where a 10,000-mile undersea cable is laid connecting europe to west africa. he shared his story at town hall in seattle earlier this summer. it's about 50 minutes. [applause] >> thank you. in addition to the surveys, you'll find ipads under all of your seats if you want to look right now. [laughter] it's wonderful to be here. it's an honor to be at town hall, and i love being in seattle all the time to see friends and the beautiful city. um, i, um, i started, as you can probably tell, a little bit from that bio, i have written in the past mostly about architecture, about buildings. um, and the thing about that is when you write about architecture, you can look at the history of the place and the history of the building, and you can talk to the architect, but

then most importantly at the end of the process or the middle of the process you can go, and you can see the building, and you can hear and feel what it sounds like and what it smells like and actually go and experience it. or there are lots of buildings that form cities, and you can regardless of the sort of complicated history of, you know, politics and culture that's made a city, you can still go walk around it, and that's a kind of key, sort of crucial part of the experience. it's something you can completely embody, you can go there. but about, um, over the last several years though what i realized was that writing about architecture moment more and more i was sitting in front of my laptop screen, and then at the end of the day -- particularly since around 2007 when i got an iphone -- i would get up and that disconnect was incredibly striking to me. i was ostensibly supposed to be out in the world looking at things, but instead i was

sitting in front of my computer. and even more striking, that world beyond my screen seemed not to be a world at all. there were places to shop or talk to friends that were kind of a landscape of the mind, but there was no physical presence to them at all. there was sort of there's no way of understanding what was actually back there. the one kind of image we had of it, the consistent image of that world behind the screen was always this, was the internet is some sort of amorphous blob that was infinite and kind of unknowable and, you know, you weren't really supposed to know where you were on it, and it wasn't supposed to be that descriptive about what this place was which always kind of reminded me of the blue marble picture of the earth, you know, sort of floating in space. that's both meant to say this is where we are, but it's also too much to understand in some form. and that was what the internet was. it was this sort of this big, amorphous blob, and that was all that i could sort of know about

the physical reality behind the glass as much as i was trying to look, you know, get a sense for the place that i was in. and this amounted to a kind of low-grade existential crisis because how could i sort of know who i was if i didn't know what that world was behind the screen? and, um, and then, and then one day, um, this happened. [laughter] my internet at home broke, as it occasionally does, and the cable guy came to fix it and sort of started at the dusty clump of cables behind my couch and then followed it out to the front of my building in brooklyn and under to the basement and down to the backyard. there was this other big clump of cables. and then there was a squirrel running along the wire. and he said i think a squirrel is chewing on your internet. and this was, obviously, surprising because, um, the internet was a transcendent

idea, it wasn't something a squirrel could chew on. [laughter] but more striking than that, if a squirrel could chew on that piece of the internet, there must be other pieces that a squirrel could chew on. and so i got this image that, um, that, you know, what would happen if i kind of yanked the cable from the wall and started to follow it, you know, where would it go? it must go somewhere, there must be some physical path. but all i knew was that amorphous blob. but the thing was when i started to think about what, you know, when i started to sort of ask what that place was and could i go visit it, the answer was unequivocally, no. only fools tried to visit the internet. like in this episode of south park where the internet breaks, but there's no internet to find out if the internet is broken. so they all become, um, internet refugees in california because that's where there's internet, and it becomes very "grapes of

wrath." and then eventually they find the internet, this big, this big version of the router you might have at home. and they play the close encounters of the third kind song at it to try to wake it up, but that doesn't work. and eventually one of the little guys climbs up the ramp and unplugs the giant plug in back and plugs it back in. [laughter] and then he as, the flashing yellow light is steady green. and they're saved. [laughter] you know, salvation. or if that's not the internet, then this is internet, this single box with a red light on it which is represented in the british sitcom the i.t. crowd where they convince their colleague that they have arranged with the elders of the internet for her to borrow the internet for an office presentation. normally it lives at the top of big men because that's -- big ben because that's where you get

the best reception. but they've manged to procure it for the afternoon so she can show it off. and she says, she says, this is the internet, the whole internet? is it heavy? and they laugh at her, and they say, of course not. the internet doesn't weigh anything, it's wireless, you know? but that's the implication, that's what we all think. or there are the poets who also have their own conceptions of the internet, and my favorite is the writer christine smallwood who points out that the history of the internet is a history of metaphors about the internet all stumbling around this dilemma, how do we talk to each other about an invisible god? and then she weighs the relative merits of describing the internet as a tootsie roll, a hot tub, a highway or plane. and then she realizes that, actually, the internet is probably quite ugly, and she wishes it weren't. she wishes, she says, that it looked like matt damon or like lines of light written in an invisible sky. and so we're back to that

amorphous blob. we sort of can't get away from the lines of light in the sky, the sort of, you know, inany anytime, uncontainable university that's impossible to understand. but, fortunately, there was one guy who did understand that the internet was a place or at least could be something else other than this amorphous blob, and that was senator ted stevens of alaska. [laughter] who, um, who said when he was chair of the senate commerce science and technology committee and, therefore, responsible for legislating the internet: the internet is not something you just dump something on, it's not a big truck, a series of tubes. and we all laughed at this. we sort of, we thought this was completely hilarious. [laughter] and i made fun of him. again, the internet isn't a series of tubes, it's this transcendent idea, it's changed absolutely everything. but for those of us who are precouped with the physical world, then that -- preoccupied

with the physical world, it seemed he was right, but there must be something out there, and it was those tubes that i set out to see. so i want to talk about those tubes, but first a caveat which is that logically speaking the internet is incredibly complicates, and any given web page you load will have thousands and thousands of processes behind it. but physically the kind of the reality of it is relatively straightforward. there are -- it's, you know, the basic unit is at the center of the unit is a ten gigabit per second wave of light through fiberoptic cables that are then and over long distances buried along the railroad tracks and places like this which is in the middle of kansas which is a place that came about, or i encountered it after working on a photo essay for "wired" a few years ago and was asked to find, you know, pieces of the internet that we could photograph. and i was on the phone with a pr person for one of the big

internet backbones and said, so, is there like a hut in the middle of the country where, you know, where they, where this, you know, where the fiber, you know, the signals are regenerated, and she said let me find out. got on the phone a guy with a pickup truck in kansas city, the middle of the country, with the responsibility for all of the regeneration huts in a 500-mile radius and then proceeded to sort of surreally ask him which was the most beautiful hut. and this was the place that came up. [laughter] but the key, the key thing still is that basic idea that there's light, you know, light pulsing through fiber, and this is the kind of, this is the sort of even smaller unit. this is the fiberoptic jumper cable that's literally filled with light. when you bend it, light comes out. and what's remarkable is the basic unit today is a ten-gigabit per second wave, already that's a 40-gigabit per

second wave, and even more remarkably you'll have situations where there are multiple wavelengths or colors of light through a single strand of fiber, so you'll have 50 or 60 or even 75 different ten-gigabit wave lengths of light through a single fiber. so immediately it does become the sort of massive numbers, but always there are these yellow fiberoptic cables. and then they come together in buildings. this building is one of my favorites, it's 60 hudson street in new york. and if the internet is a network of networks, it's all about these places where one network can connect to another, you know, where you have the router of one network, comcast or a time warner connected to the router of another network, a facebook, a google or a microsoft. and that's, you know, that's a very physical process. it's about, you know, a big refrigerator-like machine with blinking likes and a yellow cable strung up into the ceiling of a building like this and down

into the cage and into the router of another network. and there aren't as many of these places as you might think. there are about a dozen of these buildings in the world that are by far the most important, in order to magnitude more important than the next tier measured by the fact that they are the places where more networks meet than any other. in seattle that's the westen building which, actually, i did not visit and don't know a whole lot about. but if not in that top dozen, it's sort of the very next tier of most important buildings. um, but this thing that's interesting about it is that they are, there's a kind of publicness to it. you know, yes, you know, the buildings are highly secure, and you can't just walk in, and there aren't at least yet, you know, kind of brewery tours of the internet, but there's a lot of conversation about where you are, where one network is and where another network is and where are we in the same place

so we can physically connect one route tore another. and a lot of that conversation happens among about a very relatively small group of about 900 network engineers -- 300 network engineers who gather under the banner of the north american network operators group. if you talk about going to conferences to network, they literally go to conferences to network, and they do it about three times a year. they meet, their annual meeting is three times a year because those social ties are so important, and they drink a lot of beer, and they figure out -- they trust each other, and they figure out if you're clueful or not, clueful being the opposite of clueless. and if so, you know, does it make sense for me to connect my network to your network, or perhaps i should connect my network to your network, and i'll pay you as well, you know, we'll enter into some business arrangement. but it is all about the space in between, it is all about trusting the other engineer to make sure that things are working properly in order to create this network of networks. and it all happens in these sort

of enormous building-sized jumbles of these yellow fiberoptic cables. and then the part, the part that i love the most is that then at some point it hits the dirt, you know, at some point the internet, these buildings are connected to the earth. they're immovable. you know, their geography's very specific, and that's what this room is. it's called a fiber vault. and if the rest of these buildings are kind of like walking into a machine, sort of loud and cold to keep the machines cool, and, um, you know, the hard floors and high ceilings and, you know, just an incredibly sort of overwhelming environment. when you walk into this room, it's hot, and it's still, and it smells like dirt because this is where the fibers come out of the ground. and this in particular is in a building in ashbush, virginia --

ashburn, virginia, which is a strange place because most of the important buildings are in amsterdam and london and new york. there are a few outliers, and ashburn, virginia, right near dulles airport is one of them. so you end up with network engineers talking about ashburn as if it's one of these big cities when it's an unincorporated suburb. the key building is owned, you can see the dulles airport runways. and because this is a place where -- because so many networks are meeting and bandwidth becomes so abundant and cheap, you end up with this sort of parasitic activity where data centers -- which i'm describing as the places where data is stored -- gather around these distribution depots, these places where all the networks meet. you can see those kind of aircraft carrier-like buildings around the handful of buildings at the center. and then a piece of the book was excerpted a few weeks ago with the, um, sensational headline

"the bull's eye of america's internet" with a map of this and a red concentric circle around it. and the company that owns this building, all week we were tweeting we are the bull's eye of america's internet because this is what they do. they provide space and a sort of environment with the proper care and feeding for network equipments so networks can come and connect one to the other. ..

inside are usually four, six or eight strands of fiber and a kind of plastic wrapper and a copper, another copper wrapper that send electricity through the wire to power the repeaters that exist every 50 miles or so, these big bluefin tuna like things that sit on the ocean floor. the principle is incredibly simple. light goes in on one end of the ocean and comes out of the other. there is all this fantastically complex materials and processing technology and forward air record correction and all these complicated algorithms but the basic geography is incredibly clear that you have a landing station on one shore of the ocean, a kind of a house-like structure tucked away in some seaside neighborhood and then a tube under the ocean. it is that other dimension, the one, if, thickness of a garden hose, it is 5,000

mile length or 8,000 mile length seems almost incomprehensible to comprehend there is the a manhole like this, this being particularly beautiful one. question is there a manhole on the beach where the cable end? the answer was yes, there is actually a manhole on the beach where the cable lands. what is so remarkable the cables often stretch from the same places between the same places they always stretched in the 150 year history of telegraph cables. off then between classic port cities from new york to lisbon to hong kong, to singapore, to mombasa. it is always tracing the same path, the historic trade routes. i wanted to see one of these cables being built. which was, would serve a rare historical moment. there hasn't been a new transatlantic kabl built in 10 years. there will be one next summer. but, this is my friend simon cooper, who i have never

actually met. we only sort of communicated by telephone and through his videoconferencing link. he works, he switched jobs, he worked until recently for top deck communications, which is the communications wing of tata the big industrial conglomerate based, big indian industrial conglomerate which is based in singapore. the undersea cable industry is dominated almost entirely by englishmen and they're all 42 because they all started with the beginning of the boom about 20 years ago. and he has this incredibly expansive geographic imagination. he says things like this. and tata was born out of when they bought a network out of bankruptcy, a link across the atlantic and a link across the pacific. they started adding pieces to it until essentially they had a continuous loop around the world. you can bio wave light one direction or the other. if the cable breaks on one side they send it around the other way which seems like a

incredit whether i amazing way of thinking about the geography of earth. because prices are always falling on transatlantic and trans-pacific routes is find new places that weren't wired. which meant primarily in the persian gulf and africa. so three years ago africa had essentially one cable down the west coast. now there are three down the west coast and three down the east coast. and it was one of those cables that i wanted to see being installed. but when i said i really, can, do you have any cables landing, are there any cables being constructed soon? he said, yeah, we'll keep you posted. i was worried he would say guam or also building a cable or somalia which seemed like a bad place to go sit on the beach. and instead, it was a cable from lisbon, and so a little after 9:00 on a monday morning, this guy walked out of the water. i carrying a lightweight nylon line, that was the

first link between, between land and sea. and so they pulled the line on the beach and the bulldozer started and brought it out to the cabling ship, a special ship. then a bulldozer started to pull the cable in. then it was floated on these buoys, on these orange boories. -- buoys. you can see the english engineers looking on. once the cable was in place the buy in the wetsuit who was a spanish underwater construction worker, like a pirate with a big hoop earing, walked back into the surf with a big knife and started cutting the buoys off. the cable, the buoys would pop up out of the water and the cable would drop and the skiff would chase them down. he would do that the whole way, the whole kilometer to the ship. they give him a glass of juice and cookie and he would jump in and swam back and would have a cigarette when he got to the beach.

that was the first piece that put the cable in place. and then once it sort of came ashore they had to strip back the kind of extra layers of steel coating that are on the cable close to shore to keep anchors from going, from running over it and breaking it. which meant that these, big guys with tattoos and hacksaws start hacking away at the cable. first getting the steel mesh out and working more delicately to take the sort of plastic sheathing. finally working with the fibers like jewelers where they're actually fusing the fibers together with the cable that came down the hill from the landing station and fusing them with a hole punch machine that sort of heats them together. so when you see these guys, you see these guys going at the internet with a hacksaw it starts to seem a lot less like a more fuss blob and seems like a lot more physical thing. and then when the tide goes out they sort of put this steelcase around it.

and try to get it as buried as possible without having to put on their scuba gear for that sort of first, those first dangerous feet in the water. and what's remarkable that it's the, it's, you know, that technology, again, is, you know, is astounding in the capacity that you can put through a, a single fiber but the both physically the sort of in gross terms and culturally it's the same it has been for 100 years. this was the picture from the telegraph archives, museum and archivessy essentially the exact same thing right down to the english engineer, the guy in the hat in the back pointing and local laborers and the ship and the cable coming up on the beach in hong kong. and then when the process is done over the course of three or four days the ship steams off, 8,000 miles down the coast of africa, laying, paying the cable off of the back and then the people in

this village near lisbon, you know, life goes back to normal. they put the manhole cover back on. they cover it with sand and it is kind of there forgotten. nobody talks about it. but that seems, that doesn't seem right to me. it seems like, you know, we should be talking about this. there's a, every time, we talked about the cloud but obviously the cloud isn't a cloud and it seems like every time that we put more, you know, we give more to the cloud we give up some responsibility for it. we forget about it. we put the sand over it, when in fact we should be having a conversation about what that is. there is a great neil stevenson line that says wired people should know something about wires. so want to finish with a story about my visit to two data centers which are the first ground update at that centers of the number one and number two most visited web sites, facebook and google. both whom made the same decision about five years

apart was to build their data centers in central oregon, not quite in the same place but 100 to 150 miles away from each other but mostly for the same reason. if the exchange points, places where networks meet are often in these major cities, that places where data centers are, sort of end up on two poles. they either gather where we are or around these exchange points and in places like virginia or silicon valley. or they go to the place that it is absolutely most efficient for them to be which is often someplace cold with lots of cheap power. like, central oregon, like quincy in washington where microsoft was sort of one of the first to do that. to put their big data center in quince system i'm sure somebody here has probably been there. but the thing that was so striking about my visit to these two places was the degree to which facebook saw its data center in a place called primeville, oregon, as a show piece.

facebook embraced primeville and primeville embraced facebook. there was a big celebration with facebook coming in with enormous machine not bringing as many jobs as they might have liked but definitely bringing spirit to the town. turns out apple moved in directly across the street. these are massive buildings. 300, the first of three buildings planned. so 300,000 square foot building the size of three wal-marts. wal-mart being the measure is of all things big, and uses as much power as, uses more power than the entire county that it sits in. and yet is sort of taking the place of the industry that had left. you get a sense of it sort of coming out of the earth and coming out of the landscape and if before i went i thought it was going to be sort of a industrial blight it was the opposite. it was sort of surprisingly

beautiful thing and this thing the town absolutely embraced. which for facebook has really become a show piece. there's a joke to be made about that. that sort of facebook is playing fast and loose with our privacy and everybody can come over and see but it seems to me to sort of embody the idea, this is somewhat belongs to you. you know, that this is, the things in here are in part yours. there's a lot of pride in that. so you have a building that's a real hot rod that is one of the most efficient data centers because it can be sort of designed from the ground up and optimized to use as little energy as possible. and then, really probably the most beautiful data center you will ever see. most sort of look like a seam my underbelly like a electrician went absolutely crazy. but face book lined everything up perfectly. each one of the blue lights has a terabyte hard drive. the building as rows and rows of them like stacks in a library.

being there and even knowing that it is difficult to make a leap between sort of knowing the sort of emotional resonance of some of the things this contains, you know the announcements of new babies and new jobs and deaths and many more bannal things and knowing that it he is here. there is big leap of the imagination required to connect that abstraction with those things that it contains but it is sort of a start. it is nice to know it is actually there and the library analogy is a good one. this is the place that contains these things. but my experience at google was essentially the exact opposite. where facebook had sort of opened wide the doors and, you know, spent the entire day answering questions and making sure i understood which had been the case as well in dozens and dozens of the other pieces of the internet that i had visited at google i was, you know, i invited myself over. they said sure, come on

over. and then was essentially given a tour of the parking lot. and when i said, well can you tell me bit what is going on inside these buildings? i'm sure that is information we have internally but not something we share. i'm sure they do know what is going on inside the buildings. sorted continue to play out the farce with the visit to the googlers vegetable patch which was fallow which it was winter. and lunch of salmon and greens and peanut butter cups. the sort of invitation for each person in turn invited to lunch to tell me how much they liked working at google. the degree to which this was the outlyer among dozens and dozens of places i visited was really striking. what is even more striking if not hypocritical given google's mission statement of organizing and distributing the world's information and the sense that i had they should be held to a higher standard. given how much we trust, how much we entrust them, that

trust wasn't returned and there was a sense that, don't worry, we'll take care of it. all of you don't need to understand this. unlike the dozens of other network engineers who had made sure i understood this and could then share that. then when i said, oh, i'm disappointed not to have, not to have get a chance to see inside these buildings, the response was that governors and senators had been dispointed toot. which was a prescient comment and now governors and senators are investigating google for these privacy things [laughing] but it's, i mean is that exceptionalism that was so striking to me and equally so, the sense that, you know, this doesn't, this doesn't have to be hidden behind closed doors. there was another way of thinking about this. when i, when i left google and drove, drove down the hill to portland i passed the bonneville dam which is a fortress.

there are these huge gates off the highway and you sort of go through the gates and a army corps of engineer guard searched your car and waves you in. once you're inside, there's a sort of museum and fish ladder, you can watch the fish go. and a sense that the complicated, 75 plus years of history are discussed and presented and considered and shared. this is somehow public infrastructure. this is many so how belongs to all of us. seems if that, certainly this is a sensitive place. certainly this is a place that had security issue of some sort and that's very clear and sort of every piece of it. but what is equally clear it somehow belongs to us and there's a sense that we should know what goes on in there. of course google is private company and you know, the argument, that there are, there's a competitive advantage from keeping their data center private makes a lot of sense but it is also

clear there's, this can't be a black box given how much we have given to google and other companies and how much we give to the internet. so that's, it is that sense of openness that i have sort of kept in mind and that's the kind of thing that i feel like a conversation about what the internet should be should consider. so, thank you. [applause] i'm happy to take a few questions. i guess you should come up to the mic as well if you want. >> in your book you allude to a couple difficult poems that came to mind like, about the technology of being dinosaurs when the skins came off. what i've been learning on the internet i've always kept in mind an elephant's

child. they, there was six honest men that taught me all i knew, who, what, when, where, and who. which one do you think honest men the internet needs now? >> so the who? >> who, what, where, when, and why are the ones that teach us what's going on in the world. >> uh-huh. >> and the internet is treated like as you pointed out as a cloud and all this type of stuff. >> uh-huh. >> what is the question people should be asking the most about the internet now? >> for me the first question was, where? where is it? and then the second question was, what is it? the third question, was, why is it here? and the why is it here was amazing in that it was a surprisingly human story. you know the buildings like, 60 huts, there is some sort

of geography where they 60 huts sits at elbow of lower manhattan. always an important spot for telecommunications and first way out of town, the holland tunnel. the there is always a carries matic salesperson. there is always somebody who convinced the first two networks to come and made this building someplace other networks would want to come, in the case of eqinex ashburn, that was very dramatic blue lights and really good snack bar all but adhering to a aesthetic principle the guy called cyberrific. that was the important point. i feel for now, for me having looked at the where, the what, and the who, the sort of how what else we could be consisting of the internet, of the internet that we have is really compelling. tubes is almost entirely, is entirely decrip tiff but interesting to start to

think what the descriptive possibilities are. you can find 30 different kinds of lettuce and fish and coffee beans and anything else you want but you probably have only one choice of internet. we're eating internet equivalent of iceberg lettuce. i think there is conversation that could be had, should be had what a different, what more choices about where our internet comes from would look like. >> thank you. >> yeah. >> all right you mentioned that the thickness of the wire that gives us internet is about that of a garden hose. what kind of precautions do they make this wire does not get severed or otherwise damaged? >> you have the undersea cables are about that thick, you know. international. they, they do get severed and damaged. you know whether, by dragging anchors or by under water landslides or earthquakes and when one of the under water cables is broken and the most famous

case was in 2006 off the coast of taiwan in luzon, there was a major earthquake that severed six of the eight cables connecting southeast asia and the internet was essentially knocked off-line. supposedly there was a major worldwide drop in spam and trading was halted in korea and there were major consequences. to fix it you have to send a ship out and though a grappling hook over the side. find the end of the cable. pick it up. find the other end of the cable. fuse each strand of fiber together and throw over the side. in luzon there were multiple breaks among multiple cables and took a matter of weeks and months to fix it. in terms of precaution it's interesting. because the biggest risk by far is from dragging anchors there is a group called the international cable protection committee whose job is essentially announce where the cables are. rather than hiding them. they try to broadcast where the cables are so anchors

don't break them. there is definitely a disconnect between the sense of security and sort of risk of the cables that the people who operate the cables have versus sort of some, some higher ups and most striking example of that i was getting ready to visit one of these cable landing stations and i was asked to speak with the head of the security for one of the big backbone companies. and he said we're happy to have you do this. we want to share how this works. but we ask that you not publish the location of the landing station. and if you enter the name of that company and the town that it is in, you know a big red flag lands on google maps and on his desk. so there's, not only that, but the fcc license, the landing license for all these cables is a matter of public record. so this secrecy is, is a is not very, the secrecy isn't the key to it at all. so.

go ahead. >> whand what kind of vulnerabilities are there for terrorists attacks on these stations or cutting cables? >> the, the, the, well, i mean the points of biggest concern are often the places where the networks meet, these major buildings. but again because these are, they sort of, there is kind of a publicness to that connection between networks they the companies that own the buildings are eager to announce where they are so everybody knows who's there so they can connect their networks and it is just not, it is not a very, doesn't make a whole lot of sense in that they're quite big buildings. they're difficult to, to destroy in any wholesale way. and it is not as if hitting a piece of them would have a major impact on the

internet. you're perceived trying to take down the global economy and you perhaps slowed down a few networks until morning. certainly these are secure places but it is as much a single wrap might have $75,000 worth of equipment, but rather than for terrorist reasons. it was interesting for me that the kind of, sort of higher up the food chain i got of internet people, people who operate the internet exchange points the less concerned they were about, talking about where they were because they recognize hiding them is not the way to do it. with the data centers it is interesting. google had, in dow had very recently had, satellite image on google maps had been scrubbed, not just, old but it was scrubbed. i have to admit i was a little bit didn't pointed because she recently changed it seemed so going get maps is was scrubbed and now it is a clear image. there is only no sign on the

door. there is a sign that says, industries, not google. facebook does have a big sign. so the security issues i mean, one of the other, one of the most major cuts, real successful attacks on the internet that actually had a big effect was silicon valley when a big, when somebody had clipped all the, essentially all the right cables in a manhole and it was determined to be out of a union dispute. somebody knew exactly which cables to cut. so the terrorist threat, for the, certainly for cyberterrorism, for attacks through the network is a lot greater concern than the physical infrastructure. yeah. >> could you talk a little bit about the economics. we're all interested in the cable i see. the undersea cables. could you tells who,

obviously the company that lays them pays for it but the economics of leasing the usage and how long the cables last, et cetera. >> yeah. so the, well, so everybody, the internet is never free. somebody is always paying somewhere and we sort of lose sight of that because we pay at home in a lump sum. we assume we get the rest of the internet and maybe that's capped or maybe it isn't but embedded in that are all of these other payments for the connections between networks. and ideally two networks will connect in a way that they call piering, they're piers. they exchange traffic on equal terms and each give to the other what it needs back. the transatlantic cables, the trans-pacific cables, those are owned by a few different types. some, there are a couple big consortia of verizon and deutsche telekom and things

like that a decade ago built these cables together and put them in the water which is usually somewhere 200, 300, $400 million. there are a couple of boutique firms that only own cables. there are a couple backbone companies like level 3 or tata that own their own cables. they're often the basic unit is their renting they're leasing, of a certain number of 10 gigabyte per second waves of light. as might a google. google or facebook both run big global networks of their own. at a big enough level they will also be leasing a 10 gigabyte per second or 40 or 50 of them across the atlantic. so that's -- they will either have agreements or all buy capacity on each other's cables. so if one cable is cut they are already have space reserved on another cable as backup. and the problem the englishmen who run the

cables like to say that the capacity is cheap as chips. always getting cheaper because the, if, at the moment the major, the dominant unit is this 10 gigabyte per second wave, you can switch out what are called the line cards. these things look like a stick of or pack of wrigley's gum are incredibly dense and cost about as much as a laptop. pop out the 10 gigabyte per second once and put in brand new 40 gigabyte per second ones and spend a lot of time to tune the wave lengths. so they all fit together like a chord. suddenly your cable has four times more capacity. so the new cable that is being built next year isn't because there's, the other cables are filled but actually a shorter route. it is fewer miles, which is meant to appeal to the wall street trading firms. that essentially arbitrage based on the price differences between new york and lon done.

-- london. being two or three mill seconds closer to the other city is worth a new 200 or $300 million cable. so. any other questions? yeah. >> could you speak to the beginning of the internet where it began and how it was first connected? was it the same system we have today? >> yeah, sure. in tybes i begin at the beginning. i begin with the, with the first physical piece of the internet. there was a sort of intellectual history before it about packets which the had distributed networks and sort of this idea it wasn't a direct connection but could pass in smaller bytes between places. my relentless focus was on the physical places and in that light there is, it turned out that the first piece of the internet, the first machine came, arrived on the campus of ucla labor

day weekend, 1969. and the guy who was the professor, a guy named leonard klein rock whose lab it was coming to is still there today in the same office. the machine, interface message processor, was until recently, sort of under a bunch of coffee cups in a conference room across from his office. he finally succeeded turning into it the kleinrock internet history reading room or something like that which i haven't had a chance to see. but that is the kind of place where the internet, he likes to say, took its first breath with a connection from there to stanford research institute in menlo park which is the first two nodes of the hyper pet, which was predecessor to the internet or rather the first network that came the internet when other networks were attached to it at the moment when the linga was established between all the

different networks emerged, near as '83 or near '84 when tcip said this is the way networks are going to communicate. you still that when your internet breaks at home. with that it was network of networks, the arpa net connected to the physicist network connected to the emerging bank networks and became the internet. and then there was al gore. [laughter] no, no, who, who sponsored the key piece of legislation that essentially, in a way privatized the internet and allowed all the privately-owned, autonomous networks to bloom and in '94, '95, '96 period. yeah. >> you mentioned buildings for these networks where they come together. are there real estate companies like reits that, that invest in building these buildings and leasing them? >> yes. very lucky ones.

it is, a couple of the buildings i was in portland yesterday and portland has this great internet building and was talking to the guy who managed it. i hadn't been to the internet in about a year and i don't think i mentioned that the internet has this really specific smell, a sort of burnt toast kind of smell. it was great to walk back into the building and there was the same smell. home on the internet. but the, he talked about how, how lucky the owners feel that they sort of, they kind of happened into this building. this building, became the key interconnection point in portland. essentially the dominant spot in oregon where the networks of the internet meet which is incredibly valuable. you know, you're charging rent for both the cage but also charging rent for what is called the crossconnect, the connection between one cage and the other. so there is, his building is

owned by a you know, i don't know if it is a reit precisely but an investment company. and eqinoex is essentially in the real estate business. they own the land. i wasn't surprised to see in ashburn they paid off their underlying ground lease. this is not a campus that can be moved. they can't move it across the street. it's like a coral reef. absolutely created in this place and that piece of dirt is incredibly important. then of course the land around ashburn is becoming incredibly valuable for that, so. >> in your book you quoted churchhill about how we create our buildings and our buildings create us. in terms of the architecture not only the architect of specific buildings but this massive interdependent architecture that has been created, these tubes, what are they doing to us?

>> hmmm. my starting point was certainly a concern that i was losing touch with the physical world and was living entirely in front of the screen, and one of the great pleasures of visiting the internet when you visit the internet you're not on the internet. i put my phone in my bag and it stayed there and i spent a day with these people. that engagement was very satisfying. that's sort of one way of thinking about it. you know, i mean, my sense of where the internet's going, well, i mean the other way of talking about it, as there is, you guys have philosophical idea of the network of networks. it seems sort of impossible to, to disappear. you know, there are, if it disappears in its current form, two more networks connect and there is a new internet net in some way.

there was a article in the new yorker, my internet. i don't know if you saw this. he imagined there was internet that split. there was only one pun people on it. he woos tired of it so starting a an internet within the internet. it is always linguistic this place of metaphor that impacts, what is this big thing we spend all our day on? no, sorry. >> follow up. >> please. >> the thing i was concerned about principally, this acceleration of interdependence and interconnectedness and how this is changing us as human beings in individually and collectively? >> one of, the, i don't know. i mean, it's a hard thing to answer. one then i was really struck by was, was the, and you

talk about the churchhill quote, about we shape our buildings and our buildings shape us, is the, i mean all of this infrastructure is only 10 or 15 years old. you know, it is all relatively incredibly new and we're just, some of the newest buildings are the ones that are the most monumental that seem to say, that seem to want to express in these places the ideals of the things that hold them. both facebook's data center and a great building in london called telehouse that looks like it should look. it is meant to celebrate what's going on inside and is the kind of key building in london. but, you know, the thing that is somewhat heartening, and this is complicated. i don't want to sort of go too far with it but i'm very struck by facebook's humanness. i'm very struck by the idea that the building seems to represent an idea, this ideal that it's about people, that it is about us. that should be reflected in the whole of everything there.

there should be a rigor in that and the contrast is little bit easy but i was struck in the opposite direction by google's inhumanness. this entirely machine. this is entirely algorith algorithm-driven. this isn't about any sort of compassion but instead the search for some impossible perfect information so. that's a big idea. i'm not sure that is all baked but. >> we're just about out of time. we'll have this be our last question, if that's all right? >> sure. >> oh dear. >> i'm one of these people who doesn't really understand a lot of the fist i can is of this. >> me too. >> i sort of had the idea that there were spots where the signal was transmitted through the ire and not through a fiber-optic fiber. but now, what i'm hearing

here all the way from the picture on the screen to the picture on my cousin in australia's screen there is find wire connecting -- fiber-optic wire connecting, is that true. >> yeah. >> you taught me something. >> good, thank you. [laughter] i think we should stop there then. thank you. [applause] ladder. i mean, as i >> in terms of female political representation, we're behind iraq and north korea. so americans like to congratulate themselves all the time on we're number one on all these things. we're just not. you know, we're not doing very well in infant

mortality. we're not doing very well in maternal mortality. obviously we talked so much about things like obesity and good health but in terms of women leading, we really are not doing anywhere near as well as we should be doing. and we shouldn't be doing it not because it's fairly egalitarian. that was our early argument. we should have women in high places because that's the fairness principle. well i believe in the fairness principle but i also believe in pragmatism. if everything worked in america, law firms were chugging along really well and hospitals were running like clock work, and congress was really doing a bang-up job, i would say, well, you know, things are pretty food. good. we need women in leadership positions because nobody is leading as well as they should be. and if we're, ignoring a big chunk of the population, maybe that accounts for why

the leadership is not as good as it ought to be >> we had a lot of discussions about the, about the vetting. i wasn't happy with the product and, you know, in the movie obviously you have a process that's 10 weeks long that's distilled down into two hours. so, you know, out of necessity some of the timelines are rearranged but it's the true story what happened. on the question of the vetting, we got to the end of the process and senator mccain hadn't determined who he wanted to pick. we had the realization that we can't win with any of the candidates as displayed in the movie, pawlenty, romney. it was extraordinarily difficult set of election circumstances that we were going to be outspent by $200 million. the president, president

bush, who i had honor to work for, his approval rating was in the 30s. barack obama was speaking to crowds of hundreds of thousands in europe. there was a fervor for his candidacy on the part of the press. and trying to figure out, trying to figure out how to win and, i'm the person who said we should take a look at sarah palin, from a, you know, from alaska. >> are you proud of that moment? >> you know, i, that moment freezes and slows down in my brain. [laughter] you know, standing, we spent a couple of days at the jersey shore and i remember everything, i remember every aspect of the moment. i can smell the smell of long beach island. you know, the salt air. you know the cars in front of the house. and i picked up the phone and i called rick davis and you said, we should take a look at sarah palin. the vetting that was done, i

said to rick that it's very important. rick was in charge of the vetting process and the team of the campaign that she be fully and completely vetted like all the other candidates. can we do with 10 lawyers or 20 lawyers in a couple days what we've done with three lawyers over a couple of weeks where all the other candidates? there were four parts to that vet. and the first part, and you could do a document stri on this alone. >> we're not going to do that. i will bring in jay roach. >> i do want to make the part about the vet, what we're talking about. because i think there is a lot of context on this. is that the first part was the tax information, the medical record and all that stuff. and it was clear. the second part is depicted in the movie where mark salter and i have a discussion operationally how the campaign is going to run. this is how your life is going to change. the third part of the vet

was the questionnaire which was really fitness for office. that we conducted and fourth part was interview with john mccain himself. so what john mccain and sarah palin said to each other is unknown to me. it's known to them. the questionnaire that culver house did and the results of it, we didn't have the insight on lack of preparedness. we'll obviously talk about that more >> you know, as important as this project has become to my life, i can scarcely remember the first time i learned about this historic congressional race between two future presidents in 1789 but what i do remember reading about it in a book and it was treated with the typical one or two sentences you would see about this congressional race. and i thought to myself, way to bury the lead. all of sudden we're in this

race between two future presidents, james madison, james monroe. they're debating the most important issues we talked about as a country. whether we should have a bill of rights. what kind of union we should have. all of sudden you're on the next page they're in the first congress. i said way to bury the lead. i decided i would read everything i could about this 1789 election. what i found no one had ever written about it before i decided i was going to tell this story. the book founding rivals, coopens at the inauguration of george washington. what many people don't know is that when he took the oath of office, two of the 13 states were outside the union. north carolina and rhode island did not ratify the constitution because of their concern that it was missing a bill of rights, a guaranty of fundamental liberty abouts. this was prominent for the antifederalists throughout the continent. the common denominator of antifederalists which james monroe was one they opposed the constitution. many of them came at it from different angles.

some genuinelily believed i could not have a union that covered all these different and diverse states. there may be independent states or regional con federal sis but they didn't think any government could be ever suitable to this entire continent. james monroe represent ad majority of antifederalist opinion in his objection to the constitution was centered around it missing a bill of rights. while washington took the oath of office two states, new york, and virginia, were agitating for a new constitutional convention. in the words of james madison and george washington, they were terrified at this prospect. they believed it would be infiltrated by enemies of the new government and the constitution would be scrapped and done away with and our union would be fractured, never ever to come together again. >> up next on "book tv", .