Thirteen years ago, I spent a curious afternoon with the Silicon Valley financier and futurist Peter Thiel. Our meeting, for a magazine profile I was writing, predated Thiel’s shift into electoral politics, where he later gained fame—or infamy, depending on your bent—as a Republican mega-donor, right-wing influencer, and, in some sense, kingmaker. (It was Thiel who introduced his former employee JD Vance to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2021.) Mostly what we talked about that afternoon was a fantastical-sounding project Thiel was backing to establish floating microstates out in the ocean—way beyond any nation’s territorial waters, and thus beyond any government’s control—as de facto laboratories for libertarian experimentation: start-up countries, in other words. Prototype plans involved a movable, diesel-powered, twelve-thousand-ton structure with room for 270 residents. Thiel and his team called it seasteading.
That meeting—and Thiel himself—kept bubbling to mind as I read Richard Powers’s extraordinary new novel, Playground. Partly because one of Playground’s four woven plotlines involves a tech mogul masterminding a seasteading scheme in the South Pacific. A bit on the nose, as they say. But also because Thiel and Powers—whom I also profiled, for this magazine, following the wild success of his Pulitzer-winning novel, The Overstory—have a predilection for aiming their mental lenses toward the future. (Powers was gaming out the ramifications of AI back in 1995, for example, and virtual reality in 2000.) The difference is not what they see out there in the future; it’s what they believe we should and can do about it.
Playground’s mogul, Todd Keane, is a classic Powers character: more comfortable with the intricacies of coding than with those of the human heart. He’s fifty-seven, and the billionaire founder and CEO of an all-in-one social media platform called Playground. (Powers’s Playground suggests the super-app model for PayPal that Thiel and Elon Musk, among its other founders, originally envisioned.) But Keane also suffers “from what…computer folks call latency,” retreating into the past after a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, dictating his life story to an AI module called Profunda. Many of these memories eddy around his high school and college pal Rafi Young: “young, gifted, and Black,” to crib the playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s phrase. When Rafi casually volunteers a way to monetize the nascent Playground, he’s double-crossed by Keane.
Their soured friendship provides the central whirlpool of the plot, but others get pulled in: Evie Beaulieu, a Canadian diver and celebrity oceanographer; Ina Aroita, a Pacific Islander artist and Rafi’s love; the eighty-two residents of Makatea, a South Pacific atoll Keane has chosen for his seasteading venture; and, to a degree, Profunda, the AI module with a frighteningly superhuman consciousness “not honoured,” like Shakespeare’s monster Caliban, “with a human shape.”
But as Powers did in The Overstory, speaking Lorax-like for the trees, another larger character looms: the ocean itself. Powers evokes its ever more fragile splendor with glimmering schools of sensual detail, as here, inventorying its sounds: “the click of triggerfish grinding their spines, the toadfish’s spectacular boat whistles and drum solos, the high-pitched chirps of herring farts and the bellow of roaring lionfish, the rhythmic piping of…mantas, the songs of whales that carried for thousands of deep-sea miles.” The ocean’s waves lap at the lives of Powers’s cast. The sea, he writes, was “forever unfolding, forever exploring, forever tinkering with form, and every part of it was busy talking about what was all around…So was every being that came from those waters. Which meant every living thing.”
“When you start a company, true freedom is at the beginning of things,” Peter Thiel told me that afternoon, before sliding the thought to the topic of nations. “The United States Constitution had things you could do at the beginning that you couldn’t do later. So the question is, can you go back to the beginning of things?” Powers poses kindred questions in Playground, but he glimpses the answers at the literal beginning: in the oceans that birthed us, life’s original playground, which millennia later we still know so little about, even as we continue to exploit and exhaust them. As Powers once said: “One of the best ways to decide what kind of world we want to live in may be to build our understanding of the kind of world we do live in.” Ultra-vivid, wildly gripping, and visionary in its scope, Playground feels like a foundation block for just that.
Plus: Cheers for Three New Fall Reads
Autumn brings dynamic nonfiction from G&G contributors. Wright Thompson’s The Barn (Penguin) layers deeply personal reporting and potent writing to uncover the hidden history of Emmett Till’s Mississippi murder, underscoring Thompson’s range as a storyteller in the wake of his bestselling Pappyland. In Valley So Low (Knopf), Jared Sullivan recounts in cinematic detail the saga of a coal disaster and the self-described “hillbilly lawyers” who stood up for blue-collar workers in a tiny Tennessee town. And with Night Magic (Algonquin), Leigh Ann Henion revels in the glow of Appalachian fireflies, moon gardens, and bioluminescent fungi to show how nocturnal life is not something to fear, but to revere. —CJ Lotz Diego
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