I've always written primarily about architecture, about buildings, and writing about architecture is based on certain assumptions. An architect designs a building, and it becomes a place, or many architects design many buildings, and it becomes a city, and regardless of this complicated mix of forces of politics and culture and economics that shapes these places, at the end of the day, you can go and you can visit them. You can walk around them. You can smell them. You can get a feel for them. You can experience their sense of place.
Vždy som písal hlavne o architektúre, o budovách, a písanie o architektúre je založené na určitých predpokladoch. Architekt navrhne budovu, ktorá sa stáva miestom, alebo veľa architektov navrhne veľa budov, z ktorých sa stáva mesto a napriek zmesi komplikovaných politických, kultúrnych a ekonomických vplyvov, ktoré tieto miesta formujú, ich nakoniec môžete navštíviť. Môžete sa po nich prejsť. Môžete ich ovoňať. Môžete ich precítiť. Môžete sa s nimi zžiť.
But what was striking to me over the last several years was that less and less was I going out into the world, and more and more, I was sitting in front of my computer screen. And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone, I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day, but I was also getting up at the end of the day and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket. And what was surprising to me was how quickly my relationship to the physical world had changed. In this very short period of time, you know, whether you call it the last 15 years or so of being online, or the last, you know, four or five years of being online all the time, our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that our attention is constantly divided. You know, we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking out in the world around us.
Ale v posledných rokoch ma začalo zarážať to, že som čím ďalej tým menej vychádzal von, do sveta a viac a viac som sedel za počítačom. Obzvlášť od roku 2007, keď som si kúpil iPhone, som nielen celý deň sedel za počítačom, ale dopadol som tak, že som stále hľadel na tú malú obrazovku, ktorú som mal vo vrecku. Prekvapilo ma, ako rýchlo sa zmenil môj vzťah k fyzickému svetu. Za túto krátku dobu, či už to bolo posledných 15 rokov, čo sme online, alebo posledné štyri či päť rokov toho, čo sme vkuse online sa zmenil náš vzťah k okoliu a svoju pozornosť neustále delíme, dívame sa aj na obrazovku, aj na svet okolo seba.
And what was even more striking to me, and what I really got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen seemed to have no physical reality of its own. If you went and looked for images of the Internet, this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse where we don't seem to be anywhere on it. We can never seem to grasp it in its totality. It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth, the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest, I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole. We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse.
Čo ma zarážalo ešte viac a na čo som fakt nevedel prísť bolo, že to vo vnútri obrazovky vyzeralo, akoby to ani nemalo fyzickú podobu. Ak ste niekedy hľadali fotky internetu, našli ste toto, tento slávny obrázok od Opte, na ktorom internet vyzerá ako akási Mliečna dráha, tento nekonečný zhluk, ktorý nepôsobí, že by sme v ňom niekde mali byť aj my. Zdá sa, že nie je ani možné to úplne pochopiť. Odjakživa mi to pripomínalo fotky Zeme z Apolla, fotku nášho modrého mramoru, a myslím, že nám to aj naznačuje, že sa to ani nedá úplne pochopiť. Popri jeho veľkosti budeme navždy tak nejako maličkí.
So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them together in the same place.
Takže, ak existoval tento svet a tento monitor, a ak existoval hmotný svet okolo mňa, nikdy som ich nevedel spojiť do jedného celku.
And then this happened. My Internet broke one day, as it occasionally does, and the cable guy came to fix it, and he started with the dusty clump of cables behind the couch, and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard, and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall. And then he saw a squirrel running along the wire, and he said, "There's your problem. A squirrel is chewing on your Internet." (Laughter) And this seemed astounding. The Internet is a transcendent idea. It's a set of protocols that has changed everything from shopping to dating to revolutions. It was unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter) But that in fact seemed to be the case. A squirrel had in fact chewed on my Internet. (Laughter) And then I got this image in my head of what would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started to follow it. Where would it go? Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit? Could I go there? Who would I meet? You know, was there something actually out there?
A potom sa stalo toto. Pokazil sa mi internet, ako sa to občas stáva, prišiel chlapík, aby to opravil a začal s gučou zaprášených káblov za gaučom, nasledoval ich do vchodu a do pivnice a na zadný dvor, a tam ležalo takéto obrovské klbko káblov. Potom zbadal veveričku, ktorá bežala popri kábloch a povedal „Tam je váš problém. Veverička vám obhrýza internet.“ (Smiech) Bol to pre mňa šok. Internet pôsobí ako niečo nadprirodzené. Je to súbor protokolov, ktoré zmenili všetko od nakupovania, cez randenie, po revolúcie, určite nie niečo, čo môže obhrýzať veverička. (Smiech) Ale zdá sa, že tak to naozaj bolo, veverička mi naozaj obhrýzala internet. (Smiech) A tak som si predstavil, čo by sa stalo, keby som vytrhol kábel zo steny a nasledoval ho. Kam by som sa dostal? Je internet miesto, ktoré môžeme navštíviť? Mohol by som tam vojsť? Koho by som stretol? Je tam niekde naozaj niečo?
And the answer, by all accounts, was no. This was the Internet, this black box with a red light on it, as represented in the sitcom "The IT Crowd." Normally it lives on the top of Big Ben, because that's where you get the best reception, but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it for the afternoon to use in an office presentation. The elders of the Internet were willing to part with it for a short while, and she looks at it and she says, "This is the Internet? The whole Internet? Is it heavy?" They say, "Of course not, the Internet doesn't weigh anything."
Odpoveďou je pravdepodobne Nie. Ako hovoria v komédii The IT Crowd, internet je táto čierna skrinka s červeným svetielkom. Býva na vrchu veže Big Ben, pretože tam je najlepší signál a keď si ho chceli na jedno poobedie požičať, aby ho vo firme mohli použiť na prezentáciu, staršinovia zodpovední za internet boli ochotní požičať ho na chvíľu a ona sa na to tak pozrela a vraví: „Toto je internet? Celý internet? Je to ťažké?“ Ostatní hovoria „Samozrejme, že nie, internet nič neváži.“
And I was embarrassed. I was looking for this thing that only fools seem to look for. The Internet was that amorphous blob, or it was a silly black box with a blinking red light on it. It wasn't a real world out there.
A ja som sa zahanbil, lebo som hľadal práve tú vec, ktorú hľadajú iba blázni. Internet bol teda iba niečo beztvaré alebo čierna krabička s červeným svetielkom. Bol to nereálny svet,
But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there, and that's what I spent about two years visiting, these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers that use as much power as the cities in which they sit, and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York, which is one of the buildings in the world, one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings, where more networks of the Internet connect to each other than anywhere else. And that connection is an unequivocally physical process. It's about the router of one network, a Facebook or a Google or a B.T. or a Comcast or a Time Warner, whatever it is, connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into the ceiling and down into the router of another network, and that's unequivocally physical, and it's surprisingly intimate. A building like 60 Hudson, and a dozen or so others, has 10 times more networks connecting within it than the next tier of buildings. There's a very short list of these places. And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home to about a half a dozen very important networks, which are the networks which serve the undersea cables that travel underneath the ocean that connect Europe and America and connect all of us. And it's those cables in particular that I want to focus on.
ktorý ale v skutočnosti reálny je. Máme tu naozajstný svet internetu, po ktorom som chodil zhruba dva roky, bol som v obrovských výpočtových strediskách, ktoré spotrebujú toľko elektriny ako celé mestá, v ktorých sa nachádzajú, a bol som aj na miestach, akým je 60 Hudson Street v New Yorku, čo je jedna z tých budov sveta, jedna z veľmi krátkeho zoznamu budov, je ich asi tucet, kde sa spája viac sietí internetu ako kdekoľvek inde na svete a to spojenie je jednoznačne hmotným procesom. Všetko je to o routri jednej siete, Facebooku, alebo Google, alebo B.T., alebo Comcast, alebo Time Warner proste čohokoľvek, ktorý je väčšinou žltým optickým káblom napojený k stropu a potom routru ďalšej siete a to je ten zjavný, ohromne dokonalý fyzický proces. Na mieste ako 60 Hudson Street a asi tucte podobných miest sa v porovnaní s iným budovami spája asi desaťkrát viac sietí. Existuje veľmi krátky zoznam takýchto miest, pričom 60 Hudson je obzvlášť zaujímavá, pretože v nej sídli zhruba 6 veľmi dôležitých sietí, ktoré slúžia ako základne podmorských káblov, ktoré ležia na dne oceánov a spájajú Európu s Amerikou a teda nás všetkých. Chcel by som sa zamerať práve na tieto káble.
If the Internet is a global phenomenon, if we live in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath the ocean, cables like this. And in this dimension, they are incredibly small. You can you hold them in your hand. They're like a garden hose. But in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive, as expansive as you can imagine. They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five or eight thousand miles in length, and if the material science and the computational technology is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean and comes out on the other, and it usually comes from a building called a landing station that's often tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood, and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams, but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction. And they're tiny. They're the thickness of a hair.
Ak je internet globálnym fenoménom, ak žijeme v nejakom globálnom mestečku, je to preto, že na dne oceánu sú káble ako napríklad tento, ktorý má neuveriteľne malé rozmery. Môžete ho chytiť do ruky. Vyzerá ako hadica. Avšak niektoré dosahujú neuveriteľné rozmery, kedy môžu byť také obrovské ako si len viete predstaviť. Tiahnu sa krížom cez oceán. Sú dlhé tri, päť, osem tisíc míľ a zatiaľ čo veda o materiáloch a počítačoch je neuveriteľne komplikovaná, základný fyzický proces je neuveriteľne jednoduchý. Svetlo vojde dnu na jednom konci oceána a vyjde na druhom, pričom väčšinou vychádza z budovy, ktorá sa volá pristávacia stanica, ktorá býva často nenápadne zastrčená v malých prímorských mestečkách, na dne oceána ležia tiež zosilňovače, ktoré vyzerajú ako tuniak modroplutvý a na každej päťdesiatej míli zosilňujú signál a keďže rýchlosť prenosu je neuveriteľne vysoká, základnou jednotkou je 10 gigabit za sekundu vlnovej dĺžky svetla, možnože to je tisíckrát rýchlejšie ako vaše pripojenie, respektíve je schopné prenosu 10 000 videí a nielen to, ale jediné vlákno toho kábla môže preniesť nie iba jednu vlnovú dĺžku svetla, ale aj 50, 60, či 70 rôznych vlnových dĺžok alebo farieb svetla, no a v jednom kábli je aj osem vlákien, štyri v každom smere. Sú maličké, tenké ako vlas.
And then they connect to the continent somewhere. They connect in a manhole like this. Literally, this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in. This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland. And the landscape is changing. Three years ago, when I started thinking about this, there was one cable down the Western coast of Africa, represented in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line. Now there are six cables and more coming, three down each coast. Because once a country gets plugged in by one cable, they realize that it's not enough. If they're going to build an industry around it, they need to know that their connection isn't tenuous but permanent, because if a cable breaks, you have to send a ship out into the water, throw a grappling hook over the side, pick it up, find the other end, and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over. It's an intensely, intensely physical process.
No a tie sa potom spoja niekde na pevnine. Spájajú sa v takejto šachte. Naozaj, tu je zapojený 5 000 míľ dlhý kábel. Je to v Halifaxe, kábel, ktorý ide z Halifaxu do Írska. Toto rozloženie sa ale mení. Pred tromi rokmi, keď som o tomto všetkom začal rozmýšľať, bol na západnom pobreží Afriky jeden kábel, ktorý je na tejto mape od Steva Songa zobrazený tenkou čiernou čiarou. Dnes je tam šesť káblov a ďalšie tri sú na ceste na každé pobrežie. Je to spôsobené tým, že keď sa krajina pripojí jedným káblom, uvedomí si, že jej to nestačí. Ak na tom chce vystavať priemysel, musí si byť istá, že jej pripojenie je dostatočne silné, pretože ak sa kábel roztrhne, musíte na more poslať loď, zakotviť, vytiahnuť kábel, nájsť jeho druhý koniec, znovu ich spojiť a hodiť naspäť do vody. A to je naozaj intenzívny fyzický proces.
So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate. And I've never met him. We've only communicated via this telepresence system, which always makes me think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter) And he is English. The undersea cable industry is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42. (Laughter) Because they all started at the same time with the boom about 20 years ago. And Tata had gotten its start as a communications business when they bought two cables, one across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific, and proceeded to add pieces onto them, until they had built a belt around the world, which means they will send your bits to the East or the West. They have -- this is literally a beam of light around the world, and if a cable breaks in the Pacific, it'll send it around the other direction. And then having done that, they started to look for places to wire next. They looked for the unwired places, and that's meant North and South, primarily these cables to Africa. But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination. He thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness.
Toto je môj kamarát Simon Cooper, ktorý až donedávna pracoval na oddelení pre komunikáciu pre Tata Communications, veľký indický priemyselný konglomerát a ktorého som nikdy nestretol. Komunikovali sme iba cez videokonferenčný systém, ktorý ma núti rozmýšľať o ňom ako o tom mužovi vo vnútri internetu. (Smiech) Je Angličan. Angličania dominujú priemyslu podmorských káblov a zdá sa, že všetci majú 42 rokov. (Smiech) To preto, lebo všetci začali v rovnakom čase, v čase veľkého rozmachu pred zhruba 20 rokmi. Ako komunikačný podnik začala Tata, keď kúpila dva káble, jeden v Atlantiku a druhý v Tichom oceáne a začala k nim pridávať kúsky až kým nevybudovali okruh okolo celého sveta, čo znamená, že bity posielajú na východ alebo na západ. Doslova je to lúč svetla okolo sveta a ak sa pokazí kábel v Tichom oceáne, pošlú lúč opačným smerom. Potom, keď to dokončili, začali hľadať ďalšie miesta, ktoré by mohli pripojiť. Hľadali nepripojené miesta, to znamená sever a juh, hlavne teda Afriku. Mňa udivuje Simonova neuveriteľná geografická predstavivosť. On sa na svet díva neuveriteľne expanzívne.
And I was particularly interested because I wanted to see one of these cables being built. See, you know, all the time online we experience these fleeting moments of connection, these sort of brief adjacencies, a tweet or a Facebook post or an email, and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that. It seemed like there was a moment when the continent was being plugged in, and I wanted to see that. And Simon was working on a new cable, WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon. And he said there was coming soon, depending on the weather, but he'd let me know when, and so with about four days notice, he said to go to this beach south of Lisbon, and a little after 9, this guy will walk out of the water. (Laughter) And he'll be carrying a green nylon line, a lightweight line, called a messenger line, and that was the first link between sea and land, this link that would then be leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light. Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated on these buoys until it was in the right place. Then you can see the English engineers looking on. And then, once it was in the right place, he got back in the water holding a big knife, and he cut each buoy off, and the buoy popped up into the air, and the cable dropped to the sea floor, and he did that all the way out to the ship, and when he got there, they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie, and then he jumped back in, and he swam back to shore, and then he lit a cigarette. (Laughter)
Mňa to všetko zaujímalo o to viac, že som chcel vidieť ako sa takýto kábel tvorí. Viete, keď sme online zažívame tie prchavé momenty spojenia, akési spoločenstvo, status na Tweeteri alebo na Facebooku, alebo email a pôsobí to ako výsledok fyzickej aktivity. Vyzeralo to tak, že prichádzal moment, kedy sa pripojí nový kontinent a práve to som chcel vidieť. Simon pracoval na novom kábli, WACS, the West Africa Cable System, ktorý viedol z Lisabonu na západné pobrežie Afriky, do Cote d´Ivoire, do Ghany, Nigérie, Cameroonu. Povedal, že to príde už čoskoro, že záleží od počasia, ale že mi dá vedieť, a tak mi asi štyri dni dopredu povedal, aby som išiel na pláž južne od Lisabonu a že okolo deviatej tam z vody vyjde nejaký chlapík, (Smiech) bude niesť zelené nylonové lanko, tenučké lanko, ktoré sa volá kotvové lanko, je prvým spojením medzi morom a zemou a neskôr sa zmení na 9 000-míľovú svetelnú cestu. Zo špeciálnej lode potom začal buldozér vyťahovať kábel upevnený na bójach, až pokiaľ nebol tam, kde mal byť. Tomu všetkému sa prizerali anglický inžinieri. A keď už bolo všetko na svojom mieste, chlapík vošiel naspäť do vody s veľkým nožom, odrezal bóje, tie vyleteli do vzduchu a kábel padol na dno mora. Urobil to po celej dĺžke až k lodi a keď k nej došiel, dali mu pohár džúsu a sušienku, potom skočil naspäť do vody, priprával k brehu a zapálil si cigaretu. (Smiech)
And then once that cable was on shore, they began to prepare to connect it to the other side, for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station. And first they got it with a hacksaw, and then they start sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a -- sort of working like chefs, and then finally they're working like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up with the cable that had come down, and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together. And when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw, you stop thinking about the Internet as a cloud. It starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing. And what surprised me as well was that as much as this is based on the most sophisticated technology, as much as this is an incredibly new thing, the physical process itself has been around for a long time, and the culture is the same. You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer giving directions in the background. And more importantly, the places are the same. These cables still connect these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa, Mumbai, Singapore, New York.
Keď už bol kábel na pobreží, začali ho upravovať na pripojenie k druhému koncu, ku káblu, ktorý priniesli z pristávacej stanice. Začali s pílkou a potom akoby hobľovali plastové časti, čo vyzeralo akoby na tom pracovali kuchári a nakoniec to konečne začali opracovávať ako šperkári, aby mohli pripojiť tie tenučké káble ku káblom, ktoré priniesli a pritavili ich k sebe takou spájkovačkou. Keď vidíte tých chlapov ako opracúvajú kábel pílou, prestanete o internete rozmýšľať ako o nejakom oblaku. Začne vám to pripadať ako neuveriteľne hmotná vec. Čo ma tiež prekvapilo je, ako veľmi je to všetko založené na premyslenej technológii, a aké je to všetko neuveriteľne nové, i keď samotný fyzický proces a aj kultúra tu už boli dlhú dobu. Vidíte miestnych robotníkov. Vidíte inžinierov z Anglicka, ktorí to všetko riadia. A čo je najdôležitejšie, tie miesta sú stále rovnaké. Káble stále spájajú rovnaké mestá, miesta ako Lisabon, Mombasa, Mumbai, Singapúr, New York.
And then the process on shore takes around three or four days, and then, when it's done, they put the manhole cover back on top, and they push the sand over that, and we all forget about it.
Proces na pobreží trvá tak tri-štyri dni a keď je všetko hotové, zavrú káblovú šachtu, zasypú ju pieskom a my všetci na to pomaly zabudneme.
And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud, but every time we put something on the cloud, we give up some responsibility for it. We are less connected to it. We let other people worry about it. And that doesn't seem right. There's a great Neal Stephenson line where he says that wired people should know something about wires. And we should know, I think, we should know where our Internet comes from, and we should know what it is that physically, physically connects us all. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thanks. (Applause)
Zdá sa mi, že sa veľa hovorí o „oblaku“, ale zakaždým, keď niečo dáme na „oblak“, vzdávame sa svojej zodpovednosti za to, čo tam dáme, sme k tomu menej pripojení. Prenechávame to na starosť iným. A to sa mi nezdá správne. Neal Stephenson povedal úžasnú vec, a to, že ľudia, ktorí majú internet by mali vedieť aspoň niečo o kábloch. A myslím si, že by sme mali vedieť odkiaľ náš internet je a mali by sme tiež vedieť, čo nás všetkých naozaj fyzicky spája. Ďakujem. (Potlesk) (Potlesk) Vďaka. (Potlesk)