lolliplay The Internet Is Broken. How Do We Fix It?

At the bottom of the ocean there is a garden hose stuffed with glass. Life is difficult at this depth. Plants are unknown; oxygen is scarce. There are eels with very large mouths and fish that glow.

Their world may seem strange, but it has a point of contact with our own. That hose filled with glass is ours; we put it there. It is a bundle of optical fibers that carry beams of light. The beams of light are bits of data, encoded as pulses. The bits of data are Facebook friend requests and financial trades, Twitch streams and supply chain analytics. Here, among the eels, lies a major artery of the algorithmic age.

There are many such arteries, but this one is known as MAREA. It is the highest-capacity submarine fiber-optic cable in the Atlantic, running across the ocean from a suburb of Bilbao, Spain, to Virginia Beach. Where it comes ashore, it looks like a snake rising out of the sea.

MAREA is a reminder that the internet has a body. A body of glass, copper, silicon and a thousand other things — things that have to be dug out of the earth and hammered into useful shapes, with significant inputs of labor and energy.

Bodies are material; they are also historical. Submarine cables like MAREA, writes the scholar Nicole Starosielski, frequently follow “the contours of earlier networks.” Installing underwater lines is expensive, and it’s safer to follow the paths of prior telephone and telegraph networks — themselves shaped by even older patterns of empire and capital. Cables typically shadow the sea routes pioneered in previous centuries, routes that circulated cotton, silver, spices, settlers and slaves.

The growth of networks was guided by a desire for power and profit. They were not just conduits for conveying information, but mechanisms for forging relationships of control. While the internet is more sophisticated than its predecessors, it continues this tradition.

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