Playground by Richard Powers accidentally made me understand why tech bros hate the state - and why they're still wrong. Need more relevant book recs!
Just finished Playground and I can't stop thinking about one particular thing it does.
The novel follows Todd, who builds an early social platform into a multi-billion dollar company. Powers traces his worldview with genuine empathy — in Todd's universe, code produces output, clean code produces clean products, and cause leads to effect. From inside that logic, the state really does look like pure noise.
What got me is how clearly Powers shows why that worldview forms. Todd is a rich white kid who went to private school and never had a meaningful interaction with public services. The state was always invisible to him. So he builds despite it — or so he believes.
The irony Powers builds into the novel without ever stating it outright: Playground only becomes a billion-dollar platform because millions can access it. That access requires the internet, which started as a US government defence project. The electricity, the supply chains, the stable legal systems — all of it is state-produced or state-enabled.
He contrasts Todd with Rafi, his Black friend who got into the same private school on merit but never had the option of treating the state as abstract. Same era, same country — entirely different relationship to public systems.
Has anyone else read Playground and picked up on this thread? And more broadly — does anyone else think fiction is doing a better job right now of explaining tech ideology than most non-fiction is? Please recommend more books that help me understand the world better!