The protagonist is born into abject poverty, grows up in a refugee camp with no prospects or agency, is radicalized by foreign agents profiting from the ensuing chaos, suffers savage persecution at a brutal detention facility, and ultimately launches an attack that will decimate a divided nation. He braved war zones, detention camps, and mass protests to catch a glimpse of the forces shaping our world and synthesized those insights in his critically-acclaimed debut novel, American War.Īmerican War paints a raw and haunting picture of the compounding nature of violence and the dark places into which the road of divisiveness leads. Omar El Akkad spent ten years as a journalist covering the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the U.S. But the future is shaped at least as much by cultural, political, and social factors as by technology. Many have followed that line of thinking by studying weird pockets of early adopters in order to identify new technology trends. William Gibson famously noted that the future is already here-it’s just not very evenly distributed. The rollercoaster isn’t fun anymore, but we can’t get off. Propagandists reverse engineer algorithms to deliver automated misinformation at scale. Most Americans struggle to eke out a living even as corporate profits surge. Filter bubbles enclose us in their comfortable but toxic embrace. The federal government is alternatively self-destructive or deadlocked. It feels like America is tearing itself apart.
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