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a man's hand, that man could lose his manhood. "What struck me about the story," wrote

Steyn, "was a detail: The hysteria was spread by cell phones and text messaging. Think

about that: You can own a cell phone yet still believe a foreigner's handshake can

melt away your penis. What happens when that kind of technologically advanced

primitivism advances beyond text messaging?"

This is not a chapter about cell phones, so why do I raise these stories? Because

ever since I began writing about globalization, I've been challenged by critics along

one particular line: "Isn't there a certain technological determinism to your

argument? To listen to you, Friedman, there

are these ten flatteners, they are converging and flattening the earth, and there

is nothing that people can do but bow to them and join the parade. And after a

transition, everyone will get richer and smarter and it will all be fine. But you're

wrong, because the history of the world suggests that ideological alternatives, and

power alternatives, have always arisen to any system, and globalization will be no

different."

This is a legitimate question, solet me try to answer it directly: I am a technological

determinist! Guilty as charged.

I believe that capabilities create intentions. If we create an Internet where people

can open an online store and have global suppliers, global customers, and global

competitors, they will open that online store or bank or bookshop. If we create work

flow platforms that allow companies to disaggregate any job and source it to the

knowledge center anywhere in the world that can perform that task most efficiently

at the lowest cost, companies will do that sort of outsourcing. If we create cell

phones with cameras in them, people will use them for all sorts of tasks, from cheating

on tests to calling Grandma in her nursing home on her ninetieth birthday from the

top of a mountain in New Zealand. The history of economic development teaches this

over and over: If you can do it, you must do it, otherwise your competitors will-and

as this book has tried to demonstrate, there is a whole new universe of things that

companies, countries, and individuals can and must do to thrive in a flat world.

But while I am a technological determinist, I am not a historical determinist. There

is absolutely no guarantee that everyone will use these new technologies, or the

triple convergence, for the benefit of themselves, their countries, or humanity.

These are just technologies. Using them does not make you modern, smart, moral, wise,

fair, or decent. It just makes you able to communicate, compete, and collaborate

farther and faster. In the absence of a world-destabilizing war, every one of these

technologies will become cheaper, lighter, smaller and more personal, mobile, digital,

and virtual. Therefore, more and more people will find more and more ways to use them.

We can only hope that more people in more places will use them to create, collaborate,

and grow their living standards, not the opposite. But it doesn't have to happen.

To put it another way, I don't know how the flattening of the world will come out.

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Indeed, this is the point in the book where I have to make a confession: I know that

the world is not flat.

Yes, you read me right: I know that the world is not flat. Don't worry. I know.

I am certain, though, that the world has been shrinking and flattening for some time

now, and that process has quickened dramatically in recent years. Half the world today

is directly or indirectly participating in the flattening process or feeling its

effects. I have engaged in literary license in titling this book The World Is Flat

to draw attention to this flattening and its quickening pace because I think it is

the single most important trend in the world today.

But I am equally certain that it is not historically inevitable that the rest of the

world will become flat or that the already flat parts of the world won't get

unflattened by war, economic disruption, or politics. There are hundreds of millions

of people on this planet who have been left behind by the flattening process or feel

overwhelmed by it, and some of them have enough access to the flattening tools to

use them against the system, not on its behalf. How the flattening could go wrong

is the subject of this chapter, and I approach it by trying to answer the following

questions: What are the biggest constituencies, forces, or problems impeding this

flattening process, and how might we collaborate better to overcome them?

Too Sick

I once heard Jerry Yang, the cofounder of Yahoo!, quote a senior Chinese government

official as saying, "Where people have hope, you have a middle class." I think this

is a very useful insight. The existence of large, stable middle classes around the

world is crucial to geopolitical stability, but middle class is a state of mind, not

a state of income. That's why a majority of Americans always describe themselves as

"middle class," even though by income statistics some of them wouldn't be considered

as such. "Middle class" is another way of describing people

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who believe that they have a pathway out of poverty or lower-income status toward

a higher standard of living and a better future for their kids. You can be in the

middle class in your head whether you make $2 a day or $200, if you believe in social

mobility-that your kids have a chance to live better than you do-and that hard work

and playing by the rules of your society will get you where you want to go.

In many ways, the line between those who are in the flat world and those who are not

is this line of hope. The good news in India and China and the countries of the former

Soviet Empire today is that, with all their flaws and internal contradictions, these

countries are now home to hundreds of millions of people who are hopeful enough to

be middle class. The bad news in Africa today, as well as rural India, China, Latin

America, and plenty of dark corners of the developed world, is that there are hundreds

of millions of people who have no hope and therefore no chance of making it into the

middle class. They have no hope for two reasons: Either they are too sick, or their

local governments are too broken for them to believe they have a pathway forward.

The first group, those who are too sick, are those whose lives are stalked every day

by HIV-AIDS, malaria, TB, and polio, and who do not even enjoy steady electricity

or potable water. Many of these people live in shockingly close proximity with the

flat world. While in Bangalore I visited an experimental school, Shanti Bhavan, or

"Haven of Peace." It is located near the village of Baliganapalli, in Tamil Nadu

Province, about an hour's drive from downtown Bangalore's glass-and-steel high-tech

centers-one of which is aptly called "The Golden Enclave." On the drive there, the

school's principal, Lalita Law, an intense, razor-sharp Indian Christian, explained

to me, with barely controlled rage in her voice, that the school has 160 children,

whose parents are all untouchables from the nearby village.

"These kids, their parents are ragpickers, coolies, and quarry laborers," she said

as we bounced along in a jeep on the potholed roads to the school. "They come from

homes below the poverty line, and from the lowest caste, the untouchables, who are

supposed to be fulfilling their destiny and left where they are. We get these children

at ages four and five. They don't know what it is to have a drink of clean water.

They are

used to drinking filthy gutter water, if they are lucky enough to have a gutter near

where they live. They have never seen a toilet, they don't have baths. . . They don't

even have proper scraps of clothing. We have to start by socializing them. When we

first get them they run out and urinate and defecate wherever they want. [At first]

we don't make them sleep on beds, because it is a culture shock."

I was typing frantically in the back of the jeep on my laptop to keep up with her

scalding monologue about village life.

"This 'India Shining' thing [the slogan of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP,

in the 2004 election] irritates people like us," she added. 'You have to come to the

rural villages and see whether India is shining, and you look into a child's face

and see whether India is shining. India is shining okay for the glossy magazines,

but if you just go outside Bangalore you will see that everything about India shining

is refuted ... [In the villages] alcoholism is rife and female infanticide and crime

are rising. You have to bribe to get electricity, water; you have to bribe the tax

assessor to assess your home correctly. Yes, the middle and upper classes are taking

off, but the 700 million who are left behind, all they see is gloom and darkness and

despair. They are born to fulfill their destiny and have to live this way and die

this way. The only thing that shines for them is the sun, and it is hot and unbearable

and too many of them die of heatstroke." The only "mouse" these kids have ever

encountered, she added, is not one that rests next to a computer but the real thing.

There are thousands of such villages in rural India, China, Africa, and Latin America.

And that is why it is no wonder that children in the developing world-the unflat

world-are ten times more likely to die of vaccine-preventable diseases than are

children in the developed flat world. In the worst-affected regions of rural southern

Africa, a full one-third of pregnant women are reportedly HIV-positive. The AIDS

epidemic alone is enough to put a whole society into a tailspin: Many teachers in

these African countries are now afflicted with AIDS, so they cannot teach, and young

children, especially girls, have to drop out either because they must tend to sick

and dying parents or because they have been orphaned by AIDS and cannot afford the

school fees. And without education, young people cannot learn how to protect

themselves

from HIV-AIDS or other diseases, let alone acquire the life-advancing skills that

enable women to gain greater control over their own bodies and sexual partners. The

prospect of a full-blown AIDS epidemic in India and China, of the sort that has already

debilitated southern Africa, remains very real, largely because only one-fifth of

the people at risk for HIV worldwide have access to prevention services. Tens of

millions of women who want and would benefit from family-planning resources don't

have them for lack of local funding. You cannot drive economic growth in a place where

50 percent of the people are infected with malaria or half of the kids are malnourished

or a third of the mothers are dying of AIDS.

There is no question that China and India are better off for having at least part

of their population in the flat world. When societies begin to prosper, you get a

virtuous cycle going: They begin to produce enough food for people to leave the land,

the excess labor gets trained and educated, it begins working in services and industry;

that leads to innovation and better education and universities, freer markets,

economic growth and development, better infrastructure, fewer diseases, and slower

population growth. It is that dynamic that is going on in parts of urban India and

urban China today, enabling people to compete on a level playing field and attracting

investment dollars by the billions.

But there are many, many others living outside this cycle. They live in villages or

rural areas that only criminals would want to invest in, regions where violence, civil

war, and disease compete with one another to see which can ravage the civilian

population most. The world willbe entirely flat only when all these people are brought

into it. One of the few people with enough dollars to make a difference who has stepped

up to this challenge is Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, whose $27 billion Bill and

Melinda Gates Foundation has focused on this huge, disease-ravaged,

opportunity-deprived population. I have been a critic of some of Microsoft's business

practices over the years, and I do not regret one word I have written about some of

its anticompetitive tactics. But I have been impressed by Gates's personal commitment

of money and energy to address the unflat world. Both times I spoke to Gates, this

is the subject he wanted to talk about most and addressed with the most passion.

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"No one funds things for that other 3 billion," said Gates. "Someone estimated that

the cost of saving a life in the U.S. is $5 or $6 million- that is how much our society

is willing to spend. You can save a life outside of the U.S. for less than $100. But

how many people want to make that investment?

"If it was just a matter of time," Gates continued, "you know, give it twenty or thirty

years and the others will be there, then it would be great to declare that the whole

world is flat. But the fact is, there is a trap that these 3 billion are caught in,

and they may never get into the virtuous cycle of more education, more health, more

capitalism, more rule of law, more wealth ... I am worried that it could just be half

the world that is flat and it stays that way."

Take malaria, a disease caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes. It is the greatest

killer of mothers on the planet right now. While virtually no one dies of malaria

today in the flat world, more than 1 million people die from this disease each year

in the unflat world, about seven hundred thousand of them children, most of them in

Africa. Deaths from malaria have actually doubled in the last twenty years because

mosquitoes have become resistant to many antimalarial drugs, and commercial drug

companies have not invested much in new antimalarial vaccines because they believe

there is no profitable market for them. If this crisis were happening in a flat country,