1. Friedman criticizes people my age and younger for not keeping up globally. As he tells his own kids, "Keep working. The kids in China and India are hungry for your jobs." In a way it’s a good rhetorical strategy, for as much as it lays blame on his audience for the problem, it also offers them an obvious way to participate in solving it. While there may be some truth to this, I think there are a couple of key things Friedman ignores.

   If we have become a "lazy" society of fun-loving consumers, it is largely because our economy has demanded this of us. This is especially true of the generations to which Friedman points, who have been the targets of ungodly amounts of advertising. Here’s the thing I don’t get, if Joe and Jane America lose their jobs, they won’t be buying the latest cell phone or the designer toilet brush or whatever. They certainly won’t be calling help lines in Bangalore. This flat world relies upon consumers in America and Europe, and in order to be consumers, we need leisure time. Even if I keep my job, but I work 12-18 hours a day, like these folks Friedman discusses, I’m not going to have time to watch TV, even if I have TiVo. Of course the Indians and Chinese realize this. They don’t see a future of serving American callers. They want their own TiVo. But if they are going to buy their own TiVo’s and X-Box’s and so on, then they are going to have to make more money and they are going to have to have the leisure time to use them.

   In short, they will have to become more like us.

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2. There is a kind of contradictory rhetoric in Friedman’s book. On the one hand, his framing argument about "Globalization 3.0" identifies the "individual" as the site of globalization. This runs through the book as he talks about opportunities for individuals to globalize and also how the individual must now be responsible for ensuring his/her own employablity into the future. However, there is also a clear nationalism to the book. Friedman always returns to "America" and how our country must respond to this challenge. I wonder if this is not an attempt at some rhetorical savvy on his part: to appeal to the right with a discussion of individuals and to the left with talk of national responsibilities.

   Either way, I say this. Regardless of right or left, you’d have to be a fool to imagine the state, let alone a corporation, will just take care of you, like a parent. In the book, Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, says his company can thrive "even if we never hire another American." I think this is the logic of any corporation. Corporations are no more American than money is American. However, the state has (or should have) the well-being of the nation as a primary concern, along with a concern for the well-being of the global community of nations. I would emphasize this aspect of Friedman’s argument.
   
   
   Friedman compares our current crisis with the "Missile Gap" and Space Race of the late 50s and 60s. A curious comparison since the Missile Gap turned out to be vaporware. However the reaction at that time was a serious government investment in basic scientific research and higher education. For example, the SUNY system was constructed in the sixties. There was a massive hiring of tenure-track faculty and an influx of students. However this kind of funding and priority went away in the eighties. Not coincidently, this disinvestment occurs at the same time that a decline in scientists and engineers occurs. That is, Friedman notes it takes 12-15 years to educate a good engineer or scientist (starting in elementary school). That missing generation of science folks (my generation of current thirty-somethings) was in elementary school in the early eighties. What happens instead is the science becomes applied, commerical research funded by corporations (who in turn receive the subsidies once given directly to the researchers, right?). However, where funding in basic research returns dividends directly for the education of American students and the general benefit of society, academic entrepeneurialism benefits the researcher, the funding corporation, and perhaps the particular university in question. Then the corporation turns around and says something like Craig Barrett: we don’t need America; we just need brain power. But the university will never say that, especially not the public university

3. As much as I agree with Friedman’s analysis of the importance of science and engineering, we must heed Heidegger’s warning about the "will to technology." Part of the danger of the flat world is that it has virtualized human labor, as Heidegger and more recently Arthur Kroker have warned. Seeing every problem as a technical problem is ultimately dehumanizing in a dangerous way. By the same token, we must not naturalize our Enlightenment/humanistic notion of humanity, which is just as historical/cultural/technological/ideological as any other notion might be. Of course Friedman does this with all this talk about the "individual," but I don’t expect him to wade into that philosophical territory here, so I don’t think of that as a legitimate criticism of this book.

   That said, I think that if we are to address the challenges of the flat world, we will need to rethink our ideas of subjectivity. We will need an understanding of materiality, technology, and human identity (both for communities and singular bodies) that allows us to create a future that improves the lived experience of human lives in an environmentally sustainable way. While Globalization 3.0 has many dangers, contradictions, and inequities, it is where we are moving and perhaps part of the growing pains of modernization.

   Here I turn to a more philosophical source, Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Community:

   Contemporary politics is this devastating experimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities. Only those who succeed in carrying it to completion–without allowing what reveals to remain veiled in the nothingness that reveals, but bringing language itself to language–will be the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a State, where the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified.

   The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.

   I’m not going to go into Agamben today, but simply suggest that these passages offer a beginning point for imagining the role the humanities can play in building the "coming community."

4. OK, one last point, b/c Agamben reminds me. The second quoted passage, from the end of Agamben’s book, comes from a section titled Tianamen. For Agamben, Tianamen Square represented a gathering of singular beings, individuals without a collective social identity, who had rejected the social-ideological identities offered by the state. It is interesting to me, because Friedman doesn’t discuss Tianamen Square, though he makes extensive reference to the coming down of the Berlin Wall, which happened in the same year. Tianamen is a less optimistic moment certainly, but presumably more relevant for the Chinese economy that so interests him. China may have made strides toward being more competitive in the global marketplace, but in other areas not so much. While India is a more open and democratic nation; it is also a discontinuous nation where ultra-modern spaces bump against traditional ones.

   I’ll have to think some more about this one.

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