Samanth Subramanian

I read on the way back.

I was walking to and from there.

And of course, it struck me that the only reason I was able to load it on my phone as I was walking was because the internet was carrying this story to me through some undersea cable or another.

And then fast forward to a few years ago when there was a big volcanic eruption off the coast of Tonga, which is an archipelago in the South Pacific.

And Tonga lost connection to its only international subsea data cable.

The mudslide and landslide that kind of came out of the volcanic eruption underwater severed this line and Tonga was sort of plunged into a kind of internet darkness.

And that started to make me think, well, what is it like today for a country or a society or an economy to live without the Internet for even a brief period?

What are these cables like today?

How have they changed from the time that Neal Stephenson wrote this essay in the 1990s

Who lays them now?

Who owns them now?

Has the funding changed?

Do governments play a different role, similar role?

And I kind of wanted to find all of this out.

And I wanted to use Tonga as this kind of little test case of what it was like for a country to live without the internet for a while.

And that's why I pitched the book.

Well, the cables themselves are very different.

I mean, the first telegraph cable was made of copper and you kind of send pulses of electricity through it and that comes out of the other end and it's kind of decoded.

The modern fiber optic cable is a real technological marvel.

I mean, I haven't stopped marveling at it since I started