Eliminating "Playgrounds" - A Review
"Playground" by Richard Powers embodies the ontological failings of conscientious liberalism
Halfway through my PhD, my supervisor suggested I pick up the latest Richard Powers novel, Playground. The Pulitzer-winning author of The Overstory — which I have yet to read — decided to build his new story around two key topics; the development of Artificial Intelligence (which is all over the news, every day) and the exploitation of Pacific Island communities (which is not). As someone who grew up watching the expansion of cyberspace, and its encroachment on my adult life in the Pacific, Powers paints an overly romanticized and benign picture of the state of decay already manifest in the AI system he champions as an ultimate victory in his narrative.
It is worth noting Playground was nominated for the 2024 Booker Prize, and Yagnishsing Dawoor at The Guardian called it an electrifyingly beautiful tale of tech and the ocean (claiming indisputable greatness over a point I would say debases the entire conceit). I agree with Wendy Smith at the National Book Review it was “unabashedly intellectual but deeply felt,” but would contest it abjectly fails to deal with the, “most pressing issues of our time in the most wrenchingly human terms.” Smith’s take is an astute read of the literary elements, but decline to fully examine the socio-political; “Powers leaves us with a Zen-like koan: Every dance is a game, and every game its own best explanation.” A useful sentiment in a dialogue of art for art’s sake, but by portraying the “Other” as an American author, there’s a deeper responsibility to the audience Powers ultimately abdicates.
Beyond this point, spoilers abound, so if you haven’t read the book and intend to, given what I’ve written below, this is your spoiler warning.
Playground offers a variety of different narrative perspectives, but the bulk of the novel is divided between two characters; Todd Keane and Rafi Young. Todd is from a home near the shore of Lake Michigan in Evanston, and Rafi grows up around Pilsen - I’ve lived in both of these places, and I’ll give Powers - an Evanston native - credit for getting the depiction of his hometown right, but the value of place is otherwise not fully captured in this story. Born in 1970, the story follows their evolution through a selective Catholic highschool (where Rafi has received the scholarship Todd’s father endows), and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where Powers has also spent years of his life as both a student and faculty member. I haven’t been to Champaign-Urbana, so I’ll assume his depiction is accurate, as those scenes were perhaps the strongest of the central narrative.
Introduced to this environment is Ina Aroita - a multi-ethnic, Pan-Oceanian art student - who both men fall in love with, but only after Rafi has already begun dating her. Rafi and Todd have shared their most intimate secrets of love and loss with each other throughout their high school friendship, and they have a bond that carries them, deliberately, to college together. Ina is used as an inscrutable muse, communicative but without power to influence change, representing a wedge which Powers forces between the two friends. A moment of trust is betrayed, because Rafi and Todd retain an uncharacteristic inability to work through a problem around a woman knowing them both as fully as they know each other, despite her obvious ability to process and partition her relationship with each in a healthy manner. Rafi allows his sense of betrayal at Todd offering Ina a glimpse into his vulnerabilities as a friendship ending moment, and - to put it in the parlance of games often employed in Playground - the penalty exceeds the foul.
As I also met my spouse - a multi-ethnic, Pan-Oceanian art student - while I was at college and she dated one of my good friends, I can confidently note there are some limitations to maturity and masculinity embodied in Todd and Rafi’s relationship that may be a product of taking place a generation earlier, but also evidence some elaborately concocted behavioral traits through trauma events in the story that are convenient to Powers in manufacturing a core conflict of the book. (In comparison to the friendship-ending transgression between these two men over a slight misunderstanding and miscommunication, my wife and I - with our kids - were welcomed to stay with our old friend the last time we were visiting the city where he lived.) The conflict doesn’t match the consequences.
There are plenty of fantastic ideas presented over the course of the book, and I derived the greatest enjoyment from the reading recommendations Powers makes throughout. Most central to the conceit of the book — the connection between finite and infinite games — is What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task by Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov. This search for immortality, and comprehensive computational capacity to achieve a functional capacity to resurrect the dead is Todd Keane’s great pursuit. I would say it is also Rafi’s, but we never get to truly understand where Rafi, Ina, and the entire community of Makatea in French Polynesia actually stand on issues, because Todd Keane, as the narrative self-insertion of Powers, basically re-formats the whole hard drive on their character development with the end of the book.
There are also moments given over to Evelyne Beaulieu - an amalgamated avatar for female oceanographic exploration - who provides opportunities for Powers to heap descriptive praise on the biodiversity of the ocean and the call of the deep. This allows Powers an opportunity to tip his hat to the legacy of the Cousteau family and Sylvia Earle. Their legacies speak for themselves, and are well-known. I’ll take the opportunity to share the late Dr. Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa’s Sweat and Salt Water: Selected Works, which provides a critical non-Western perspective at the highest levels of discourse on connection to the ocean rooted in a life lived ontologically immersed in Oceania. She and her sister Dr. Katarina Teaiwa’s work on Decolonial Possibilities would have been welcome reference points to better inform Powers - who has decided to write about the Pacific - on what being from the Pacific really means. The astonishment of Ina at first seeing snow, like she’d never heard of it, reads like accounts of cargo cults forming in awe at first contact with American Servicemen. Everything is given an erudite exoticism that belies the nissological reality of daily life in Oceania.
Reading Playground, and recognizing the limits of an arm’s length, studied understanding of the Pacific reminded me of another recent instance in popular American media of conscientious liberalism gone awry - Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - involving a muddling of details and, ultimately, doing a disservice to the reality of the Pacific. They both attempt to draw attention to areas of environmental concern they know are important, but misrepresent in ways that end up damaging the audience’s understanding of Oceania.
(Stay with me - I grew up as a tremendous fan of Winona Ryder, and loved the first movie, and this is a review of Playground, so I’ll keep the analogy tight, with a single spoiler.)
To avoid bringing Jeffrey Jones (who has since been convicted as a sex offender for crimes involving minors) back on set, the subplot for Charles Deetz’s character involves an elaborate death (narrated in an otherwise fantastic manner by the wonderful Catherine O’Hara) involving a plane crash while on a birdwatching trip to Funafuti atoll in the interest of spotting the Tuamotu Sandpiper.
The Tuamotu Sandpiper is native to the Tuamotu islands of French Polynesia. Meanwhile, Funafuti atoll is where the capital of Tuvalu is located, over 4,000km away. The Tuamotu Sandpiper is endangered, and its area of occupancy doesn’t include Tuvalu. The story ultimately vilifies a shark as the fatal culprit - which is both unnecessary and inaccurate, as Tuvalu has reported zero unprovoked shark attacks.
I’m not sure what prompted screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar to pluck Funafuti and the Tuamotu Sandpiper out of the options available and mash them into an expository stop-motion scene. Fact-checking any reference takes less time than writing the scene with the range of online databases now available, and it would’ve taken only five minutes more reading to be 100% less wrong.
This all gets back to a key issue of Western storytelling epistemology that Playground exemplifies; artistic license for narrative convenience. As a related example, I discussed this with Joe Harris, author of the graphic novel, Great Pacific, in the context of fabricating a tribe inhabitating the North Pacific Garbage Patch bearing no real similarity to the Chamorro or Hawaiian communities in the relative vicinity, but inferring connection to the nuclear legacy of the Marshall Islands. The desire to bring attention to an issue of global importance is not necessarily met with the critical demands of the importance of getting the details to a place where they reflect the reality of the lived experience for the people in the regions being depicted because the stories aren’t being written for them. They are also not being written informed by the voices of the people in the region. In the acknowledgements of Playground, Powers includes no indigenous Pacific authors.
Trade publishers and movie studios do not demand this level of intellectual honesty in the manner academic peer review demands, and both the audience and broader global community pay the price of this casual misinformation. There is a threshold for suspension of disbelief, and at a certain amorphous point, under commercial models of media distribution and communication of ideas, the effort required for accurate, grounded depictions of scenarios yield diminishing returns.
With the absolute stripping of agency from every character but Todd Keane, Powers diminished any potential returns on the moral of his story, which could have been redirected towards the otherwise saliently covered idea of the infinite game; playing the game to continue the play. Examining this idea as the moral center of the narrative would have demanded a more thorough examination of what continuing the game would have looked like for the characters in Playground. It would have provided a much more honest depiction of inter-generational and post-human decision-making than the perfunctory mentions in the discussion of direct democracy being employed on Makatea. By removing its center and restoring an equilibrium where the rich white American dictates the terms of engagement for those in his orbit. The game being played with the reader in the narrative of Playground is proven ultimately solipsistic, regardless of the good intentions behind bringing attention to environmental issues facing Oceania. The agency of all other characters beyond Todd Keane ends up being invalidated, and Powers fails to acknowledge the topological complexity of brains, and the inability to control for the life of the mind. Most egregiously, the idea that a tech billionaire might be the savior of the Pacific through having his Ebenezer Scrooge, “come to Jesus” moment and bequeathing his fortune (made through twisting the world in an attempt to understand and control for all possible eventualities - gamifying and monetizing at Rafi’s suggestion that people need stakes to invest themselves in the platform) to his unrequited college love is a critically reductive way to view the systemic issues stacked through centuries of settler-colonialism and capital market imperialism.
The descriptions of plastic pollution (which Powers has clearly read about in the news) and the immaculately swept solar panels and tiles of old Chinese stores in the Pacific (which he has clearly never visited) kept setting off the alarm in my mind over little incongruities that add up to an inadequate understand of what it would actually take to solve problems in the region. I’ve worked with enough solar projects in the Pacific to know that regional solar projects are generally not given the maintenance and repair attention they need due to budget constraints and thin human resource pools being required to work over maritime areas continental commuters can barely fathom. The idea of anything being immaculate when the humidity and salinity inevitably invite mold and erosion - it gives away the unreality of the universe Powers is attempting to portray. He’s trying to wipe clean the big problems in one fell swoop with Todd’s final action instead of picking up on the little problems along the way.
Stories about the edge of the ocean, written by privileged continental white men given the structural opportunity to profit from the idea of a space, without having to get up close, get uncomfortable, preclude truly understanding what makes Oceania unique. There is no happy ending for Pacific island communities that doesn’t involve structural overhaul of the global economy that has put them on the edge of precarity. It is irresponsible and unrealistic to suggest otherwise when framing a narrative. That none of the editorial and publishing team Powers has working with him were able to identify and address these issues throughout the drafting of Playground is indicative of a broader challenge to tackle in the mainstream publishing industry. Likewise, that they would let this book hit shelves with the phrase, “the last wild place we have yet to colonize” on the back cover is an egregious affront to the inherent value of the ocean as it has been understood and inhabited for millennia prior to colonial incursion. (Welcome to 1.5° overshoot - brought to you by the engines of colonialism!)
The surface coat given to the topic by Powers mostly highlights for anyone aware of the deeper issues raised (AI, financial regulation, resource exploitation, environmental degradation, etc.) how much more thought needs to be applied by all parties towards tackling these challenges. So the multi-billionaire leaves all his money to an sculptor on an island in French Polynesia - then what? The book ends before digging into what actually might go into making Oceania a safe, successful, thriving space in the wake of what our global capitalist resource mismanagement systems have wrought upon it.
It ruminates on the question of whether to treat Pacific Islands as little more than future seamounts for seasteading libertarians who have abandoned the social contract of their homelands? Oceania has already been treated as a military and environmental sacrifice zone, while Aotearoa — also known as New Zealand — is staged as a refuge for the rich and powerful, while stringently controlling the international migration relationships it holds with its tropical island neighbors.
The idea of playgrounds, the fond mention of Gauguin (a syphilitic lecher who didn’t do the French Polynesians any favors, either), and the insistence on a techno-capitalist enlightenment providing Oceanic communities with the lifeline out of a disaster brought on by continental excesses and exploitation compounded over generations. There must be a reckoning with the reductive, romanticized view of the Global South as the playground for continental man-children. As islands across the region are hoarded and fortified by billionaires as we speak, the infringement upon sovereignty and the disparity in wealth across the region continues to grow. Why are individuals allowed to hold more wealth than the entire population of Pacific Island Countries? There are about three dozen people who individually possess more wealth than all of the Pacific Island Countries combined (reminder; this is an area the size of Africa home to around ten million people).
Playground — perhaps inadvertently — shines a light on the ontological disparity between continental thinkers from overdeveloped economies and the nissological realities faced by Oceanic communities on beyond the margins of global capitalism. There is an opportunity for ACP (Africa, Caribbean, Pacific) states to eliminate this type of behavior, and establish much stronger conditions for foreign investment, ownership, and engagement in nissological development. When I first emigrated to Fiji (an immigrant without a job waiting - not an expat), in order to secure a work permit, I ended up taking a job with some absolutely horrid Aussies that I escaped as quickly as I could when I got a job at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. I remember with disdain the phrase the head of that Aussie company would often repeat; “We’re here for a good time, not a long time.”
I can think of no mentality more willing to make a mess, exploit, and abandon. Enabling or allowing this sort of mentality to flourish and profit with the region is not how civilizations thrive. The conditions of entry, investment, and citizenship must be much more strictly designed to ensure the Global South derives the value it truly holds from its interaction with overdeveloped economies attempting to leverage their wealth for further advantage. Oceania represents one of the last places beyond the all-encompassing grasp of global market forces — “the last wild place we have yet to colonize,” indeed — and Powers utilities the board game Go to symbolize Todd’s effort to capture Rafi, along with all of Makatea. Analogous to the strategic seizure of Pacific space by neo-colonial powers vying over influence in the Pacific, the continents keep treating Pacific peoples as though they’re part of board, not players in their own right. Powers allows Todd Keane to fall into the exact same pattern of behavior.
It falls upon the communities across the region to assert their longstanding record of sustainable stewardship to ensure decisions made are in accordance with their rights and in the interest of creating scenarios where they can thrive. There’s no comparable billionaire to Todd Keane who our society has any reason to expect would suddenly drop dead and empower the most marginalized people on the planet. Eliminate the playgrounds. The Pacific isn’t a safe haven for billionaires to retreat when the mess they’ve made in their homelands catches up with them. It’s the front line in the battle against the destabilization wrought by human activity that has drawn us into the Anthropocene, and it should be treated as such - as a space of mounting dangers that demands respect, and must be cultivated with care by all who reside within to ensure it remains a place of life for all, with a biosphere able to thrive alongside the rest of humanity.
For Powers, there is no break from the trajectory that has led us into this troubling reality. Powers inserts himself as Keane, who performs both as protagonist and Deus ex machina for his arm’s-length love long unrequited and her community across the sea. A denuding of nuance strips both value and meaning, and inhibits true understanding and connection. As a reader trying to understand perspectives of the world beyond one’s own, baking falsehoods into the text without caveats creates misapprehension on the part of the unaware, and leaves a sense of distaste and dissatisfaction in those aware of the flavor a home-cooked Oceanic story should really have.
Anyone looking for a palate cleanser to follow Playground can pick up Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures as a good place to start afresh.
www.andrewirvin.net