Sometimes, I get to tell someone who didn’t know that the internet depends critically on vast networks of subsea cables which connect all the earth’s continents.
This usually happens with people who don’t work in tech, but even those who are professional web developers learn this at some point.
People are usually surprised, as if they had thought about it, the idea that the internet happens “in the cloud” often leads them to the impression that most of the internet’s communication happens “through the air” like radio.
I myself was surprised, when I looked into it, that we’ve been doing this since the 1850s:
Recently, I’ve started following an industry blog which tracks developments in subsea cables.
This short recent post stood out to me as a very neat example that demonstrates how the internet gets built.
Here’s most of this very short post, and one of the maps:
Microsoft has applied for several maritime usage licenses to do ship surveys of proposed routes for new subsea cables connecting Ireland to the UK. Its SOBR2 cable will connect Ireland to Wales as opposed to the usual Cornwall landings. It will apparently land at Malahide Beach and/or Portmarnock on the Irish side.
It is not clear to me whether the intent is to branch the cable or whether there are two landing options. Details are sparse on the cable itself. My educated guess would be a 96 pair unrepeatered cable because it minimizes capex and maximizes bandwidth punch with such systems easily handling a couple petabits per second.
The site survey will focus on the top three meters of the sea floor. It will take samples to ascertain the texture and composition of material with an eye towards a deep burial of the cable itself. The samples will help determine not only burial depth but also how well armoured the cable will be. The Irish Sea is notorious for fibre cuts due to fishing. The Sea is heavily trafficked.
This terse summary refers to so many things we don’t usually consider when we wonder how our internet traffic gets to servers in America or Europe:
Maritime usage licenses from the nations which govern waters the cable will be laid in
Surveying routes and the geology of the sea floor
Choosing places for the cable to “land” at each end (the impact assessment contains a wealth more detail)
Technical details of the cable construction (including whether it needs to be armored against fishing vessels!)
Last year, I was lucky enough to visit Cornwall.
I learned that some of the earliest transantlantic cables landed there - being, of course, one of the westernmost points of the English isles.
Sennen Cove, near Land's End. This is not where the cables landed, but it's a nice photo.
This is behind the reference in the post above to the “usual Cornwall landings”.
My work in tech doesn’t usually need me to care about infrastructural details like this.
But I really enjoy knowing a bit about how the world around me fits together, what it is made of.
Ursula Franklin was a scientist, author, activist and Quaker who wrote, among many things, on technology.
De-escalate speed, and also de-escalate vocabulary.
Much of our vocabulary comes, again, out of production and advertising.
I think we might make a pact with each other never to use the word “awesome”.
I think the world was fine without the word awesome.
De-escalate vocabulary, de-escalate hype.
I consider reflecting on the ways my vocabulary and attitudes are shaped by a consumerist and technological society to be part of my spiritual practise.
Hype and marketing lead us awayh from the truth in order to influence others.
I want to remember, when I am trying to be persuasive, to influence using truth, not exaggeration.
It’s good enough if things work.
Everything doesn’t have to be “splendid”, “cutting edge”, “world class”.
Those are responses to production.
See where those things come from.
It’s very poor practice to hurry on your plants in the winter; when we have fluorescent lights all our plants get spindly and look miserable.
There is nothing to speed per se.
Like efficiency, speed has a direction.
It is not its own virtue; it depends on towards what we are speeding.
And while there are many injustices we wish to speed away from, speed allows or necessitates us to miss details, to omit nuance, sometimes to fail to attend adequately to reality.
Zulip is a team chat app, broadly similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams.
When the Future of Coding community started considering Slack alternatives earlier this year, I was reminded that Zulip exists.
They didn’t end up moving to it, but I got interested.
I am in several Slacks, for my day job and a couple of community groups.
The difference when I open Zulip is noticeable.
Zulip has a snappier and denser UI.
But it’s the way messages are grouped into topics that makes it really easy to ignore a bunch of messages that I don’t need to read.
That makes it much faster to get a broad sense of “what’s happening” and then focus on chats I actually care about.
On a personal level, I wish groups with ideological commitments would consider supporting Zulip, a small independent company funded by its customers whose owners are intimately involved in building the product.
Rather than Slack (sold to Salesforce) or Discord (raised hundreds of millions of dollars).
I really hope to see more communities and companies considering Zulip as a viable alternative to the corporate players.
Many people in tech are obsessed with exponential growth.
But I wonder…
Are things which look like exponential growth always the spread of an idea between humans?
Are they always ideas whose implementation can be easily parallelized or distributed, so that as the idea spreads, the growth of its implementation is not bottlenecked?
Where the growth of an idea was not exponential, was that because its implementation couldn’t proceed in a decentralised way?
Was it because the material resources needed for its implementation weren’t already widely available, ready to be put to use?
Is the end of exponential growth (the top of the S curve) due to saturation of the idea among humans?
