Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Sunday, March 19, 2017
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Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
"LOVE LOVE LOVE your futorological brickbats! Love them! You are in fine company with Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary with these." -- Paulina Borsook
"Devoted to highly rhetorical nitpicking, but it is fun to read." -- Chris Mooney
"Rather close but correct reading." -- Evgeny Morozov
"Mean, but true." -- Annalee Newitz
"Dale Carrico's skewering of the salvific pretensions of Silicon Valley's soi disant savior/founders never disappoints." -- Frank Pasquale
"Pretty breathless, but I guess it had to be said." -- Bruce Sterling
"An essential reality check for those who are too entranced by transhumanism to notice the sordid reality behind the curtain." -- Charlie Stross
1 comment:
> . . .my plans for Spring Break (well underway) are to read. . .
Just saw this one reviewed in the Times. I'll have to take a
look at it next time I'm in Barnes & Noble.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/books/review-american-war-omar-el-akkad.html
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A Haunting Debut Looks Ahead to a Second American Civil War
Books of The Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
MARCH 27, 2017
AMERICAN WAR
By Omar El Akkad
333 pages. Knopf. $26.95.
Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, “American War,” is an unlikely
mash-up of unsparing war reporting and plot elements familiar
to readers of the recent young-adult dystopian series
“The Hunger Games” and “Divergent.” . . .
Set in the closing decades of the 21st century and the opening
ones of the 22nd, El Akkad’s novel recounts what happened during
the Second American Civil War between the North and South and
its catastrophic aftermath. It is a story that extrapolates the
deep, partisan divisions that already plague American politics
and looks at where those widening splits could lead. A story that
maps the palpable consequences for the world of accelerating
climate change and an unraveling United States. . .
[El Akkad uses]. . . details — many gathered, it seems, during
his years as a reporter — to make his fictional future feel
alarmingly real. . . using a collagelike method (involving
fictional news clippings, oral history excerpts, memoirs,
government documents) to help chronicle the events that led
to and followed the Second American Civil War.
Those events include escalating battles over the use of
fossil fuel; the assassination of the United States president
by a secessionist suicide bomber in 2073; horrifying drone
attacks, massacres and guerrilla violence that further embitter
both sides; and, just as the war is about to conclude in 2095
with a reunification ceremony, the release of a biological
agent by a Southern terrorist that results in a decade-long
plague claiming 110 million lives. . .
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