Can Coral Vote? : Reading Playground Amid Oceanic Futures and the Thai Pearl Necklace Project

I recently finished reading Playground, a new novel by Richard Powers, and it left me thinking deeply—not only about the oceanic worlds it imagines, but about our own here in Thailand. If you’re someone interested in floating cities, future technology, nonhuman rights, and the question of how we might live with a world not built solely for humans, then this book is well worth your time.

Set on a remote atoll in the Pacific Ocean, Playground follows a speculative project to build the world’s first fully autonomous, AI-governed floating city. The island’s residents are asked to vote on whether to greenlight the project. But this isn’t just a novel about technology and governance—it’s a story about dreams, ecological precarity, and the political entanglements between human and nonhuman worlds.

One particular line in the book stopped me in my tracks. During a heated community meeting, a young woman from the island stands up and asks:

“If the creatures of the reef are going to be harmed, shouldn’t they get to vote?”

It sounds whimsical at first. But it’s one of the most serious political questions the book asks—and one that speaks directly to my own work. What kind of political systems do we need in a time when our decisions directly affect multispecies worlds? Can corals, reef fish, or even AI have “voice” or “representation” in the governance of shared spaces?

As I read Playground, I couldn’t help but think about the proposed Pearl Necklace Project here in Thailand. This ambitious plan envisions a chain of artificial islands stretching across the Gulf, intended to protect Bangkok from rising seas and coastal erosion. Much like the city in Playground, it’s being framed as a climate adaptation megaproject—one part techno-fix, one part economic vision, and one part speculative hope.

I’ve described projects like these as speculature: the entanglement of speculation and infrastructure in dealing with planetary uncertainty. The Pearl Necklace Project, like the fictional floating city in Playground, is not just a technical intervention—it’s a cosmotechnical proposition. It’s about where we think the future should be built, who we believe it should serve, and who gets to shape it.

Both the novel and the real-world project share an unspoken assumption: that the ocean is the “last frontier,” a site for expansion, innovation, and planetary recalibration. But if we follow the novel’s lead, we are forced to ask: what would it mean to include the reef’s creatures, the shifting tides, or the sedimented histories of coastal communities in that future-making?

What Playground does so well is to open up a speculative space for posthuman politics—what Isabelle Stengers might call cosmopolitics—where decisions are no longer reserved for humans alone. In the novel, AI systems trained on ecological feedback and affective data participate in deliberative processes. The project’s legitimacy depends not only on community consensus but on a wider web of more-than-human entanglements.

The implications are far-reaching. What if our environmental impact assessments were not merely technocratic checklists but forums for multispecies negotiation? What if Bangkok’s climate future wasn’t decided in boardrooms, but in collaboration with the wetlands, winds, and waters that already inhabit its edges?

I finished the novel just after returning from fieldwork in Bang Khun Thian, a low-lying coastal district of Bangkok already bearing the brunt of subsidence and sea-level rise. Reading Playground in that moment felt uncanny. The fictional island and our real-world delta are not as far apart as we might think—geographically, temporally, or politically.

If Playground teaches us anything, it’s that futures are never simply built—they’re negotiated, imagined, and sometimes contested by those we least expect. Whether coral should vote might sound absurd. But the absurdity lies not in the question—but in how long we’ve avoided asking it.

In a time when the sea is swallowing the city, and the city is reaching back to colonize the sea, we need stories like Playground to remind us that imagination is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.

So if you’re interested in posthuman politics, speculative infrastructures, or the rights of nature, this book might just open up new currents of thought. And if you’re working, like I am, on projects that are trying to reshape coastlines—Playground might even help you listen better to the waves.