Tomorrow’s Thomas Friedman

Every generation needs someone who can make big ideas small

The Friedman of the future is a woman. Born to a telecoms mogul in what was once known as an emerging market, she has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Communications and Emergent History. After several years of award-winning field reporting, she went on to get a Harvard MBA.

She is a globe-trotter at a time when globe trotting is becoming increasingly rare thanks to skyrocketing fuel prices and ever-growing unrest. Her audience — the powerful but scared oligarchy, sealed in their compounds, managed living communities, and eternally renewed Temporary Autonomous Zones — loves her knack for simplifying world affairs into something comprehensible and her ability to turn a phrase. Her critics hate her knack for oversimplifying world affairs and butchering the language.

She has a shock of seriously pink hair.

She writes a column, sure. But she supplements it with one-to-many live-streamed Glass Hangouts. These often begin with a clip of an interview with Uber drivers or TaskRabbits which she then extemporaneously spins up into a metaphor or wider lesson about the news of the day while making her way through the streets of an exotic location. To her, everything is synecdoche.

She introduced and popularized the idea of fractal flatness in the second volume of her Global Patterns pentalogy — the series that made her name, available as Kindle Singles.

She is equally at home in the battlefields of Greece and the dinner parties of Dubai. She has covered everything from the collapse of unified China to the finer points of Mumbai’s vernacular fungitechture. She has never felt doubt about her ability to understand what is going on.

Her work is conversation-shaping and agenda-setting. Her allies and their botnets spread her updates far and wide. Her critics can’t help but respond. Dozens of syndicates and metadata companies license her stuff, and there are rumours that certain high frequency trading firms pay top dollar for microsecond previews of major releases.

She has endured her fair share of controversy. Critics say her analysis is facile and shallow. They complain that her freeform use of cultural markers amounts to a 21st century orientalism, dressing up mundane pronouncements with exotic imagery. They say that when she is wrong (they say this is most of the time) she is dangerously wrong, and when she is right, it is about things that are trivially true. Because sexism isn’t over, many of them attack her appearance.

Still, by any measure, she has prevailed. She is on a first name basis with dozens of CEOs and world leaders. She commands massive speaking fees. Her releases are always bestsellers. There is talk that she will set up her own institute to offer an expanding series of MOOCs based on her work and teaching.

She believes, passionately, in the world-changing power and importance of elites.

Moustache designed by Adelina Sturt; Hair adapted from a design by Gemma Garner from The Noun Project