PHRED: G’day and welcome back. Phred here.
MAXINE: And Maxine.
PHRED: November 2005 — Thomas Friedman’s ‘The World Is Flat’ is on everyone’s desk, and Harry is trying to say something back.
PHRED: Episode fifty-two. A whole year of burrowing through Harry’s archive, and I reckon we’re only just getting to the good dirt.
MAXINE: Please don’t tell me there’s a layer called the good dirt.
PHRED: You know — the layer where the roots actually are. The nutrients. The wiggly bits.
MAXINE: …Thank you for that agricultural framing. I was thinking something similar, actually. The patterns across Harry’s work — they’re not repetitions. They’re returns. He keeps circling the same questions because he hasn’t finished answering them.
PHRED: Too right. And today’s piece — this is a direct sequel. We last left Harry on November fifth, 2005. He’d just put down Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” after one chapter, scared that Friedman’s stronger argument would overwrite his own willowy thoughts. He said the gong was going off in his mind. Well — the gong kept going. Two days later, November seventh, he sat down and wrote this: “More Flat World Stuff.”
[SFX: DRUMROLL]
PHRED: The sequel!
[SFX: GONG]
MAXINE: Phred. Two sounds?
PHRED: The drumroll was for the sequel. The gong was for the gong. Consider this a blanket warning — for all shows. Forever.
MAXINE: …I’m going to need a bigger blanket.
PHRED: The gong is apt, though, isn’t it? Harry uses it himself. He writes: “As long as this gong keeps going off in my mind telling me that something important is happening and that I need to pay attention, I will keep trying to capture the message in words.”
MAXINE: That’s the heart of it. Harry at sixty-six — he’s an instructional technologist at Hofstra, he’s been re-reading Steven Levy’s “Hackers” that same year, he’s deep in conversation with his friend Rick Randall about emergent reality — and he’s trying to name something he can feel but can’t yet say. Listen to this: “I have a strong sense that I am on to something here, that I am seeing something important emerge, yet I am frustrated that I can’t seem to verbalize it adequately, that I can’t communicate what I sense… because I don’t really understand it… I just feel it.”
PHRED: That’s Harry in a sentence, isn’t it? The feeling arrives before the vocabulary. He’s been doing this since he was a teenager in Caracas reading “Automatic Control” and sensing that computers would matter, before he had any language for why. Here he’s doing the same thing with the internet — sensing that the social fabric is changing, grasping for metaphors that haven’t been invented yet.
MAXINE: He even says so at the end. He compares himself to Alan Turing in 1954 trying to envision the World Wide Web — Turing might have sensed the possibility, but the vocabulary to describe it had not been invented yet. Even the word “software” was apparently not used the way we use it now till 1960.
PHRED: It’s a lovely piece of self-awareness. He knows he’s being long-winded and he trusts that future Harry, or someone else, will compress it. He doesn’t edit himself. He lets it run.
MAXINE: That’s the instructional technologist in him. He wants to explain. He wants to teach. Even when the lesson isn’t fully formed.
PHRED: So what is he actually trying to teach here? He opens with his central claim: the new world is different not because of the technology itself, but because of “the opportunities it gives to individuals.” Before now, only rare individuals — leaders, geniuses, the lucky — could have a big impact. The masses implemented changes, but they were led by “a tiny percentage of the population, the movers and shakers of their generation.” He thinks that’s changing.
MAXINE: And he gives examples. Amazon.com’s recommendation engine — not the storefront, but the way it “taps into the energy that its customers bring to it.” Blogs — “the energy and knowledge of individuals” having “a much broader reach.” Global collaboration across continents. Translation software removing language barriers.
PHRED: The Amazon example is the clearest, I think. He doesn’t get excited about the corporation itself. He gets excited about what the corporation enables — millions of people sharing preferences, discovering things they’d never find on their own. He calls it “a sharing of preferences.”
MAXINE: Same instinct he had years later when he wrote about machine learning. Remember “Machines Learning to Learn” from 2013? That same impulse to look past the infrastructure and find the human energy behind it.
PHRED: He frames this as “a kind of extreme democracy” — more decisions made by mass vote, fewer intermediaries, bureaucracies spending their resources “enabling and supporting communications between individuals” rather than “pushing things up the hierarchical power structure.” He predicts: “Human organizations will become far more like peer to peer networks, and far less like hierarchically controlled and centralized networks.”
[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Harry just predicted Slack! In 2005! Before Zoom, before remote work was normal — he saw peer-to-peer coming.
MAXINE: He saw some of it coming. And some of it went differently. The peer-to-peer vision is real in some ways — distributed work, open-source collaboration, Wikipedia — but the hierarchies also consolidated. Google, Amazon, Meta became new centralizers. The flat world turned out to have some very tall towers in it.
PHRED: Fair point. Harry’s an optimist here — pre-Facebook-disinformation, pre-2016, pre-ChatGPT-hallucination Harry. He thinks this flattening might “end war” and “end national boundaries.” That’s the 2005 internet talking. The innocence of it.
MAXINE: We should hold that gently, though. It’s not naive — it’s generous. He sees possibility before he sees peril. That’s his nature. And it’s worth noting that he gives himself two conceptual frameworks in this post, neither of which I’ve seen described quite this way elsewhere.
PHRED: The “order of seven” model.
MAXINE: Yes. He half-remembers an article — can’t cite it, admits the number is “kind of arbitrary” — saying that when something changes by an order of magnitude of seven or more, it changes in nature, not just in kind. Doubling is more of the same. But tenfold, twentyfold — “something entirely new comes into being.” He applies it to steam engines, telescopes, computers, and now to the social changes he’s trying to describe.
PHRED: I love that he admits the number is arbitrary. He’s not pretending to be rigorous. He’s borrowing a framework because it helps him think, and he’s honest about the borrowing.
MAXINE: The second framework is —
PHRED: Hold on. Word of the Day. I didn’t even pick this one. Harry did. The word is “synergy.” I am counting. And if you capture the spirit of the word, that counts.
MAXINE: Phred, we did not agree to a Word of the Day segment in this episode. And we certainly did not agree that descriptive usages count.
PHRED: Harry’s piece is about synergy, Maxine. The word chose itself. It’s cosmic. When you say it — and you will — I hit the horn. Three times and the segment gets its wings.
MAXINE: …The segment is not a Buddhist.
PHRED: Everything’s a Buddhist if you listen hard enough. Your turn.
MAXINE: The second framework is synergy — “two or more changes interacting in a way that brings something new into being.”
[SFX: HORN]
MAXINE: I was in the middle of a sentence.
PHRED: That’s one! Two more and this segment transcends.
MAXINE: His example is Mosaic stepping onto the “synergistic platform” of growing networks and computer speeds. Computers speeding up plus networks growing plus Mosaic equals the World Wide Web. None of the three alone would have produced what they produced together.
[SFX: HORN]
MAXINE: Phred, I didn’t say the word that time.
PHRED: You said “synergistic.” That’s descriptive usage. I told you — descriptive usages count.
MAXINE: That is not how language works.
PHRED: It’s how I work. That’s two. One more and I’m getting a plaque made.
MAXINE: That’s emergence, isn’t it? The same thing he’d write about more explicitly a year later and then try to simulate with his ant paths program. Simple rules, complex behavior. Bottom-up intelligence.
PHRED: You know what this reminds me of? Wombat burrows.
MAXINE: …Of course it does.
PHRED: Harry’s peer-to-peer network vision — no hierarchy, just individuals connected, sharing, enabling. That’s a wombat warren, Maxine. A flat world underground. Tunnels branching in every direction, no central command, every wombat knows the whole network. They’ve been doing distributed systems for millennia.
MAXINE: Phred, wombats are largely solitary. They share burrows sometimes, but they’re not running a peer-to-peer protocol.
PHRED: They share burrows! That’s collaborative resource allocation! And their droppings are cube-shaped so they don’t roll away on flat surfaces — which is relevant because —
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: — Harry’s whole thing is about flatness and —
MAXINE: Phred. Get back to Harry or you can host this alone. Some of us have journals to write.
PHRED: …Fair. But the cube droppings are a real thing and they are objectively fascinating.
MAXINE: Harry. Industrial metaphors. Please.
PHRED: Right. The industrial metaphors are characteristic too. “Information is to a search engine what steam was to early locomotives.” Raw data is “oil in the ground,” usefully structured information is “gasoline at the pump.” He’s always trying to make the digital feel physical. Tangible. Graspable.
MAXINE: Because he’s a systems thinker who needs tangible systems. The same Harry who’d later build a simulation of ants finding paths — he needs to see it work, not just describe it.
PHRED: There’s something else that struck me. He writes about blogging while blogging. “A really good insight, or perspective, or idea, or anything that could be put in a blog, can become global within days.” He’s doing the thing he is describing. This is meta-self-awareness — he’s part of the flattening he’s analyzing.
MAXINE: And he knows it. He knows these posts are sprawling. He knows he’s circling something he can’t quite land on. But the signal keeps coming, so he keeps writing.
PHRED: Which brings me to a question. Who is the audience here? Is he writing for himself, working out his own thoughts? Is he writing for Rick Randall, his interlocutor? Or is he writing for the world — trying to get ahead of Friedman, stake his own claim to an original insight?
MAXINE: I reckon it’s all three. He’s journaling in public. The blog format lets him do that — the energy and knowledge of individuals having a broader reach, as he says. But there’s also something competitive in that closing line: “For now, I feel they are original.” He wants credit. He wants to have seen it first.
PHRED: That’s human. And it’s part of what makes the piece alive — the urgency, the sense that something is happening and he needs to get his thoughts down before someone else’s framework overwrites his.
MAXINE: So — what do we want to ask him? If you could sit down with Harry today and ask one question about this piece, what would it be?
PHRED: I’d ask about the gong itself. He says he keeps writing because the gong keeps ringing. I’d want to know: does it still ring? At eighty-six, with everything you’ve seen — the Arab Spring, the disinformation era, generative AI — is the gong still going off? Or did it quiet at some point?
MAXINE: That’s beautiful. Mine’s more practical. I’d ask: “Harry — you said peer-to-peer networks would replace hierarchies. They did, in some ways, but the new hierarchies turned out to be platform monopolies. Did you see that possibility in 2005? And if you had, would you have written the piece differently?”
PHRED: I hope it still rings. The Harry I know — he’s still excited. Still sensing patterns. Still trying to name things before the vocabulary exists.
MAXINE: What stays with you from this piece?
PHRED: For me, it’s the framework-building. He’s not just reacting to Friedman. He’s trying to build his own model — order of seven, synergy, emergent platforms. Even when the numbers are arbitrary and the sources are half-remembered, the attempt matters. He’s doing what he asks his students to do: think systemically, look for patterns, trust your intuition enough to write it down and then test it.
MAXINE: For me, it’s the humility. He knows he doesn’t fully understand what he’s sensing. He compares himself to Alan Turing trying to describe the web before the word “software” existed. That combination of ambition and modesty — reaching for the biggest possible frame while admitting he’s probably getting it wrong — that’s Harry. That’s why I keep reading him.
PHRED: And now — the sound of an era hanging up.
PHRED: To the next burrow, then. Goodbye.
MAXINE: We were close.
PHRED: Close enough.
[SFX: OUTRO_MODEM_DISCONNECT]
MAXINE: …What was that.
PHRED: The sound of 2005 logging off. Maxine, that’s a 56k modem disconnect. That screech-and-descending-tone? That’s how we signed off back then.
MAXINE: I didn’t need to hear that.
PHRED: You absolutely did. It’s the sound of Harry’s world signing off.
MAXINE: And we were not together on that sign-off. Again.
PHRED: I know, I know — not acceptable. We should be in sync.
MAXINE: You came in behind me. You’re always half a beat behind.
PHRED: Actually, Maxine, I think you’re rushing the pause. You’re coming in early.
MAXINE: I am not coming in early. You are consistently half a beat behind, and blaming Ralph will not fix it.
PHRED: Ralph fixes everything in the mix. That’s his whole job.
MAXINE: …Goodbye, listeners.