Disconnecting the Undersea Cable Network, 1850–2015

This presentation focuses on the ways in which global infrastructures have been constructed in relation to historically specific social and environmental imaginations, and how this process in turn informs the modes by which networks operate and the scales at which they do so. In particular, it tracks how security, in the broadest sense, has played a critical role in the development of cable geographies. Companies often route cables in ways that insulate them from potential interference in surrounding environments, ranging from natural disasters to anticipated geopolitical friction. As these networks get layered over one another, the past sources of friction gain a certain kind of residual life in contemporary systems. Perhaps ironically, these embedded histories of security in the cable network have left us with a relatively concentrated, centralized, and precarious Internet infrastructure, which remains routed along a fairly constrained geography. An attention to the contingent and material qualities of infrastructure systems can generate a kind of counterimagination to the conception of today's networks as flexible, distributed, and resilient.