0:00:00.827,0:00:02.858 I've always written primarily about architecture, 0:00:02.858,0:00:05.383 about buildings, and writing about architecture 0:00:05.383,0:00:08.124 is based on certain assumptions. 0:00:08.124,0:00:10.582 An architect designs a building, and it becomes a place, 0:00:10.582,0:00:13.062 or many architects design many buildings, and it becomes 0:00:13.062,0:00:16.336 a city, and regardless of this complicated mix of forces 0:00:16.336,0:00:18.733 of politics and culture and economics that shapes 0:00:18.733,0:00:21.736 these places, at the end of the day, you can go 0:00:21.736,0:00:24.392 and you can visit them. You can walk around them. 0:00:24.392,0:00:26.065 You can smell them. You can get a feel for them. 0:00:26.065,0:00:29.558 You can experience their sense of place. 0:00:29.558,0:00:31.907 But what was striking to me over the last several years 0:00:31.907,0:00:35.282 was that less and less was I going out into the world, 0:00:35.282,0:00:38.511 and more and more, I was sitting in front of my computer screen. 0:00:38.511,0:00:42.831 And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone, 0:00:42.831,0:00:44.707 I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day, 0:00:44.707,0:00:46.804 but I was also getting up at the end of the day 0:00:46.804,0:00:50.104 and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket. 0:00:50.104,0:00:52.963 And what was surprising to me was how quickly 0:00:52.963,0:00:55.900 my relationship to the physical world had changed. 0:00:55.900,0:00:57.675 In this very short period of time, you know, whether you 0:00:57.675,0:01:01.131 call it the last 15 years or so of being online, or the last, 0:01:01.131,0:01:04.090 you know, four or five years of being online all the time, 0:01:04.090,0:01:07.264 our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that 0:01:07.264,0:01:09.063 our attention is constantly divided. You know, 0:01:09.063,0:01:11.627 we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking 0:01:11.627,0:01:13.459 out in the world around us. 0:01:13.459,0:01:15.986 And what was even more striking to me, and what I really 0:01:15.986,0:01:18.988 got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen 0:01:18.988,0:01:22.777 seemed to have no physical reality of its own. 0:01:22.777,0:01:25.545 If you went and looked for images of the Internet, 0:01:25.545,0:01:28.663 this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte 0:01:28.663,0:01:31.793 of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse 0:01:31.793,0:01:33.889 where we don't seem to be anywhere on it. 0:01:33.889,0:01:36.313 We can never seem to grasp it in its totality. 0:01:36.313,0:01:39.930 It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth, 0:01:39.930,0:01:42.660 the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest, 0:01:42.660,0:01:45.357 I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole. 0:01:45.357,0:01:49.042 We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse. 0:01:49.042,0:01:52.407 So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was 0:01:52.407,0:01:55.264 the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them 0:01:55.264,0:01:58.245 together in the same place. 0:01:58.245,0:02:01.452 And then this happened. 0:02:01.452,0:02:04.050 My Internet broke one day, as it occasionally does, 0:02:04.050,0:02:06.784 and the cable guy came to fix it, and he started with 0:02:06.784,0:02:08.911 the dusty clump of cables behind the couch, 0:02:08.911,0:02:12.121 and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard, 0:02:12.121,0:02:14.997 and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall. 0:02:14.997,0:02:17.551 And then he saw a squirrel running along the wire, 0:02:17.551,0:02:20.342 and he said, "There's your problem. 0:02:20.342,0:02:24.763 A squirrel is chewing on your Internet." (Laughter) 0:02:24.763,0:02:27.890 And this seemed astounding. The Internet is 0:02:27.890,0:02:31.264 a transcendent idea. It's a set of protocols that has changed 0:02:31.264,0:02:34.719 everything from shopping to dating to revolutions. 0:02:34.719,0:02:37.348 It was unequivocally not something 0:02:37.348,0:02:40.659 a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter) 0:02:40.659,0:02:42.537 But that in fact seemed to be the case. 0:02:42.537,0:02:45.739 A squirrel had in fact chewed on my Internet. (Laughter) 0:02:45.739,0:02:47.926 And then I got this image in my head of what would happen 0:02:47.926,0:02:50.106 if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started 0:02:50.106,0:02:51.710 to follow it. Where would it go? 0:02:51.710,0:02:55.218 Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit? 0:02:55.218,0:02:56.567 Could I go there? Who would I meet? 0:02:56.567,0:02:59.943 You know, was there something actually out there? 0:02:59.943,0:03:02.980 And the answer, by all accounts, was no. 0:03:02.980,0:03:05.760 This was the Internet, this black box with a red light on it, 0:03:05.760,0:03:09.190 as represented in the sitcom "The IT Crowd." 0:03:09.190,0:03:12.749 Normally it lives on the top of Big Ben, 0:03:12.749,0:03:15.831 because that's where you get the best reception, 0:03:15.831,0:03:19.136 but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it 0:03:19.136,0:03:22.308 for the afternoon to use in an office presentation. 0:03:22.308,0:03:24.682 The elders of the Internet were willing to part with it 0:03:24.682,0:03:27.548 for a short while, and she looks at it and she says, 0:03:27.548,0:03:30.938 "This is the Internet? The whole Internet? Is it heavy?" 0:03:30.938,0:03:34.898 They say, "Of course not, the Internet doesn't weigh anything." 0:03:34.898,0:03:37.215 And I was embarrassed. I was looking for this thing 0:03:37.215,0:03:39.511 that only fools seem to look for. 0:03:39.511,0:03:42.346 The Internet was that amorphous blob, or it was a silly 0:03:42.346,0:03:44.592 black box with a blinking red light on it. 0:03:44.592,0:03:46.920 It wasn't a real world out there. 0:03:46.920,0:03:50.232 But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there, 0:03:50.232,0:03:51.998 and that's what I spent about two years visiting, 0:03:51.998,0:03:55.543 these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers 0:03:55.543,0:03:58.188 that use as much power as the cities in which they sit, 0:03:58.188,0:04:01.377 and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York, 0:04:01.377,0:04:03.085 which is one of the buildings in the world, 0:04:03.085,0:04:05.983 one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings, 0:04:05.983,0:04:08.627 where more networks of the Internet connect to each other 0:04:08.627,0:04:09.985 than anywhere else. 0:04:09.985,0:04:12.602 And that connection is an unequivocally physical process. 0:04:12.602,0:04:15.087 It's about the router of one network, a Facebook or 0:04:15.087,0:04:18.029 a Google or a B.T. or a Comcast or a Time Warner, whatever it is, 0:04:18.029,0:04:20.460 connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into 0:04:20.460,0:04:23.154 the ceiling and down into the router of another network, 0:04:23.154,0:04:27.531 and that's unequivocally physical, and it's surprisingly intimate. 0:04:27.531,0:04:30.824 A building like 60 Hudson, and a dozen or so others, 0:04:30.824,0:04:33.150 has 10 times more networks connecting within it 0:04:33.150,0:04:34.998 than the next tier of buildings. 0:04:34.998,0:04:37.066 There's a very short list of these places. 0:04:37.066,0:04:39.974 And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home 0:04:39.974,0:04:42.563 to about a half a dozen very important networks, 0:04:42.563,0:04:44.861 which are the networks which serve the undersea cables 0:04:44.861,0:04:47.209 that travel underneath the ocean 0:04:47.209,0:04:49.462 that connect Europe and America and connect all of us. 0:04:49.462,0:04:53.049 And it's those cables in particular that I want to focus on. 0:04:53.049,0:04:56.909 If the Internet is a global phenomenon, if we live 0:04:56.925,0:04:59.365 in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath 0:04:59.365,0:05:01.470 the ocean, cables like this. 0:05:01.470,0:05:04.356 And in this dimension, they are incredibly small. 0:05:04.356,0:05:07.298 You can you hold them in your hand. They're like a garden hose. 0:05:07.298,0:05:11.361 But in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive, 0:05:11.361,0:05:13.001 as expansive as you can imagine. 0:05:13.001,0:05:15.556 They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five 0:05:15.556,0:05:18.167 or eight thousand miles in length, and 0:05:18.167,0:05:20.776 if the material science and the computational technology 0:05:20.776,0:05:24.309 is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process 0:05:24.309,0:05:28.089 is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean 0:05:28.089,0:05:31.374 and comes out on the other, and it usually comes 0:05:31.374,0:05:34.007 from a building called a landing station that's often 0:05:34.007,0:05:36.954 tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood, 0:05:36.954,0:05:39.688 and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor 0:05:39.688,0:05:42.208 that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles 0:05:42.208,0:05:45.865 they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission 0:05:45.865,0:05:49.071 is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second 0:05:49.071,0:05:51.569 wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own 0:05:51.569,0:05:54.753 connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams, 0:05:54.753,0:05:58.031 but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light 0:05:58.031,0:06:00.988 through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe 0:06:00.988,0:06:04.007 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light 0:06:04.007,0:06:06.875 through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe 0:06:06.875,0:06:09.477 eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction. 0:06:09.477,0:06:12.967 And they're tiny. They're the thickness of a hair. 0:06:12.967,0:06:14.796 And then they connect to the continent somewhere. 0:06:14.796,0:06:17.134 They connect in a manhole like this. Literally, 0:06:17.134,0:06:20.223 this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in. 0:06:20.223,0:06:24.713 This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland. 0:06:24.713,0:06:27.694 And the landscape is changing. Three years ago, 0:06:27.694,0:06:29.590 when I started thinking about this, there was one cable 0:06:29.590,0:06:32.757 down the Western coast of Africa, represented 0:06:32.757,0:06:35.631 in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line. 0:06:35.631,0:06:40.476 Now there are six cables and more coming, three down each coast. 0:06:40.476,0:06:43.107 Because once a country gets plugged in by one cable, 0:06:43.107,0:06:44.907 they realize that it's not enough. If they're going to build 0:06:44.907,0:06:47.723 an industry around it, they need to know that their connection 0:06:47.723,0:06:50.433 isn't tenuous but permanent, because if a cable breaks, 0:06:50.433,0:06:52.500 you have to send a ship out into the water, throw 0:06:52.500,0:06:55.415 a grappling hook over the side, pick it up, find the other end, 0:06:55.415,0:06:58.458 and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over. 0:06:58.458,0:07:02.998 It's an intensely, intensely physical process. 0:07:02.998,0:07:07.296 So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently 0:07:07.296,0:07:09.968 worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing 0:07:09.968,0:07:12.966 of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate. 0:07:12.966,0:07:15.948 And I've never met him. We've only communicated 0:07:15.948,0:07:19.405 via this telepresence system, which always makes me 0:07:19.405,0:07:23.301 think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter) 0:07:23.301,0:07:26.498 And he is English. The undersea cable industry 0:07:26.498,0:07:30.143 is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42. 0:07:30.143,0:07:33.318 (Laughter) Because they all started at the same time 0:07:33.318,0:07:35.818 with the boom about 20 years ago. 0:07:35.818,0:07:39.078 And Tata had gotten its start as a communications business 0:07:39.078,0:07:41.543 when they bought two cables, one across the Atlantic 0:07:41.543,0:07:44.703 and one across the Pacific, and proceeded to add pieces 0:07:44.703,0:07:48.247 onto them, until they had built a belt around the world, 0:07:48.247,0:07:50.344 which means they will send your bits to the East or the West. 0:07:50.344,0:07:52.567 They have -- this is literally a beam of light around the world, 0:07:52.567,0:07:54.778 and if a cable breaks in the Pacific, it'll send it around 0:07:54.778,0:07:57.963 the other direction. And then having done that, 0:07:57.963,0:08:01.907 they started to look for places to wire next. 0:08:01.907,0:08:04.397 They looked for the unwired places, and that's meant 0:08:04.397,0:08:07.191 North and South, primarily these cables to Africa. 0:08:07.191,0:08:10.962 But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination. 0:08:10.962,0:08:13.921 He thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness. 0:08:13.921,0:08:17.234 And I was particularly interested because I wanted to see 0:08:17.234,0:08:20.086 one of these cables being built. See, you know, all the time 0:08:20.086,0:08:22.406 online we experience these fleeting moments of connection, 0:08:22.406,0:08:25.700 these sort of brief adjacencies, a tweet or a Facebook post 0:08:25.700,0:08:29.540 or an email, and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that. 0:08:29.540,0:08:31.616 It seemed like there was a moment when the continent 0:08:31.616,0:08:33.963 was being plugged in, and I wanted to see that. 0:08:33.963,0:08:36.248 And Simon was working on a new cable, 0:08:36.248,0:08:38.759 WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched 0:08:38.759,0:08:40.880 from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, 0:08:40.880,0:08:43.749 to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon. 0:08:43.749,0:08:46.082 And he said there was coming soon, depending 0:08:46.082,0:08:48.276 on the weather, but he'd let me know when, 0:08:48.276,0:08:51.477 and so with about four days notice, he said to go 0:08:51.477,0:08:54.308 to this beach south of Lisbon, and a little after 9, 0:08:54.308,0:08:58.004 this guy will walk out of the water. (Laughter) 0:08:58.004,0:09:02.324 And he'll be carrying a green nylon line, a lightweight line, 0:09:02.324,0:09:05.037 called a messenger line, and that was the first link 0:09:05.037,0:09:07.590 between sea and land, this link that would then be 0:09:07.590,0:09:11.453 leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light. 0:09:11.453,0:09:14.043 Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this 0:09:14.043,0:09:17.400 specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated 0:09:17.400,0:09:20.148 on these buoys until it was in the right place. 0:09:20.148,0:09:22.890 Then you can see the English engineers looking on. 0:09:22.890,0:09:25.703 And then, once it was in the right place, he got back 0:09:25.703,0:09:29.062 in the water holding a big knife, and he cut each buoy off, 0:09:29.062,0:09:31.361 and the buoy popped up into the air, and the cable 0:09:31.361,0:09:33.266 dropped to the sea floor, and he did that all the way out 0:09:33.266,0:09:35.139 to the ship, and when he got there, 0:09:35.139,0:09:37.552 they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie, 0:09:37.552,0:09:39.971 and then he jumped back in, and he swam back to shore, 0:09:39.971,0:09:47.131 and then he lit a cigarette. (Laughter) 0:09:47.131,0:09:49.843 And then once that cable was on shore, 0:09:49.843,0:09:53.347 they began to prepare to connect it to the other side, 0:09:53.347,0:09:56.304 for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station. 0:09:56.304,0:09:59.162 And first they got it with a hacksaw, and then they start 0:09:59.162,0:10:02.098 sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a -- 0:10:02.098,0:10:04.160 sort of working like chefs, and then finally they're working 0:10:04.160,0:10:06.868 like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up 0:10:06.868,0:10:08.545 with the cable that had come down, 0:10:08.545,0:10:11.536 and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together. 0:10:11.536,0:10:14.867 And when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw, 0:10:14.867,0:10:17.510 you stop thinking about the Internet as a cloud. 0:10:17.510,0:10:21.447 It starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing. 0:10:21.447,0:10:23.955 And what surprised me as well was that as much as this 0:10:23.955,0:10:26.802 is based on the most sophisticated technology, as much 0:10:26.802,0:10:29.707 as this is an incredibly new thing, the physical process 0:10:29.707,0:10:33.474 itself has been around for a long time, and the culture is the same. 0:10:33.474,0:10:35.463 You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer 0:10:35.463,0:10:38.638 giving directions in the background. And more importantly, 0:10:38.638,0:10:41.281 the places are the same. These cables still connect 0:10:41.281,0:10:44.331 these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa, 0:10:44.331,0:10:47.490 Mumbai, Singapore, New York. 0:10:47.490,0:10:51.576 And then the process on shore takes around three or four days, 0:10:51.576,0:10:55.767 and then, when it's done, they put the manhole cover 0:10:55.767,0:10:58.738 back on top, and they push the sand over that, 0:10:58.738,0:11:01.820 and we all forget about it. 0:11:01.820,0:11:04.071 And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud, 0:11:04.071,0:11:05.981 but every time we put something on the cloud, 0:11:05.981,0:11:08.183 we give up some responsibility for it. 0:11:08.183,0:11:12.047 We are less connected to it. We let other people worry about it. 0:11:12.047,0:11:13.330 And that doesn't seem right. 0:11:13.330,0:11:15.672 There's a great Neal Stephenson line where he says 0:11:15.672,0:11:20.069 that wired people should know something about wires. 0:11:20.069,0:11:22.339 And we should know, I think, we should know 0:11:22.339,0:11:25.092 where our Internet comes from, and we should know 0:11:25.092,0:11:29.914 what it is that physically, physically connects us all. 0:11:29.914,0:11:32.253 Thank you. (Applause) 0:11:32.253,0:11:34.650 (Applause) 0:11:34.650,0:11:38.260 Thanks. (Applause)