Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  Eventually I put a Samsung 32-inch television in my virtual shopping basket and clicked “buy.” The APIs linking Walmart and Visa seamlessly handled the purchase. But then I heard one of my favorite quotes in researching this book. After I pressed “buy,” the system used my zip code to determine whether there was a 32-inch television in a Walmart store near me where I could drive in and pick it up, or my TV could be delivered from a Walmart store in the region, or it had to come out of one of the new mega Walmart fulfillment centers dedicated to online orders—each of which could house two cruise ships. With some products, the Walmart system has already anticipated increased demand and prepositioned stock to serve the customer at the cheapest price everywhere: that means shovels in Michigan in winter, golf balls in Florida year-round, and big-screen televisions and Doritos in the week before Super Bowl Sunday.

  “So we promised you a date of delivery, when you pressed ‘buy,’” said King. “We did that on the basis of probability calculations.” Now, however, the system has to go through a whole other set of optimizations to get the best delivery-pickup solution or some combination of the two. It does this based on your location, other items you may have bought besides the 32-inch television, where they might be coming from, and what size and how many boxes they may require. There are myriad combinations to sort through, given Walmart’s four thousand stores and multiple fulfillment centers.

  “There are about four hundred thousand variables,” said King. But now that you—the customer—have already made the purchase and are not waiting online, he added, “we have time, so we do it in under a second.”

  I started to laugh. “What did you just say?” I asked him, incredulous. “Once I press ‘buy,’ you have all kinds of time. You have under a second?”

  He laughed, too.

  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. When connectivity is ubiquitous and complexity is free, the world gets really fast. But the race never ends. Just when you think you’ve achieved escape velocity from your competitors, someone gets faster. As I was closing this book, Walmart announced that to upgrade its ability to compete in e-commerce with Amazon—which still does eight times Walmart’s sales online—it was buying Jet, a year-old Internet retail startup. The Economist reported on August 13, 2016, that Jet’s appeal to Walmart was its “real-time pricing algorithm, which tempts customers with lower prices if they add more items to their basket. The algorithm also identifies which of Jet’s vendors is closest to the consumer, helping to minimize shipping costs and allowing them to offer discounts. Walmart plans to integrate the software with its own.”

  It turns out that “under a second” was just too damned slow.

  The Start-Up from Batman

  In March 2016, I was visiting Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where a mutual friend introduced me to Sadik Yildiz, whose family runs a number of information-technology companies. Among them is Yeni Medya, or New Media Inc., which exemplifies just how fast a small maker can get just how big from just how remote a place by leveraging the supernova.

  New Media Inc., which was founded by Yildiz’s nephew, Ekrem Teymur, does big data analytics and media monitoring for the Turkish and other governments and the private sector, among many other things. They track all the media, including social media, in real time and can report to their customers what stories appear about them in the media anywhere. They can also inform the customer in real time of the top twenty subjects people are talking about and in what proportions. It is all displayed on a dashboard in colored boxes with the headline and percentage in each box.

  “The Turkish presidency is a customer, and through our system they can receive a real-time poll service—every minute you can poll the public,” Yildiz explained to me. “Big data is making things easy for everyone now. The software that we have developed in-house aggregates all the news sources in Turkey and the United States every five minutes—even Google News does not track every source at this pace all the time. We track all the existing stories on Twitter, and we archive all the stories that we track—one million stories a day; no one is archiving like that even in the United States—so if a news source deletes the story they publish about you after it is circulated, you can still use our system to retrieve it and use it for judiciary purposes. And then any government or company can use that to track what is said about them.”

  How do you make money?

  “The business makes money on a subscription basis depending on how many keywords you want tracked and how many users you will have,” explained Yildiz. “‘Thomas Friedman’ would only be one word.” (A bargain!) “They can give you content analysis, what is being said about you, break it down by geography, where it is coming from, how many people in which city are reading it, who started the story about you or the trend first—that is, who are the influencers—and how many followers used the same wording or how the original wording evolved and changed.”

  I was intrigued. It turns out that whispering—like guessing—is also officially over. “All the members of the Turkish parliament are using it to track about themselves,” said Yildiz. “So are some news agencies, [who can] judge their reporters by whose stories are getting picked up most.”

  I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear everything being said about me, but I was intrigued by the tool they’d built. How much does it cost? Packages range from one thousand to twenty thousand dollars, he said, again depending on the number of keywords you want tracked.

  So with all this amazing technology and reach, I asked, where did you start this company?

  “Batman,” he answered.

  Is that a real place? I asked. “Yes it is!” Yildiz shot back. “And actually the city’s mayor has sued the Batman movie for using the name without permission!” Yildiz is a Turkish Kurd, and so his family’s company is based in the Kurdish-speaking region of eastern Turkey, in the family’s hometown, called Batman. They have other businesses—construction and water treatment. But their real success came through leveraging the supernova from Batman. How did they do that? It was a family affair that started up as soon as the global flows from the supernova hit their town.

  “My nephew, Ekrem Teymur, is the founder and chief engineer behind it—he is forty-two,” explained Yildiz. “He was born in Batman and is the number-one data engineer in Turkey—the company was his idea.” New Media Inc. has one hundred employees, and for a long time was competing from Batman with the biggest companies in the world. Most of the key positions in the company are held by family members—Ekrem and his six sisters, all born in Batman. The sisters, most of whom had only basic education, are now working as the chief editor, sales managers, and app production managers—a remarkable thing for a city where most of the women are not even allowed by their families to work.

  The main business office, though, is now in Istanbul, said Yildiz, “but we still employ a lot of people in Batman.” Thanks to all the connectivity today, they “can sit in their home in front of their computers and do jobs for us—and so it creates a lot of employment opportunities.” Besides Batman and Istanbul, they have offices now in Dublin, Dubai, Beirut, and Palo Alto. Why the hell not?

  “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!”

  Sadik Yildiz’s story—and I have met so many others like him in the past decade—is a vivid example of how education plus connectivity plus supernova means that “more and more people are being empowered at lower and lower levels of income than ever before, so they think and act as if they were in the middle class, demanding human security and dignity and citizens’ rights,” explained Khalid Malik, former director of the U.N.’s Human Development Report Office. “This is a tectonic shift. The Industrial Revolution was a ten-million-person story. This i
s a couple-of-billion-person story.” And we are just at the beginning of it.

  I will have more to say about this later in the book. But I did have one last question for Yildiz: When did your family start this company?

  “In 2007,” he said.

  FIVE

  The Market

  Kayvon Beykpour is the cofounder and CEO of Periscope—the live-streaming video app launched in March 2014 that within four months had ten million users. It was quickly bought by Twitter, which understood that it offered a kind of video version of live tweeting. Periscope became popular so fast by creating a platform on which users could employ their smartphones to share with anyone in the world the live video of whatever event they were participating in or watching, be it a hurricane, earthquake, or flood, a Donald Trump rally, a thrill ride at Disney World, a confrontation with a cop, or a sit-in by Democratic lawmakers on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Beykpour describes Periscope’s mission as enabling everyone “to explore the world through someone else’s eyes” and in doing so build “empathy and truth”—empathy by putting people into vivid contact with one another and their circumstances, and truth because live video doesn’t easily lie. You can see everything raw.

  Just how raw is illustrated by this story Beykpour told me:

  Last July [2015], I was flying from San Francisco to London to go to Wimbledon. I was on the United flight and was kicking myself because I had forgotten to download movies from iTunes to watch on my iPad and I was wondering what I was going to do for nine hours. So I decided to see if the United Wi-Fi was powerful enough to get onto Periscope and watch some video, because it takes a lot of bandwidth. So I signed on to Periscope, and it worked! The first thing I did was to watch my girlfriend walking our dog, live, at Crissy Field beach [in San Francisco] near the Golden Gate Bridge. Then I thought I would see who else was on Periscope. So, when you go on the platform there is a map feature of the world and a dot indicating where anyone is live broadcasting. You just click on that dot and you watch someone’s broadcast. [You can also watch a replay of live broadcasts.] I found this dot in the Hudson River. I thought, “I wonder what that is?” and I clicked on it. And it was this woman on a ferry crossing the Hudson in a storm. And she is saying “I am in a really bad storm and I am really scared.” And she is talking and it was dark and she was in the front row and you could see the silhouette of the captain steering in the background moving the wheel and all this rain is coming down, beating on the window, and you can feel the turbulence. She was terrified.

  There were seven other people on the site watching this, and all of us were reassuring her that it was going to be okay. I am on this plane probably somewhere over Greenland, and we’re having our own turbulence, and these other people were all over the world and we’re all strangers and we’re all trying to comfort her. I watched for ten or fifteen minutes. Afterwards I was thinking to myself, “How is it possible that we helped to create something that enabled me to step into someone else’s shoes like that? It feels like a superpower.” You can’t help but empathize when you can see through other people’s eyes, especially folks you wouldn’t have otherwise had occasion to connect with, and talk to them in real time. Imagine you’re a Syrian refugee on a boat and you are broadcasting live as you are crossing the Mediterranean or walking into Serbia …

  Beykpour’s experience is a compelling illustration of how globalization—which in this book I will refer to by the umbrella term “the Market”—is also in acceleration today. For a long time many economists insisted that globalization was simply a measure of trade in physical goods, services, and financial transactions. That definition is way too narrow. Globalization, for me, has always meant the ability of any individual or company to compete, connect, exchange, or collaborate globally. And by that definition, globalization is now exploding. We can now digitize so many things, and, thanks to mobile phones and the supernova, we can now send those digital flows everywhere and pull them in from anywhere. Those flows drive the globalization of friendships and finance, hate and exclusion, education and e-commerce, news you can use, gossip that will titillate and rumors that will unsettle. Although trade in physical goods and financial products and services—the hallmarks of the twentieth-century global economy—has actually flattened or declined in recent years, 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, concluded a pioneering study on this subject in March 2016 by the McKinsey Global Institute, Digital Globalization: The New Era of Global Flows: “The world is more interconnected than ever.”

  Think of the flow of friends through Facebook, the flow of renters through Airbnb, the flow of opinions through Twitter, the flow of e-commerce through Amazon, Tencent, and Alibaba, the flow of crowdfunding through Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe, the flow of ideas and instant messages through WhatsApp and WeChat, the flow of peer-to-peer payments and credit through PayPal and Venmo, the flow of pictures through Instagram, the flow of education through Khan Academy, the flow of college courses through MOOCs, the flow of design tools through Autodesk, the flow of music through Apple, Pandora, and Spotify, the flow of video through Netflix, the flow of news through NYTimes.com or BuzzFeed.com, the flow of cloud-based tools through Salesforce, the flow of searches for knowledge through Google, and the flow of raw video through Periscope and Facebook. All these flows substantiate McKinsey’s claim that the world is, indeed, more connected than ever.

  Indeed, 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. Back then, you wanted to build your town or your factory along a rushing river—such as the Amazon—and let it flow through you. That river would give you power, mobility, nourishment, and access to neighbors and their ideas. So it is with these digital flows into and out of the supernova. 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.

  The world cannot get this connected in so many new realms at such profound new depths without being reshaped. And this chapter is about how these digital global flows are doing just that: enabling so many more people around the world to access the supernova’s technology toolbox to become makers and breakers; making the world so much more interdependent in financial terms, so every country is now more vulnerable to every other country’s economy; driving contact between strangers at a pace and scale we’ve never seen before, so that good and bad ideas can go viral and extinguish and manufacture prejudices much more quickly; making every leader more exposed and transparent; and ensuring that the price countries pay for adventures abroad will be much higher than they expect, making these flows a new source of geopolitical restraint.

  Interconnections or Intercourse?

  These digital rivers now coursing around the globe, tying everyone more closely together, are only going to become richer and faster as more people connect to the supernova with mobile devices. In January 2015, the Boston Consulting Group released a study, The Mobile Revolution: How Mobile Technologies Drive a Trillion-Dollar Impact, funded by Qualcomm. Among the impacts it studied was just how devoted people are becoming to their mobile phones. To drill down, BCG commissioned a poll that asked people in the United States, Germany, South Korea, Brazil, China, and India this headline question: “Which of the following things would you give up for a year rather than give up personal use of your mobile phone?” Dining out? Sixty-four percent said they would give it up. Having a pet? Fifty-one percent said they would give that up. Going on vacation? Fifty percent. One day off a week? Fifty-one percent. Seeing friends in person—some forty-five percent were ready to let that go. Then they really got serious and asked: What would yo
u give up for a year first—your mobile phone or sex?

  Thirty-eight percent of respondents said they would give up sex for a year rather than give up their mobile phone!

  Broken down by country, the South Koreans led the way in a willingness to trade human intercourse for voice and data intercourse: sixty percent! Their reasons are not hard to grasp. The Swedish telecom giant Ericsson notes:

  Mobile technologies have transformed the way we live, work, learn, travel, shop, and stay connected. Not even the industrial revolution created such a swift and radical explosion in technological innovation and economic growth worldwide. Nearly all fundamental human pursuits have been touched, if not revolutionized, by mobile. In less than fifteen years, 3G [third generation] and 4G technologies have reached three billion subscriptions, making mobile the most rapidly adopted consumer technology in history.

  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. More than ever before, we rise and fall together. So few can now so easily and so profoundly affect so many so far away … We are experiencing the aspirations, hopes, frustrations, plights of others in direct and visceral ways”—just the way Kayvon Beykpour did when he shared that stormy boat ride with a stranger, while flying over the ocean himself.

  The French president, François Hollande, had a small breakfast for columnists during the opening session of the United Nations in September 2015, which focused heavily on the flood of refugees from the Middle East and Africa who were trying every which way to get into Europe. Afterward, one of Hollande’s aides remarked to me: it is amazing how quickly information is disseminated and made operational by these refugees; they are constantly on the move, trying to cross the Mediterranean, and yet manage to stay highly informed through social networks on the things they need to know.