Glitching on the Sea

This week, we’re back the original idea behind this newsletter – a newsletter that’s informal and “what I’d send you if you were to ask me what’s on my mind this week.”

On my mind this week: the sea.

It started last weekend when I read William Langewiesche’s “Leave No Soldier Behind”. The writing was so good that it made me look up Langewiesche and go through his bibliography. In there I found out he’s written a book. It’s called the The Outlaw Sea and I immediately bought it on my Kindle. On the very same Kindle that three other unfinished books are waiting for me.

I couldn’t help it after peeking into the sample. Here’s the first paragraph on the first page:

Since we live on land, and usually beyond sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world, and to ignore what in practice that means. Some shores perhaps can be tamed, but beyond the horizon lies the wave-maker, an anarchic expanse, the open ocean of the high seas. Under its many names, and with variations in color and mood, this single ocean spreads across three fourths of the globe. Geographically it is not the exception to our world but by far its greatest defining feature. By social measures it is important too. At a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, and when citizenship is treated as an absolute condition of human existence, it is a place that remains radically free.

If you were to divide humanity into mountain and sea people (right after describing everyone as either a cat or a dog person) I’d very much be one of the mountain folk. I don’t like beaches that much, I’ve never had a thought other than “it’s pretty flat, alright” when staring at the sea, and every time I’ve been on a boat I was disappointed like someone who saw their favorite band play live for the first time and after two hours of standing and expensive drinks realized that they prefer to watch concerts from their couch on the TV.

Describe the ocean world as an “anarchic expanse” though and you got me hooked.

But here’s the interesting bit, the thing that truly put the sea on my mind this week: while I’m reading The Outlaw Sea, The Verge publishes this piece called The Cloud Under The Sea, which starts with these two sentences:

The internet is carried around the world by hundreds of thousands of miles of slender cables that sit at the bottom of the ocean. These fragile wires are constantly breaking – a precarious system on which everything from banks to governments to TikTok depends.

Hell yes. I haven’t read the article yet – I’m saving it for when I finished The Outlaw Sea – but even if you tried you couldn’t make me hit that bookmark button (actually: the “email to myself” buttons) faster than with these two sentences.

That opening made me immediately think of the article on undersea cables: Neal Stephenson’s Mother Earth Mother Board, published in Wired magazine in 1996. It now sits behind a paywall, but it seems like people want to share it anyway - and who’s to tell them they’re wrong? It’s an amazing piece of writing. It’s very long (the senior editor who edited it back in 1996 commented on it to say “a typical feature piece in a magazine is 5000 words, and a long one hits 10,000 words. This was 42,000 words.”) and very good.

Thinking about Stephenson’s article, I remembered another another fantastic Wired article, that’s also about technology and the sea: High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace. Also behind a paywall, but it seems like they still have it available under a different name. I just said “remember” as if I hadn’t thought of the following two paragraph every few months for years now:

Jolted awake in Wyoming, Habib pushes himself out of bed. His dogs cluster around him. Clearly they want to go along, but he’ll need a little more help than they can give. It’s time to mobilise the Titan A-Team.

In Seattle, it’s warm and breezy as Marty Johnson zips through the traffic in his black BMW Z3 convertible. He’s wearing shades and, although he just turned 40, he has a boyish look that suits the car. Since graduating first in his class from New York’s Webb Institute, a pre-eminent undergraduate naval architecture school, he has travelled the world with his laptop, building 3D models and helping refloat sunken things. He oversaw a system to lift a submerged F-14 from 70 metres of water near San Diego in 2004.

While I’m following the associations in my head - the sea, undersea cables, mother board, cowboys of the deep - someone recommends another Langewiesche article to me: What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane, an article about flight MH370, the one that “vanished into the Indian Ocean.”

Again: the sea. Again: technology versus the sea.

That’s what Langewiesche’s book and these articles point at and what will forever fascinate me - that’s why the sea’s been on my mind this whole week.

We might feel as if we’re living in a digital world - detached from the physical one once we’re inside our houses, living more or less in an ether called the internet - but that feeling only holds as long as the physical world plays along. When it doesn’t, our world glitches - things that seem impossible, that can’t happen, happen.

Here’s Langewiesche on MH370 and the absurdity of a plane simply disappearing in a world that can be examined, step by step, on Google Maps:

The idea that a sophisticated machine, with its modern instruments and redundant communications, could simply vanish seems beyond the realm of possibility. It is hard to permanently delete an email, and living off the grid is nearly unachievable even when the attempt is deliberate. A Boeing 777 is meant to be electronically accessible at all times.

And yet.

With that: happy reading!