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the video images it was beaming back were being watched simultaneously by the 24th

MEU, United States Central Command headquarters in Tampa, CentCom regional

headquarters in Qatar, in the Pentagon, and probably also at the CIA. The different

analysts around the world were conducting an online chat about how to interpret what

was going on and what to do about it. It was their conversation that was scrolling

down the right side of the screen.

Before I could even express my amazement, another officer traveling with us took me

aback by saying that this technology had "flattened" the military hierarchy-by giving

so much information to the low-level officer, or even enlisted man, who was operating

the computer, and empowering him to make decisions about the information he was

gathering. While I'm sure that no first lieutenant is going to be allowed to start

a firefight without consulting superiors, the days when only senior officers had the

big picture are over. The military playing field is being leveled.

I told this story to my friend Nick Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO and a loyal

member of the Red Sox Nation. Nick told me he was at CentCom headquarters in Qatar

in April 2004, being briefed by General John Abizaid and his staff. Abizaid's team

was seated across the table from Nick with four flat-screen TVs behind them. The first

three had overhead images being relayed in real time from different sectors of Iraq

by Predator drones. The last one, which Nick was focused on, was showing a Yankees-Red

Sox game.

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On one screen it was Pedro Martinez versus Derek Jeter, and on the other three it

was Jihadists versus the First Cavalry.

Flatburgers and Fries

I kept moving-all the way back to my home in Bethesda, Maryland. By the time I settled

back into my house from this journey to the edges of the earth, my head was spinning.

But no sooner was I home than more signs of the flattening came knocking at my door.

Some came in the form of headlines that would unnerve any parent concerned about where

his college-age children are going to fit in. For instance, Forrester Research, Inc.,

was projecting that more than 3 million service and professional jobs would move out

of the country by 2015. But my jaw really dropped when I read a July 19, 2004, article

from the International Herald Tribune headlined: "Want Fries With Outsourcing?"

"Pull off U.S. Interstate Highway 55 near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and into the

drive-through lane of a McDonald's next to the highway and you'll get fast, friendly

service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant-or even

in Missouri," the article said. "The order taker is in a call center in Colorado

Springs, more than 900 miles, or 1,450 kilometers, away, connected to the customer

and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines. Even some restaurant

jobs, it seems, are not immune to outsourcing.

"The man who owns the Cape Girardeau restaurant, Shannon Davis, has linked it and

three other of his 12 McDonald's franchises to the Colorado call center, which is

run by another McDonald's franchisee, Steven Bigari. And he did it for the same reasons

that other business owners have embraced call centers: lower costs, greater speed

and fewer mistakes.

"Cheap, quick and reliable telecommunications lines let the order takers in Colorado

Springs converse with customers in Missouri, take an electronic snapshot of them,

display their order on a screen to make sure

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it is right, then forward the order and the photo to the restaurant kitchen. The photo

is destroyed as soon as the order is completed, Bigari said. People picking up their

burgers never know that their order traverses two states and bounces back before they

can even start driving to the pickup window.

"Davis said that he had dreamed of doing something like this for more than a decade.

'We could not wait to go with it,' he added. Bigari, who created the call center for

his own restaurants, was happy to oblige- for a small fee per transaction."

The article noted that McDonald's Corp. said it found the call center idea interesting

enough to start a test with three stores near its headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois,

with different software from that used by Bigari. "Jim Sappington, a McDonald's vice

president for information technology, said that it was 'way, way too early' to tell

if the call center idea would work across the thirteen thousand McDonald's restaurants

in the United States. . . Still, franchisees of two other McDonald's restaurants,

beyond Davis's, have outsourced their drive-through ordering to Bigari in Colorado

Springs. (The other restaurants are in Brainerd, Minnesota, and Norwood,

Massachusetts.) Central to the system's success, Bigari said, is the way it pairs

customers' photos with their orders; by increasing accuracy, the system cuts down

on the number of complaints and therefore makes the service faster. In the fast-food

business, time is truly money: shaving even five seconds off the processing time of

an order is significant," the article noted. "Bigari said he had cut order time in

his dual-lane drive-throughs by slightly more than 30 seconds, to about 1 minute,

5 seconds, on average. That's less than half the average of 2 minutes, 36 seconds,

for all McDonald's, and among the fastest of any franchise in the country, according

to QSRweb.com, which tracks such things. His drive-throughs now handle 260 cars an

hour, Bigari said, 30 more than they did before he started the call center . . . Though

his operators earn, on average, 40 cents an hour more than his line employees, he

has cut his overall labor costs by a percentage point, even as drive-through sales

have increased . . . Tests conducted by outside companies found that Bigari's

drive-throughs now make mistakes on fewer than 2 percent of all orders, down from

about 4 percent before he started using the call centers, Bigari said."

Bigari "is so enthusiastic about the call center idea," the article noted, "that he

has expanded it beyond the drive-through window at his seven restaurants that use

the system. While he still offers counter service at those restaurants, most customers

now order through the call center, using phones with credit card readers on tables

in the seating area."

Some of the signs of flattening I encountered back home, though, had nothing to do

with economics. On October 3, 2004,1 appeared on the CBS News Sunday morning show

Face the Nation, hosted by veteran CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer. CBS had been in

the news a lot in previous weeks because of Dan Rather's 60 Minutes report about

President George W. Bush's Air National Guard service that turned out to be based

on bogus documents. After the show that Sunday, Schieffer mentioned that the oddest

thing had happened to him the week before. When he walked out of the CBS studio, a

young reporter was waiting for him on the sidewalk. This isn't all that unusual,

because as with all the Sunday-morning shows, the major networks-CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN,

and Fox-always send crews to one another's studios to grab exit interviews with the

guests. But this young man, Schieffer explained, was not from a major network. He

politely introduced himself as a reporter for a Web site called InDC Journal and asked

whether he could ask Schieffer a few questions. Schieffer, being a polite fellow,

said sure. The young man interviewed him on a device Schieffer did not recognize and

then asked if he could take his picture. A picture? Schieffer noticed that the young

man had no camera. He didn't need one. He turned his cell phone around and snapped

Schieffer's picture.

"So I came in the next morning and looked up this Web site and there was my picture

and the interview and there were already three hundred comments about it," said

Schieffer, who, though keenly aware of online journalism, was nevertheless taken

aback at the incredibly fast, low-cost, and solo manner in which this young man had

put him up in lights.

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I was intrigued by this story, so I tracked down the young man from InDC Journal.

His name is Bill Ardolino, andhe is a very thoughtful guy. I conducted my own interview

with him online -how else? -and began by asking about what equipment he was using

as a one-man network/newspaper.

"I used a minuscule MP3 player/digital recorder (three and a half inches by two inches)

to get the recording, and a separate small digital camera phone to snap his picture,"

said Ardolino. "Not quite as sexy as an all-in-one phone/camera/recorder (which does

exist), but a statement on the ubiquity and miniaturization of technology nonetheless.

I carry this equipment around D.C. at all times because, hey, you never know. What's

perhaps more startling is how well Mr. Schieffer thought on his feet, after being

jumped on by some stranger with interview questions. He blew me away."

Ardolino said the MP3 player cost him about $125. It is "primarily designed to play

music," he explained, but it also "comes prepackaged as a digital recorder that

creates a WAV sound file that can be uploaded back to a computer . . . Basically,

I'd say that the barrier to entry to do journalism that requires portable, ad hoc

recording equipment, is [now] about $100-$200 to $300 if you add a camera, $400 to

$500 for a pretty nice recorder and a pretty nice camera. [But] $200 is all that you

need to get the job done."

What prompted him to become his own news network?

"Being an independent journalist is a hobby that sprang from my frustration about

biased, incomplete, selective, and/or incompetent information gathering by the

mainstream media," explained Ardolino, who describes himself as a "center-right

libertarian." "Independent journalism and its relative, blogging, are expressions

of market forces-a need is not being met by current information sources. I started

taking pictures and doing interviews of the antiwar rallies in D.C, because the media

was grossly misrepresenting the nature of the groups that were organizing the

gatherings-unrepentant Marxists, explicit and implicit supporters of terror, etc.

I originally chose to use humor as a device, but I've since branched out. Do I have

more power, power to get my message out, yes. The Schieffer interview actually brought

in about twenty-five

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thousand visits in twenty-four hours. My peak day since I've started was fifty-five

thousand when I helped break 'Rathergate'... I interviewed the first forensics expert

in the Dan Rather National Guard story, and he was then specifically picked up by

The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Globe, NYT, etc., within forty-eight hours.

"The pace of information gathering and correction in the CBS fake memo story was

astounding/' he continued. "It wasn't justthat CBS News 'stonewalled' after the fact,

it was arguably that they couldn't keep up with an army of dedicated fact-checkers.

The speed and openness of the medium is something that runs rings around the old

process. . . I'm a twenty-nine-year-old marketing manager [who] always wanted to write

for a living but hated the AP style book. As iiberblogger Glenn Reynolds likes to

say, blogs have given the people a chance to stop yelling at their TV and have a say

in the process. I think that they serve as sort of a 'fifth estate' that works in

conjunction with the mainstream media (often by keeping an eye on them or feeding

them raw info) and potentially function as a journalism and commentary farm system

that provides a new means to establish success.

"Like many facets of the topic that you're talking about in your book, there are good

and bad aspects of the development. The splintering of media makes for a lot of

incoherence or selective cognition (look at our country's polarization), but it also

decentralizes power and provides a better guarantee that the complete truth is out

there . . . somewhere . . . in pieces."

On any given day one can come across any number of stories, like the encounter between

Bob Schieffer and Bill Ardolino, that tell you that old hierarchies are being

flattened and the playing field is being leveled. As Micah L. Sifry nicely put it

in The Nation magazine (November 22, 2004): "The era of top-down politics-where

campaigns, institutions and journalism were cloistered communities powered by

hard-to-amass capital -is over. Something wilder, more engaging and infinitely more

satisfying to individual participants is arising alongside the old order."

I offer the Schieffer-Ardolino encounter as just one example of how the flattening

of the world has happened faster and changed rules, roles, and relationships more

quickly than we could have imagined. And,

though I know it is a cliche, I have to say it nevertheless: You ain't seen nothin

yet. As I detail in the next chapter, we are entering a phase where we are going to

see the digitization, virtualization, and automation of almost everything. The gains

in productivity will be staggering for those countries, companies, and individuals

who can absorb the new technological tools. And we are entering a phase where more

people than ever before in the history of the world are going to have access to these

tools- as innovators, as collaborators, and, alas, even as terrorists. You say you

want a revolution? Well, the real information revolution is about to begin. I call

this new phase Globalization 3.0 because it followed Globalization 2.0, but I think

this new era of globalization will prove to be such a difference of degree that it

will be seen, in time, as a difference in kind. That is why I introduced the idea

that the world has gone from round to flat. Everywhere you turn, hierarchies are being

challenged from below or transforming themselves from top-down structures into more