Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

In July 2014, when the World Cup soccer tournament was held in Brazil, it was only thanks to Airbnb that all the visitors had a place to stay, because Brazil had not built enough hotel rooms to house all those who wanted to come and watch the games.

In fact, the most interesting thing Chesky and his fellow Airbnb makers made was one of the most complex things to make at scale: trust.

That was Airbnb’s real innovation—a platform of trust—where everyone could not only see everyone else’s identity but also rate them as

good, bad, or indifferent hosts or guests.

system. Take trusted identities and relevant reputations and put them together with the supernova and global flows and suddenly you have more than three million homes or rooms listed on Airbnb—that’s more than Hilton, Marriot, and Starwood combined. And Hilton started in 1919!

What we did was give those strangers identities and brands that you could trust.

“There are eighty million power drills in America that are used an average of thirteen minutes. Does everyone really need their own drill?”

“it is all about how you put them together that creates the customer value,” said Ashe. Now,

In the Walmart supernova today, having under a second to make complexity free is what constitutes having all kinds of time for the system to sort out four hundred thousand delivery variables.

Yeni Medya, or New Media Inc.,

“There is nothing called ‘underprivileged’ anymore,” said Yildiz. “All you need is a working brain, some short training, and then put your idea into a fantastic business from any part of the world!”

“This is a tectonic shift. The Industrial Revolution was a ten-million-person story. This is a couple-of-billion-person story.” And we are just at the beginning of it.

Globalization, for me, has always meant the ability of any individual or company to compete, connect, exchange, or collaborate globally.

globalization as measured by flows is “soaring—transmitting information, ideas, and innovation around the world and broadening participation in the global economy” more than ever,

these digital flows have become so rich and powerful they are to the twenty-first century what rivers running off mountains were to civilization and cities in days of old.

But the rivers you want to build on now are Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure—giant connectors that enable you, your business, or your nation to get access to all the computing-power applications in the supernova, where you can tie into every flow in the world in which you want to participate.

making the world so much more interdependent in financial terms, so every country is now more vulnerable to every other country’s economy;

If a decade ago, we would have said it feels like we’re all living in a crowded village, today, argues Dov Seidman, “it feels like we’re all living in a crowded theater. The world isn’t just interconnected, it is now becoming interdependent.

So I have a picture of me taking pictures of them taking pictures of me.

The McKinsey Digital Flows study noted that back in 1990, “the total value of global flows of goods, services, and finance amounted to $5 trillion, or 24 percent of world GDP. There were some 435 million international tourist arrivals, and the public Internet was in its infancy. Fast-forward to 2014: some $30 trillion worth of goods, services, and finance, equivalent to 39 percent of GDP, was exchanged across the world’s borders. International tourist arrivals soared above 1.1 billion.” But here’s what’s even more interesting:

“instantaneous exchanges of virtual goods”:

Today, data flows are “exerting a larger impact on growth than traditional goods flows,” McKinsey found. “This

“conversational commerce,”

These messaging apps are going to make conventional e-mail seem to our kids what conventional mail seemed to the first generation of e-mail users.

Mobile messaging apps are “the next platform and they are going to change a lot of things,” said David Marcus, who runs Facebook Messenger and used to run PayPal. “If we are successful, a lot of your life will be running on a messaging app. It is becoming the hub for everyday interactions with people and business and services. E-mail will stick around for less immediate connections.”

Messaging apps, of course, are phone number–based, but Marcus’s vision for Facebook Messenger is to make phone numbers disappear.

management experts John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison coined the term “the Big Shift.” The Big Shift, they argue, is that we’re moving from a long period of history in which stocks were the measure of wealth and the driver of growth—how much of every resource imaginable you could stock up on and then draw down and exploit—to a world in which the most relevant source of comparative advantage will be how rich and numerous are the flows passing through your country or community and how well trained your citizen-workers are to take advantage of them.

different source of value is becoming more powerful? We believe there’s good reason to think that value is shifting from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows. Put more simply, we believe that flows trump stocks [italics added] … As the world speeds up, stocks of knowledge depreciate at a faster rate. As one simple example, look at the rapid compression in product life cycles across many industries on a global scale. Even the most successful products fall by the wayside more quickly as new generations come through the pipeline faster and faster. In more stable times, we could sit back and relax once we had learned something valuable, secure that we could generate value from that knowledge for an indefinite period. Not anymore.

To succeed now, we have to continually refresh our stocks of knowledge by participating in relevant flows of new knowledge.

You have to contribute to them as well to really be “in the flow.” “We can’t participate effectively in flows of knowledge—at least not for long—without contributing knowledge of our own,” the authors note. “This occurs because participants in these knowledge flows don’t want free riding ‘takers’; they want to develop relationships with people and institutions that can contribute knowledge of their own.”

Being in the flow will constitute a significant strategic and economic advantage.

“A pattern begins to emerge; ICT [information and communications technology] growth occurs, and as the population becomes more comfortable with the technology and more productive, the GDP level begins to increase as well.”

Globalization was always driven by financial flows, but thanks to the supernova, these now digitized financial flows are happening at almost unfathomable rates.

The jockeying is so intense, Nature reported, that traders figured out that “fiber-optic cables carry the most data, but do not give the speed required.

One of the most important drivers of the digitization of finance today is PayPal, the digital payments platform that got its start as part of eBay and specializes in the secure,

Dan Schulman, PayPal’s CEO, explained that the company’s goal “is democratizing financial services and making the opportunity to move and manage money a right and possibility for every citizen—not just for the affluent.” Banks, he explained, “were established in an era dominated by physical presence, not digital flows, and the physical world had expensive infrastructure. A branch needs thirty million dollars of deposits to be profitable. And so where are banks closing? In all the neighborhoods where the average income level is below the national median.” They cannot attract enough deposits.

“What happened with the explosion of mobile and smartphones,” said Schulman, “is that all the power of a bank branch is now in the palm of a consumer’s hand. And the incremental cost to add a customer when software is at scale approaches zero. All of a sudden the transaction of cashing a check or paying a bill or getting a loan or sending money to someone you love—which were simple and easy things for us in America already—becomes simple and easy”—and nearly free—for the three billion people around the world who have been underserved.

Specifically, those societies that are most open to flows of trade, information, finance, culture, or education, and those most willing to learn from them and contribute to them, are the ones most likely to thrive in the age of accelerations. Those that can’t will struggle.

Never get between a hungry student and a new flow of knowledge in the age of accelerations.

In the pre-Facebook, pre–social network era, the notion of community “was constrained around you, around that time and around that place.” Now, with social networks, you have “the ability to maintain relationships through every context of your life if you choose to”—and to create new contexts for relationships that were unimaginable just a decade ago.

“if you grew up in the world of mobile phones with Facebook, the connectivity to a community can remain strong both for those who stay and those who leave.”

Globalization has always been everything and its opposite—it can be incredibly democratizing and it can concentrate incredible power in giant multinationals; it can be incredibly particularizing—the smallest voices can now be heard everywhere—and incredibly homogenizing, with big brands now able to swamp everything anywhere.

That said, people have bodies and souls, and when you feed one and not the other you always get in trouble. When people feel their identities and sense of home are being threatened, they will set aside economic interests and choose walls over Webs, and closed over open, in a second—not everyone will make that choice, but many will.

I would posit the reason for the accelerating change is similar to why networked computers are so powerful. The more processing cores that you add the faster a given function can occur. Similarly, the more integrated that humans are able to exchange ideas the more rapidly they will be able to accomplish novel insights. Different from Moore’s Law, which involves the compiling of logic units to perform more rapid analytic functions, increased communication is the compiling of creative units (i.e., humans) to perform ever more creative tasks.

A “black elephant,” it was explained to me by the London-based investor and environmentalist Adam Sweidan, is a cross between a “black swan”—a rare, low-probability, unanticipated event with enormous ramifications—and “the elephant in the room: a problem that is widely visible to everyone, yet that no one wants to address, even though we absolutely know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.”

While the power of men and machines and flows has been reshaping the workplace and politics and geopolitics and the economy, and even some of our ethical choices, the power of many is driving the acceleration in Mother Nature, which is reshaping the whole biosphere, the whole global ecological system.

NASA currently states that Greenland is losing 287 billion tons of ice per year, The Washington Post reported on December 16, 2015. When I visited in 2008 it was “only” 200 billion a year.

consider the paragraph from a January 7, 2016, story on the environment on Bloomberg.com: “CO2 is famously entering the atmosphere about 100 times faster than it did when the planet emerged from the most recent ice age, about 12,000 years ago. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 35 percent higher than its peak for the last 800,000 years. Sea-levels are higher than they’ve been in 115,000 years, and the rise is accelerating. A century of synthetic-fertilizer production has disrupted the earth’s nitrogen cycle more dramatically than any event in 2.5 billion years” (italics added).

The Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago, but the fossil record shows signs of simple life starting only about 3.8 billion years ago, and complex life forms only about 600 million years ago. Over the millennia, life forms have changed and evolved, depending on the epoch. For the last 11,500 years or so, geologists tell us, we have been in the Holocene epoch, which followed the Pleistocene epoch, also known as “the Great Ice Age.” Why should we care? Because we will miss the Holocene if it goes, and it appears to be going. For most of the Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history, its climate was not very hospitable to human beings, as it oscillated between “punishing ice ages and lush warm periods” that “locked humanity into seminomadic lifestyles,” explained Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, one of the world’s leading Earth scientists, and one of my teachers on all things climate. It’s only been in the last eleven thousand years that we have enjoyed the calm, stable climate conditions that allowed our ancestors to emerge from their Paleolithic caves and create seasonal agriculture, domesticate animals, erect cities and towns, and eventually launch the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the information technology revolution.

Holocene, was an “almost miraculously stable and warm interglacial equilibrium, which is the only state of the planet we know for sure can support the modern world as we know it,”