flat flat flat.

murakami says it. momus says it. that prick friedman says it too. The flyer on my desk touting an Alfonse Mucha show at the local shopping mall sure as hell says it. The world is getting flat, and it's mostly a good thing. Sure they mean different things... on the surface.

They're on about the dissolution of protection schemes, whether those be the perceived difference between art and commerce, the legal and physical barriers to exporting all labor to poorer countries, or the distance between anything high and low. It's all turning into a postmodern mash-up and it's good they say.

Now, the destruction of the idea of authenticity within the fashion world I think makes sense. We can't buy our way into any kind of authenticity other than authentic consumerism. Maybe the art world is really just putting on airs when it pretends that it's significantly different from advertisers and product designers. I'm not inclined to think so, but I can see it. In the same vein, if we don't erect legal barriers (that is to say arbitrary distinctions based on nationality) to replace the physical barriers that oceans once represented, low-end and gradually higher end jobs will trickle away, or wages and job security will flatten with the third world. I don't like that, but maybe it is just.
The missing thrust of this though is that when we squish it all flat, not everyone's going to come in smiling and appreciating plurality. I think the real effect of flatness being played out in america now is the religious right's war on everything. The church used to be placated with it's smug sense of "high"ness and the whole pie in the sky promise seemed to be enough to keep them from wanting to tinker too much with the earthly realm. But as they've been pulled down (by science), and the everyday pulled up (through consumerism) they're feeling the pinch. No longer able to perceive the courts as "high" but ultimately "beneath" them, the church has started to show a lot of interest in destroying the courts. There are literal advocates of theocracy in America getting on cable news these days. Sure wild plurality is one kind of flatness, but totalitarian theocracy is another, and it's a lot easier to imagine.
The other target of the right of course is the intellectuals... and by extension, intellectualism... analysis and reasoned debate. That's how we got where we are, with the news media actually pausing to admire the deftness of scott mclellan's "almost lies". Our old venerated systems of democracy are just another method, and they're losing out to the Straussian idea of guiding the populace with useful fictions.
The totally imaginary idea of fashion or musical authenticity is just a metaphor for the old systems that we should defend despite the increasing plurality and flatness of the world. Without some moral absolute (like Allah, or so), our deepest beliefs are subject to question, and it's only through a tradition and a wink and nod that we don't continually assail our beliefs about democracy, murder, welfare, and so on. In a flat world, that need not be the case.
If the world were really going to go totally flat, I'd expect that the most utilitarian morals and ideas would come out on top, but MONEY. Accumulations of money and power will never be flat. If you don't know the american news, you don't know the power of money. Totally anti-populist laws get hyped by a media in the pockets of those in power. Agendas that suit those already in positions of wealth and power are pushed and their opponents villified. Accretions of money and power only grow, and the flatness of the world is broken into two discreet non-contiguous surfaces... the haves and the have-nots.
That's what I see as the fruit of flatness boosterism. Intellectuals will be the first to hang.

flat flat flat.