Surprisingly enough, it’s not Thomas Friedman who wrote this, it was David Graeber, in his book, Debt: The First 5000 Years.

I have to admit that I have not actually read this book, (and now, I never will) I am relying on a review from LizardBreath at Unfogged, and this is what she finds:

But then he starts talking about how democratic methods of structuring organizations are often more efficient than rigid hierarchies, and so will often arise spontaneously when people really need to be get things done. And he uses Apple Computers as an example:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.

I don’t know all that much about the history of Apple or of the computer business generally, but I’m pretty sure that’s as wrong as it could possibly be. Apple was founded by two guys, neither of whom (AFAIK) worked for IBM (maybe for a very short time? But certainly not extendedly). It was notoriously a rigid, top-down hierarchy, it was founded in the ’70s, not the ’80s, and who had a laptop until the very end of the ’80s? That’s a whole lot of wrong for one sentence.

It’s so stupid, that I am amazed that this wasn’t written by Tom Friedman.