Put this way, Friedman's notion might seem obvious, so baggy as to account for everything under the sun. In fact, it is more precise than that. The horizontal society is a society of entertainment and at the same time a society of surveillance, where privacy is both valued and routinely invaded. The horizontal society is global, but the United States is its avant-garde. The ideal of the autonomous individual spawned a rights revolution that continues.
Identity is diffuse, capable of being molded and remolded.
The risk of Friedman's essay is a certain looseness. As the book proceeds, his sharper propositions too often blur into clouds of abstraction. After a strong start, he crams a great many bland ideas about nationalism, ethnicity and migration into his bag in order to demonstrate that the concept of the horizontal is, in fact, compendious. Repetition takes over. We get oft-told tales about assimilation, immigration and language.