Stephenson, Neal - Mother Earth Mother Board.pdf - Stephenson, Neal - margozap

Archive | 4.12 - Dec 1996 | features

Mother Earth Mother Board

The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three

continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.

By Neal Stephenson

In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace

of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic

Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable

Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean

Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk;

also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of

global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and

technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the

longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired .

Information moves, or we move to it. Moving to it has rarely been popular and is growing

unfashionable; nowadays we demand that the information come to us. This can be

accomplished in three basic ways: moving physical media around, broadcasting radiation

through space, and sending signals through wires. This article is about what will, for a short

time anyway, be the biggest and best wire ever made.

Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space: the two points at

opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point, even if they are on

opposite sides of the planet. The cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the

geometry of the world of commerce and politics and ideas that we live in. The financial districts

of New York, London, and Tokyo, linked by thousands of wires, are much closer to each other

than, say, the Bronx is to Manhattan.

Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble bits struggled down

the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the New, it must have made people's hair stand

up on end in more than just the purely electrical sense - it must have seemed supernatural.

Perhaps this sort of feeling explains why when Samuel Morse stretched a wire between

Washington and Baltimore in 1844, the first message he sent with his code was "What hath God

wrought!" - almost as if he needed to reassure himself and others that God, and not the Devil,

was behind it.

During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought!" a plethora of different codes,

signalling techniques, and sending and receiving machines were patented. A web of wires was

spun across every modern city on the globe, and longer wires were strung between cities. Some

of the early technologies were, in retrospect, flaky: one early inventor wanted to use 26-wire

cables, one wire for each letter of the alphabet. But it quickly became evident that it was best to

keep the number of individual wires as low as possible and find clever ways to fit more

information onto them.

This requires more ingenuity than you might think - wires have never been perfectly

transparent carriers of data; they have always degraded the information put into them. In

general, this gets worse as the wire gets longer, and so as the early telegraph networks

spanned greater distances, the people building them had to edge away from the

seat-of-the-pants engineering practices that, applied in another field, gave us so many boiler

explosions, and toward the more scientific approach that is the standard of practice today.

Still, telegraphy, like many other forms of engineering, retained a certain barnyard, improvised

quality until the Year of Our Lord 1858, when the terrifyingly high financial stakes and

shockingly formidable technical challenges of the first transatlantic submarine cable brought

certain long-simmering conflicts to a rolling boil, incarnated the old and new approaches in the

persons of Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and Professor William Thomson, respectively, and brought

the conflict between them into the highest possible relief in the form of an inquiry and a scandal

that rocked the Victorian world. Thomson came out on top, with a new title and name - Lord

Kelvin.

Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the

1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century

California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable

projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke's book How the World Was One ). The only things that

have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more

bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.

Those early cables were eventually made to work, albeit not without founding whole new fields

of scientific inquiry and generating many lucrative patents. Undersea cables, and long-distance

communications in general, became the highest of high tech, with many of the same

connotations as rocket science or nuclear physics or brain surgery would acquire in later

decades. Some countries and companies (the distinction between countries and companies is

hazy in the telco world) became very good at it, and some didn't. AT&T acquired a dominance of

the field that largely continues to this day and is only now being seriously challenged by a

project called FLAG: the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe.

In which the Hacker Tourist encounters: Penang, a microcosm of the Internet. Rubber,

Penang's chief commodity, and its many uses: protecting wires from the elements and

concupiscent wanderers from harmful DNA. Advantages of chastity, both for hacker

tourists and for cable layers. Bizarre Spectaclesin the jungles of southern Thailand.

FLAG, its origins and its enemies.

5° 241 24.932' N, 100° 241 19.748' E City of George Town, Island of Penang, Malaysia

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 necessitates a lot of banging around

through meatspace. Over the course of two months, photographer Alex Tehrani and I hit six

countries and four continents trying to get a grip on this longest, fastest, mother of all wires. I

took a GPS receiver with me so that I could have at least a general idea of where the hell we

were. It gave me the above reading in front of a Chinese temple around the corner from the

Shangri-La Hotel in Penang, Malaysia, which was only one of 100 peculiar spots around the

globe where I suddenly pulled up short and asked myself, "What the hell am I doing here?"

You might well ask yourself the same question before diving into an article as long as this one.

The answer is that we all depend heavily on wires, but we hardly ever think about them. Before

learning about FLAG, I knew that data packets could get from America to Asia or the Middle

East, but I had no idea how. I knew that it had something to do with wires across the bottom of

the ocean, but I didn't know how many of those wires existed, how they got there, who

controlled them, or how many bits they could carry.

According to legend, in 1876 the first sounds transmitted down a wire were Alexander Graham

Bell saying "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." Compared with Morse's "What hath God

wrought!'' this is disappointingly banal - as if Neil Armstrong, setting foot on the moon, had

uttered the words: "Buzz, could you toss me that rock hammer?'' It's as though during the 32

years following Morse's message, people had become inured to the amazing powers of wire.

Today, another 120 years later, we take wires completely for granted. This is most unwise.

People who use the Internet (or for that matter, who make long-distance phone calls) but who

don't know about wires are just like the millions of complacent motorists who pump gasoline

into their cars without ever considering where it came from or how it found its way to the corner

gas station. That works only until the political situation in the Middle East gets all screwed up,

or an oil tanker runs aground on a wildlife refuge. In the same way, it behooves wired people to

know a few things about wires - how they work, where they lie, who owns them, and what sorts

of business deals and political machinations bring them into being.

In the hopes of learning more about the modern business of really, really long wires, we spent

much of the summer of 1996 in pursuits such as: being arrested by toothless, shotgun-toting

Egyptian cops; getting pushed around by a drunken smuggler queen on a Thai train; vaulting

over rustic gates to take emergency shits in isolated fields; being kept awake by groovy

Eurotrash backpackers singing songs; blowing Saharan dust out of cameras; scraping equatorial

mold out of fountain pens; stuffing faded banknotes into the palms of Egyptian service-industry

professionals; trying to persuade non-English-speaking taxi drivers that we really did want to

visit the beach even though it was pouring rain; and laundering clothes by showering in them.

We still missed more than half the countries FLAG touches.

Our method was not exactly journalism nor tourism in the normal sense but what might be

thought of as a new field of human endeavor called hacker tourism: travel to exotic locations in

search of sights and sensations that only would be of interest to a geek.

I will introduce sections with readings from my trusty GPS in case other hacker tourists would

like to leap over the same rustic gates or get rained on at the same beaches

5° 26.325' N, 100° 17.417' E Penang Botanical Gardens

Penang, one of the first sites visited by this hacker tourist partly because of its little-known

historical importance to wires, lies just off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. The British

acquired it from the local sultan in the late 1700s, built a pathetic fort above the harbor, and

named it, appropriately, after the hapless General Cornwallis. They set up a couple of churches

and established the kernel of a judicial system. A vigorous market grew up around them. A few

kilometers away, they built a botanical garden.

This seems like an odd set of priorities to us today. But gardens were not mere decorations to

the British - they were strategic installations.

The headquarters was Kew Gardens outside of London. Penang was one of the forward outposts,

and it became incomparably more important than the nearby fort. In 1876, 70,000 seeds of the

rubber tree, painstakingly collected by botanists in the Amazon rain forest, were brought to Kew

Gardens and planted in a greenhouse. About 2,800 of them germinated and were shipped to the

botanical gardens in Sri Lanka and Penang, where they propagated explosively and were used

to establish rubber plantations.

Most of these plantations were on the neighboring Malay Peninsula, a lumpy, bony tentacle of

land that stretches for 1,000 miles from Bangkok in the north to Singapore in the south, where

it grazes the equator. The landscape is a stalemate between, on one hand, the devastatingly

powerful erosive forces of continual tropical rainstorms and dense plant life, and, on the other

hand, some really, really hard rocks. Anything with the least propensity to be eroded did so a

long time ago and turned into a paddy. What's left are ridges of stone that rise almost vertically

from the landscape and are still mostly covered with rain forest, notwithstanding efforts by the

locals to cut it all down. The flat stuff is all used for something - coconuts, date palms, banana

trees, and above all, rubber.

Until artificial rubber was invented by the colony-impaired Germans, no modern economy could

exist without the natural stuff. All of the important powers had tropical colonies where rubber

was produced. For the Netherlands, it was Indonesia; for France, it was Indochina; for the

British, it was what they then called Malaya, as well as many other places.

Without rubber and another kind of tree resin called gutta-percha, it would not have been

possible to wire the world. Early telegraph lines were just naked conductors strung from pole to

pole, but this worked poorly, especially in wet conditions, so some kind of flexible but durable

insulation was needed. After much trial and error, rubber became the standard for terrestrial

and aerial wires while gutta-percha (a natural gum also derived from a tree grown in Malaya)

was used for submarine cables. Gutta-percha is humble-looking stuff, a nondescript brown crud

that surrounds the inner core of old submarine cables to a thickness of perhaps 1 centimeter,

but it was a wonder material back in those days, and the longer it remained immersed in salt

water, the better it got.

So far, it was all according to the general plan that the British had in mind: find some useful

DNA in the Americas, stockpile it at Kew Gardens, propagate it to other botanical gardens

around the world, make money off the proceeds, and grow the economy. Modern-day Penang,

however, is a good example of the notion of unintended consequences.

As soon as the British had established the rule of law in Penang, various kinds of Chinese people

began to move in and establish businesses. Most of them were Hokkien Chinese from north of

Hong Kong, though Cantonese, Hakka, and other groups also settled there. Likewise, Tamils and

Sikhs came from across the Bay of Bengal. As rubber trees began to take over the countryside,

a common arrangement was for Chinese immigrants to establish rubber plantations and hire

Indian immigrants (as well as Malays) as laborers.

The British involvement, then, was more catalytic than anything else. They didn't own the

rubber plantations. They merely bought the rubber on an open market from Chinese brokers

who in turn bought it from producers of various ethnicities. The market was just a few square

blocks of George Town where British law was enforced, i.e. where businessmen could rely on a

few basics like property rights, contracts, and a currency.

During and after World War II, the British lost what presence they had here. Penang fell to the

Japanese and became a base for German U-Boats patrolling the Indian Ocean. Later, there was

a somewhat messy transition to independence involving a communist insurrection and a war

with Indonesia. Today, Malaysia is one of Asia's economic supernovas and evidently has decided

that it will be second to none when it comes to the Internet. They are furiously wiring up the

place and have established JARING, which is the Malaysian Internet (this word is a somewhat

tortured English acronym that happens to spell out the Malay word for the Net).

If you have a look at JARING's homepage (www.jaring.my/jaring) , you will be confronted by a

link that will take you to a page reciting Malaysia's censorship laws, which, like most censorship

laws, are ridiculously vague and hence sort of creepy and yet, in the context of the Internet,

totally unworkable.

In a way, the architects of JARING are trying to run the Kew Gardens experiment all over again.

By adopting the Internet protocol for their national information infrastructure, they have copied

the same DNA that, planted in the deregulated telecom environment of the United States, has

grown like some unstoppable exotic weed. Now they are trying to raise the same plant inside a

hothouse (because they want it to flourish) but in a pot (because they don't want it to escape

into the wild).

They seem to have misunderstood both their own history and that of the Internet, which run

strangely parallel. Today the streets of George Town, Penang's main city, are so vivid, crowded,

and intensely multicultural that by comparison they make New York City look like Colonial

Williamsburg. Every block has a mosque or Hindu temple or Buddhist shrine or Christian church.

You can get any kind of food, hear any language. The place is thronged, but it's affluent, and it

works. It's a lot like the Internet.

Both Penang and the Internet were established basically for strategic military reasons. In both

cases, what was built by the military was merely a kernel for a much vaster phenomenon that

came along later. This kernel was really nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules. If you

wanted to follow those rules, you could participate, otherwise you were free to go elsewhere.

Because the protocol laid down a standard way for people to interact, which was clearly set out

and could be understood by anyone, it attracted smart, adaptable, ambitious people from all

over the place, and at a certain point it flew completely out of control and turned into something

that no one had ever envisioned: something thriving, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially

peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success.

JARING's link to the global Internet is over an undersea cable that connects it to the United

States. This is typical of many Southeast Asian countries, which are far better connected to the

US than they are to one another. But in late June of 1996, a barge called the Elbe appeared off

the coast of Penang. Divers and boats came ashore, braving an infestation of sea snakes, and

floated in a segment of armored cable that will become Malaysia's link to FLAG. The capacity of

that cable is theoretically some 5.3 Gbps. Much of this will be used for telephone and other

non-Internet purposes, but it can't help but serve as a major floodgate between JARING, the

censored pseudo-Internet of Malaysia, and the rest of the Net. After that, it will be interesting to

see how long JARING remains confined to its pot.

FLAG facts

The FLAG system, that mother of all wires, starts at Porthcurno, England, and proceeds to

Estepona, Spain; through the Strait of Gibraltar to Palermo, Sicily; across the Mediterranean to

Alexandria and Port Said, Egypt; overland from those two cities to Suez, Egypt; down the Gulf

of Suez and the Red Sea, with a potential branching unit to Jedda, Saudia Arabia; around the

Arabian Peninsula to Dubai, site of the FLAG Network Operations Center; across the Indian

Ocean to Bombay; around the tip of India and across the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea

to Ban Pak Bara, Thailand, with a branch down to Penang, Malaysia; overland across Thailand to

Songkhla; up through the South China Sea to Lan Tao Island in Hong Kong; up the coast of

China to a branch in the East China Sea where one fork goes to Shanghai and the other to

Koje-do Island in Korea, and finally to two separate landings in Japan - Ninomiya and Miura,

which are owned by rival carriers.

Phone company people tend to think (and do business) in terms of circuits. Hacker tourists, by

contrast, tend to think in terms of bits per second. Converting between these two units of

measurements is simple: on any modern phone system, the conversations are transmitted

digitally, and the standard bit rate that is used for this purpose is 64 kbps. A circuit, then, in

telephony jargon, amounts to a datastream of 64 kbps.

Copper submarine cables of only a few decades ago could carry only a few dozen circuits - say,

about 2,500 kbps total. The first generation of optical-fiber cables, by contrast, carries more

than 1,000 times as much data - 280 Mbps of data per fiber pair. (Fibers always come in pairs.

This practice seems obvious to a telephony person, who is in the business of setting up

symmetrical two-way circuits, but makes no particular sense to a hacker tourist who tends to

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