The Mediocre Inflection

god after all these years i hope that it's finally dawning on people that tom friedman is a mere mannerism: a quasi-master of the technocratic catch-phrase that i guess gives some people the sensation that they understand something. i have a feeling that The Great Inflection isn't going to take off, and i'm dqing 'pq.' so you just write the same column and you say: wow the world is really connecting through the internet. right then it strikes you that this isn't anything anyone ever doubted, also that it's something you more than fully exploited a decade ago etc. so you start trying to re-name your insights, to kind of disguise the fact that you're just trafficking in commonplaces. what underlies the whole vision, of course, is precisely what i've been calling squishy totalitarianism: or as he puts it, 'the public-private partnership that makes America great.' i wonder if he still thinks they're rioting in egypt for more standardized testing. "The old average is over," writes friedman. "Everyone who wants a job now must demonstrate how they can add value better than the new alternatives." it's gotten to where we can read sentences like this smoothly even though they're not in english. but it hasn't gotten to the point where they mean anything. he needs to go beyond 'hyper-connected,' which he's been using to denote this period for, say, 8 years, and dramatically unveil a new era of connectivity well beyond that. he may need to start inventing his own prefixes, because i'm not sure where you go from 'hyper'. possibly to sleep.