Samanth Subramanian: “All technology is human”

The author of The Web Beneath the Waves on the growing influence of Big Tech over the Internet’s undersea cables, and the political implications of this

Reporting on submarine cables must have meant negotiating a secretive world. What was the hardest door to open?

Author Samanth Subramanian (Chinky Shukla)

The hardest doors to open remain the big tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, which have, of late, been laying/funding two out of every three new cables. We know how reliant we are on these companies for software, social media, AI services, and other aspects of the Internet — so it was a shock to me to find out how reliant we are on them for even the physical infrastructure of it. They refused to grant interviews with any of their cable engineers or executives, which made it difficult for me to ascertain why they got into the cable business. It isn’t hard to guess, though. The lifeblood of their business is data, and given that the cost of a cable is — if not inconsequential — certainly hugely affordable to these cash-rich companies, it makes perfect sense that they want to control the cables through which this data flows as well.

The other surprising thing about this infrastructure is, in a sense, how little has changed from 150 years ago. If you overlay a map of the 19th century’s submarine telegraph network over a map of the 21st century’s undersea cable network, you’ll see that many cables still take the same routes, land in the same spots, stay dense or sparse in the same places. In one sense, this is a reflection of how the nodes of economic power are still shockingly similar to those of the late 19th century. With one exception: there are many more cables in the South China Sea and in South East Asia in general, which is a sure indicator of the rise of China and its immediate sphere of influence.

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What is surprisingly universal is how reliant all these places have become on their cables. But the degree of that reliance differs, of course. An island like Taiwan, with 15 undersea cables landing on its shores, and with an economy that is deeply integrated into global finance, will feel the shock of a total cable outage much, much more deeply than say Tonga, which has just the one international cable running out to its capital. When Tonga experienced an outage of that cable, life ground to a halt — but since it is so remote from the hurly burly of the global economy, it was able to bear that shock a little easier. Which is to say: it wasn’t as if stock exchange transactions worth billions of dollars a day, for instance, had to be suspended. But this is also a reminder that places like Tonga are under-connected — without backup options — for a reason: cables are increasingly laid by companies that have no real incentive to link up small, isolated communities.

A single damaged cable can isolate an entire nation, as happened in Tonga. Do you think governments have underestimated how dangerously dependent modern societies have become on a surprisingly fragile piece of infrastructure? Are undersea cables becoming the new front line of geopolitical competition?

I think they’ve underestimated that dependence for a long time, but they’re slowly starting to wake up to it. And they’re trying, in clumsy ways, to ward off that kind of ruinous damage. The UK, for instance, has two warships constantly patrolling its waters to protect its undersea infrastructure. The Scandinavian nations have the same. Taiwan is trying to figure out alternatives in case China cuts all its cables in an act of war. The US has been cutting China out of cable projects, because it is suspicious of Chinese hardware companies that might snoop on cable traffic on behalf of their government. Companies within the industry will point out that malicious sabotage of cables still makes up only a tiny fraction of all the cable cuts in a calendar year. But governments are beginning to think that that fraction will rise, or at least that even the occasional act of sabotage can cause real havoc.

You write about ‘grey-zone warfare’, acts that fall below the threshold of open conflict. How difficult was it to separate genuine accidents from deliberate acts of sabotage?

Very difficult. Close to impossible. The ocean is still a vast place, and it’s impossible to keep track of what ships do on open waters. And the truth is that accidents happen, quite frequently — and that the method of the accident (such as a dropped anchor) can also be the method of sabotage. You’d need to show malicious intent in a court of law to prove sabotage, but because the law of the sea is so vague and difficult to enforce, given all the gaps in jurisdiction, prosecutions are rare to non-existent. This is, of course, what grey-zone actors count on when they set out to wreck a cable on purpose.

The companies that own or finance many of these cables are mostly technology giants rather than telecom operators. Has control over the internet shifted from governments to a handful of corporations? If so, what does that mean for digital sovereignty?

Control has absolutely shifted just as you describe. We’ve already seen what that has meant for our experience of the Internet: on a day-to-day basis, you and I and millions of other people are trapped inside the walled gardens created by just a few companies. And for those companies to now also control the cables of the internet, determining when and where they will be laid, is truly frightening.

An example: many wealthy or powerful countries are now able to demand of these companies that the customer data of their citizens must reside on servers on their soil. Smaller countries have no such leverage. At the same time, they need increased internet connectivity — so, when a tech giant offers to land a cable on their shores, these countries aren’t exactly able to make demands about customer data or privacy or anything else. At a time when many wealthy governments are growing increasingly jumpy about their sovereign control over their data infrastructure, poorer nations find that if they want better internet at all, they must relinquish some of their sovereign control to Western tech giants.

One of the pleasures of the book is that it never becomes a technical manual. Delightfully, it is filled with people: engineers, divers, sailors and repair crews. Why was it important for you to tell the story through human lives instead of technology alone?

Because all technology is human! There’s no such thing as neutral technology: everything is created by humans and operated by humans, with all the biases and prejudices and habits and tendencies that these humans bring to their work. Those are the things I really wanted to understand, because they’re the qualities that shape our experience of the Internet today, for better or worse.

Your previous books explored subjects as different as Sri Lanka’s civil war, JBS Haldane, and India’s coastline. Looking back, do you see a common thread running through your work? Is it ultimately about uncovering the hidden systems (political, scientific or physical) that shape everyday life?

I think that’s one aspect, although you could say that every journalist aims to uncover such systems. My main motivation, I feel, is to put human beings at the centre of big, important historical or political or cultural currents. To show how they shape these currents and are, in turn, shaped by them. These bigger ebbs and flows of history are so abstract that we — or at least I — can never really understand them until I see how they encounter the experiences of individual people. Then things fall into place. So, whether that is the coast as a place with a uniquely cosmopolitan history, or a decades-long war, or the intersection of politics and genetics, or undersea cables, my quest is always to understand them through human stories.

After spending time with the people who build and repair these networks, what, in your view, is the biggest misconception the public has about how resilient or vulnerable the Internet really is?

I think one of the illusions of globalisation is the erasure of borders and the sudden arrival of a digital world. Nonsense. Borders are as influential as ever, and the digital world depends entirely on physical stuff: glass and plastic and metals and rare earths and chips, the supply chains of which are being warped and broken and reshaped even as we speak. We’ve seen the recent global panics about chip shortages and control of rare earth minerals, and there’s still an overwhelming reliance on oil and gas. Globalisation itself is vulnerable — and therefore the Internet, which one could say is the chief agent of globalisation, is also very vulnerable.

Nawaid Anjum is an independent journalist, translator and poet. He lives in New Delhi.