Samanth Subramanian

Thank you for having me.

Well, I mean, there's a long answer and a short answer.

And the long answer has to do with this essay that I read more than 10 years ago.

This was an essay by the science fiction writer Neil Stephenson.

And he had written this piece in Wired magazine sometime in the 90s, 40,000 words long.

It took up like virtually the entire magazine.

called Mother Earth Motherboard.

And that essay had Stephenson, you know, he sort of cast himself in the role of what he calls a hacker tourist.

And he goes around the world kind of looking at places where these subsea cables land and are installed into the earth or let into the sea or repaired.

And he meets these like odd people who do this kind of work or did this kind of work back then.

And he kind of traces through all of this, a picture of the nascent internet.

I mean, the internet was already there, but I guess it wasn't as big as it was now, obviously, but you know, it wasn't even as big as it was in 2005.

There was a lot of big data explosions yet to come, but it was clearly something that was burgeoning.

And I think,

Neil Stephenson did such a good job, even in the 1990s, of reminding people that the internet is reliant on this physical infrastructure, this actual cabling that looks remarkably similar to telegraph cables from the 1800s, although, of course, there are big differences.

So he wrote this essay in the 1990s.

I read it in 2012, I think, and I remember being so entranced

by the story that I had to step out to get groceries.

And I kept reading on my phone.

I read in the shop.