Getting Flat, Part 2

In Getting Flat, Part 1, I looked at what Tom Friedman says about Linux and open source in his new bestseller, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twent-First Century. -- and in It's a Flat World, After All, a long feature that ran in the April 10, 2005 edition of the New York Times Magazine. The summary: Tom's flat-world insights are right-on, though a bit compromised by undue emphasis on competition (much of which isn't there) between open source communities and Microsoft, and insufficient credit to open source for having flattened the world (by helping create the Net and now supplying its growing infrastructural building materials) -- creating, in the process, a marketplace much more open and unlimited than the old software business it threatens.

Here in Part 2, I go look into what Tom says about IT -- plus the rest of what's going on in our flat new world. Here's the gist of his take on IT, from his New York Times feature:

Wherever you look today -- whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft; or the world of business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and working with some of the most advanced Western multinationals -- hierarchies are being flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between companies and among individuals.

Do you recall ''the IT revolution'' that the business press has been pushing for the last 20 years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was just the prologue. The last 20 years were about forging, sharpening and distributing all the new tools to collaborate and connect. Now the real information revolution is about to begin as all the complementarities among these collaborative tools start to converge. One of those who first called this moment by its real name was Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just ''the end of the beginning.'' The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been ''the warm-up act.'' Now we are going into the main event, she said, ''and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of life.''

Again, we see how Tom is big on Big Companies and Big Challenges for nations and regions, neither of which (we observe, ironically) are very flat. Another example:

...there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western Europeans will continue leading the way. These new players are stepping onto the playing field legacy free, meaning that many of them were so far behind that they can leap right into the new technologies without having to worry about all the sunken costs of old systems. It means that they can move very fast to adopt new, state-of-the-art technologies, which is why there are already more cellphones in use in China today than there are people in America

If you want to appreciate the sort of challenge we are facing, let me share with you two conversations. One was with some of the Microsoft officials who were involved in setting up Microsoft's research center in Beijing, Microsoft Research Asia, which opened in 1998 -- after Microsoft sent teams to Chinese universities to administer I.Q. tests in order to recruit the best brains from China's 1.3 billion people. Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science students tested, Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at Microsoft: ''Remember, in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.''

Now I'm thinking, What do you mean we, Times-man? All due respect to Microsoft (and I give them plenty), they're not what's happening with computing in China. Linux is huge there, and for all the good flattening-force reasons Tom details elsewhere. But there's something else in that last paragraph, in addition to Microsoft, that shows where Tom may be barking (or at least gesturing) up the wrong tree: this business about IQ tests.

A friend who worked at Microsoft once told me the company is fundamentally about "more school". It's built by, and for, academic achievers like the two guys who founded the company. (I read recently that one had an SAT score of 1600 and the other had a score of 1590 -- back when scoring was much tougher than it is today). He noted that the company brass "can't go two paragraphs without using the word 'smart'", and asked, "Are there any other companies that want to know your SAT scores? Your GPA? Or that grade you on a curve?" He also said Microsoft was the first to call its facility a "campus". Not sure if that's true, but it's plausible enough to make his point.

I can save Microsoft a pile of time and money by reporting a fact no school wants to admit, and will flatten the world far more than any other factor: pretty much everybody is smart. Here's how iconoclast educator John Taylor Gatto put it in Harpers several years ago:

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. That same year he announced his retirement, in "I Quit, I think", which ran as an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal. The gist:

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first -- the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.

In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.

I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn't want to accept that notion--far from it--my own training in two elite universities taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell curve and that human destiny, because of those mathematical, seemingly irrefutable, scientific facts, was as rigorously determined as John Calvin contended. The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence --insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality -- that I became confused. They didn't do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

Bit by bit I began to devise guerrilla exercises to allow the kids I taught—as many as I was able—the raw material people have always used to educate themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from surveillance, and as broad a range of situations and human associations as my limited power and resources could manage. In simpler terms, I tried to manuever them into positions where they would have a chance to be their own teachers and to make themselves the major text of their own education...

I dropped the idea that I was an expert, whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself.

The italics are mine.

Nothing I have ever read has resonated with me more. In kindergarten I was David (literally, that's my given name): one of the smart kids, with an IQ score of 137. By the 8th grade my IQ score had dropped 103.

I say "score" because I believe that's all it is. Nobody has an IQ. Tests that measure IQ aren't thermometers or dipsticks. They're just tests. You might do well on one day and bad on another. My own known IQ scores have a range of 80 points. A few years ago I went through a battery of tests to determine whether or not I had Attention Deficit Disorder. The guy giving the tests told me afterwards that on one I had the highest score he'd ever seen: I got all the answers right. "If I gave you just that test, I'd say you were brilliant." Then he told me that, on another test, I had the worst scores he'd ever seen. "If I gave you just that test, I'd say you were mentally retarded."

They never came up with a clear diagnosis, by the way. I had lots of ADD characteristics (distractability, fidgeting), but didn't exactly fit the profile. Or any other they could name. I told them, "I have a sense that there may be a periodic table of attention types, and you guys are still at the earth-air-fire-water stage." He said, "You're right."

I hated being judged in school, right from the start. In Kindergarten the teacher sent me to the "thinking chair" repeatedly. (I still remember sitting there thinking, about what?) In first grade they put me in the slow reading group. And there I stayed, pretty much. My Iowa Test scores started strong in 1st grade, but by 8th grade they were down to the 10th percentile in vocabulary and zip in reading: the score couldn't be lower if I'd done nothing with the test. Come to think of it, that's probably what I did.

In fact, my reading was fine. So was my vocabulary. At home, I devoured books. I just hated school, hated homework, hated the whole system. Including athletics, another caste system where I became an untouchable.

Natually, that system wanted to shunt me off to the local vocational-technical high school to learn how to fix cars and work a drill press -- like all the other academic failures. Fortunately my parents believed in me, and sent me off to a Lutheran prep school — which I only half-jokingly called an "academic correctional institution". (This may be my old room.)

By that time I was already a ham radio operator and a committed geek. At home, electronics were my main thing. At school, I continued to earn lousy grades; but I still learned plenty. That's because my curiousity was uncrushed by the system. And, like geeks and misfits everywhere, I treasured what made me different and worked constantly to increase the delta between my soul and the bell curve. In other words, I educated myself. Just like Franklin, Edison and the rest of history's productive misfits.

I say all this because it's clear to me (and probably to Tom, too) that the flat new world isn't so big on fitting. Here we reward differences. We value uniqueness, creativity, innovation, initiative, resourcefulness. Every patch to the software in the server that brings you this essay was created by somebody different, with something different to contribute. Yes, a meritocracy is involved. But I can assure you it has nothing to do with grades or IQ tests. It has to do with quality of code, and with all the virtues that produce it, only some of which are fostered in school.

In the flat new world, educational opportunities are limitless, even without help from school, government, churches or business. Much of what you need to know, about pretty much everything, is out there on the Web somewhere -- especially if you're a technologist. Of course, the Web isn't everywhere. But it's in all the flat places, and the flatness is spreading, fast. Which is another of Tom's points.

I also bring up the school/smartness issue because I want to invite readers to visit their own prejudices there. If you're one of those folks who proved their smarts in school, or in some other environment that values the bell curve (sports, for example), you may not be quick to buy the case Gatto and I are making here. Those labeled smart have a vested interest in maintaining the system that does the labeling. To be smart, you need the average, and the dumb. Whats more, you need systems that produce those populations. The flaws in this system are not obvious to those who are graced by it. To the disgraced the flaws are vivid. Beleive me.

Of course, the average and the dumb are still plentiful. No doubt about it. But try this concept on for size: most of them were made that way. They were shaped by school systems which have had, from the dawn of the industrial age, a main purpose: to produce employees for boxed positions in corporate org charts that take the shape of pyramids: wide at the bottom, narrow at the top. The many supporting the few. We may have needed the caste system that made each of us a ranked "product" (and we call ourselves that) of "an education". There were few alternatives in the industrial age, aside from farming and other relatively solitary occupations. There are plenty now: as many as there are individuals with access to broadband.

The flat world is different. The flat world really does reward individuality, creativity, freedom, initiative. Tom says that too, but he also seems to think school is going to solve the problem — when, in fact, school may be a big part of the problem. And not just in the U.S. Other countries may have better educational systems than we have in the U.S.; but those countries also produce plenty of intellects whose self-education is far more helpful than whatever they obtain from school. And the ability to self-educate is essential in the flat new world.

As Tom puts it in his book, "once the world has been flattened and the new forms of collaboration made available to more and more people, the winners will be those who learn the habits, processes and skills most quickly -- and there is simply nothing that guarantees it will be Americans or Western Europeans permanently leading the way."

In fact, given the odds, Chinese and Indian folks will lead the way. Tom thinks many will be "zippies", the label given to "the huge cohort of Indian youth who are the first to come of age since India shifted away from socialism and dived headfirst into global trade and the information revolution by turning itself into the world's service center." More specifically, a zippie is what Outlook calls a "young city or suburban resident between 15 and 25 years of age, with a zip in the stride."

But does that have to be a Real Big Deal? Tom thinks it does. We need to compete.

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Links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=cc2a003cd936d374&ex=1270267200&partner=rssuserland

http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/

http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/worldisflat.htm

http://www.chaucers.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/ek/people/kunz.htm

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/

http://www.cluetrain.com/book/markets.html