Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
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About this ebook
#1 New York Times Bestseller • Los Angeles Times Bestseller
One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 Books to Read Now • One of Kirkus Reviews's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books of the Year
Shortlisted for the OWL Business Book Award and Longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Version 2.0, Updated and Expanded, with a New Afterword
We all sense it—something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your kids. You can’t miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are being transformed in so many realms all at once—and it is dizzying.
In Thank You for Being Late, version 2.0, with a new afterword, Thomas L. Friedman exposes the tectonic movements that are reshaping the world today and explains how to get the most out of them and cushion their worst impacts. His thesis: to understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the planet’s three largest forces—Moore’s law (technology), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)—are accelerating all at once. These accelerations are transforming five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community. The year 2007 was the major inflection point: the release of the iPhone, together with advances in silicon chips, software, storage, sensors, and networking, created a new technology platform that is reshaping everything from how we hail a taxi to the fate of nations to our most intimate relationships. It is providing vast new opportunities for individuals and small groups to save the world—or to destroy it.
With his trademark vitality, wit, and optimism, Friedman shows that we can overcome the multiple stresses of an age of accelerations—if we slow down, if we dare to be late and use the time to reimagine work, politics, and community. Thank You for Being Late is an essential guide to the present and the future.
Thomas L. Friedman
Thomas L. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist-the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and the author of numerous bestselling books, among them From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World Is Flat. He was born in Minneapolis in 1953, and grew up in the middle-class Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1975 with a degree in Mediterranean studies, attended St. Antony's College, Oxford, on a Marshall Scholarship, and received an M.Phil. degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. After three years with United Press International, he joined The New York Times, where he has worked ever since as a reporter, correspondent, bureau chief, and columnist. At the Times, he has won three Pulitzer Prizes: in 1983 for international reporting (from Lebanon), in 1988 for international reporting (from Israel), and in 2002 for his columns after the September 11th attacks. Friedman's first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, won the National Book Award in 1989. His second book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999), won the Overseas Press Club Award for best book on foreign policy in 2000. In 2002 FSG published a collection of his Pulitzer Prize-winning columns, along with a diary he kept after 9/11, as Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. His fourth book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005) became a #1 New York Times bestseller and received the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in November 2005. A revised and expanded edition was published in hardcover in 2006 and in 2007. The World Is Flat has sold more than 4 million copies in thirty-seven languages. In 2008 he brought out Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which was published in a revised edition a year later. His sixth book, That Used to Be Us: How American Fell Behind in the World We Invented and How We Can Come Back, co-written with Michael Mandelbaum, was published in 2011. It was followed by Thank You For Being Late in 2016. Thomas L. Friedman lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family.
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Reviews for Thank You for Being Late
121 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Overall, I enjoyed Thank You for Being Late (TYFBL) and appreciated the author's research and insights. However, given that the book was published prior to the inauguration of the current president, the narrative was significantly dated -- a bit of a time capsule -- because it didn't speak to the host of more recently-emerged social and public policy challenges faced by our nation and its allies. I admired the author's ability to wrap his hands and head around some extremely gnarly technology issues and to elucidate them in comprehensible layman's terms. Overall, Friedman's prose was OK, if inelegant -- but you're not reading a book like this for well-turned sentences. Originally, I was afraid that boiling down the primary forces of the current acceleration of change to an alliterative trio (Mother Earth, Market, Moore's Law) was overly precious and wouldn't work...but I warmed to the framing as the book proceeded. At other times, however, Friedman seemed overly cutesy, e.g. labeling the cloud as "the supernova."I enjoyed the final few sections of TYFBL most of all, because they described a set of conditions at the local level in which social progress was not just possible but also tangible. I felt inspired by Friedman's examples, and am motivated to figure out how I might plug into contributing to the kind of social change he describes. Especially at this moment in our nation's history, heaven knows we all need to help.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Friedman describes the rapid expansion of technology and its impact on the economy and environment locally and worldwide. He uses personal stories to support how the changes can both level the playing field and leave others behind. At times, he wanders off topic in an attempt to booster proposed action plans. While the author mentions some source materials, there are no footnotes or endnotes. My favorite sentence in the book is regarding Minnesota nice mad me giving a point for humor. Describing how she felt when a driver cut her off on the freeway, Rene told her husband, “Jay, I was so mad. I almost honked.”
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thomas Friedman's books should be must reading for two groups: those in public office, and those who are not in public office.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I enjoyed this book—Friedman seems to capture my attention. However, it feels like it is all ready dated. After having read the “sample” I didn’t feel ready to pay to read the second half. I may take a trip to my public library...
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I enjoyed Tom Friedman's articles in the New York Times and his observations and comments in various other media including the new shows. It took me a while to read the book ( 460 pages) but it was well worth my time and effort. What this book was about mostly was "change." Changes in technology, culture, climate change, politics and globalization have been overwhelming, particularly in the last 10 years. Friedman uses 2007 as a jumping off point for his review and observations regarding change. 2007 was the release of the iPhone and various other technology changes occurred during that year.
I particularly enjoyed Friedman's thoughts on careers and jobs. Young people must prove themselves to be very adaptable to change, market themselves effectively and pursue lifelong learning. A college or high school degree will not get you very far in today's business world or in the future.
In some ways I am envious. I have retired so I have no way of testing how well I would or will do in this type of accelerated change. This is a great book for young business oriented people and college graduates to read.
Regrettably I think that the election of 2016 proves that too many Americans are not adapting to change or the realities affecting their careers and life. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The book caught my eye because of the word “optimist” in the subtitle—I do like books that give me a sense of possibility. He spends the first half of the book talking about acceleration—of technology, of globalization, of climate change—beyond what we have experienced before and not slowing. And there was really nothing optimistic there; convincing, worrisome, but not optimistic. His metaphor of living in the eye of the storm—moving, but in balance and in control-- was helpful and calming. But the best chapter by far is “Mother Nature as Political Mentor”—where he outlines his out-of-the-box thinking giving you the sense that things really could change. Big picture, beyond political party ideology, and broad ranging ideas for change—these are the sorts of ideas that we all should be coming up with and then doing the hard work to see which of them might actually be possible.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very good! I really enjoyed his analysis of this fast-paced, stress filled world we live in. His analysis of why this is I found compelling. For all that feel the world is going "to hell in a hand-basket", this book offers optimism as well as an informed analysis as to why. I found this to be a great read.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting examples but.this book could probably been successful as a long magazine article. It was a bit repetitive in part! Overall a faily good effort andoli would always read his stuff!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I couldn't finish the book. It is basically about the history of advances in technology. I found the book annoying. Things like the fact that the author calls "The Cloud" the cloud/supernova.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Really disappointing. Much inferior to The World is Flat.
I was expecting his usual leftist and globalist diatribes, but do we need a book with a McKinsey consultant telling us that people are using Facebook? - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I like Thomas Friedman; I have a lot of respect for him. But I have a real problem with Friedman books. "Thank You for Being Late" is my third, at least, and I've had the same issue time and again. But before getting into that, let me recap this book broadly along with my reactions to some of its piece parts. It'll help make my point a bit clearer, and perhaps some of you will recall a similar experience.The early chapters deal with all the changes, mostly technological, that have occurred in recent years, with an emphasis on the last decade or two. There are a lot of examples dealing with computer related advances in hardware, software, and networks, mostly from the early days of personal computers to the present. He gives a lot of emphasis to 2007 because of the huge infrastructure and capacities that had recently erupted, with a lot of focus on big name companies of today which had origins that year. It's an incredible and very exciting history, one that I have encouraged my techie grandson to read, and one that I will probably re-read over the years.Friedman also describes three large forces at work in the dawn of our new century - Technology, Globalization, and Mother Nature - that will be shaping our workplace, politics, ethics, geopolitics and community, i.e. environment. And opportunities. He also covers work place skills, and how they are changing, and how young people can best be prepared to deal with the future. There is also the very big issue of the pace of change. It seems so many things these days are obsolete before we get to take them out of the box. (Two months after I bought my iPhone 7 all I have been hearing is how great 8 will be.) Throughout the book, Friedman carefully builds links to help the reader understand we are coming from, where we are, and where we seem to be headed. Until the last chapters.Then he does a nostalgia/community thing that for me derailed before pulling into the station. I am about the same age as Friedman, I too look back at my early Midwest days with a lot of good memories and strong emotions. I know that I often look at the past with rose tinted glasses. I suspect he has done the same. For example, I feel that (sadly) many of his concerns regarding the assimilation of new immigrants are out of touch in the current environment. And I never saw the fit with the preceding pages. Whatever, these last ninety-five pages just didn't work for me. So 5 stars for the first 350 or so and 1 star for the last 95. Oddly enough I recall loving only the first half of "From Beirut...." and most but not all of "The World is Flat.....". For some reason, he just doesn't seem to bring it home for me; maybe next time....
Book preview
Thank You for Being Late - Thomas L. Friedman
PART I
REFLECTING
ONE
Thank You for Being Late
Everyone goes into journalism for different reasons—and they’re often idealistic ones. There are investigative journalists, beat reporters, breaking-news reporters, and explanatory journalists. I have always aspired to be the latter. I went into journalism because I love being a translator from English to English.
I enjoy taking a complex subject and trying to break it down so that I can understand it and then can help readers better understand it—be that subject the Middle East, the environment, globalization, or American politics. Our democracy can work only if voters know how the world works, so they are able to make intelligent policy choices and are less apt to fall prey to demagogues, ideological zealots, or conspiracy buffs who may be confusing them at best or deliberately misleading them at worst. As I watched the 2016 presidential campaign unfold, the words of Marie Curie never rang more true to me or felt more relevant: Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
It’s no surprise so many people feel fearful or unmoored these days. In this book, I will argue that we are living through one of the greatest inflection points in history—perhaps unequaled since Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, a German blacksmith and printer, launched the printing revolution in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation. The three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change—are all accelerating at once. As a result, so many aspects of our societies, workplaces, and geopolitics are being reshaped and need to be reimagined.
When there is a change in the pace of change in so many realms at once, as we’re now experiencing, it is easy to get overwhelmed by it all. As John E. Kelly III, IBM’s senior vice president for cognitive solutions and IBM Research, once observed to me: We live as human beings in a linear world—where distance, time, and velocity are linear.
But the growth of technology today is on an exponential curve. The only exponential we ever experience is when something is accelerating, like a car, or decelerating really suddenly with a hard braking. And when that happens you feel very uncertain and uncomfortable for a short period of time.
Such an experience can also be exhilarating. You might think, Wow, I just went from zero to sixty miles per hour in five seconds.
But you wouldn’t want to take a long trip like that. Yet that is exactly the trip we’re on, argued Kelly: The feeling being engendered now among a lot of people is that of always being in this state of acceleration.
In such a time, opting to pause and reflect, rather than panic or withdraw, is a necessity. It is not a luxury or a distraction—it is a way to increase the odds that you’ll better understand, and engage productively with, the world around you.
How so? When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,
argues my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership. You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to reimagine a better path.
But what matters most is what you do in the pause,
he added. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: ‘In each pause I hear the call.’
Nothing sums up better what I am trying to do with this book—to pause, to get off the merry-go-round on which I’ve been spinning for so many years as a twice-a-week columnist for The New York Times, and to reflect more deeply on what seems to me to be a fundamental turning point in history.
I don’t remember the exact date of my own personal declaration of independence from the whirlwind, but it was sometime in early 2015, and it was totally serendipitous. I regularly meet friends and interview officials, analysts, or diplomats over breakfast in downtown Washington, D.C., near the New York Times bureau. It’s my way of packing more learning into a day and not wasting breakfast by eating alone. Once in a while, though, with the D.C. traffic and subways in the morning always a crapshoot, my breakfast guests would arrive ten, fifteen, or even twenty minutes late. They would invariably arrive flustered, spilling out apologies as they sat down: The Red Line subway was delayed…
The Beltway was backed up…
My alarm failed…
My kid was sick…
On one of those occasions, I realized I didn’t care at all about my guest’s tardiness, so I said: No, no, please—don’t apologize. In fact, you know what, thank you for being late!
Because he was late, I explained, I had minted time for myself. I had found
a few minutes to just sit and think. I was having fun eavesdropping on the couple at the next table (fascinating!) and people-watching the lobby (outrageous!). And, most important, in the pause, I had connected a couple of ideas I had been struggling with for days. So no apology was necessary. Hence: Thank you for being late.
The first time, I just blurted out that response, not really thinking about it. But after another such encounter, I noticed that it felt good to have those few moments of unplanned-for, unscheduled time, and it wasn’t just me who felt better! And I knew why. Like many others, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the dizzying pace of change. I needed to give myself (and my guests) permission to just slow down; I needed permission to be alone with my thoughts—without having to tweet about them, take a picture of them, or share them with anyone. Each time I reassured my guests that their lateness was not a problem, they would give me a quizzical look at first, but then a lightbulb would suddenly go on in their heads and they would say something like: I know what you mean … ‘Thank you for being late!’ Hey, you’re welcome.
In his sobering book Sabbath, the minister and author Wayne Muller observes how often people say to him, I am so busy.
We say this to one another with no small degree of pride,
Muller writes, as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character … To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know when the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single, mindful breath, this has become a model of a successful life.
I’d rather learn to pause. As the editor and writer Leon Wieseltier said to me once: technologists want us to think that patience became a virtue only because in the past we had no choice
—we had to wait longer for things because our modems were too slow or our broadband hadn’t been installed, or because we hadn’t upgraded to the iPhone 7. And so now that we have made waiting technologically obsolete,
added Wieseltier, their attitude is: ‘Who needs patience anymore?’ But the ancients believed that there was wisdom in patience and that wisdom comes from patience … Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.
We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.
And it is not just knowledge that is improved by pausing. So, too, is the ability to build trust, to form deeper and better connections, not just fast ones, with other human beings,
adds Seidman. Our ability to forge deep relationships—to love, to care, to hope, to trust, and to build voluntary communities based on shared values—is one of the most uniquely human capacities we have. It is the single most important thing that differentiates us from nature and machines. Not everything is better faster or meant to go faster. I am built to think about my grandchildren. I am not a cheetah.
It is probably no accident, therefore, that what sparked this book was a pause—a chance encounter I had in, of all places, a parking garage, and my decision not to rush off as usual but to engage with a stranger who approached me with an unusual request.
The Parking Attendant
It was early October 2014. I had driven my car from my home in Bethesda to the downtown there and parked in the public parking garage beneath the Hyatt Regency hotel, where I was meeting a friend at the Daily Grill for breakfast. As required, I got a time-stamped ticket when I arrived. After breakfast, I located my car in the garage and headed for the exit. I drove up to the cashier’s booth and handed the man there my ticket, but before studying it, he studied me.
I know who you are,
said the elderly gentleman with a foreign accent and a warm smile.
Great,
I hurriedly responded.
I read your column,
he said.
Great,
I responded, itching to be on my way home.
I don’t always agree,
he said.
Great,
I responded. It means you always have to check.
We exchanged a few more pleasantries; he gave me my change and I drove off, thinking: "It’s nice to know the parking guy reads my column in The New York Times."
About a week later, I parked in the same garage, as I do roughly once a week to catch the Red Line subway to downtown D.C. from the Bethesda Metro station. I got the same time-stamped ticket, I took the subway to Washington, I spent the day at my office, and I took the Metro back. Then I went down to the garage, located my car, and headed for the exit—and encountered the same attendant in the booth.
I handed him my time-stamped ticket, but this time, before he handed me my change, he said: Mr. Friedman, I write, too. I have my own blog. Would you look at it?
How can I find it?
I asked. He then wrote down the Web address on a small piece of white paper normally used to print out receipts. It said "odanabi.com," and he handed it to me with my change.
I drove off, curious to check it out. But along the way my mind quickly drifted to other thoughts, like: "Holy mackerel! The parking guy is now my competitor! The parking guy has his own blog! He’s a columnist, too! What’s going on here?"
So I got home and called up his website. It was in English and focused on political and economic issues in Ethiopia, where he was from. It concentrated on relations among different ethnic and religious communities, the Ethiopian government’s undemocratic actions, and some of the World Bank’s activities in Africa. The blog was well designed and displayed a strong pro-democracy bent. The English was good but not perfect. The subject didn’t greatly interest me, though, so I didn’t spend a lot of time on the site.
But over the next week I kept thinking about this guy: How did he get into blogging? What did it say about our world that such an obviously educated man works as a parking cashier by day but has his own blog by night, a platform that enables him to participate in a global dialogue and tell the whole world about the issues that animate him, that is, Ethiopian democracy and society?
I decided I needed to pause—and learn more about him. The only problem was that I didn’t have his personal e-mail, so the only way for me to contact him was to take the subway to work every day and park in the public garage to see if, by chance, I could bump into him again. And that’s what I did.
After several days of coming up empty, I was rewarded when one morning I arrived very early and my blogger-parker was there in the cashier’s booth. I stopped at the ticket machine, put my car into park, got out, and waved to him.
Hey, it’s Mr. Friedman again,
I said. Can I have your e-mail address? I want to talk to you.
He found a scrap of paper and wrote it down for me. His full name, I discovered, was Ayele Z. Bojia. That same evening I e-mailed him and asked him to tell me a little bit about his background and when he started blogging. I told him I was thinking of writing a book on writing about the twenty-first century and I was interested in how other people got into the blogging/opinion-writing universe.
He e-mailed me back on November 1, 2014: "I consider the first article I posted on Odanabi.com is also the first day I start blogging … Of course, if the question is also about what motivates me doing that, there are quite a good number of issues that bother me back home in my country of origin—Ethiopia—on which I would like to reflect my personal perspectives. I hope you would excuse me if I am not able to instantaneously respond to your message as I am doing that in between work. Ayele."
On November 3, I e-mailed him again: What were you doing in Ethiopia before you came here and what are the issues that bother you most? No rush. Thanks, Tom.
And the same day he wrote back: Great. I see a big reciprocity here. You are interested to know what issues bother me most while I am interested to learn from you how I can best communicate those issues of my concern to my target constituency and the larger public.
To which I immediately answered: Ayele, You have a deal! Tom.
I promised to share with him all that I could about how to write a column, if he would tell me his life story. He immediately agreed, and we set a date. Two weeks later I came from my office in downtown D.C., near the White House, and Bojia came up from his parking garage, and we met nearby at Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Bethesda. He was sitting at a small table by the window. He had salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache and wore a green wool scarf wrapped around his neck. He began by telling me his story of how he became an opinion writer—and then I told him mine—as we each sipped Peet’s finest brew.
Bojia, who was sixty-three when we first met, explained that he’d graduated with a BA in economics from Haile Selassie I University, named after the longtime Ethiopian emperor. He is an Orthodox Christian and an Oromo, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, with its own distinct language. Dating back from his time as a campus Oromo activist, he explained, he’d been promoting the culture and aspirations of the Oromo people in the context of a democratic Ethiopia.
All my effort is geared towards making it possible for all peoples of Ethiopia to be proud of whatever nationality they belong to and be a proud Ethiopian by citizenship,
Bojia explained. Those efforts drew the ire of the Ethiopian regime and forced him into political exile in 2004.
Bojia, who bore himself with the dignity of an educated immigrant whose day job was just to earn money so he could seriously blog at night, added: I am not trying to write for the writing sake. I want to learn the techniques. [But] I have a cause to promote.
He named his blog Odanabi.com after a town in Ethiopia near the capital, Addis Ababa. The town is currently being touted to become the administrative and cultural seat of the Oromia regional government. He explained that he began his writing career on various Ethiopian Web platforms—Nazret.com, Ayyaantuu.net, AddisVoice.com, and Gadaa.com, an Oromo site, but their pace and his eagerness to participate in ongoing debates did not match: I am appreciative of those websites, which gave me an opportunity to express my views, but the process was just too slow.
So, he explained, as a person working at the parking garage with certain financial constraints, I had to open this website [of my own] to have this regular outlet for myself.
His site is hosted by Bluehost.com for a small fee.
The political field in Ethiopia is dominated by extremes, Bojia added: There is no middle ground open to reason.
One of the things that impressed him about America and that he wanted to bring to Ethiopia was the way people stand for their rights, but also see the other guy’s points of view.
(Maybe you have to be a foreigner from a divided land working in an underground parking garage to see today’s America as a country where arguments are bringing people closer, but I loved his optimism!)
He may just be in the cashier’s booth making change, he told me, but he’s always trying to observe people and how they express themselves and convey their opinions. Before I came here I never heard of Tim Russert,
Bojia said of the late, great Meet the Press host. I don’t know him, but when I started following [his program] it was kind of infectious for me. When he engages he doesn’t push people in an extreme way. He is merciless in presentation of his facts and very respectful to others’ feeling.
As a result, Bojia concluded, by the time he is finished every discussion you feel that he gave us some information
—and triggered something in the mind of the person he interviewed. Tim would have liked that.
Does he know how many people read his blog? I asked.
From month to month it fluctuates with the issue, but there is a steady audience out there,
he informed me, adding that the Web metrics he uses suggest that he is being read in around thirty different countries. But then he added: If there is any way you can help me manage my website, I will be extremely happy.
The thirty-five hours a week he’d spent over the last eight years working in the parking garage were just for subsistence—my website is where my energy is.
I promised to do what I could to help. Who could resist a parking attendant who knows his Web metrics! But I had to ask: What’s it like for you—parking attendant by day, Web activist by night—to have your own global blog, while sitting in Washington and reaching people in thirty countries
—even if the numbers are small?
I feel like I am a little bit empowered at this time,
Bojia answered without hesitation. These days I kind of regret that I wasted my time. I would have started some three or four years ago, and not sent stuff here and there. Had I concentrated on developing my own blog by now I would have a bigger audience … I have a deep satisfaction from what I am doing. I am doing something positive that helps my country.
Heating and Lighting
So over the next few weeks I e-mailed Bojia two memos on how I went about constructing a column, and I followed up with another meeting at Peet’s coffee shop to make certain that he understood what I was trying to say. I can’t say how much it helped him, but I learned an enormous amount from our encounters—more than I ever anticipated.
For starters, just entering Bojia’s world a tiny bit was an eye-opener. A decade ago the two of us would have had little in common, and now we were colleagues of sorts. Each of us was on a journey to bring our priorities to a wider audience, to participate in the global discussion and to tilt the world our way. We were both also part of a bigger trend. We have never seen a time when more people could make history, record history, publicize history, and amplify history all at the same time,
remarked Dov Seidman. In previous epochs, to make history you needed an army, to record it you needed a film studio or a newspaper, to publicize it you needed a publicist. Now anyone can start a wave. Now anyone can make history with a keystroke.
And Bojia was doing just that. Artists and writers have moonlighted from time immemorial. What is new today is how many can now moonlight, how many others they can now touch from the moonlight if what they write is compelling, how fast they can go global if they prove they have something to say, and how little money it now costs to do so.
To live up to my side of the bargain with Bojia, I had to think more deeply about the craft of opinion writing than I had ever done before. I had been a columnist for nearly twenty years when we met, after being a reporter for seventeen years, and our encounter forced me to pause and put into words the difference between reporting and opinion writing and what actually makes a column work.
In my two memos to Bojia I explained that there is no set formula for writing a column, no class you attend, and that everyone does it differently to some degree. But there were some general guidelines I could offer. When you are a reporter, your focus is on digging up facts to explain the visible and the complex and to unearth and expose the impenetrable and the hidden—wherever that takes you. You are there to inform, without fear or favor. Straight news often has enormous influence, but it’s always in direct proportion to how much it informs, exposes, and explains.
Opinion writing is different. When you are a columnist, or a blogger in Bojia’s case, your purpose is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform—to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue.
That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.
Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both.
But how do you go about generating heat or light? Where do opinions come from? I am sure every opinion writer would offer a different answer. My short one is that a column idea can spring from anywhere: a newspaper headline that strikes you as odd, a simple gesture by a stranger, the moving speech of a leader, the naïve question of a child, the cruelty of a school shooter, the wrenching tale of a refugee. Everything and anything is raw fodder for creating heat or light. It all depends on the connections you make and insights you surface to buttress your opinion.
More broadly speaking, though, I told Bojia, column writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created.
This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them.
When I say your own values, priorities, and aspirations, I mean the things that you care about most and aspire to see implemented most intensely. That value set helps you determine what is important and worth opining about, as well as what you will say. It is okay to change your mind as an opinion writer; what is not okay is to have no mind—to stand for nothing, or for everything, or only for easy and safe things. An opinion writer has to emerge from some framework of values that shapes his or her thinking about what should be supported or opposed. Are you a capitalist, a communist, a libertarian, a Keynesian, a conservative, a liberal, a neocon, or a Marxist?
When I refer to the world’s big gears and pulleys, I am talking about what I call the Machine.
(Hat tip to Ray Dalio, the renowned hedge fund investor, who describes the economy as a machine.
) To be an opinion writer, you also always need to be carrying around a working hypothesis of how you think the Machine works—because your basic goal is to take your values and push the Machine in their direction. If you don’t have a theory about how the Machine works, you’ll either push it in a direction that doesn’t accord with your beliefs or you won’t move it at all.
And when I say people and culture, I mean how different peoples and cultures are affected by the Machine when it moves and how they, in turn, affect the Machine when they react. Ultimately columns are about people—the crazy things they say, do, hate, and hope for. I like to collect data to inform columns—but never forget: talking to another human being is also data. The columns that get the most response are almost always the ones about people, not numbers. Also, never forget that the best-selling book of all time is a collection of stories about people. It’s called the Bible.
I argued to Bojia that the most effective columns emerge from mixing and rubbing these three ingredients together: you can’t be an effective opinion writer without a set of values that informs what you’re advocating. Dov Seidman likes to remind me of the Talmudic saying What comes from the heart enters the heart.
What doesn’t come from your heart will never enter someone else’s heart. It takes caring to ignite caring; it takes empathy to ignite empathy. You also can’t have an effective column without some take
on the biggest forces shaping the world in which we live and how to influence them. Your view of the Machine can never be perfect or immutable. It always has to be a work in progress that you are building and rebuilding as you get new information and the world changes. But it is very difficult to persuade people to do something if you can’t connect the dots for them in a convincing way—why this action will produce this result, because this is how the gears and pulleys of the Machine work. And, finally, I told Bojia, you’ll never have an opinion column that works unless it is inspired and informed by real people. It can’t just be the advocacy of abstract principles.
When you put your value set together with your analysis of how the Machine works and your understanding of how it is affecting people and culture in different contexts, you have a worldview that you can then apply to all kinds of situations to produce your opinions. Just as a data scientist needs an algorithm to cut through all the unstructured data and all the noise to see the relevant patterns, an opinion writer needs a worldview to create heat and light.
But to keep that worldview fresh and relevant, I suggested to Bojia, you have to be constantly reporting and learning—more so today than ever. Anyone who falls back on tried-and-true formulae or dogmatisms in a world changing this fast is asking for trouble. Indeed, as the world becomes more interdependent and complex, it becomes more vital than ever to widen your aperture and to synthesize more perspectives.
My own thinking on this subject has been deeply influenced by Lin Wells, who teaches strategy at the National Defense University. According to Wells, it is fanciful to suppose that you can opine about or explain this world by clinging to the inside or outside of any one rigid explanatory box or any single disciplinary silo. Wells describes three ways of thinking about a problem: inside the box,
outside the box,
and where there is no box.
The only sustainable approach to thinking today about problems, he argues, is thinking without a box.
Of course, that doesn’t mean having no opinion. Rather, it means having no limits on your curiosity or the different disciplines you might draw on to appreciate how the Machine works. Wells calls this approach—which I will employ in this book—being radically inclusive.
It involves bringing into your analysis as many relevant people, processes, disciplines, organizations, and technologies as possible—factors that are often kept separate or excluded altogether. For instance, the only way you will understand the changing nature of geopolitics today is if you meld what is happening in computing with what is happening in telecommunications with what is happening in the environment with what is happening in globalization with what is happening in demographics. There is no other way today to develop a fully rounded picture.
These are the main lessons I shared with Bojia in my memos and our coffees. But here is a confession, which I also happily shared with him at our last meeting, which happened as I was completing this book: I had never thought this deeply about my own craft and what makes a column work until our chance encounter prompted me to do so. Had I not paused to engage him, I never would have taken apart, examined, and then reassembled my own framework for making sense of the world in a period of rapid change.
Not surprisingly, the experience set my mind whirring. And not surprisingly, my meetings with Bojia soon led me to start asking myself the same questions I was asking him to explore: What is my value set and where did it come from? How do I think the Machine works today? And what have I learned about how different peoples and cultures are being impacted by the Machine and responding to it?
That’s what I started doing—in the pause—and the rest of this book is my answer.
Part II is about how I think the Machine works now—what I think are the biggest forces reshaping more things in more places in more ways on more days. Hint: the Machine is being driven by simultaneous accelerations in technology, globalization, and climate change, all interacting with one another.
And Part III is about how these accelerating forces are affecting people and cultures. That is, how they are reshaping the workplace, geopolitics, politics, ethical choices, and communities—including the small town in Minnesota where I grew up and where my own values were shaped.
Part IV offers the conclusions I draw from it all.
In short, this book is one giant column about the world today. It aims to define the key forces that are driving change around the world, to explain how they are affecting different people and cultures, and to identify what I believe to be the values and responses most appropriate to managing these forces, in order to get the most out of them for the most people in the most places and to cushion their harshest impacts.
So you never know what can result from pausing to talk to another person. To make a short story long—Bojia got a framework for his blog and I got a framework for this book. Think of it as an optimist’s guide to thriving and building resilience in this age of accelerations, surely one of the great transformative moments in history.
As a reporter, I am continually amazed that often, when you go back and re-report a story or a period of history, you discover things you never saw the first time. As I began to write this book, it immediately became clear to me that the technological inflection point that is driving the Machine today occurred in a rather innocuous-sounding year: 2007.
What the hell happened in 2007?
PART II
ACCELERATING
TWO
What the Hell Happened in 2007?
John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist who backed Netscape, Google, and Amazon, doesn’t remember the exact day anymore; all he remembers is that it was shortly before Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 9, 2007, to announce that Apple had reinvented the mobile phone. Doerr will never forget, though, the moment he first laid eyes on that phone. He and Jobs, his friend and neighbor, were watching a soccer match that Jobs’s daughter was playing in at a school near their homes in Palo Alto. As play dragged on, Jobs told Doerr that he wanted to show him something.
Steve reached into the top pocket of his jeans and pulled out the first iPhone,
Doerr recalled for me, and he said, ‘John, this device nearly broke the company. It is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.’ So I asked for the specs. Steve said that it had five radios in different bands, it had so much processing power, so much RAM [random access memory], and so many gigabits of flash memory. I had never heard of so much flash memory in such a small device. He also said it had no buttons—it would use software to do everything—and that in one device ‘we will have the world’s best media player, world’s best telephone, and world’s best way to get to the Web—all three in one.’
Doerr immediately volunteered to start a fund that would support creation of applications for this device by third-party developers, but Jobs wasn’t interested at the time. He didn’t want outsiders messing with his elegant phone. Apple would do the apps. A year later, though, he changed his mind; that fund was launched, and the mobile phone app industry exploded. The moment that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone turns out to have been a pivotal junction in the history of technology—and the world.
There are vintage years in wine and vintage years in history, and 2007 was definitely one of the latter.
Because not just the iPhone emerged in 2007—a whole group of companies emerged in and around that year. Together, these new companies and innovations have reshaped how people and machines communicate, create, collaborate, and think. In 2007, storage capacity for computing exploded thanks to the emergence that year of a framework for software called Hadoop, making big data
possible for all. In 2007, development began on an open-source platform for writing and collaborating on software, called GitHub, that would vastly expand the ability of software to start, as Netscape founder Marc Andreessen once put it, eating the world.
On September 26, 2006, Facebook, a social networking site that had been confined to users on college campuses and at high schools, was opened to everyone at least thirteen years old with a valid e-mail address, and started to scale globally. In 2007, a micro-blogging company called Twitter, which had been part of a broader start-up, was spun off as its own separate platform and also started to scale globally. Change.org, the most popular social mobilization website, emerged in 2007.
In late 2006, Google bought YouTube, and in 2007 it launched Android, an open-standards platform for devices that would help smartphones scale globally with an alternative operating system to Apple’s iOS. In 2007, AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive connectivity provider, invested in something called software-enabled networks
—thus rapidly expanding its capacity to handle all the cellular traffic created by this smartphone revolution. According to AT&T, mobile data traffic on its national wireless network increased by more than 100,000 percent from January 2007 through December 2014.
Also in 2007, Amazon released something called the Kindle, onto which, thanks to Qualcomm’s 3G technology, you could download thousands of books anywhere in the blink of an eye, launching the e-book revolution. In 2007, Airbnb was conceived in an apartment in San Francisco. In late 2006, the Internet crossed one billion users worldwide, which seems to have been a tipping point. In 2007, Palantir Technologies, the leading company using big data analytics and augmented intelligence to, among other things, help the intelligence community find needles in haystacks, launched its first platform. Computing power and storage reached a level that made it possible for us to create an algorithm that could make a lot of sense out of things we could not make sense of before,
explained Palantir’s cofounder Alexander Karp. In 2005, Michael Dell decided to relinquish his job as CEO of Dell and step back from the hectic pace and just be its chairman. Two years later he realized that was bad timing. I could see that the pace of change had really accelerated. I realized we could do all this different stuff. So I came back to run the company in … 2007.
It was also in 2007 that David Ferrucci, who led the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and his team began building a cognitive computer called Watson—a special-purpose computer system designed to push the envelope on deep question and answering, deep analytics, and the computer’s understanding of natural language,
noted the website HistoryofInformation.com. ‘Watson’ became the first cognitive computer, combining machine learning and artificial intelligence.
In 2007, Intel introduced non-silicon materials—known as high-k/metal gates (the term refers to the transistor gate electrode and transistor gate dielectric)—into microchips for the first time. This very technical fix was hugely important. Although non-silicon materials were already used in other parts of the microprocessor, their introduction into the transistor helped Moore’s law—the expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years—continue on its path of delivering exponential growth in computing power. At that time there was real concern that Moore’s law was hitting a wall with traditional silicon transistors.
By opening the way to non-silicon materials it gave Moore’s law another shot in the arm at a time when many people were thinking it was coming to an end,
said Sadasivan Shankar, who worked on Intel’s material design team at the time and now teaches materials and computational sciences at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Commenting on the breakthrough, the New York Times Silicon Valley reporter John Markoff wrote on January 27, 2007: Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors. Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.
For all of the above reasons, 2007 was also the beginning of the clean power revolution,
said Andy Karsner, the U.S. assistant secretary of energy for efficiency and renewable energy from 2006 to 2008. If anyone in 2005 or 2006 told you their predictive models captured where clean tech and renewable energy went in 2007 they are lying. Because what happened in 2007 was the beginning of an exponential rise in solar energy, wind, biofuels, LED lighting, energy efficient buildings, and the electrification of vehicles. It was a hockey stick moment.
Last but certainly not least, in 2007 the cost of DNA sequencing began to fall dramatically as the biotech industry shifted to new sequencing techniques and platforms, leveraging all the computing and storage power that was just exploding. This change in instruments was a turning point for genetic engineering and led to the rapid evolution of DNA sequencing technologies that has occurred in recent years,
according to Genome.gov. In 2001, it cost $100 million to sequence just one person’s genome. On September 30, 2015, Popular Science reported: Yesterday, personal genetics company Veritas Genetics announced that it had reached a milestone: participants in its limited, but steadily expanding Personal Genetics Program can get their entire genome sequenced for just $1,000.
As the graphs on the next two pages display, 2007 was clearly a turning point for many technologies.
Technology has always moved up in step changes. All the elements of computing power—processing chips, software, storage chips, networking, and sensors—tend to move forward roughly as a group. As their improving capacities reach a certain point, they tend to meld together into a platform, and that platform scales a new set of capabilities, which becomes the new normal. As we went from mainframes to desktops to laptops to smartphones with mobile applications, each generation of technology got easier and more natural for people to use than the one before. When the first mainframe computers came out, you needed to have a computer science degree to use them. Today’s smartphone can be accessed by young children and the illiterate.
As step changes in technology go, though, the platform birthed around the year 2007 surely constituted one of the greatest leaps forward in history. It suffused a new set of capabilities to connect, collaborate, and create throughout every aspect of life, commerce, and government. Suddenly there were so many more things that could be digitized, so much more storage to hold all that digital data, so many faster computers and so much more innovative software that could process that data for insights, and so many more organizations and people (from the biggest multinationals to the smallest Indian farmers) who could access those insights, or contribute to them, anywhere in the world through their handheld computers—their smartphones.
This is the central technology engine driving the Machine today. It snuck up on us very fast. In 2004, I started writing a book about what I thought then was the biggest force driving the Machine—namely, how the world was getting wired to such a degree that more people in more places had an equal opportunity to compete, connect, and collaborate with more other people for less money with greater ease than ever before. I called that book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. The first edition came out in 2005. I wrote an updated 2.0 edition in 2006 and a 3.0 edition in 2007. And then I stopped, thinking I had built a pretty solid framework that could last me as a columnist for a while.
I was very wrong! Indeed, 2007 was a really bad year to stop thinking.
I first realized just how bad the minute I sat down in 2010 to write my most recent book, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, which I coauthored with Michael Mandelbaum. As I recalled in that book, the first thing I did when I started working on it was to get the first edition of The World Is Flat off my bookshelf—just to remind myself what I was thinking when I started back in 2004. I cracked it open to the index, ran my finger down the page, and immediately discovered that Facebook wasn’t in it! That’s right—when I was running around in 2004 declaring that the world was flat, Facebook didn’t even exist yet, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, applications
were what you sent to college, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people, was a typographical error. All of those technologies blossomed after I wrote The World Is Flat—most of them around 2007.
So a few years later, I began updating in earnest my view of how the Machine worked. A crucial impetus was a book I read in 2014 by two MIT business school professors—Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—entitled The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. The first machine age, they argued, was the Industrial Revolution, which accompanied the invention of the steam engine in the 1700s. This period was all about power systems to augment human muscle,
explained McAfee in an interview, and each successive invention in that age delivered more and more power. But they all required humans to make decisions about them.
Therefore, the inventions of that era actually made human control and labor more valuable and important.
Labor and machines were, broadly speaking, complementary, he added. In the second machine age, though, noted Brynjolfsson, we are beginning to automate a lot more cognitive tasks, a lot more of the control systems that determine what to use that power for. In many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans.
So humans and software-driven machines may increasingly be substitutes, not complements.
The key, but not the only, driving force making this possible, they argued, was the exponential growth in computing power as represented by Moore’s law: the theory first postulated by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the speed and power of microchips—that is, computational processing power—would double roughly every year, which he later updated to every two years, for only slightly more money with each new generation. Moore’s law has held up close to that pattern for fifty years.
To illustrate this kind of exponential growth, Brynjolfsson and McAfee recalled the famous legend of the king who was so impressed with the man who invented the game of chess that he offered him any reward. The inventor of chess said that all he wanted was enough rice to feed his family. The king said, Of course, it shall be done. How much would you like?
The man asked the king to simply place a single grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, then two on the next, then four on the next, with each subsequent square receiving twice as many grains as the previous one. The king agreed, noted Brynjolfsson and McAfee—without realizing that sixty-three instances of doubling yields a fantastically big number: something like eighteen quintillion grains of rice. That is the power of exponential change. When you keep doubling something for fifty years you start to get to some very big numbers, and eventually you start to see some very funky things that you have never seen before.
The authors argued that Moore’s law just entered the second half of the chessboard,
where the doubling has gotten so big and fast we’re starting to see stuff that is fundamentally different in power and capability from anything we have seen before—self-driving cars, computers that can think on their own and beat any human in chess or Jeopardy! or even Go, a 2,500-year-old board game considered vastly more complicated than chess. That is what happens when the rate of change and the acceleration of the rate of change both increase at the same time,
said McAfee, and we haven’t seen anything yet!
So, at one level, my view of the Machine today is built on the shoulders of Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s fundamental insight into how the steady acceleration in Moore’s law has affected technology—but I think the Machine today is even more complicated. That’s because it’s not just pure technological change that has hit the second half of the chessboard. It is also two other giant forces: accelerations in the Market and in Mother Nature.
The Market
is my shorthand for the acceleration of globalization. That is, global flows of commerce, finance, credit, social networks, and connectivity generally are weaving markets, media, central banks, companies, schools, communities, and individuals more tightly together than ever. The resulting flows of information and knowledge are making the world not only interconnected and hyperconnected but interdependent—everyone everywhere is now more vulnerable to the actions of anyone anywhere.
And Mother Nature
is my shorthand for climate change, population growth, and biodiversity loss—all of which have also been accelerating, as they, too, enter the second halves of their chessboards.
Here again, I am standing on the shoulders of others. I derive the term the age of accelerations
from a series of graphs first assembled by a team of scientists led by Will Steffen, a climate change expert and researcher at the Australian National University, Canberra. The graphs, which originally appeared in a 2004 book entitled Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, looked at how technological, social, and environmental impacts were accelerating and feeding off one another from 1750 to 2000, and particularly since 1950. The term Great Acceleration
was coined in 2005 by these same scientists to capture the holistic, comprehensive, and interlinked nature of all these changes simultaneously sweeping across the globe and reshaping the human and biophysical landscapes of the Earth system. An updated version of those graphs was published in the Anthropocene Review on March 2, 2015; they appear here of this book.
When we started the project it was ten years since the first accelerations had been published, which ran from 1750 to 2000,
explained Owen Gaffney, director of strategy for the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and part of the Great Acceleration team. We wanted to update the graphs to 2010 to see if the trajectory had altered any
—and indeed it had, he said: it had accelerated.
It is the core argument of this book that these simultaneous accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law together constitute the age of accelerations,
in which we now find ourselves. These are the central gears driving the Machine today. These three accelerations are impacting one another—more Moore’s law is driving more globalization and more globalization is driving more climate change, and more Moore’s law is also driving more potential solutions to climate change and a host of other challenges—and at the same time transforming almost every aspect of modern life.
Craig Mundie, a supercomputer designer and former chief of strategy and research at Microsoft, defines this moment in simple physics terms: The mathematical definition of velocity is the first derivative, and acceleration is the second derivative. So velocity grows or shrinks as a function of acceleration. In the world we are in now, acceleration seems to be increasing. [That means] you don’t just move to a higher speed of change. The rate of change also gets faster … And when the rate of change eventually exceeds the ability to adapt you get ‘dislocation.’ ‘Disruption’ is what happens when someone does something clever that makes you or your company look obsolete. ‘Dislocation’ is when the whole environment is being altered so quickly that everyone starts to feel they can’t keep up.
That is what is happening now. The world is not just rapidly changing,
adds Dov Seidman, it is being dramatically reshaped—it is starting to operate differently
in many realms all at once. And this reshaping is happening faster than we have yet been able to reshape ourselves, our leadership, our institutions, our societies, and our ethical choices.
Indeed, there is a mismatch between the change in the pace of change and our ability to develop the learning systems, training systems, management systems, social safety nets, and government regulations that would enable citizens to get the most out of these accelerations and cushion their worst impacts. This mismatch, as we will see, is at the center of much of the turmoil roiling politics and society in both developed and developing countries today. It now constitutes probably the most important governance challenge across the