THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE by Thomas L.Friedman (Picador, 2016)
The title of one of the chapters in this hefty tome is called ‘Just Too Damned Fast’ which sums up how most people feel about the rapidity of change in the modern age.
The title of the book as a whole refers to a comment the author made to those who turned up late for an appointment. Instead of being frustrated over the lack of puntuality, he uses the time to think, reflect and take stock of things.
Thomas L. Friedman is a seasoned, Pulitizer-prize winning New York Times columnist who promises that this book will help us to thrive in the face the challenges that lie ahead. He calls it an ‘optimist’s guide’ but parts of it only confirmed my pessimism.
Whatever its flaws, he certainly can’t be accused of tackling this mighty topic in a superficial manner. Those with attention deficit disorder will balk at the idea of wading through 600 pages that make up the 2.0 version of the book which, for good measure, comes with a new afterword written after Trump’s election.
Thomas L. Friedman
The opening chapters reflect on the speed of technological change in the world which he calls ‘the age of accelerations’. Friedman identifies 2007 as a pivotal year. He started writing his previous book, The World Is Flat, three years before when “Twitter was still a sound and the cloud was still in the sky”. Pithy soundbites like this show his desire to engage with general readers rather than blinding us with science.
Nevertheless, there’s no dumbing down of the complex issues here. The scale of Freidman’s research is impressive and his observations are based on numerous interviews with the movers and shakers behind many of the innovations we take for granted these days. The shock and awe towards the growth in computing power and the ‘gee whizz’ factor is high as he itemises the innovations that have revolutionized the way we work, play and interact. He writes: “When you look at how this diffusion of these digital flows keep accelerating, it boggles the mind to think how interdependent the world will be in another decade”.
None of this is new, of course. Our minds may be boggled but we have a sense of what’s happening even if we still don’t know all the implications.
Friedman is strongest when addressing the impact on employment. He notes that, in the relatively recent past, if you did an honest day’s work and played by the rules you had every right to expect you’d earn a good salary and maintain a high standard of living. This is no longer a given. For many, it’s a case of being forced to adapt and learn new skills or face being swept aside by the march of progress.
Acceleration is nothing new. This is a scene from ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ made in 1982
For this reason, he notes that it can be seen as anachronistic to ask youngsters what they want to be when they grow up. Instead we should be asking: How are you going to be when you grow up? This would then be followed up with probing questions about passion and purpose.
Friedman asserts somewhat menacingly that “Average is over”. We all have to be prepared to invent what LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman hideously refers to as investing in “the start-up of you”. The problem is, of course, that not everyone can transform their passion into a purpose and the world is not big enough to accomodate all the would-be entrepreneurs.
Knowledge is power and lifelong learning is an asset to human development but the barriers that divide us are not simply composed of physical walls. When Friedman talks of the need for global communites and sharing he leaves the reader in no doubt that he believes America is the best hope to deliver this new era of enlightenment. In a passage that is best read while listening to the Star-Spangled Banner, he claims that all of us “depend on a healthy American economy, a strong American military able to project power and deter autocracies, and an unwavering willingness to defend the values of pluralism and democracy against those who would threaten them from abroad or within”.
If I were an American I might feel a surge of nationalist pride while reading such jingoistic claptrap but, instead, this strikes me as the kind of partisan language that I regard as part of the problem rather than contributing to the cure. This is perhaps why I’m more pessimistic about the shape of things to come than he is.
In an earlier section he warns “If a society doesn’t build solid floors under people, many will reach for a wall”. Friedman writes in the future tense but all this is happening in the present time.
Friedman rightly points out the paradox of being connected digitally while being increasingly disconnected from nature and our fellow citizens. He writes with passion and conviction of the need to maintain communities that are still intact and build new connections in communities that are in tatters. In the former category he waves the flag for his home town of Minneapolis in the State of Minnesota and as an example of the latter he cites the demise of the infrastructure in Austin, Texas.
He is correct to point out that “We will get the best of the technologies only if we don’t let them distract us from making deep human connections” , but chooses to conveniently skip over the possibility that the rich and powerful are quite content to see the mass of humanity being distracted in this manner.
