The Undersea Network

Abstract

Starosielski, N. (2015) The Undersea Network. Durham: Duke University PressBook reviewRarely did a book on my desk get as much attention of colleagues passing by as this one, thanks to its cover showing two massive, concrete-coated cables which mysteriously emanate from the water somewhere in Guam, at a sandy shore of the Pacific Ocean. Withered and overcome with rust, these cables could be the relicts of a bygone era; they are, in fact, part of today's network infrastructure that directs the largest part of data traffic between North America, Asia, and Australia and keeps many digital lives working the way they do.Given that undersea cables are absent from daily experience and remain invisible for most of its users, it might come as a surprise that such hefty material is still needed for running the Internet. More and more ordinary activities - both professional and profane - require a network connection and (ever larger) amounts of data, but the cable infrastructure behind these activities is hardly taken into account when the vices and virtues of living within digital technologies are discussed. "Although contemporary networking continues to depend on wired infrastructure, we lack a language - beyond terms like 'a series of tubes' - to describe just how grounded these systems remain" (p. 9), states Nicole Starosielski and experiments with constructing that very language in her debut monograph which explores the transpacific cable network historically and ethnographically. By following the network's route, the author reconstructs some of the immense efforts mobilized for the construction of this infrastructure as well as the numerous frictions - technical, environmental, economic, political - that occurred during that process, rebuking the notion of the Internet as a seemingly free-floating and delocalized entity and turning it into a place-bound and fragile matter in need of incessant "repair and maintenance" (Graham & Thrift 2007).Far and wide travels through 13 countries and some amount of patience were required to get hold of a recalcitrant object of ethnographic inquiry that only surfaces at scattered landing points all along the shores of the Pacific Ocean and at cable stations usually kept under surveillance and hidden from view (with the notable exception of Papenoo, Tahiti, where the cable landing point has become a memorial site). When Starosielski opens her diary, sketching the diverse environments, both material and cultural, the network runs through, it dawns on the reader that every mile of her strenuous journey has been worthwhile. Hard to imagine how an exclusively historical or theoretical account could have depicted the infrastructure's manifold contours in such stunning concreteness.The author digs out traces of the undersea network by means of interviews, observations, and analyses of a wide range of written sources, contemporary and historical, and puts the materiality of the network centre stage in most of the book's six chapters, an approach she refers to as "network archeology" (p. 15). She starts with an outline from the era of the telegraph to the fiber-optic systems of the present, anchoring their history in what is called "copper cable colonialism" (p. 31), and then analyzes different spheres of popular discourse around the cable network, distinguishing narratives of "connection and disruption" from "nodal and transmission narratives" (p. 67f.). The topics of the subsequent chapters are more diverse, such as the shifts in the spatial organization of labour at an ATT the struggles between cable companies, government agencies, and the local populations whose land is afflicted by cable-laying, with the companies mostly winning out the competition; the critical role of remote islands for the functioning of the whole network as well as their vulnerability to changing geographies of power, as in the case of Yap, one of the Federated States of Micronesia, once an important passage point of the network. …