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ever and more difficult. In some ways, everything is different

from how it was in 1989. Indeed in his 1999 best-seller, The

Lexus and the Olive Tree, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist

Thomas L. Friedman writes: “the world is only ten years old.”

The World Wide Web provides the most dramatic example

of how the last decade has transformed the world. In 1989, the

Internet’s 400 early adopters were predicting that it would rev-

olutionize how people communicate, but even they could not

imagine how pervasive it would become. As I write this, there

are more than 580 million Internet users worldwide, and usage

doubles every 100 days. Even if the Berlin Wall had not fallen

on November 9, 1989, the ability of people around the world

to effectively communicate electronically brought down all the

walls that previously separated and ghettoized nations.

Since 1989, technology has done what ideology could not and

created a worldwide community of the wired. The web allows

revolutionary minorities to make their case to the outside world,

even when they are under siege, as rebels did several years ago in

the Mexican state of Chiapas. But even as technology has facili-

tated the global exchange of ideas and made the world a smaller

place, it has failed to make it a peaceful one. The last time I had

the heart to check, the world was torn by twenty-five border dis-

putes, involving some forty nations. And instant communica-

tion—that most modern of inventions—has facilitated, rather

than impeded, the rise of religious fundamentalism around the

world, in a form that demonizes nonbelievers and gleefully puts

the most up-to-date technology to medieval use. As a result, we

now live in a world where a woman can still be stoned to death

for adultery, and everyone can watch it on satellite TV.

The world has undergone economic transformation as well.

China has embraced entrepreneurism and other forms of capi-

talism. And the European Union, once dismissed as a Utopian

Introduction to the Revised Edition, 2003

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