Andrew Blum: What is the Internet, really?

Especially with cables, and placing them on buoys until you reach the right place. Then you can see the British engineers inspecting it. Then, once the cables were in the right place, the engineer would go back into the water with a large knife and cut the line from the buoy, so that the buoy would fly into the air and the cable would go down to the bottom of the water. sea. He did so to the boat, and when he returned to it, they gave him a glass of juice and some candy, then he jumped back, swam until he reached land and lit a cigarette.

Then when the cable is on the ground, the engineers prepare to take it to the other side, this is the cable they brought from the landing station. First they bring it in with a metal saw, and they start cutting it out of the plastic inside similar to the work of a master chef, and at the end they work it like a jeweler, extracting those thread-sized fibers. of hair and attaching them to the cable that was lowered, then fusing them together using this punching machine. When you see these people heading towards the cable with a hacksaw, you stop seeing the Internet as a cloud.

The process appears to be a physical process par excellence. What also surprised me was that as much as this process is based on very advanced technology, no matter how new it may seem, and the physical process itself has been around for a long time, the culture is the same. You can see the local workers, you can see a British engineer giving instructions in the background, but the most important thing here is that the places are the same. These cables connect the classic ports of cities such as Lisbon, Mombasa, Mumbai, Singapore and New York. Then it takes three or four days to work on the beach, and then when the work is done, they put a cover on it with a hole in the top and put sand on it, and we all forget about it.

It seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud, but every time we put something in the cloud, we abdicate some responsibility for it. We became less attached to it and caused people to feel anxious about it. This doesn't seem right. There's a great quote from Neal Stevenson where he says that people who are connected to the Internet should learn something about cables. And I think we have to know where the Internet comes from, we have to know

what

that real physical thing is that connects us all. Thank you (Applause) (Applause) Thank you (Applause).