ELEVEN: The Unflat World, No Guns or Cell Phones Allowed

On a trip back home to Minnesota in the winter of 2004, I was having lunch with my friends Ken and Jill Greer at Perkins pancake house when Jill mentioned that the state had recently passed a new gun law. The conceal and carry law, passed on May 28, 2003, established that local sheriffs had to issue permits for anyone-other than those with felony records or declared mentally ill-who requested to carry concealed firearms to work (unless the person's employer explicitly restricted that right). This law is supposed to deter criminals, because if they try to hold you up, they can't be sure that you too are not packing a weapon. The law, though, contained a provision to allow business owners to prevent nonemployees from bringing concealed weapons into a place of business, like a restaurant or health club. It said that any business could ban concealed handguns on its premises if it posted a sign at each entrance indicating that guns were not allowed there. (This reportedly led to some very creative signage, with one church suing the state for the right to use a biblical quote as its gun-banning sign and a restaurant using a picture of a woman in a cooking apron toting a machine gun.) The reason this all came up at our lunch was that Jill mentioned that at health clubs around the city, where she played tennis, she noticed two signs now popping up regularly, one right after the other. At their tennis club in Bloomington, for example, there is a sign right by the front door that says, “No Guns Allowed.” And then nearby, outside the locker rooms, is another sign: “No Cell Phones Allowed.”

Hmrara. No guns or cell phones allowed? Guns I understand, I said, but why cell phones?

Silly me. It was because some people were bringing cell phones with cameras into locker rooms, covertly taking pictures of naked men and women and then e-mailing them around the world. What will they think of next? Whatever the innovation, people will find a way to use it and abuse it.

While interviewing Promod Haque at Norwest Venture Partners in Palo Alto, I was helped by the firm's public relations director, Katie Belding, who later sent me this e-mail: “I was chatting with my husband about your meeting with Promod the other day... He is a history teacher at a high school in San Mateo. I asked him, 'Where were you when the world went flat?' He said it just happened the other day at school when he was in a faculty meeting. A student was suspended for helping another student cheat on a test-we're not talking the traditional writing answers on the bottom of your shoe or passing a note, though...” Intrigued, I called her husband, Brian, and he picked up the story: “At the end of the period, when all of the tests were being passed up to the front of the classroom, this student very quickly and slyly pulled out his cell phone and somehow snapped a picture of some test questions, and instantly e-mailed it to his friend who was taking the same test the next period. His friend also had a cell phone with a digital camera and e-mail capabilities and was apparently able to view the questions before the next period. The student was caught by another teacher when he pulled out the cell phone between periods. It is against the rules to have a cell phone on campus-even though we know that all the kids do-so the teacher confiscated it and saw that the kid had a test on it. So the dean of discipline, at our regular faculty meeting, opened by saying, 'We have something new to worry about.' Essentially he said, 'Beware, keep your eyes open, because the kids are so far ahead of us in terms of the technology.'”

But things aren't all bad with this new technology, noted Brian: “I went to a Jimmy Buffett concert earlier this year. Cameras were not allowed, but cell phones were. So then the concert starts and everyone suddenly starts holding up their cell phones and taking pictures of Jimmy Buffett. I've got one right on my wall. We were sitting in the second row and the guy next to us held up his cell phone, and I said, 'Hey, would you mind e-mailing me some of those? No one will believe we sat this close.' He said 'Sure,' and we gave him a card with our e-mail [address]. We didn't really expect to see any, but the next day he e-mailed us a bunch.”

My trip to Beijing described earlier fell right after the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which happened on June 4, 1989, that is, 6/4/89. My colleagues at the Times bureau informed me that on that day the Chinese government censors were blocking SMS messages on cell phones that contained any reference to Tiananmen Square or even the numbers 6 and 4. So if you happened to be dialing the phone number 664-6464, or sending a message in which you told someone you would meet at 6 p.m. on the 4th floor, the Chinese censors blocked it using their jamming technology.

Mark Steyn, writing in the National Review (October 25, 2004), related a story from the London Arabic newspaper paper Al-Quds al-Arabi about a panic that broke out in Khartoum, Sudan, after a crazy rumor swept the city, claiming that if an infidel shook a man's hand, that man could lose his manhood. “What struck me about the story,” wrote Steyn, “was a detail: The hysteria was spread by cell phones and text messaging. Think about that: You can own a cell phone yet still believe a foreigner's handshake can melt away your penis. What happens when that kind of technologically advanced primitivism advances beyond text messaging?”

This is not a chapter about cell phones, so why do I raise these stories? Because ever since I began writing about globalization, I've been challenged by critics along one particular line: “Isn't there a certain technological determinism to your argument? To listen to you, Friedman, there are these ten flatteners, they are converging and flattening the earth, and there is nothing that people can do but bow to them and join the parade. And after a transition, everyone will get richer and smarter and it will all be fine. But you're wrong, because the history of the world suggests that ideological alternatives, and power alternatives, have always arisen to any system, and globalization will be no different.”

This is a legitimate question, so let me try to answer it directly: I am a technological determinist! Guilty as charged.

I believe that capabilities create intentions. If we create an Internet where people can open an online store and have global suppliers, global customers, and global competitors, they will open that online store or bank or bookshop. If we create work flow platforms that allow companies to disaggregate any job and source it to the knowledge center anywhere in the world that can perform that task most efficiently at the lowest cost, companies will do that sort of outsourcing. If we create cell phones with cameras in them, people will use them for all sorts of tasks, from cheating on tests to calling Grandma in her nursing home on her ninetieth birthday from the top of a mountain in New Zealand. The history of economic development teaches this over and over: If you can do it, you must do it, otherwise your competitors will-and as this book has tried to demonstrate, there is a whole new universe of things that companies, countries, and individuals can and must do to thrive in a flat world.

But while I am a technological determinist, I am not a historical determinist. There is absolutely no guarantee that everyone will use these new technologies, or the triple convergence, for the benefit of themselves, their countries, or humanity. These are just technologies. Using them does not make you modern, smart, moral, wise, fair, or decent. It just makes you able to communicate, compete, and collaborate farther and faster. In the absence of a world-destabilizing war, every one of these technologies will become cheaper, lighter, smaller and more personal, mobile, digital, and virtual. Therefore, more and more people will find more and more ways to use them. We can only hope that more people in more places will use them to create, collaborate, and grow their living standards, not the opposite. But it doesn't have to happen. To put it another way, I don't know how the flattening of the world will come out.

Indeed, this is the point in the book where I have to make a confession: I know that the world is not flat.

Yes, you read me right: I know that the world is not flat. Don't worry. I know.

I am certain, though, that the world has been shrinking and flattening for some time now, and that process has quickened dramatically in recent years. Half the world today is directly or indirectly participating in the flattening process or feeling its effects. I have engaged in literary license in titling this book The World Is Flat to draw attention to this flattening and its quickening pace because I think it is the single most important trend in the world today.

But I am equally certain that it is not historically inevitable that the rest of the world will become flat or that the already flat parts of the world won't get unflattened by war, economic disruption, or politics. There are hundreds of millions of people on this planet who have been left behind by the flattening process or feel overwhelmed by it, and some of them have enough access to the flattening tools to use them against the system, not on its behalf. How the flattening could go wrong is the subject of this chapter, and I approach it by trying to answer the following questions: What are the biggest constituencies, forces, or problems impeding this flattening process, and how might we collaborate better to overcome them?

Too Sick

I once heard Jerry Yang, the cofounder of Yahoo!, quote a senior Chinese government official as saying, “Where people have hope, you have a middle class.” I think this is a very useful insight. The existence of large, stable middle classes around the world is crucial to geopolitical stability, but middle class is a state of mind, not a state of income. That's why a majority of Americans always describe themselves as “middle class,” even though by income statistics some of them wouldn't be considered as such. “Middle class” is another way of describing people who believe that they have a pathway out of poverty or lower-income status toward a higher standard of living and a better future for their kids. You can be in the middle class in your head whether you make $2 a day or $200, if you believe in social mobility-that your kids have a chance to live better than you do-and that hard work and playing by the rules of your society will get you where you want to go.

In many ways, the line between those who are in the flat world and those who are not is this line of hope. The good news in India and China and the countries of the former Soviet Empire today is that, with all their flaws and internal contradictions, these countries are now home to hundreds of millions of people who are hopeful enough to be middle class. The bad news in Africa today, as well as rural India, China, Latin America, and plenty of dark corners of the developed world, is that there are hundreds of millions of people who have no hope and therefore no chance of making it into the middle class. They have no hope for two reasons: Either they are too sick, or their local governments are too broken for them to believe they have a pathway forward.

The first group, those who are too sick, are those whose lives are stalked every day by HIV-AIDS, malaria, TB, and polio, and who do not even enjoy steady electricity or potable water. Many of these people live in shockingly close proximity with the flat world. While in Bangalore I visited an experimental school, Shanti Bhavan, or “Haven of Peace.” It is located near the village of Baliganapalli, in Tamil Nadu Province, about an hour's drive from downtown Bangalore's glass-and-steel high-tech centers-one of which is aptly called “The Golden Enclave.” On the drive there, the school's principal, Lalita Law, an intense, razor-sharp Indian Christian, explained to me, with barely controlled rage in her voice, that the school has 160 children, whose parents are all untouchables from the nearby village.

“These kids, their parents are ragpickers, coolies, and quarry laborers,” she said as we bounced along in a jeep on the potholed roads to the school. “They come from homes below the poverty line, and from the lowest caste, the untouchables, who are supposed to be fulfilling their destiny and left where they are. We get these children at ages four and five. They don't know what it is to have a drink of clean water. They are used to drinking filthy gutter water, if they are lucky enough to have a gutter near where they live. They have never seen a toilet, they don't have baths... They don't even have proper scraps of clothing. We have to start by socializing them. When we first get them they run out and urinate and defecate wherever they want. [At first] we don't make them sleep on beds, because it is a culture shock.”

I was typing frantically in the back of the jeep on my laptop to keep up with her scalding monologue about village life.

“This 'India Shining' thing [the slogan of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, in the 2004 election] irritates people like us,” she added. 'You have to come to the rural villages and see whether India is shining, and you look into a child's face and see whether India is shining. India is shining okay for the glossy magazines, but if you just go outside Bangalore you will see that everything about India shining is refuted... [In the villages] alcoholism is rife and female infanticide and crime are rising. You have to bribe to get electricity, water; you have to bribe the tax assessor to assess your home correctly. Yes, the middle and upper classes are taking off, but the 700 million who are left behind, all they see is gloom and darkness and despair. They are born to fulfill their destiny and have to live this way and die this way. The only thing that shines for them is the sun, and it is hot and unbearable and too many of them die of heatstroke.“ The only ”mouse“ these kids have ever encountered, she added, is not one that rests next to a computer but the real thing.

There are thousands of such villages in rural India, China, Africa, and Latin America. And that is why it is no wonder that children in the developing world-the unflat world-are ten times more likely to die of vaccine-preventable diseases than are children in the developed flat world. In the worst-affected regions of rural southern Africa, a full one-third of pregnant women are reportedly HIV-positive. The AIDS epidemic alone is enough to put a whole society into a tailspin: Many teachers in these African countries are now afflicted with AIDS, so they cannot teach, and young children, especially girls, have to drop out either because they must tend to sick and dying parents or because they have been orphaned by AIDS and cannot afford the school fees. And without education, young people cannot learn how to protect themselves from HIV-AIDS or other diseases, let alone acquire the life-advancing skills that enable women to gain greater control over their own bodies and sexual partners. The prospect of a full-blown AIDS epidemic in India and China, of the sort that has already debilitated southern Africa, remains very real, largely because only one-fifth of the people at risk for HIV worldwide have access to prevention services. Tens of millions of women who want and would benefit from family-planning resources don't have them for lack of local funding. You cannot drive economic growth in a place where 50 percent of the people are infected with malaria or half of the kids are malnourished or a third of the mothers are dying of AIDS.

There is no question that China and India are better off for having at least part of their population in the flat world. When societies begin to prosper, you get a virtuous cycle going: They begin to produce enough food for people to leave the land, the excess labor gets trained and educated, it begins working in services and industry; that leads to innovation and better education and universities, freer markets, economic growth and development, better infrastructure, fewer diseases, and slower population growth. It is that dynamic that is going on in parts of urban India and urban China today, enabling people to compete on a level playing field and attracting investment dollars by the billions.

But there are many, many others living outside this cycle. They live in villages or rural areas that only criminals would want to invest in, regions where violence, civil war, and disease compete with one another to see which can ravage the civilian population most. The world will be entirely flat only when all these people are brought into it. One of the few people with enough dollars to make a difference who has stepped up to this challenge is Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, whose $27 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has focused on this huge, disease-ravaged, opportunity-deprived population. I have been a critic of some of Microsoft's business practices over the years, and I do not regret one word I have written about some of its anticompetitive tactics. But I have been impressed by Gates's personal commitment of money and energy to address the unflat world. Both times I spoke to Gates, this is the subject he wanted to talk about most and addressed with the most passion.

“No one funds things for that other 3 billion,” said Gates. “Someone estimated that the cost of saving a life in the U.S. is $5 or $6 million— that is how much our society is willing to spend. You can save a life outside of the U.S. for less than $100. But how many people want to make that investment?

“If it was just a matter of time,” Gates continued, “you know, give it twenty or thirty years and the others will be there, then it would be great to declare that the whole world is flat. But the fact is, there is a trap that these 3 billion are caught in, and they may never get into the virtuous cycle of more education, more health, more capitalism, more rule of law, more wealth... I am worried that it could just be half the world that is flat and it stays that way.”

Take malaria, a disease caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes. It is the greatest killer of mothers on the planet right now. While virtually no one dies of malaria today in the flat world, more than 1 million people die from this disease each year in the unflat world, about seven hundred thousand of them children, most of them in Africa. Deaths from malaria have actually doubled in the last twenty years because mosquitoes have become resistant to many antimalarial drugs, and commercial drug companies have not invested much in new antimalarial vaccines because they believe there is no profitable market for them. If this crisis were happening in a flat country, noted Gates, the system would work: Government would do what it needed to do to contain the disease, pharmaceutical companies would do what they needed to do to get the drugs to market, schools would educate young people about preventive measures, and the problem would be licked. “But this nice response works only when the people who have the problem also have some money,” said Gates. When the Gates Foundation issued a $50 million grant to combat malaria, he added, “people said we just doubled the amount of money [worldwide] going to fight malaria... When the people who have the need don't have the money, it takes outside groups and charities to get them to the point where the system can kick in for them.”

Up to now, though, argued Gates, “we have not given these people a chance [to be in the flat world]. The kid who is connected to the Internet today, if he has the curiosity and an Internet connection, is as [empowered] as me. But if he does not get the right nutrition, he will never play that game. Yes, the world is smaller, but do we really see the conditions that people live in? Isn't the world still really big enough that we don't see the real conditions that people live in, the kid whose life can be saved for $80?”

Let's stop here for a moment and imagine how beneficial it would be for the world, and for America, if rural China, India, and Africa were to grow into little Americas or European Unions in economic and opportunity terms. But the chances of their getting into such a virtuous cycle is tiny without a real humanitarian push by flat-world businesses, philanthropies, and governments to devote more resources to their problems. The only way out is through new ways of collaboration between the flat and unflat parts of the world.

In 2003, the Gates Foundation launched a project called Grand Challenges in Global Health. What I like about it is the way the Gates Foundation approached solving this problem. They didn't say, “We, the rich Western foundation, will now deliver you the solution,” and then issue instructions and write some checks. They said, “Let's collaborate horizontally on defining both the problem and the solutions-let's create value that way-and then [the foundation] will invest our money in the solutions we both define.” So the Gates Foundation placed ads on the Web and in more conventional channels across both the developed and the developing worlds, asking scientists to respond to one big question: What are the biggest problems that, if science attended to them and solved them, could most dramatically change the fate of the several billion people trapped in the vicious cycle of infant mortality, low life expectancy, and disease? The foundation got about eight thousand pages of ideas from hundreds of scientists from around the world, including Nobel laureates. It 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. In the fall of 2003, it announced these fourteen Grand Challenges worldwide. They include the following: How to create effective single-dose vaccines that can be used soon after birth, how to prepare vaccines that do not require refrigeration, how to develop needle-free delivery systems for vaccines, how to better understand which immunological responses provide protective immunity, how to better control insects that transmit agents of disease, how to develop a genetic or chemical strategy to incapacitate a disease-transmitting insect population, how to create a full range of optimal bioavailable nutrients in a single staple plant species, and how to create immunological methods that can cure chronic infections. Within a year, the foundation received sixteen hundred proposals for ways to meet these challenges from scientists in seventy-five countries, and the foundation is now in the process of funding the best proposals with $250 million in cash.

“We're trying to accomplish two things with this program,” explained Rick Klausner, a former head of the National Cancer Institute who now runs the global health programs for the Gates Foundation. “The first is [to make] a moral appeal to the scientific imagination, [pointing out] that there are great problems to be solved that we, the scientific community, have ignored, even though we pride ourselves in how international we are. We have not taken our responsibilities as global problem solvers as seriously as our self-identity as an international community. We wanted the Grand Challenges to say these are the most exciting, sexy, scientific things that anyone in the world could work on right now... The idea was to fire the imagination. The second thing is to actually direct some of the foundation's resources to see if we could do it.”

Given the phenomenal advances in technology in the last twenty years, it is easy to assume that we already have all the tools to address some of these challenges and that the only thing lacking is money. I wish that were the case. But it is not. In the instance of malaria, for example, it isn't just the drugs that are missing. As anyone who has visited Africa or rural India knows, the health-care systems in these areas are often broken or functioning at a very low level. So the Gates Foundation is trying to stimulate the development of drugs and delivery systems that presume a broken health-care system and therefore can be safely self-administered by ordinary people in the field. That may be the grandest challenge of all: to use the tools of the flat world to design tools that work in an unflat world. “The most important health-care system in the world is a mother,” said Klausner. “How do you get things in her hands that she understands and can afford and can use?”

The tragedy of all these people is really a dual tragedy, added Klausner. There is the individual tragedy of facing a death sentence from disease or a life sentence of broken families and limited expectations. And there is the tragedy for the world because of the incredible lost contribution that all these people still outside the flat world could be making. In a flat world, where we are connecting all the knowledge pools together, imagine what knowledge those people could bring to science or education. In a flat world, where innovation can come from anywhere, we are letting a huge pool of potential contributors and collaborators slip under the waves. There is no question that poverty causes ill health, but ill health also traps people in poverty, which in turn weakens them and keeps them from grasping the first rung of the ladder to middle-class hope. Until and unless we can meet some of these grand challenges, much of that 50 percent of the world that is still not flat will stay that way-no matter how flat the other 50 percent gets.

Too Dlsempowered

There's not just the flat world and the unflat world. Many people live in the twilight zone between the two. Among these are the people I call the too disempowered. They are a large group of people who have not been fully encompassed by the flattening of the world. Unlike the too sick, who have yet even to get a chance to step onto the flat world, the too disempowered are people who you might say are half flat. They are healthy people who live in countries with significant areas that have been flattened but who don't have the tools or the skills or the infrastructure to participate in any meaningful or sustained way. They have just enough information to know that the world is flattening around them and that they aren't really getting any of the benefits. Being flat is good but full of pressure, being unflat is awful and full of pain, but being half flat has its own special anxiety. As exciting and as visible as the flat Indian high-tech sector is, have no illusions: It accounts for 0.2 percent of employment in India. Add those Indians involved in manufacturing for export, and you get a total of 2 percent of employment in India.