Earth and contributed to growing sophistication among Bahrainis in circumventing web censorship.

For over twenty years that organization was the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the world’s most effective environmental advocacy groups.

As a first step, we need to get the market and regulatory polemicists off each other’s back.

I confess, there was a time when I would use Google to see what was being written about this book. I don’t anymore. While many references are neutral or full of praise, others are vitriolic or flat-out nuts.

A special board of scientists and doctors from around the world then culled through them and distilled them down to a list of fourteen Grand Challenges—challenges where a technological innovation could remove a critical barrier to the solving of an important health problem in the developing world.

India can have the smartest high-tech vanguard in the world, but if it does not find a way to bring along more of those who are unable, disabled, under-educated, and under-served, it will be like a rocket that takes off but quickly falls back to earth for lack of sustained thrust.

I think, first and foremost, they can redefine the meaning of global populism. If populists really want to help the rural poor, the way to do it is not by burning down McDonald’s and shutting down the IMF and trying to put up protectionist barriers that will unflatten the world.

The global populist movement, better known as the anti-globalization movement, has a great deal of energy, but up to now it has been too divided and confused to effectively help the poor in any meaningful or sustained manner.

At the peak of the stock market boom, lots of pampered American college kids, wearing their branded clothing, began to get interested in sweatshops as a way of expiating their guilt.

As people around the world began to intuit this, a movement emerged, which Seattle both reflected and helped to catalyze, whereby people said, in effect, “If America is now touching my life directly or indirectly more than my own government, then I want to have a vote in America’s power.”

They deliberately define it all as decadence. Because if openness, women’s empowerment, and freedom of thought and inquiry are the real sources of the West’s economic strength, then the Arab-Muslim world would have to change.

The first person to recognize the Islamo-Leninist character of these 9/11 hijackers—that they were not fundamentalists but adherents of an extreme, violent political cult—was Adrian Karatnycky, the president of Freedom House.

“The key hijackers... were well-educated children of privilege. None of them suffered first-hand economic privation or political oppression.”

This helps to explain why although massive amounts of foreign technology are imported to the Arab regions, very little of it is internalized or supplanted by Arab innovations.

Most American blacks, I am sure, had little doubt that O. J. Simpson murdered his ex-wife, but they applauded his acquittal as a stick in the eye of the Los Angeles Police Department and a justice system that they saw as consistently humiliating and unfair to them. Humiliation does that to people.

“Iran earmarked a reward of $1 million for whoever would implement Imam Khomeini’s fatwa and kill Salman Rushdie.”

Despite the fact that bin Laden murdered thousands of innocents in the name of our religion and despite the damage that he has caused to Muslims everywhere, and especially to innocent Muslims in the West, whose life is much better than the life of Muslims in Islamic lands, to this date not a single fatwa has been issued calling for the killing of bin Laden, on the pretext that bin Laden still proclaims ‘there is no God other than Allah'

Worse, he added, Arab and Muslim satellite television channels have “competed amongst themselves in broadcasting [bin Laden’s] sermons and fatwas, instead of preventing their dissemination as they did in the case of Rushdie’s book ... With our equivocal stance on bin Laden, we from the very start left the world with the impression that we are all bin Laden.”

There were other factors, to be sure—most notably the deterrent effect of Pakistan’s own nuclear arsenal.

The flattening of the world has also led to more urbanization and large-scale immigration to the West of many of these young, unemployed, frustrated Arab-Muslim males, while simultaneously making it much easier for informal networks of these young men to form, operate, and interconnect.

Just as you take an item off the shelf in a discount store in Birmingham and another one is immediately made in Beijing, so the retailers of suicide deploy a human bomber in Baghdad and another one is immediately recruited and indoctrinated in Beirut.

The flat world has also been such a huge boon for al-Qaeda and its ilk because of the way it enables the small to act big, and the way it enables small acts—the killing of just a few people—to have big effects.

The Internet is an enormously useful tool for the dissemination of propaganda, conspiracy theories, and plain old untruths, because it combines a huge reach with a patina of technology that makes anything on the Internet somehow more believable.

They simply disseminate their ideas globally, using the flat-world platform, and inspire and exhort people to use their own local capacity to take initiatives—to blow up a train in Spain or a subway in London.

In addition to soliciting financial aid online, terrorists recruit converts by using the full panoply of website technologies (audio, digital video, etc.) to enhance the presentation of their message.

That means a much more serious global effort to stanch nuclear proliferation by limiting the supply—to buy up the fissile material that is already out there, particularly in the former Soviet Union, and prevent more states from going nuclear.

From his corporate headquarters in Afghanistan, bin Laden proved to be a very deft supply chain manager.

We all are now so much more conscious that a person’s life can be wiped out by the arbitrary will of a madman in a cave in Afghanistan.

Most of all, though, it is imperative that we nurture more people with the imaginations of Abraham George and Fadi Ghandour.

The more people with the imagination of 11/9, the better chance we have of staving off another 9/11.