Internet Undersea Cables--map from The Guardian (click for original article)

Let’s say you’re reading this in Egypt, or Hong Kong, or London. How exactly do bits and bytes get from this web server (somewhere in California) to your far-flung screen? It’s not satellites or magic, but it is crazy. There’s a wire running along the bottom of the ocean with beams of light screaming through it.

The German literary theorist Walter Benjamin has a line that goes something to the effect of, “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Part of what he meant by that is that there is no work of art or industry that does not have structural violence somewhere beneath its cultural scaffolding. To offer a heinously crude example, Romantic poetry is sublime and all, but the money that funded its production was made by landowners who exploited the working poor while their government went about colonizing the world.

As it happens, the British needed an excellent communications system to maintain their empire, so later put a great deal of 19th-century effort and engineering into linking the corners of the Commonwealth with telegraph wires. That was a predecessor of the modern intercontinental fiberoptic cable network, which some private investors were trying to expand in the mid-1990s. Neal Stephenson decided to follow the route of the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe, or FLAG, cable-laying project from Thailand to Japan and back to Egypt, and he chronicled the adventure, in which he dubbed himself a “hacker tourist,” in a 1996 article published in Wired magazine. It is no exaggeration to say that it is one of the most astonishing pieces of journalism ever conceived.

“Mother Earth Motherboard” is brilliant business reporting, smart technological history, and savvy storytelling. What’s more, if you have read or intend to read James Gleick’s The Information, this article is a must-read companion. Obviously, these projects were conceived in entirely different decades, separated by billions of websites and petabytes of digital information. But they are complimentary in that Gleick weaves intellectual and scientific history with the industrial archeology of common communications, and Stephenson ties common communications to the industrial archeology of circum-planetary engineering. And by using the somewhat bookish phrase “industrial archeology,” I simply mean “the history of how stuff gets made.” (Simple example: Whether in Washington or London, you’re likely reading this in front of a QWERTY keyboard. Why QWERTY? Not because the arrangement of letters makes for easy typing; rather, because the arrangement prevented early typists from smashing common letters like “a” and “e” with their strongest fingers, a hazard that would tangle the levered arms on early typewriters. Industrial archeology stares you in the face all day long.)

Stephenson honestly wants to know just how people approach the engineering project of tying continents together with cable, and the the answer is more complicated and far more interesting than I first suspected. He explains the approach:

Our method was not exactly journalism nor tourism in the normal sense but what might be thought of as a new field of human endeavor called hacker tourism: travel to exotic locations in search of sights and sensations that only would be of interest to a geek.

This leads to a story that covers subjects ranging from the intricacies of mathematical models used to calculated the curvature of slackened wires trailing 30 kilometers out into the ocean behind specialized cable-laying ships, to the basic mechanics of what happens when those cables run ashore at their terrestrial destinations:

One day a barge appears off the cove, and there is a lot of fussing around with floats, lots of divers in the water. A backhoe digs a trench in the cobble beach. A long skinny black thing is wrestled ashore. Working almost naked in the tropical heat, the men bolt segmented pipes around it and then bury it. It is never again to be seen by human eyes. Suddenly, all of these men pay their bills and vanish. Not long afterward, the phone service gets a hell of a lot better.

And while he does not linger on the economic plight of the laborers who actually dig the holes and build the manholes for stretching the buried cable across southern Thailand, he is straightforward in describing the conditions of the work that builds the Internet:

The manhole-making village we are visiting on this fine, steamy summer day has a population of some 130 workers plus an unknown number of children. The village was founded in the shade of an old, mature rubber plantation. Along the highway are piles of construction materials deposited by trucks: bundles of half-inch rebar, piles of sand and gravel. At one end of the clearing is a double row of shelters made from shiny new corrugated metal nailed over wooden frames, where the men, women, and children of the village live. On the end of this is an open-air office under a lean-to roof, equipped with a whiteboard – just like any self-respecting high tech company. Chickens strut around flapping their wings uselessly, looking for stuff to peck out of the ground.

The story here loops across Southeast Asia and the Far East, back through North Africa, and concludes at the historical starting point for key developments in long-distance communication, southwest England. Simultaneously, Stephenson careens between the mid-1850s, the construction of the Library of Alexandria around 300 BCE, and the (then, as in, 1996) present, linking technological entrepreneurship in a manner more exciting than most comic books:

Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke’s book How the World Was One). The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that building FLAG constitutes a “document of barbarism,” but the insanity of the project sounds something like the modern equivalent of white people barreling across the American West—except the American West is the floor of the ocean, and there are international telco cabals instead of railway tycoons. This of course takes more than a few column inches to capture. The article is nearly 42,000 words long, which Wired must have abbreviated for the print edition—that’s about 70 pages cut-and-pasted into an MS Word document. But if you really like knowing how things work, then I can’t recommend this article more highly.

(H/T: I got to this piece from The Byliner, where I will likely see many other hundreds of hours melt away chasing good #longreads.)

Dismissing these most recent arguments allows him to clear the way for a more fundamental critique of liberal political thought and its relation to science. While setting aside contemporary battles to analyze intellectual history makes sense, the disputes he brushes off the table can hardly be taken lightly. One of the scientists behind last year’s breakthrough in induced pluripotent cells penned an editorial in The Washington Post explaining that the Bush administration’s policy on stem cells set research on life-saving cures back by several years. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only sex education. Almost every other country represented at the Bali climate talks last year understood that arguments over climate change and energy policy are in fact what Levin presents as caricature: “a clash of simple scientific facts against willful ignorance and greed”–and what he misses is that some of the richest companies in the world will eventually be those on the same side as the thousands of scientists and policy makers armed with those simple scientific facts. If a decidedly conservative Supreme Court reminding the Environmental Protection Agency of its responsibility to regulate greenhouse gas emissions of mercury pollution isn’t evidence of retrograde anti-rationalism in the executive branch, then I’m not sure what is. And appointing an anti-contraception activist without a medical degree or experience in family planning to the Office of Population Affairs was just one demonstration that in this conservative administration, scientific knowledge is no prerequisite for managing taxpayer dollars on issues that demand scientific integrity, like public health.

But Levin’s point in bracketing these recent issues is to clear the ground for his more complex thesis: That thinkers on the left have not grappled with the dialectical nature of the enlightenment and scientific rationality. That is, scientific rationality can contain its own opposite; strict adherence to purely rational thought can lead to a dogmatic mythology reminiscent of the theocratic teachings that enlightenment thinking pushed aside in the West in the 18th century.

Denying the legitimacy of current claims about scientific policy, he instead ploughs through the intellectual history of the 18th and 19th centuries and completely disregards the substantial body of 20th century scholarship that deals precisely with the tension between scientific rationalism and modern life. In fact, the work of Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who penned Dialectic of Enlightenment, dealt in part with the need for theory to operate in a self-aware manner that never denied the ideological conditions of its own formation. Many significant critiques of the original iterations of this “critical theory” subsequently demonstrated its shortcomings, but ignoring the influence of these and other thinkers, like Herbert Marcuse, on liberal thought in the 20th century is an oversight that dramatically destabilizes Levin’s claim that the left’s “blindness to the power of science is a…perplexing quandary.”

Others versed in the history of the subject will deal far better than I could with his subsequent attempt to claim that unfortunate support for eugenic programs from some prominent progressive leaders in the first half of the 20th century now has any bearing whatsoever on the mainstream left.

But Levin is right to point out the tensions between left thinking on dynamic responses to climate change and the some of the deeply conservative impulses of the environmental movement. Yet I can’t help thinking that this critique would have been more pertinent before the significant alliances between mainstream progressives and environmental activists that began in the late 1990s. I can’t help thinking that this critique would have had more bite in the 1970s, or even the late 1980s.

Some of the most powerful and important progressive thinking of the current moment is already well beyond the either-or tension Levin describes between “science beholding nature” and scientific mastery over the natural world. This new framework goes by the name “sustainability,” and while it has not yet filtered into the upper echelons of U.S. political discourse, it is the synthesis of this dialectic. It is about focusing the power of scientific rationality for the simultaneous preservation of the natural world and the project of promoting human equality.

Sustainability is grounded in the idea that equality means that everyone who lives on the planet–and everyone who will live on it in the future–deserves access to healthy and productive resources. And we should think twice before dismissing earnest critiques of governments that fail simultaneously to promote equality by impoverishing the resources of its current and future citizens and to support the science that can fuel that justice.