Thread by @AlecMacGillis

Here we are: publication day for FULFILLMENT: Winning & Losing in One-Click America.

I've been working on the book for 3 yrs, but it stretches much further back. It grew out of years of reporting across the country and being overwhelmed by the regional disparities on display.🧵

The regional disparities have been growing wider than ever, between winner-take-all cities and left-behind ones.

The imbalance is not good for either: on the one hand, unaffordability and congestion; on the other, abandonment and despair.

And political alienation all around.

There are plenty of ways to tell the story of this regional inequality. I chose to tell it through the frame of Amazon, a company that serves both as a natural thread through the country due to sheer ubiquity, and as a leading explanation for the disparities due to its dominance.

But this is not a book of policy argument. It's a reported narrative that takes you deep inside the whole ecosystem of tech-dominated America, from top to bottom. Among the places and realms I infiltrated or reported from these past few years:

...a closed-door meeting in El Paso where Amazon execs cajoled local business owners to join Marketplace; a warehouse orientation session in Baltimore (I passed the drug test); a cardboard-box maker's homeless shelter in Dayton; a Black heritage parade past new Seattle condos...

...a career day at HQ2 in Arlington VA where a sockless young man told middle-aged people how they had to write their resumes; a warehouse in OH where legally blind people were assigned to drive forklifts; the office of a Seattle tech lobbyist who cackled over repealing a tax...

...a warehouse in Pennsylvania where two workers died in accidents in just a few years; a dumpster in Baltimore; a cloud-industry gala at a Virginia vineyard; a data center near Columbus where guards tracked me w/ binoculars; the oldest bar in Ohio.

All this is in FULFILLMENT.