Here in Dymaxia we tend to see the world not as flat, but to use a little
less tricky phrase, horizontal. For instance, in our horizontal world, we
have the impression that our tech support guys for this site --available 24/7,
BTW-- are in Hong-Kong; yet, we can't be quite sure. We do know, however,
that you, dear readers, land here from all over the world. Looking at a 24 hour
bar chart of visits to the site, it's impossible to see where the US business
day begins and ends. In actuality, it's a pretty flat bar chart, that looks an
awful lot like a
piano keyboard!
Without trying to elevate the term or merely pun, we are going to argue that
"horizontal" is different from "flat" and question whether Tom Friedman has
noted the difference and, more importantly, it's real political significance.
This, because horizontal implies a system that is non-hierarchical, one that is
peer to peer and one that allows us to reach from any endpoint to any other
endpoint without interference. Because of this horizontalness, the Internet
provides a level of connectivity that extends far beyond what was imagined just a decade or so ago when this all began to roll
out. In the boom exuberance, capital flowed like wine downhill from Sonoma to
Silicon Valley and the great build-out took off. Fiber cable that might have
taken the governments and the great TELCO'S decades to finance, was laid out
across the continents and oceans and, with a certain lag, began to be lighted up.
First in were the Wal-Marts and Merrill Lynchs of the world who sought to cut
their costs for a competitive edge. Then came the end-user services and suddenly
millions of individuals, who by reasons of geography and politics, had been kept
well behind the cutting edge, became part of the same highly elastic
wavelength.
As a result, even as the War on Terrorism put the kybosh on immigration,
Indian and Chinese programmers and designers no longer had to be physically in the US to find out what problems the leading edge was dealing with
and thus where the entrepreneurial opportunities lie. So, as Friedman reports, suddenly there
were millions of young, hungry, well educated Asians able to find work in their
own countries. And it wasn't just data entry, low level tech support and
outdated COBOL coding they were being asked to do by American corporations with
bloated valuations,
desperate to meet quarterly projections.
Most non-geeks would be hard pressed to explain what the Open
Source Movement is all about even if they had heard of its existence. The importance of Open Source --and it's not only the threat this movement
poses to Microsoft's hegemony-- is that any programmer can join into an open
source development group to work on a project that is unpaid, self governing and
with a resulting end product that is generally free to the user. More significantly, Open
Source developers are often busy building the kind of cutting edge software applications that the
new horizontal world requires. These social networking platforms, like wiki's,
and social web-knowledge building, or other group activities that allow for the efficient
sharing of writing, photos, videos, audiocasts and beyond in the vast sea of new content and applications
that is being spawned, all rely on group, self managing activities that greatly speed up the
development process. Some people wonder why trained developers would
volunteer so much time and effort with no direct pay but, in fact, there can be no better means of
connecting and learning from one's peers around the world --since these are often truly
global efforts-- than getting involved in a cutting edge project.
This activity spawned by low barrier, horizontal connectivity and communication
has brought us all to a new inflexion point, a term that was popularized by Intel founder Andy Grove, to describe critical points
in time where everything changes. We saw IBM topple when software development
became "off-the-shelf' and more efficient ways of developing and building it
were evolved by the mainly West Coast based software companies; M$FT now faces
the same possible fate. The know-how for efficient, team software development,
and the high tech process, platforms and financial infrastructure that grew up
in its wake to make Silicon Valley the epicenter of the last boom, is now being
spread around the world, peer-to-peer via the horizontal
platform.
When giant seismic changes occur below, there are always massive reactions to
follow on the surface. We dare to be optimistic enough to think this momentum cannot be
totally suppressed but we do
strongly fear that attempts will be made to throttle and control the Internet.
We have the potential to make major strides towards a horizontal world built on this layer of
global connectivity. In the background, we already hear the footsteps of those
very powerful forces
who would like to mold and game the system by tampering with all layers of the
Internet in order to make it work to their advantage, while subverting and
reversing the movement to openness through technical, economic, judicial and
legislative barriers.
And to get back to the urging of our guest from across the pond, who, we of
course, hope will read this; Taking the lead now, at this critical juncture,
means assuming the responsibility to make sure that, despite major forces to the
contrary, the playing field remains horizontal and the interlopers and censors
are kept at bay. It will take more than a flat, nonpolitical, effort and it will
have to be global.