What I'm Reading: Maintaining What We Built
As our world continues to groan through the pains of the death of an epoch and the birth of a new age, things break. Deep down we all know our lives will never be the same and that we can't go back to times that felt more familiar and safer. We also know we have to leave behind things that matter to us. As we move forward, what do we discard and what do we repair to carry along with us? This is something of an internal inventory, but I've also been concerned about the infrastructure of our joint lives.
In line with this theme, I enthusiastically recommend a recent longread in The Verge:
The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
The piece is a deep dive into the ships that repair the undersea cables that connect us all to the Internet. I'm someone who often games out the worst case scenario, and I've wondered what might happen if enough of these cables were cut or damaged to push past the redundancies. For one, banking would halt, as would much communication. We would be marooned, our smartphones and tablets bricked. How long would it take for chaos to reign?
Very little stands between us and calamity. From the article: "The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks." These people are invisible, doing the dangerous work of keeping the Internet on.
Undersea cable repair companies are having trouble recruiting, ironically, in part, because of poor Internet service during long voyages. I suppose the adventure of the sea is no longer a draw in a world of constant stimulation, but, as I read the article, I began to see clearly that the practical can be romantic.
I also recently read a good piece in The Atlantic about the ongoing debacle at Boeing that gives a pretty damning account of how accountability was outsourced along with American manufacturing. As always, the finance bros and their quarterly earnings reports were at the scene of the crime.
Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing
A particularly chilling excerpt for anyone who flies regularly: "[T]he door of a Boeing 737 had fallen out mid-flight. In the days following his visit, [Boeing's CEO's] office admitted that it still didn’t know quite what had gone wrong, because it didn’t know how the plane had been put together in the first place."
I hope you'll enjoy these stories.
Thanks for reading!
Kitanya