The Invisible Seafaring Industry That Keeps the Internet Afloat

Dominant systems locked in by strong network effects always appear invulnerable to disruption, until they're suddenly not. The current internet is a particularly massive network lock-in, but given its technical debt and increasingly painful aspects (more on this below), there is no reason a disruptor at the full-stack level cannot or should not ari... See more

FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it necess... See more

These two unrelated developments—the rise of New York, the neglect of Tampa and Mobile—revealed the economics that would affect seaports as container shipping grew. For ports, capturing container traffic was going to be expensive, requiring investments out of all proportion to what had come before. For ship lines, the days when vessels meandered al

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Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gaz

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