Samanth Subramanian

I thought there would be underwater unmanned vehicles and so on and so forth.

But actually, a lot of it is just exactly how telegraph lines were fixed back in the day, which is that you send a ship out to where you think the cut is.

And obviously now our sense of where a broken cable might lie is much, much sharper than it used to be in the 1800s.

But once you get there, you throw a grapnel hook overboard and you kind of drag it along the seafloor and you hope that it snags the cable.

And sometimes you have a bite and you pull it up and it's caught something else entirely and you chuck it back into the ocean and you try again.

And so this is essentially how all ships do repairs these days.

And of course, once you get the cable on board...

it then jumps back into extremely sophisticated gear.

So there's a lab on board the ship that is built to splice sort of glass fiber optic cables together.

It's stabilized even in a very rocky sea.

It can sort of work with astounding levels of stability.

There's a clean room.

And so you kind of do all of this stuff and then you carefully lay it back into the ocean in the exact coordinates where it used to be.

And you test it and you test it again and again until you make sure that it works.

Well, I mean, one of the weaknesses, this is not a weakness from the Internet's point of view, maybe, although some people might beg to differ.

But I think this earlier point that I raised, which is the dominance of four essentially American tech companies in the cable laying world.

is a weakness in one way.

It kind of shrinks the internet because the internet then depends on where these companies want to lay cables and people rely on them for who's going to get served by the internet and who isn't.

There's an example that I cite in the book about the longest cable laid anywhere in the world.

And this is a cable called 2Africa and it's funded and owned, I think, almost entirely by Meta.