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I've always written primarily about architecture,

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about buildings, and writing about architecture

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is based on certain assumptions.

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An architect designs a building, and it becomes a place,

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or many architects design many buildings, and it becomes

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a city, and regardless of this complicated mix of forces

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of politics and culture and economics that shapes

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these places, at the end of the day, you can go

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and you can visit them. You can walk around them.

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You can smell them. You can get a feel for them.

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You can experience their sense of place.

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But what was striking to me over the last several years

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was that less and less was I going out into the world,

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and more and more, I was sitting in front of my computer screen.

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And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone,

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I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day,

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but I was also getting up at the end of the day

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and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket.

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And what was surprising to me was how quickly

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my relationship to the physical world had changed.

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In this very short period of time, you know, whether you

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call it the last 15 years or so of being online, or the last,

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you know, four or five years of being online all the time,

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our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that

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our attention is constantly divided. You know,

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we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking

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out in the world around us.

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And what was even more striking to me, and what I really

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got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen

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seemed to have no physical reality of its own.

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If you went and looked for images of the Internet,

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this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte

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of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse

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where we don't seem to be anywhere on it.

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We can never seem to grasp it in its totality.

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It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth,

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the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest,

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I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole.

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We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse.

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So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was

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the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them

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together in the same place.

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And then this happened.

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My Internet broke one day, as it occasionally does,

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and the cable guy came to fix it, and he started with

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the dusty clump of cables behind the couch,

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and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard,

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and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall.

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And then he saw a squirrel running along the wire,

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and he said, "There's your problem.

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A squirrel is chewing on your Internet." (Laughter)

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And this seemed astounding. The Internet is

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a transcendent idea. It's a set of protocols that has changed

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everything from shopping to dating to revolutions.

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It was unequivocally not something

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a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter)

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But that in fact seemed to be the case.

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A squirrel had in fact chewed on my Internet. (Laughter)

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And then I got this image in my head of what would happen

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if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started

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to follow it. Where would it go?

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Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit?

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Could I go there? Who would I meet?

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You know, was there something actually out there?

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And the answer, by all accounts, was no.

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This was the Internet, this black box with a red light on it,

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as represented in the sitcom "The IT Crowd."

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Normally it lives on the top of Big Ben,

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because that's where you get the best reception,

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but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it

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for the afternoon to use in an office presentation.

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The elders of the Internet were willing to part with it

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for a short while, and she looks at it and she says,

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"This is the Internet? The whole Internet? Is it heavy?"

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They say, "Of course not, the Internet doesn't weigh anything."

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And I was embarrassed. I was looking for this thing

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that only fools seem to look for.

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The Internet was that amorphous blob, or it was a silly

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black box with a blinking red light on it.

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It wasn't a real world out there.

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But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there,

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and that's what I spent about two years visiting,

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these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers

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that use as much power as the cities in which they sit,

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and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York,

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which is one of the buildings in the world,

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one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings,

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where more networks of the Internet connect to each other

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than anywhere else.

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And that connection is an unequivocally physical process.

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It's about the router of one network, a Facebook or

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a Google or a B.T. or a Comcast or a Time Warner, whatever it is,

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connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into

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the ceiling and down into the router of another network,

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and that's unequivocally physical, and it's surprisingly intimate.

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A building like 60 Hudson, and a dozen or so others,

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has 10 times more networks connecting within it

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than the next tier of buildings.

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There's a very short list of these places.

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And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home

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to about a half a dozen very important networks,

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which are the networks which serve the undersea cables

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that travel underneath the ocean

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that connect Europe and America and connect all of us.

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And it's those cables in particular that I want to focus on.

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If the Internet is a global phenomenon, if we live

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in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath

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the ocean, cables like this.

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And in this dimension, they are incredibly small.

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You can you hold them in your hand. They're like a garden hose.

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But in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive,

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as expansive as you can imagine.

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They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five

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or eight thousand miles in length, and

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if the material science and the computational technology

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is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process

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is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean

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and comes out on the other, and it usually comes

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from a building called a landing station that's often

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tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood,

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and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor

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that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles

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they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission

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is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second

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wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own

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connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams,

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but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light

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through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe

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50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light

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through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe

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eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction.

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And they're tiny. They're the thickness of a hair.

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And then they connect to the continent somewhere.

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They connect in a manhole like this. Literally,

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this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in.

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This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland.

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And the landscape is changing. Three years ago,

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when I started thinking about this, there was one cable

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down the Western coast of Africa, represented

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in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line.

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Now there are six cables and more coming, three down each coast.

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Because once a country gets plugged in by one cable,

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they realize that it's not enough. If they're going to build

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an industry around it, they need to know that their connection

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isn't tenuous but permanent, because if a cable breaks,

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you have to send a ship out into the water, throw

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a grappling hook over the side, pick it up, find the other end,

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and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over.

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It's an intensely, intensely physical process.

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So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently

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worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing

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of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate.

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And I've never met him. We've only communicated

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via this telepresence system, which always makes me

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think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter)

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And he is English. The undersea cable industry

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is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42.

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(Laughter) Because they all started at the same time

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with the boom about 20 years ago.

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And Tata had gotten its start as a communications business

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when they bought two cables, one across the Atlantic

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and one across the Pacific, and proceeded to add pieces

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onto them, until they had built a belt around the world,

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which means they will send your bits to the East or the West.

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They have -- this is literally a beam of light around the world,

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and if a cable breaks in the Pacific, it'll send it around

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the other direction. And then having done that,

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they started to look for places to wire next.

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They looked for the unwired places, and that's meant

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North and South, primarily these cables to Africa.

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But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination.

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He thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness.

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And I was particularly interested because I wanted to see

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one of these cables being built. See, you know, all the time

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online we experience these fleeting moments of connection,

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these sort of brief adjacencies, a tweet or a Facebook post

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or an email, and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that.

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It seemed like there was a moment when the continent

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was being plugged in, and I wanted to see that.

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And Simon was working on a new cable,

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WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched

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from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa,

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to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon.

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And he said there was coming soon, depending

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on the weather, but he'd let me know when,

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and so with about four days notice, he said to go

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to this beach south of Lisbon, and a little after 9,

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this guy will walk out of the water. (Laughter)

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And he'll be carrying a green nylon line, a lightweight line,

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called a messenger line, and that was the first link

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between sea and land, this link that would then be

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leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light.

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Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this

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specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated

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on these buoys until it was in the right place.

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Then you can see the English engineers looking on.

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And then, once it was in the right place, he got back

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in the water holding a big knife, and he cut each buoy off,

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and the buoy popped up into the air, and the cable

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dropped to the sea floor, and he did that all the way out

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to the ship, and when he got there,

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they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie,

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and then he jumped back in, and he swam back to shore,

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and then he lit a cigarette. (Laughter)

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And then once that cable was on shore,

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they began to prepare to connect it to the other side,

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for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station.

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And first they got it with a hacksaw, and then they start

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sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a --

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sort of working like chefs, and then finally they're working

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like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up

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with the cable that had come down,

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and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together.

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And when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw,

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you stop thinking about the Internet as a cloud.

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It starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing.

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And what surprised me as well was that as much as this

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is based on the most sophisticated technology, as much

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as this is an incredibly new thing, the physical process

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itself has been around for a long time, and the culture is the same.

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You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer

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giving directions in the background. And more importantly,

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the places are the same. These cables still connect

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these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa,

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Mumbai, Singapore, New York.

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And then the process on shore takes around three or four days,

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and then, when it's done, they put the manhole cover

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back on top, and they push the sand over that,

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and we all forget about it.

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And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud,

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but every time we put something on the cloud,

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we give up some responsibility for it.

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We are less connected to it. We let other people worry about it.

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And that doesn't seem right.

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There's a great Neal Stephenson line where he says

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that wired people should know something about wires.

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And we should know, I think, we should know

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where our Internet comes from, and we should know

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what it is that physically, physically connects us all.

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Thank you. (Applause)

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(Applause)

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Thanks. (Applause)