tom moody

Paddy Johnson is reviewing MOMA's "Automatic Update" show, which ended a couple of weeks ago--Part One of her piece appears today. I noticed that curator Barbara London used Thomas Friedman's "flat world" metaphor in describing the show, so I submitted the following as a comment to Paddy's post. It's Matt Taibbi in the NY Press discussing Friedman's book The World Is Flat:

The book's genesis is a conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani casually mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

"As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: 'The playing field is being leveled.'

"What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!"

This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting—ironically, as it were—with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.

Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.

"'Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.

MOMA's version of the Flat Earth was an alternative, "steampunk" universe where artists described the coming age of cyber-connectedness using video art and other pre-Internet media. (Apparently the Net is not allowed in museum galleries.)

A late thought to the thread over at Paddy's about surf clubs and the Great Internet Sleepover:

Something I said above I'd like to explain further:

"I should clarify that the context of Marisa’s and my exchange was a question on my blog about collaboration. Someone had asked about artist teams where different parts of a common task were split. And I was questioning whether, in the tech art arena, that made art more bland because both team members had to understand it well enough to explain it to others."

The second sentence should probably read "Someone had asked about artist teams where different parts of a common task were split, say, between an artist and an engineer."

The context was XYZ art. Someone noted that a lot of this bland, by-the-numbers tech art was the fruit of teams, which were "often...a cover for one person getting someone else to do technical stuff." In reply I was conjecturing that in order to work together, the engineer had to dumb down the hardware or software theory to explain it to the artist and the artist had to dumb down the art theory to explain it to the engineer. The product they announced to the world was then doubly dumbed-down, hence XYZ art.

This would never happen with the surf blogs because it's not that type of collaboration. The surfers either (i) act as their own engineers or (ii) proudly have no skilz whatsover except roaming the internet and mashing up its by-products using off-the-shelf software.

(This comment reworded slightly from when I submitted it at Paddy's.)