This course is about Richard Powers' novel Playground, a story of friendship and love of the ocean folded into a history of AI, ecological collapse, American racism, and French colonialism. Our focus will be novel's representation of the connections that link its human and non-human characters. What sort of intelligence is needed to trace the networks that link the land, the sea, and the Cloud?

This course explores the two sides of writing technology. On the one hand, it examines today’s most ubiquitous writing technology: the digital writing of modern computers. On the other, it considers a set of literary texts that reflect on such technology in writing. The goal of the course is to habituate ourselves to moving between these two sides.