WEBVTT 00:00:00.827 --> 00:00:02.858 I've always written primarily about architecture, 00:00:02.858 --> 00:00:05.383 about buildings, and writing about architecture 00:00:05.383 --> 00:00:08.124 is based on certain assumptions. 00:00:08.124 --> 00:00:10.582 An architect designs a building, and it becomes a place, 00:00:10.582 --> 00:00:13.062 or many architects design many buildings, and it becomes 00:00:13.062 --> 00:00:16.336 a city, and regardless of this complicated mix of forces 00:00:16.336 --> 00:00:18.733 of politics and culture and economics that shapes 00:00:18.733 --> 00:00:21.736 these places, at the end of the day, you can go 00:00:21.736 --> 00:00:24.392 and you can visit them. You can walk around them. 00:00:24.392 --> 00:00:26.065 You can smell them. You can get a feel for them. 00:00:26.065 --> 00:00:29.558 You can experience their sense of place. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:29.558 --> 00:00:31.907 But what was striking to me over the last several years 00:00:31.907 --> 00:00:35.282 was that less and less was I going out into the world, 00:00:35.282 --> 00:00:38.511 and more and more, I was sitting in front of my computer screen. 00:00:38.511 --> 00:00:42.831 And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone, 00:00:42.831 --> 00:00:44.707 I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day, 00:00:44.707 --> 00:00:46.804 but I was also getting up at the end of the day 00:00:46.804 --> 00:00:50.104 and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket. 00:00:50.104 --> 00:00:52.963 And what was surprising to me was how quickly 00:00:52.963 --> 00:00:55.900 my relationship to the physical world had changed. 00:00:55.900 --> 00:00:57.675 In this very short period of time, you know, whether you 00:00:57.675 --> 00:01:01.131 call it the last 15 years or so of being online, or the last, 00:01:01.131 --> 00:01:04.090 you know, four or five years of being online all the time, 00:01:04.090 --> 00:01:07.264 our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that 00:01:07.264 --> 00:01:09.063 our attention is constantly divided. You know, 00:01:09.063 --> 00:01:11.627 we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking 00:01:11.627 --> 00:01:13.459 out in the world around us. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:13.459 --> 00:01:15.986 And what was even more striking to me, and what I really 00:01:15.986 --> 00:01:18.988 got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen 00:01:18.988 --> 00:01:22.777 seemed to have no physical reality of its own. 00:01:22.777 --> 00:01:25.545 If you went and looked for images of the Internet, 00:01:25.545 --> 00:01:28.663 this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte 00:01:28.663 --> 00:01:31.793 of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse 00:01:31.793 --> 00:01:33.889 where we don't seem to be anywhere on it. 00:01:33.889 --> 00:01:36.313 We can never seem to grasp it in its totality. 00:01:36.313 --> 00:01:39.930 It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth, 00:01:39.930 --> 00:01:42.660 the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest, 00:01:42.660 --> 00:01:45.357 I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole. 00:01:45.357 --> 00:01:49.042 We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:49.042 --> 00:01:52.407 So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was 00:01:52.407 --> 00:01:55.264 the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them 00:01:55.264 --> 00:01:58.245 together in the same place. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:58.245 --> 00:02:01.452 And then this happened. 00:02:01.452 --> 00:02:04.050 My Internet broke one day, as it occasionally does, 00:02:04.050 --> 00:02:06.784 and the cable guy came to fix it, and he started with 00:02:06.784 --> 00:02:08.911 the dusty clump of cables behind the couch, 00:02:08.911 --> 00:02:12.121 and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard, 00:02:12.121 --> 00:02:14.997 and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall. 00:02:14.997 --> 00:02:17.551 And then he saw a squirrel running along the wire, 00:02:17.551 --> 00:02:20.342 and he said, "There's your problem. 00:02:20.342 --> 00:02:24.763 A squirrel is chewing on your Internet." (Laughter) 00:02:24.763 --> 00:02:27.890 And this seemed astounding. The Internet is 00:02:27.890 --> 00:02:31.264 a transcendent idea. It's a set of protocols that has changed 00:02:31.264 --> 00:02:34.719 everything from shopping to dating to revolutions. 00:02:34.719 --> 00:02:37.348 It was unequivocally not something 00:02:37.348 --> 00:02:40.659 a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter) 00:02:40.659 --> 00:02:42.537 But that in fact seemed to be the case. 00:02:42.537 --> 00:02:45.739 A squirrel had in fact chewed on my Internet. (Laughter) 00:02:45.739 --> 00:02:47.926 And then I got this image in my head of what would happen 00:02:47.926 --> 00:02:50.106 if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started 00:02:50.106 --> 00:02:51.710 to follow it. Where would it go? 00:02:51.710 --> 00:02:55.218 Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit? 00:02:55.218 --> 00:02:56.567 Could I go there? Who would I meet? 00:02:56.567 --> 00:02:59.943 You know, was there something actually out there? NOTE Paragraph 00:02:59.943 --> 00:03:02.980 And the answer, by all accounts, was no. 00:03:02.980 --> 00:03:05.760 This was the Internet, this black box with a red light on it, 00:03:05.760 --> 00:03:09.190 as represented in the sitcom "The IT Crowd." 00:03:09.190 --> 00:03:12.749 Normally it lives on the top of Big Ben, 00:03:12.749 --> 00:03:15.831 because that's where you get the best reception, 00:03:15.831 --> 00:03:19.136 but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it 00:03:19.136 --> 00:03:22.308 for the afternoon to use in an office presentation. 00:03:22.308 --> 00:03:24.682 The elders of the Internet were willing to part with it 00:03:24.682 --> 00:03:27.548 for a short while, and she looks at it and she says, 00:03:27.548 --> 00:03:30.938 "This is the Internet? The whole Internet? Is it heavy?" 00:03:30.938 --> 00:03:34.898 They say, "Of course not, the Internet doesn't weigh anything." NOTE Paragraph 00:03:34.898 --> 00:03:37.215 And I was embarrassed. I was looking for this thing 00:03:37.215 --> 00:03:39.511 that only fools seem to look for. 00:03:39.511 --> 00:03:42.346 The Internet was that amorphous blob, or it was a silly 00:03:42.346 --> 00:03:44.592 black box with a blinking red light on it. 00:03:44.592 --> 00:03:46.920 It wasn't a real world out there. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:46.920 --> 00:03:50.232 But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there, 00:03:50.232 --> 00:03:51.998 and that's what I spent about two years visiting, 00:03:51.998 --> 00:03:55.543 these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers 00:03:55.543 --> 00:03:58.188 that use as much power as the cities in which they sit, 00:03:58.188 --> 00:04:01.377 and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York, 00:04:01.377 --> 00:04:03.085 which is one of the buildings in the world, 00:04:03.085 --> 00:04:05.983 one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings, 00:04:05.983 --> 00:04:08.627 where more networks of the Internet connect to each other 00:04:08.627 --> 00:04:09.985 than anywhere else. 00:04:09.985 --> 00:04:12.602 And that connection is an unequivocally physical process. 00:04:12.602 --> 00:04:15.087 It's about the router of one network, a Facebook or 00:04:15.087 --> 00:04:18.029 a Google or a B.T. or a Comcast or a Time Warner, whatever it is, 00:04:18.029 --> 00:04:20.460 connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into 00:04:20.460 --> 00:04:23.154 the ceiling and down into the router of another network, 00:04:23.154 --> 00:04:27.531 and that's unequivocally physical, and it's surprisingly intimate. 00:04:27.531 --> 00:04:30.824 A building like 60 Hudson, and a dozen or so others, 00:04:30.824 --> 00:04:33.150 has 10 times more networks connecting within it 00:04:33.150 --> 00:04:34.998 than the next tier of buildings. 00:04:34.998 --> 00:04:37.066 There's a very short list of these places. 00:04:37.066 --> 00:04:39.974 And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home 00:04:39.974 --> 00:04:42.563 to about a half a dozen very important networks, 00:04:42.563 --> 00:04:44.861 which are the networks which serve the undersea cables 00:04:44.861 --> 00:04:47.209 that travel underneath the ocean 00:04:47.209 --> 00:04:49.462 that connect Europe and America and connect all of us. 00:04:49.462 --> 00:04:53.049 And it's those cables in particular that I want to focus on. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:53.049 --> 00:04:56.909 If the Internet is a global phenomenon, if we live 00:04:56.925 --> 00:04:59.365 in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath 00:04:59.365 --> 00:05:01.470 the ocean, cables like this. 00:05:01.470 --> 00:05:04.356 And in this dimension, they are incredibly small. 00:05:04.356 --> 00:05:07.298 You can you hold them in your hand. They're like a garden hose. 00:05:07.298 --> 00:05:11.361 But in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive, 00:05:11.361 --> 00:05:13.001 as expansive as you can imagine. 00:05:13.001 --> 00:05:15.556 They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five 00:05:15.556 --> 00:05:18.167 or eight thousand miles in length, and 00:05:18.167 --> 00:05:20.776 if the material science and the computational technology 00:05:20.776 --> 00:05:24.309 is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process 00:05:24.309 --> 00:05:28.089 is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean 00:05:28.089 --> 00:05:31.374 and comes out on the other, and it usually comes 00:05:31.374 --> 00:05:34.007 from a building called a landing station that's often 00:05:34.007 --> 00:05:36.954 tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood, 00:05:36.954 --> 00:05:39.688 and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor 00:05:39.688 --> 00:05:42.208 that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles 00:05:42.208 --> 00:05:45.865 they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission 00:05:45.865 --> 00:05:49.071 is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second 00:05:49.071 --> 00:05:51.569 wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own 00:05:51.569 --> 00:05:54.753 connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams, 00:05:54.753 --> 00:05:58.031 but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light 00:05:58.031 --> 00:06:00.988 through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe 00:06:00.988 --> 00:06:04.007 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light 00:06:04.007 --> 00:06:06.875 through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe 00:06:06.875 --> 00:06:09.477 eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction. 00:06:09.477 --> 00:06:12.967 And they're tiny. They're the thickness of a hair. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:12.967 --> 00:06:14.796 And then they connect to the continent somewhere. 00:06:14.796 --> 00:06:17.134 They connect in a manhole like this. Literally, 00:06:17.134 --> 00:06:20.223 this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in. 00:06:20.223 --> 00:06:24.713 This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland. 00:06:24.713 --> 00:06:27.694 And the landscape is changing. Three years ago, 00:06:27.694 --> 00:06:29.590 when I started thinking about this, there was one cable 00:06:29.590 --> 00:06:32.757 down the Western coast of Africa, represented 00:06:32.757 --> 00:06:35.631 in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line. 00:06:35.631 --> 00:06:40.476 Now there are six cables and more coming, three down each coast. 00:06:40.476 --> 00:06:43.107 Because once a country gets plugged in by one cable, 00:06:43.107 --> 00:06:44.907 they realize that it's not enough. If they're going to build 00:06:44.907 --> 00:06:47.723 an industry around it, they need to know that their connection 00:06:47.723 --> 00:06:50.433 isn't tenuous but permanent, because if a cable breaks, 00:06:50.433 --> 00:06:52.500 you have to send a ship out into the water, throw 00:06:52.500 --> 00:06:55.415 a grappling hook over the side, pick it up, find the other end, 00:06:55.415 --> 00:06:58.458 and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over. 00:06:58.458 --> 00:07:02.998 It's an intensely, intensely physical process. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:02.998 --> 00:07:07.296 So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently 00:07:07.296 --> 00:07:09.968 worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing 00:07:09.968 --> 00:07:12.966 of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate. 00:07:12.966 --> 00:07:15.948 And I've never met him. We've only communicated 00:07:15.948 --> 00:07:19.405 via this telepresence system, which always makes me 00:07:19.405 --> 00:07:23.301 think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter) 00:07:23.301 --> 00:07:26.498 And he is English. The undersea cable industry 00:07:26.498 --> 00:07:30.143 is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42. 00:07:30.143 --> 00:07:33.318 (Laughter) Because they all started at the same time 00:07:33.318 --> 00:07:35.818 with the boom about 20 years ago. 00:07:35.818 --> 00:07:39.078 And Tata had gotten its start as a communications business 00:07:39.078 --> 00:07:41.543 when they bought two cables, one across the Atlantic 00:07:41.543 --> 00:07:44.703 and one across the Pacific, and proceeded to add pieces 00:07:44.703 --> 00:07:48.247 onto them, until they had built a belt around the world, 00:07:48.247 --> 00:07:50.344 which means they will send your bits to the East or the West. 00:07:50.344 --> 00:07:52.567 They have -- this is literally a beam of light around the world, 00:07:52.567 --> 00:07:54.778 and if a cable breaks in the Pacific, it'll send it around 00:07:54.778 --> 00:07:57.963 the other direction. And then having done that, 00:07:57.963 --> 00:08:01.907 they started to look for places to wire next. 00:08:01.907 --> 00:08:04.397 They looked for the unwired places, and that's meant 00:08:04.397 --> 00:08:07.191 North and South, primarily these cables to Africa. 00:08:07.191 --> 00:08:10.962 But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination. 00:08:10.962 --> 00:08:13.921 He thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:13.921 --> 00:08:17.234 And I was particularly interested because I wanted to see 00:08:17.234 --> 00:08:20.086 one of these cables being built. See, you know, all the time 00:08:20.086 --> 00:08:22.406 online we experience these fleeting moments of connection, 00:08:22.406 --> 00:08:25.700 these sort of brief adjacencies, a tweet or a Facebook post 00:08:25.700 --> 00:08:29.540 or an email, and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that. 00:08:29.540 --> 00:08:31.616 It seemed like there was a moment when the continent 00:08:31.616 --> 00:08:33.963 was being plugged in, and I wanted to see that. 00:08:33.963 --> 00:08:36.248 And Simon was working on a new cable, 00:08:36.248 --> 00:08:38.759 WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched 00:08:38.759 --> 00:08:40.880 from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, 00:08:40.880 --> 00:08:43.749 to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon. 00:08:43.749 --> 00:08:46.082 And he said there was coming soon, depending 00:08:46.082 --> 00:08:48.276 on the weather, but he'd let me know when, 00:08:48.276 --> 00:08:51.477 and so with about four days notice, he said to go 00:08:51.477 --> 00:08:54.308 to this beach south of Lisbon, and a little after 9, 00:08:54.308 --> 00:08:58.004 this guy will walk out of the water. (Laughter) 00:08:58.004 --> 00:09:02.324 And he'll be carrying a green nylon line, a lightweight line, 00:09:02.324 --> 00:09:05.037 called a messenger line, and that was the first link 00:09:05.037 --> 00:09:07.590 between sea and land, this link that would then be 00:09:07.590 --> 00:09:11.453 leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light. 00:09:11.453 --> 00:09:14.043 Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this 00:09:14.043 --> 00:09:17.400 specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated 00:09:17.400 --> 00:09:20.148 on these buoys until it was in the right place. 00:09:20.148 --> 00:09:22.890 Then you can see the English engineers looking on. 00:09:22.890 --> 00:09:25.703 And then, once it was in the right place, he got back 00:09:25.703 --> 00:09:29.062 in the water holding a big knife, and he cut each buoy off, 00:09:29.062 --> 00:09:31.361 and the buoy popped up into the air, and the cable 00:09:31.361 --> 00:09:33.266 dropped to the sea floor, and he did that all the way out 00:09:33.266 --> 00:09:35.139 to the ship, and when he got there, 00:09:35.139 --> 00:09:37.552 they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie, 00:09:37.552 --> 00:09:39.971 and then he jumped back in, and he swam back to shore, 00:09:39.971 --> 00:09:47.131 and then he lit a cigarette. (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:09:47.131 --> 00:09:49.843 And then once that cable was on shore, 00:09:49.843 --> 00:09:53.347 they began to prepare to connect it to the other side, 00:09:53.347 --> 00:09:56.304 for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station. 00:09:56.304 --> 00:09:59.162 And first they got it with a hacksaw, and then they start 00:09:59.162 --> 00:10:02.098 sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a -- 00:10:02.098 --> 00:10:04.160 sort of working like chefs, and then finally they're working 00:10:04.160 --> 00:10:06.868 like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up 00:10:06.868 --> 00:10:08.545 with the cable that had come down, 00:10:08.545 --> 00:10:11.536 and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together. 00:10:11.536 --> 00:10:14.867 And when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw, 00:10:14.867 --> 00:10:17.510 you stop thinking about the Internet as a cloud. 00:10:17.510 --> 00:10:21.447 It starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing. 00:10:21.447 --> 00:10:23.955 And what surprised me as well was that as much as this 00:10:23.955 --> 00:10:26.802 is based on the most sophisticated technology, as much 00:10:26.802 --> 00:10:29.707 as this is an incredibly new thing, the physical process 00:10:29.707 --> 00:10:33.474 itself has been around for a long time, and the culture is the same. 00:10:33.474 --> 00:10:35.463 You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer 00:10:35.463 --> 00:10:38.638 giving directions in the background. And more importantly, 00:10:38.638 --> 00:10:41.281 the places are the same. These cables still connect 00:10:41.281 --> 00:10:44.331 these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa, 00:10:44.331 --> 00:10:47.490 Mumbai, Singapore, New York. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:47.490 --> 00:10:51.576 And then the process on shore takes around three or four days, 00:10:51.576 --> 00:10:55.767 and then, when it's done, they put the manhole cover 00:10:55.767 --> 00:10:58.738 back on top, and they push the sand over that, 00:10:58.738 --> 00:11:01.820 and we all forget about it. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:01.820 --> 00:11:04.071 And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud, 00:11:04.071 --> 00:11:05.981 but every time we put something on the cloud, 00:11:05.981 --> 00:11:08.183 we give up some responsibility for it. 00:11:08.183 --> 00:11:12.047 We are less connected to it. We let other people worry about it. 00:11:12.047 --> 00:11:13.330 And that doesn't seem right. 00:11:13.330 --> 00:11:15.672 There's a great Neal Stephenson line where he says 00:11:15.672 --> 00:11:20.069 that wired people should know something about wires. 00:11:20.069 --> 00:11:22.339 And we should know, I think, we should know 00:11:22.339 --> 00:11:25.092 where our Internet comes from, and we should know 00:11:25.092 --> 00:11:29.914 what it is that physically, physically connects us all. 00:11:29.914 --> 00:11:32.253 Thank you. (Applause) 00:11:32.253 --> 00:11:34.650 (Applause) 00:11:34.650 --> 00:11:38.260 Thanks. (Applause)