1. BOOK REVIEW
THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE
Author : Thomas Friedman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date : 22 November 2016
Genre : Non fiction
Page : 496
Price : 500 rupees
ISBN : 9780241301449
“But the ancients believed that there was wisdom in patience and that wisdom
comes from patience… Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space
for reflection and thoughts”
ThankYou For Being Late (2016), a self-help bookby American journalist
Thomas L. Friedman, explores contemporary agents of social, technological,
and economic change, analysing them and suggesting possible ways for
individuals to capitalize on them as their frontiers only continue to accelerate.
Friedman also provides critiques of different social and technological advents
that might represent threats to the stability and health of human populations. His
topics range between global education, employment, geopolitics, nationalism,
and computing. The cumulative goal of Friedman’s bookis to reframe how
people think about, and shape, the environments they move through every day.
Friedman begins with a meditation on the increasing pace of the modern world.
He recalls first realizing the extent of the phenomenon when he went to
breakfast with a handful of friends, who all ended up being late; soon, he
2. realized he was impulsively thanking them for causing him to wait in solitude.
He argues that the year 2007 is a hallmark example of the proliferation of high
technology. He looks with amazement on the invention of the smart device,
which has brought unprecedented access to technology to people, and relates it
to Moore’s Law, which forecasts the rate of technological change by capping
the rate of the increase in transistor density necessary for faster computation. He
terms this cloud technology explosion the “supernova.” At the same time, the
year, with its unprecedented volume and intensity of natural disasters, signified
the reality of climate change.
Next, Friedman turns to information flow, and how its acceleration affects
human interconnectivity and globalization. He suggests that as corporations
become better able to isolate and manipulate flows, their market value will
become increasingly correlated to their prowess in this area. He suggests that
some information flows are becoming too fast for our own good, using the Air
Forceas an example of an industry whose technologies, especially drone
surveillance, have outstripped the rate of evolution of policy.
Friedman moves on to international relations in the time after the Cold War.
Now, a state’s status and stability in geopolitics are caught up in its ability to
follow trends and advances. This accelerating pace puts new stress on states,
especially those without the resources to easily keep tabs and experiment. To
suggest a way for the modern state to become more adaptable, he employs the
analogy of the natural system: dynamic and continuously energized, the natural
system consists of a multitude of tiny parts which all move in choreograph,
uniting and parting according to instantaneous forces.
Friedman ends asking how we might promote feelings of calmness and stability
in a world that is no longer stable. He discusses the benefits of community and
other local forms of organization in quelling the anxiety that inevitably
accompanies change. Moreover, he exhorts his audience to keep learning from
the past, elevating the process oflearning from history above more short-sighted
or self-conscious process.He expresses anxiety about the future of America,
calling it a majority-minority country increasingly dominated by groupthink and
corporation-sponsored ideological homogeneity. Finally, he contends that
humans need to learn; or, rather, re-learn, how to work together. It is inherently
3. difficult for anyone when truths and conditions seem to be changing too fast to
understand, but these changes are predicated on interpersonal interactions,
which remain the core of human evolution. ThankYou For Being Late thus
promotes a contrarian view on America’s ideological direction, extolling the
benefits of solitude and dissent despite deeply validating social dialogue.
