The world is not flat, nor has it ever been, but empire's apologists have been claiming otherwise for a very long time. A full decade has passed since Thomas Friedman published his manifesto on behalf of neoliberal globalization. But if Friedman's reductionism and mangled metaphors still make him an easy target for critical scorn, his “brief history of the twenty-first century” offers a remarkably compact distillation of several key ideas that organize mainstream globalization discourse well beyond his fortified outpost on the op-ed page of The New York Times. The first is a presentist assertion that globalization is new, that a recent intensification of worldwide flows of capital, goods, information, and people represents a sharp rupture with the past. This historically dubious account of global connections in turn undergirds two further claims about the character of the transformations taking place in the current moment. Globalization, in Friedman's telling as in so many others, appears as a process of convergence, synchronization, and unification. And new technologies such as smart phones, laptops, and the Internet, themselves described as the unambiguous products of Western ingenuity, hold out the promise that this “flattening” of space will advance the spread not only of economic opportunity but also of liberal, secular values. Neither the forms of global connection and movement that Friedman purports to reveal nor his ways of writing about them, however, are as novel as his breathless exclamations would have us believe. It is these paired critical insights that provide the common thread between the five new histories of globalization and technology under consideration in this essay.
