Nearly every single byte of digital information today passes through fiber-optic cables laid at the bottom of the world’s seas and oceans. Without these cables, global finance would collapse, the cloud would break apart, and Netflix would cease to exist. Who lays these cables, and maintains them, and how? What happens if they snap? Increasingly, governments are alive to the critical nature of these cables — and to the threats that would arise if they were accidentally or deliberately cut. They’re excellent targets for sabotage, as witnessed in the recent cuts to three cables passing through the Red Sea: they’re impossible to monitor constantly, easy to damage, and hard to repair. “The Submarine Network” investigates the modern history of this indispensable infrastructure.
Speaker Bio:
Samanth Subramanian writes for the Guardian, the New York Times Magazine, WIRED, and the New Yorker. His second book, “This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War,” was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. His most recent book, “A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of JBS Haldane,” was one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2020. He lives in London.
This lecture is generously supported by the George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture Fund in International Studies at the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and co-sponsored by the South Asian Studies Council.