Reflecting on this past decade and a half, during which the world went flat, it strikes me that our lives have been powerfully shaped by two dates: 11/9 and 9/11. These two dates represent the two competing forms of imagination at work in the world today: the creative imagination of 11/9 and the destructive imagination of 9/11. One brought down a wall and opened the windows of the world — both the operating system and the kind we look through. It unlocked half the planet and made the citizens there our collaborators and competitors. Another brought down the World Trade Center, closing its Windows on the World restaurant forever and putting up new invisible and concrete walls among people at a time when we thought 11/9 had erased them for good. he dismantling of the Berlin Wall on 11/9 was brought about by people who dared to imagine a different, more open world ...
"The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century" by Thomas L. Friedman
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