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Balance of Power Shifts in ‘Flat’ World


By Jeff Feinman
January 1, 2007 — 
Society’s class systems could undergo a major shift because of today’s technology, author Thomas J. Friedman said during a Manhattan panel discussion last month.

With his book “The World Is Flat” serving as the backdrop for the panel, held at the Marriott Marquis in New York City, Friedman explained how global technology is creating an explosion of wealth that could shift balances of power.

The author, who also is a foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, said that one effect of a flat world is a tremendous influx of money into the middle classes of China and India. Another is access to information from around the world. This gives those people a greater stake in the success of globalization, and could push them to try to stabilize the geopolitical situation that brought them their newfound wealth. “When the world is flat, a revolution will come from the middle,” he said.

Joining Friedman on the panel—called “Staying Ahead in a Flat World: What’s Next?”—were Tim O’Reilly, CEO and founder of O’Reilly Media; Brian Behlendorf, CTO and founder of CollabNet; and Devin Wenig, COO of Reuters Group.

Friedman cited how technology might be helping to move the Persian Gulf constitutional monarchy of Bahrain toward democracy.

“There was a remarkable story during the elections about how the Bahrainis were using Google Earth to zero in on the palaces of the ruling family, and for the first time, were able to see beyond these walls and view pictures of the homes of the ruling elite,” Friedman explained. Though the Bahrain Ministry of Information had access to Google Earth banned, many feel that the images will radically inflame further cries for democratic reform and aid in the push for equality between the rich and the poor, Friedman added.

While discussing how today’s technology is shaping the future, the panelists also touched on how past events have shaped today’s software industry. For example, the thinking and values of the Vietnam War era may have helped to mold today’s developers.

“I think it’s not just the counterculture; it’s really the culture of participation, and the culture of participation is often driven by the most passionate users,” said O’Reilly, who coined the phrase Web 2.0 to describe the new wave of open source and sharing among Internet users. “What we find is that people start out and they’re just users, then they get more excited and get involved in something like Apache. A lot of technology starts out that way, with people who are just doing it for love—this is where it is ‘free love.’ The guys who started the Internet weren’t sitting there as entrepreneurs; they were just saying, ‘Hey, this is cool.’”

“I feel like we have a culture here that idolizes the rebel,” Behlendorf said. “It is a culture here that values the people who step out and take risks.”

Wenig said that Web 2.0 will likely have major effects on the traditional business model. “We may see a fundamental breakdown of the traditional roles of producers and consumers, and I would say that transcends both software development and content,” he said. “The traditional world is, I would build a piece of software, no matter where it was, and I would throw it over the wall and I would hope you’d buy it. What’s happening now is that we are getting to on-the-fly, real-time collaboration with our customers, and that is fundamentally changing the nature of our business.”

When asked if he believes there is any chance of multinational corporations obliterating national identities, Friedman replied, “What I’ve found consistently is that identity, ethnicity and religion still exert an enormous power over people’s minds. Sovereignty always seems to get in the way. I don’t see it going there quite yet.”


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