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Deleted ScenesDeleted Scene #4Chapter Four: The Core and Gap Section: The Military-Market Link Commentary: This fourth "deleted scene" was cut simply for pacing reasons. I include it here because I love the bit about "connectivity requires code." To me, that seemed like a natural way of explaining why globalization spreads rule sets. Deleted Scene: More Definitions of Rule Sets and Global Change [TEXT BEGINS] Bud's answer was "new rule sets," and this appealed to me greatly. My sense of how life worked had always been, the more connection you want with the world, the more rules you'll need to follow. To me, that was life in a nutshell. If you wanted to live by yourself in the woods, then you could live by your own idiosyncratic rule set, but the more interaction you wanted with others in life, the more rules you needed to accept. Freedom often means simply avoiding responsibility, but it can also equate to disconnectedness. If I was going to live a connected life as a husband, father, and member of my community, then I needed to adopt rule set after rule set, each circumscribing my behavior a bit more in exchange for growing connectedness and belonging. As my friends in the information technology business like to put it, connectivity requires code. So if Globalization III meant the global economy was maturing beyond just the Triad of America, Europe and Japan to include all the "globalizing" economies, then -- by God -- new rules were coming by the barrelful. If the post-Cold War era saw barriers coming down between East and West, then new rules were rising in their place. All this growing connectivity generated economic rules, and those new rule sets were inherently destabilizing for a global security order built on the principle of national sovereignty, or the careful demarcation of where one country's rule set ends and that of a neighbor's begins. Politics and diplomacy were fast becoming a race to fill in the rule set gaps that emerged with all this growing global connectivity, and it was a race the world seemed to be losing. [TEXT ENDS] |
Putnam, 2004 |
