friedman (WAS: internet & social control)

[Dave Monroe]

Again, have read TL&TOT, the occasional column, and,
again, while he may note problems, problematics, even,
he still seems to write of globalization as not only
an overwhelming inevitability, but seemingly as an
ultimately desirable one, regardless of the contingent
and/or undesirable particulars, e.g., ...

   "What blew away all the walls were three
fundamental changes--changes in how we communicate,
how we invest and how we learn about the world. These
changes were born and incubated during the Cold War
and achieved a critical mass by the late 1980s, when
they finally came together into a whirlwind strong
enough to blow down all the walls of the Cold War
system and enable the world to come together as a
single, integrated, open plain. Today, that plain
grows wider, faster and more open every day, as more
walls get blown down and more countries get absorbed.
And that's why today there is no more First World,
Second World or Third World. There's now just the Fast
World--the world of the wide-open plain--and the Slow
World--the world of those who either fall by the
wayside or choose to live away from the plain in some
artificially walled-off valley of their own, because
they find the Fast World to be too fast, too scary,
too homogenizing or too demanding."

http://www.lexusandtheolivetree.com/the3democs.htm

Not much room for dissent or even negotiation there. 
Indeed, there's an almost Fukuyaman "end of history"
feel to Friedman's rollercoaster ride there ...

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm

Maybe, maybe not all THAT much to suabble with at an
immediate, surface level, but the construction of such
centrifugality does placve a certain rhetorical spin
on events, one with potentially, with the potential to
induce, real practical, political, economic, whatever
effects.  There's a difference between historical,
social, economic, technological, political, whatever
momenta and the rather less exorable physical kind ...

--- Jumbly Girl <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> He is critical of multi/trans/super(?--extra-?
> a-?)national corporate capitalism. Anyone who says
> otherwise is dead wrong. Have you read his books or
> not?

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