The Democratization Of Life

“Printing made us all readers. Xeroxing made us all publishers. Television made us all viewers. Digitization made us all broadcasters.”

– Lawrence Grossman

The recent trend of globalization, which cannot be more than 20 years old at its best, has awakened to all of us the possibility of living a life all over the world while we sit in front of our PC. The technological advancements, coupled with the subsequent progresses in financing, investment and politics, have translated all of our aspirations to memorable careers where speed has been dictating all the terms – and those who lost out were not stupid but only unacceptably slow. In fact, I can comfortably move on to say that there are now only two kinds of people in this world: the “fast” and the “slow”. If you have an internet connection that’s faster than you neighbor’s, it doesn’t even matter if he’s much richer: you can be assured of a spot in the finals. If you can make a telephone call from Mumbai to Rio de Janeiro and make an investment in something that’s being tipped as the “next big thing”, you’ve just gone one step ahead of the race. If a helicopter is rigged with personnel from the Indian reserve security forces in order to escort an electronic voting machine to a far off island with less then 5 occupants, then you can take pride in the fact that democracy is still alive and revered in the nation. However, up until this point, I have only spoken of what a more open world with larger markets and fading boundaries can do to empower specific activities, i.e. business and politics. What can it do to empower te individual? Rather, if globalization has indeed bettered the state of the world, what is it done to better the state of an individual?

Lest we forget, there are always two sides to every coin. I can have all kinds of names and notations for these sides, and in this case, I can call them “what have you given from it” and “what have you taken from it”. Speaking of the global village, we have given it the power to dominate over everything in this world. We have given a small company in Brazil the authority to drive into a section of the Amazon rainforest, cut down a thousand trees, sell the timber and free the landscape. We have given the local authorities the power to sell that land to people interested in erecting business houses there, and we have given the company contractors the authority to sell the timber. We have given the authority to local occupants to begin building a sky scraper on that plot of land, and the traders to export the timber to South Africa, where it is serviced into being usable in the construction industry. We have enabled the ongoing construction of the business house to demand more quantities of support-grade timber, which is now brought in from South Africa, and we have enabled the respective governments to slap duties and taxes on the import and export – the money from which will eventually trickle into the household of a destitute man who will feed his family of seven. At the same time, the business house is complete and its offices are occupied by various companies who put people in their cabins just to gather more and more information for them to make more money – the kind of information that made you take a decision in the first place to let these things happen. You can wonder how we could have given it so much, and the lies in one very important outcome of this New World we inhabit: networking. You, me and everyone like you and me are now part of one very large, inexhaustible network. We’re connected together over the internet, through the telephones, televisions and radios. We’re connected through the books we read, because those who read the same books can be thought of as having the same interests and as forming similar opinions – pertaining to goals if not to ideas. In the end, we have given ourselves to belong to this network. We have opened our markets to a wider range of prospects, and we have exposed the local manufacturer to international competition. But what have we received in return?

We have received the access to information. By throwing all the fish in this world into one big lake, we’ve made sure that if ever we wanna have fish again, we just have to go fishing in that one lake. In other words, we have democratized information. If the stock market takes an alarming dip in London, one phone call to New York can disturb investors in the US enough to pull out all their funds from the British market and into other more promising economies that have shown stabler rises, say, Thailand. It is all in the open now, and if you want to get to the big fish first, it won’t help if you’re there first in the morning. Your bait has to be tastier. If you want someone to spend money on you, then you’ve to make sure you’ve got something to offer which no one else does. Ultimately, what we’ve taken from it all is what we did give it: power. The only difference is that the system which we call globalization has taken in power in one form and transformed it into power of another form. For instance, if I elect a government in my country that promises to open up its markets to a greater extent and liberalise the economy, then I will have given the global players one extra country to align with. In exchange, I will break down the walls around me that were once restraining me from reaching out to a larger customer base. If I were to design a T-shirt and think about marketing it on a larger scale, I will now be in a better position to do so. It’s like droplets of ink in water: before, the bucket was only half full. Now, it’s up to the brim. A single drop of ink can now penetrate through to a greater depth; you’ve to just be careful as to not let it get too diluted – you’re facing a larger group of people now. For the message to be driven through, you’ve to keep hammering it in.

Just as we’re now capable of transforming ourselves into uber-individuals in terms of creativity (owing to a greater number of inspirations) and productivity (thanks to the increased access to information), the family as a fundamental unit of society has also been impacted by advancements in technology. Earlier, our fathers and grandfathers had to choose between sacrificing one luxury in order to attain another; today, it’s no longer a matter of what luxury you have – but how you use them to get better results. Earlier, there existed a sizable disparity in terms of wealth and accomplishments between those who had chanced upon just one more opportunity than the rest. Today, that disparity is negligible. When a working father realizes that his job is not being threatened by earthquakes and tornadoes tearing down his office but seemingly inexplicable dips in the stock market that are capable of shutting his company down, he will look to offset risk as much as possible by making intelligent investment decisions and not building his cabin underground. He will also realize that his children have to be brough up with different goals in mind than just settling down because he will now know that there is a long way to go before that. Today’s is a world of competitors, and there are three roads one of which you can take.

1. You stick to what you know and discard anything new and innovative as junk that won’t last the day. If this is going to be your outlook on the world, you will also find that by the end of the day, you will become part of your own idea – you’re old, and you haven’t lasted it.
2. You keep moving around without an anchor. With nothing to hold you down to a specific set of goals, you cannot have a strategy that encompasses all things. The competition in each field is fierce, and you should be able to accommodate for changes in all of them before you make a decision. In other words, you’re either a paranoid prodigy or a dead man.
3. You strike a balance between being moved around and anchored to one set of goals. And yes, it is traditionally easier said than done.

When Intel’s Gordon Moore stated his notorious law in 1965, I think he had an idea of what that law would come to mean 45 years down the line. Moore’s law, coupled with the advent of globalization in this frighteningly unipolar world, is what is making a difference today and now. Again, it’s only a measure of how fast you are. If you’re very fast, you’re one man who’s capable of changing the lives of a million men, women and their families at the click of a button. If you’re not fast enough (there’s no “slow” indicator on this switchboard), you’re one of the millions whose life is going to be determined by the guy with the faster internet connection.

(I wrote this piece while reading Thomas L. Friedman’s ‘The Lexus & The Olive Tree’, a book he wrote in 2000 about the coming of globalization. I just wanted to express my interpretation of the details of the book through this post.)