YouSaid · the spoken record

Samanth Subramanian

lines on the record: 36
first: 2026-05-13
most recent: 2026-05-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Oh man, there's a really short one that almost shouldn't exist. Because it's so short, but I feel like it's so cute because it does exist. It's, I don't know, maybe 14 miles long. I'm looking this up in my book now, and it goes between The Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. It's 41 miles. So it's not super short. But it just feels like it's one of those cables that was laid only because it demonstrated just how cost efficient these technologies were”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flashboys, that's right. That opens with the laying of a cable over land, not over sea, not under sea. But that does exist. But I think the only sort of big entities that decide that they need their own cables. And they're going to lay them and exclude everybody else from them are the big militaries of the world. So the US military has its own cables, the Chinese military has its own cables. They have their own contractors for that. And none of the public internet travels down them whatsoever.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think that exists yet. I mean, there have been instances in the past, I think, of financiers deciding that they want to lay their own overland cables. I can't remember which book it was. I think maybe it was Rocket Boy.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stop laying cables because it's very expensive to finance as a project. After the dot-com boom, for example, in early 2000 and then the dot-com bust, there was a period of stasis that lasted for almost like five years. There was all this extra cabling that had been ordered up, but nobody was laying it because it was just too expensive. So I think part of it is cyclical and it will follow the trajectory of the economy itself. But I think as far as the AI revolution or the AI boom goes, as long as that persists, I think we'll still need to see more and more cables being laid just to be able, just to make this entire project possible.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it changes the trajectory so much, it just kind of accelerates it. I mean, there was already, as I mentioned earlier, some of these big tech companies that were laying cables of their own. All those big tech companies are now engaged in their own kind of AI efforts and often very big large-scale ones of that. And so I think the need for these cables and the need to lay more cables than at a faster clip is only going to increase because I think you're going to have more AI training data centers out there. You want to have more flows of data. And so people were kind of worried for a little while, maybe about five or six years ago, people were talking about the fact that maybe there was a glut of cables out there right now and that maybe we didn't need to lay any more new cables for the foreseeable future because we were kind of set. But the AI boom has changed all that. It is also true that the cabling industry follows a similar trajectory to the world economy when there's a recession. It goes down.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use for data and a new kind of data flow that wouldn't have existed five years ago. So we have clearly already seen this explosion of additional data burdens on the cabling industry. And so I think realistically speaking, nobody thinks that we can please replace all our data infrastructure with satellites. I think cables are here for a good long while yet.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think anybody is. And the reason for that is however much satellites have improved, and they have a lot. So, for example, in the 16 months in which didn't have cabled internet, one of these outlying islands of Tonga just relied on Starlings throughout. And that was very useful. But the problem here is that however much satellites improve, Our appetite of sheer thirst for data is just going to improve exponentially. We're seeing that now with the AI boom and the fact that all of this training data is also sitting on servers in one place and we're calling it up on Claude and ChatGPT and other kind of engines on our laptop. And so this is a new kind of”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get an extra cable on there, and you have the rest of the infrastructure ready to go. But maybe a solution lies in finding other places to land, other places in which this data infrastructure can be protected. That's one option. The other option is exactly what you said right now, which is to find alternate routes. But this is not easy either. I mean, the reason, for example, that all these years cable companies continued laying through the Strait of Hormuz and didn't go through Syria is because Syria was a hotbed for conflict. I mean, it's very difficult to imagine laying a cable through Syria, Circa, eight years ago or nine years ago, or laying a cable through Iraq, circa 25 years ago, or indeed 30 years ago. These were places where geopolitical sort of turbulence made it very difficult to ensure the security of a cable. But yet, as we see now in the headline you read out, people are being forced to reconsider these other routes, which I think is a good thing as well.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one thing to do is to build out more redundancy, and I don't mean just lay more cables. If you look at the map of the telegraph cables of the late 1800s and you look at the current map of undersea cables, you see that they're kind of similar. I mean, they're almost the same except for this big new thicket of undersea data cables that has come up in East Asia and Southeast Asia. And part of the reason for that is out of habit or inertia or reasons of cost efficiency, cables still land in pretty much the same places that they did a hundred years ago. So I'm from India, for example, and many, if not all, of the undersea data cables that land in India today land in Mumbai on the west coast or Chennai on the east coast. And that's exactly where the telegraph cables used to land a century ago. I asked many people as to why this is, and you know, it's just easier. You have the data centers there already. There's economies of scale, so all you have to do is just”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, people within the industry seem to think so, and I think governments seem to think so as well. And so we've seen. And amping up by many degrees of the kinds of protective measures that governments and companies accord to these cables. So the UK, where I live right now, a few years ago, they announced that they would have two military naval vessels permanently on patrol around the island to protect not just undersea data cables, but also power cables and oil and gas pipelines, the Baltic nations and the Scandinavian nations have their Coast Guard patrols on higher alert than ever before because they think Russian ships Countries and governments are acutely aware that this is one extremely effective way of crippling economies, that a malicious actor could undertake at virtually no or little expense.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of this is, of course, efficient in any way or desirable in any way. But even more than that, I think people in the industry start to worry that something like a kind of bifurcation of the internet is going to start setting in, by which I mean that if there's a particular part of the world that needs cabling and the Americans want to cable it but don't want Chinese involvement and the Chinese want to cable it as well, there will essentially be two parallel cable systems running in that part of the world. Now, this isn't parallel in the sense of redundancy. This is parallel in the sense of superfluity. You don't need both of them, and yet you have both of them. And so what happens to the internet there? Does it get fractured and split along these two cable systems? What then happens to the promise of the internet, which, as we said, was conceived as a free and open access kind of system to link the world? And so I think there are people in the industry who talk to me quite a bit about their anxieties for just how the internet might be bipartated.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“being enforced against you. There used to be a time that the idyllic days about eight or nine years ago when Western companies and Chinese companies would come together in consortiums and lay cables jointly they would kind of bear part of the burden and they would figure out who was going to do the actual laying and how much bandwidth people would get. Two or three of these projects have actually been frozen. In one case, the cable has actually been laid, but nobody can switch it on because the US government doesn't want that to happen because a Chinese company is involved in two other cases. I think the mapping was done, the funds were committed, and then they had to kind of pull everything back. There hasn't been a new cable laid between China and the US direct. In years, in years, even though traffic between these two countries has never been greater. So you have to route everything now through the Philippines or through Singapore. It's like a very, very long way around to go from Chinese East Coast to the West Coast of the US.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is exactly one. Well, there's two, I think. But the main one is called HMN, which is a spin-off of Kuawe. And HMN has been in the cable business for a while now, like a thing more than a decade. And HMN doesn't really own cables outright. HMN is kind of like these two or three big companies, including Subcom in the US, that lay cables. They kind of go out there and they lay the cable for a corporate customer. And so you could easily go to them and say, why don't you lay our cable instead? It'll be sort of cheaper than these American companies that do it. The problem here is that for the last six or seven years, Chinese tech companies have been on sanctions lists around the world after the first Trump administration put them there. So to go out and engage HMN and to ask Huawei to come and lay a cable is to sort of risk going against that sanctions list and therefore risk all kinds of punitive measures.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so then there's a real dilemma. I mean, do they sort of look out for the privacy and data security of their citizens? Or do they give their citizens expanded internet access, which is really what they're craving? And I think this is a weakness. It gives a lie to the old sort of utopian model of a free, open internet. And as in many other ways, which we talk about all the time these days, I think this also actually sort of closes off the internet in some sense and kind of suffocates certain people who want to get online.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An internet deficient population, and for any economy today, I think the Internet is sort of, it's a prerequisite. You can't develop and grow without being online as much as everybody else is in the West. And so for the government of West Africa, of Cote d'Ivoire, for example, this presents a real dilemma. On the one hand, do they welcome Meta in and say, you know, of course, feel free to land a cable on our shows, but we have these kinds of conditions that European countries had. We want our citizens' data to be stored on servers on our soil. And this is something that European countries have been able to demand and get quite often. But unfortunately, the Cote d'Ivoire government has much less leverage than any Western European nation. And so, for example, if we were to tell Meta that, it runs the risk of Meta saying, well, that's fine, maybe we don't want to land in this country after all and loop somewhere else instead.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, one of the weaknesses, this is not a weakness from the internet's point of view, maybe, although some people might beg to defer. But I think this earlier point that I raised, which is the dominance of four essentially American tech companies in the cable laying world, is a weakness in one way. It kind of shrinks the internet because the internet then depends on where these companies want to lay cables and people rely on them for who's going to get served by the internet and who isn't. There's an example that I cite in the book about the longest cable laid anywhere in the world. And this is a cable called Two Africa. And it's funded and owned, I think, almost entirely by meta. And Meta, therefore, I think, like makes the decisions of, well, which West African countries should we land in? Now, West African countries and Africa in general, they're very underserved by the Internet. I mean, this is sort of...”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even in a very rocky seed, it can sort of work with astounding levels of stability. There's a clean room. And so you kind of do all of this stuff and then you... Carefully laid back into the ocean in the exact coordinates where it used to be, and you test it and you test it again and again until you make sure that it works.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, it's so old school. I mean, I was kind of shocked at this. I thought there would be underwater unmanned underwater vehicles and so on and so forth. But actually a lot of it is just exactly how telegraph lines were fixed back in the day, which is that you send a ship out to where you think the cut is. And obviously now our sense of where a broken cable might lie is much, much sharper than it used to be in the 1800s. But once you get there, you throw a grapnel hook overboard and you kind of drag it along the seafloor and you hope that it snags the cable. And sometimes you have a bite and you pull it up and it's caught something else entirely and you chuck it back into the ocean and you try again. And so this is essentially how all ships do repairs these days. And of course, once you get the cable on board, it then jumps back into extremely sophisticated gears. So there's a lab on board the ship that is built to splice sort of glass fiber optic cables together.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It may also be that I live in Saudi Arabia, but I'm a Gmail user, and my Gmail data is being stored somewhere else. It's being stored maybe in Western Europe or it's being stored even in the US. You don't know which server your data lives on at all. And so when you cut a bunch of cables that service that particular part of the world, you're also essentially forcing the rest of the internet to reroute itself constantly until these cables are fixed.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it would definitely impede the country's clustered around there, but we also have to remember that the internet doesn't function like a highway in the sense that the fastest route between two points is not necessarily the shortest route. So, for example, if I'm sitting in London and I'm sort of pinging a server in, let's say, Portugal, it may well be that at that particular moment and this router is making the decision for me, the shortest route is to France and then onward to Portugal by land rather than through sea throughout.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bunch of cables that's sort of crisscrossing over from Asia to Europe and vice versa. And he talks about how Alexandria is at that point kind of like a storehouse or a hub of information very similar to how it was back in the day when the library of Alexandria was still in place. So there's this parallel with ancient history. But you bring up Egypt and Egypt is a really good example. The other good example is something that's very much in the news now, which is the Strait of Hormuz. And just as it's very convenient for ships to take that path in, so it is for cables to take that path in. And the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are both choke points, as you say again, in which if a malign actor sort of wanted to really cripple the global Internet, they could go down there, use your lobster drones that you talked about.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's a big deal. I mean, Foster has under sea geography, right? I mean, the topography of the ocean floor is obviously not flat, flat, flat. There are crevasses and gorges, and there's currents that go one way or another. There's like steep lips of rocky cliffs. And so you have to kind of avoid all of this. Tonga, which I mentioned earlier, has the unfortunate situation of sitting in that Pacific ring of fire. So there's an underwater volcano not far away, and that's liable to break its cables. And it has, in the past, even before the one that I talk about. So undersea geology, geography, big deal. But even overseas geography is a massive deal. So, for example, if you want to come from Asia to Europe, as with a ship, it's much cheaper to come through the Suez Canal rather than to go around South Africa. And, you know, in the Neil Stevenson essay I talked about, he makes a big deal out of this. In a sort of really elegant way, he goes to Alexandria.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If one cable gets cut, there's enough cables crossing the Atlantic, for example, to take up the burden of the data that was severed.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The US, Southeast Asia, China, and Southeast Asia, the Gulf, and then India. So these are heavily trafficked routes. And there's a lot of cables that traffic them for the simple reason that redundancy is important. We can think about the fact that every year roughly 100 cables get cut around the world. Most of these are accidents. There might be a ship that froze its anchor overboard and cuts a cable by accident, or it might be that a fishing boat is trawling the seabed and it hooks a cable and snags it and cuts it. So think about a hundred cuts every year, and yet we don't experience nearly that order of internet outages, right? And part of the reason is, of course, we have redundancy in the form of land cables, which I haven't really talked about in this book, but there's cables coming to the US from Canada and so on. So that takes up a share of the traffic. But also there's redundancy in the marine cable ecosystem itself.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a considerable amount of redundancy built in because I think the deal here is this, even if Google owns, for example, one transatlantic cable, and even if it, let's assume hypothetically, it funnels only Google-based data through that cable. So let's assume it funnels Gmail and Google Meets and all this other stuff. Only Google Data is going through that cable. This never happens, but we'll let it ride for now. It is in Google's best interests to buy redundancy on another cable because that cable might go down. And in a similar way, it is in Meta's best interest to buy redundancy on a Google cable, just in case of Meta cable goes down. So there's a lot of redundancy built into the system. There's between 500 and 550 undersea cables around the world. Many of them are sort of clustered around these, not surprisingly, these big areas of economic activity. So Western Europe to the Eastern Seaboard.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seven or eight years ago that big tech companies, by which I mean Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft A grew so cash rich that they could afford these cables. So for example, a transatlantic cable now from London to New York would cost about $500 million, which is a lot of money still for you and me, but maybe not that much for Google. And so they started to fund these cables because rightly or wrongly, they thought, look, data is the lifeblood of our business and it makes more sense to build this infrastructure ourselves. And so now we got to the stage, or when I was researching this book, it got to a stage where two out of every three new cables were being funded and owned either in part or in full by one of these four tech companies. And that has enormous sort of implications for data privacy, data security. I mean, sort of who controls your data, but also like who controls who gets the internet.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cable looks like a good business idea. I will go out and raise money, and then I will come back to these telecom companies and say, look, I'm willing to lay this cable how much bandwidth you want to buy from me. And they would kind of apportion bandwidth in that way. And so that model prevailed for much of the 2000s. And I think it's only about...”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It definitely has. I mean, in the 80s and 90s, and I mean, I mean the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of these telecom companies around the world were state-owned. And so they would kind of figure out that they needed a cable to run from, let's say, London to Portugal to three African countries and then onwards to Singapore as an example. So the telecom companies in each of these governments would come together and they would say, well, look, this is how we want to lay the cable. This is how much money we can put up. In return, we get this much bandwidth and we can kind of sell that on to our customers. And so these companies would form essentially like a consortium. And that was a consortium model was popular for a very long time. And in the 1990s and the early 2000s, you saw this wave of privatization around the world. All of these telecom companies were hived off into private companies. And suddenly, at the same time, there was also this growth of the investor-led model. Like an investor would say,”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can, definitely. I mean, you can use satellites, and in fact, satellite phones have been around for a long while. Garmin makes all of these satellite-enabled devices, and you can download weather data and other stuff onto it. It's just that the volume, the sheer volume of data that we ingest on a daily basis, you couldn't fill Earth's orbit with enough satellites to take all that data up. I mean, think about what it means. It means everybody's Netflix streams and everybody is Zoom calls and everybody's texts and phone calls and day trades and PowerPoint presentations that live on the cloud and data servers that serve other kinds of things. Everything is essentially on a cloud somewhere and there's so much data out there that there's not enough satellites that could process all of it.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's basically it. Yeah. I mean, that hasn't changed. I mean, there's a couple of other things that haven't changed, but that definitely hasn't changed. They call them a drum or they call it a spool. But essentially, wind the cable around the spool, and then you load it on board, and then you set off into the high seas. So that part of it hasn't changed. Of course, the cable is much lighter now, so you can load a lot more cable onto it because it's not sort of thick metal.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a bunch of places. Now, as we'll probably talk about, it's mostly big tech companies paying for it out of their own wallets because they can afford to. And then they would fund a survey ship to go out and see what the best route for the cable would be from say London to Lisbon to Cape Town to, I don't know, the UAE. And then the survey ship would come back and give you the best possible route. And then a cable laying ship would go out, make multiple trips, and just slowly, very slowly lay the cable along exactly that route. And you have to do it that way because too fast and it might snap, too slow, and there's too much slack in the cable. And so you really need to kind of find this optimum speed at which to travel. And it's really funny. There's one company in the entire world that makes the kind of software that all these cable ships use that determine the ship's path, the ship's speed, all of this stuff, just so the cable is laid just so.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And down that cable you send sort of little pulses of light lasers essentially and they kind of bounce around the inner walls of the glass and they come out at the other end and you can decode them. And what they do these days, there's a long name for it called wave division multiplexing, where they send different frequencies of light encoded with different streams of data. And so that kind of bounces around the glass at various speeds. And then it comes out the other and you kind of suck suck it out and you code it all back together and you kind of read the information out that way. And that has kind of exponentially increased the amount of data that a cable can carry today. You know, these cables are produced by just a handful of companies around the world. So there's a little bottleneck over there in terms of technological capacity to produce these cables. And then there's people who find the money for these cables. So that used to include state-owned telecom companies. Then it included private investors sort of raising money.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the cables themselves are very different. I mean, the first telegraph cable was made of copper and you kind of send pulses of electricity through it, and that comes out as the other end and it's kind of decoded. The modern fiber optic cable is a real technological marvel. I mean, I haven't stopped marveling at it since I started. Researching this book The best cables or the ones at the bottom of the ocean are just a hair thick, just literally the thickness of a human hair. They're made of highly purified glass.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few years ago, when there was a big volcanic eruption off the coast of Tonga, which is an archipelago in the South Pacific, and Tonga lost connection to its only international subsea data cable, the mudslide and landslide that kind of came out of the volcanic eruption underwater severed this line and Tonga was sort of plunged into a kind of internet darkness. And that started to make me think, well, what is it like today for a country or a society or an economy to live without the internet for even a brief period? What are these cables like today? How have they changed from the time the Neil Stevenson wrote this essay in the 1990s who lays them now? Who owns them now has the funding changed? Do governments play a different role, similar role? And I kind of wanted to find all of this out and I wanted to use Tonga as this kind of little test case of what it was like.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 2005, there was a lot of big data explosions yet to come, but it was clearly something that was burgeoning. And I think Neil Stevenson did such a good job even in the 1990s of reminding people that the internet is reliant on this physical infrastructure, this actual cabling that looks remarkably similar to telegraph cables from the 1800s, although of course there are big differences. So he wrote this essay in the 1990s. I read it in, I don't know, 2012, I think, and I remember being so entranced by the story that I had to step out to get groceries and I kept reading on my phone. You know, I read in the shop, I read on the way back, I was walking to and from there. And of course, it struck me that the only reason I was able to load it on my phone as I was walking was because the internet was carrying this story to me through someone to see cable or another. And then fast forward to”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, there's a long answer and a short answer. And the long answer has to do with this essay that I read more than ten years ago, this was an essay by the science fiction writer Neil Stevenson, and he had written this piece in Wired Magazine sometime in the nineties forty thousand words long. It took up like virtually the entire magazine called Mother Earth Motherboard. And that essay had Stephenson, you know, he sort of cast himself in the role of what he calls a hacker tourist. And he goes around the world kind of looking at places where these subsea cables, land and are installed into the earth or let into the sea or repaired, and he meets these odd people who do this kind of work or did this kind of work back then. And he kind of traces through all of this a picture of the nascent internet. I mean, the internet was already there, but I guess it wasn't as big as it was now, obviously, but it wasn't even as big as it was.”
2026-05-13 · Odd Lots · Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source