The Web Beneath the Waves

A century and a half after the first telegraph line was laid under the Atlantic, we still rely on submarine cables to communicate, but now, increasingly, the cables are being laid by Google and Facebook. One of the most ambitious ongoing projects is a Google cable running from Portugal to South Africa, so the grand vision to “bring Africa online”—to establish greater connectivity in the continent—is essentially in the hands of two private corporations. Today, cables make heavy landfall in Guam, where a cottage industry of landing stations has emerged. For The Web Beneath the Waves, journalist Samanth Subramanian visits some of the essential nodes of this huge system, including Guam, Tonga, and New Caledonia, where an undersea cable repair company is based; aboard cable-laying and repair vessels out at sea; and the Google and Facebook engineers who work on cable-laying projects, providing a vivid and compelling snapshot of the internet’s—and; by extension, the world’s—most essential and yet most invisible infrastructure. The Web Beneath The Waves reveals the recent history of humankind’s ambition to communicate across huge distances for next to nothing and in next to no time, and also explores the consequences of that ambition—some of which have yet to play out.