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.
Vedno sem pisal o arhitekturi, o zgradbah, in pisanje o arhitekturi temelji na določenih domnevah. Arhitekt ustvari zasnuje stavbo, ki se razvije v prostor, več arhitektov pa zasnuje več stavb, ki se razvijejo v mesto. In kljub tej zapleteni mešanici sil politike, kulture in ekonomije, ki te kraje ustvarijo, jih lahko ob koncu dneva mirno obiščemo. Lahko se po njih sprehodimo. Lahko jih vdihnemo. Lahko jih občutimo. Lahko izkusimo njihov obstoj kot kraj.
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.
Toda v zadnjih nekaj letih me je osupnilo to, da sem se vedno manj podajal v svet in se vedno bolj pogosto znašel pred računalniškim zaslonom. Še bolj pogosto pa od leta 2007, ko sem kupil svoj iPhone, in nisem cele dneve le posedal pred zaslonom, toda sem ob koncu dneva tudi gledal v ta majhen zaslon, ki sem ga imel v žepu. Presenetilo me je, kako hitro se je spremenil moj odnos do fizičnega sveta. V tem zelo kratkem času, naj bo to zadnjih 15 let, ki jih preživljamo na spletu, ali pa zadnjih štiri, pet let, ko je splet del našega vsakdana, se je naš odnos do okolja spremenil v razdvojenost naše pozornosti. Obenem gledamo v ekrane in opazujemo svet okrog nas.
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.
Še bolj pa me je osupnilo in mi tudi ni dalo miru to, da mi je svet znotraj zaslona dal vtis, da je brez lastne fizične resničnosti. Če si želel poiskati slike interneta, je to vse kar si našel, to slavno Optejevo sliko interneta kot neke vrste Rimska cesta, ki se razprostira v neskončnost in se ne najdemo nikjer znotraj nje. Nikoli je ne zmoremo dojeti v celoti. Mene vedno spominja na sliko Zemlje, ki jo je posnel Apollo, slika modre frnikole. Zdi se mi, da na podoben način namiguje. da je ne moremo v razumeti v celoti.
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.
Vedno smo majhni navkljub njeni razsežnosti. Če bi torej imel ta zaslonski svet in okrog sebe fizični svet, ju ne bi nikoli uspel združiti na enem mestu.
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?
In potem se je zgodilo to. Kot se občasno zgodi, sem nekega dne izgubil internetno povezavo, prišel jo je popraviti serviser, ki je začel s prašno kepo kablov za kavčem, sledil ji je pred hišo, v klet in ven na dvorišče, kjer je našel zmešnjavo kablov ob steni. In potem je zagledal veverico, ki je tekla ob žici, in mi je dejal, tukaj je vaš problem. Veverica žveči vaš internet. (Smeh) To se mi je zdelo osupljivo. Internet je transcendentna zamisel. Je serija protokolov, ki je spremenila vse od nakupovanja do zmenkov in revolucij. Zatrdno ni nekaj, kar bi bila veverica zmožna prežvečiti. (Smeh) Toda kljub temu je prišlo do tega. Veverica je nedvomno prežvečila moj internet. (Smeh) Potem pa sem si začel predstavljati kaj bi se zgodilo, če bi potegnil žico iz stene in ji začel slediti. Kam bi vodila? Je internet kraj, ki ga lahko obiščeš? Lahko pridem do njega? Koga bi srečal? Je tam sploh možno kaj najti?
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."
In v vseh pogledih je bil odgovor ne. Internet je bil to, ta črna škatlica z rdečo lučko. Kot je bila prikazana v TV seriji "Računalničarji." Ponavadi se nahaja na vrhu Big Bena, ker je tam možno dobiti najboljši signal. Toda dogovorili so se, da si jo sodelavka lahko sposodi za popoldansko predavanje. Starešine interneta so se bili od naprave pripravljeni ločiti za kratek čas. Ona škatlico pogleda in reče, to je internet? Celoten internet? Je težek? Odgovorijo ji, seveda ne, internet je brez teže.
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.
Postalo me je sram. Iskal sem to stvar, ki jo očitno iščejo le bedaki. Internet je bila tista brezoblična packa, ali pa hecna črna škatla z utripajočo rdečo lučko. Ni bil del resničnega sveta.
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.
Toda, v bistvu je. Resnični svet interneta zagotovo obstaja, svet, ki sem ga zadnji dve leti obiskoval, te kraje interneta. Obiskal sem velike podatkovne centre, ki porabijo enako količino energije kot mesta v katerih se nahajajo. Obiskal sem tudi takšne kraje, stavbo na Hudson Street 60 v New Yorku, ki je ena izmed tistih na svetu, na zelo kratkem seznamu stavb, približno dvanajst jih je, kjer je med seboj povezanih več omrežij interneta kot kjerkoli drugje. Ta povezava je zatrdno fizična. Gre za usmerjevalnik enega omrežja, naj bo to Facebook ali Google, B.T., Comcast ali Time Warner, karkoli, ki je ponavadi povezan z rumenim kablom iz optičnih vlaken skozi strop v nek drug usmerjevalnik nekega drugega omrežja. To je nedvomno fizična povezava in je presenetljivo podrobna. Stavba na Hudsonovi cesti in približno 12 ostalih stavb je povezana z desetkrat več omrežji kot stavbe druge stopnje. Seznam takšnih krajev je zelo kratek. Stavba na Hudsonovi cesti je še posebej zanimiva, saj se tam nahaja približno šest zelo pomembnih omrežij. To so omrežja, ki služijo podmorskim kablom, napeljanimi pod oceanom. Ti kabli povezujejo Evropo z Ameriko in povezujejo nas. To so kabli, na katere se želim predvsem osredotočiti.
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.
Če je internet globalen fenomen, če živimo v globalni vasi, je to zaradi kablov pod oceanom. Takšnih kablov. V tej dimenziji so neverjetno majhni. Lahko jih držimo v roki. So kot vrtna cev. Toda v drugi dimenziji pa so neverjetno razsežni, tako razsežni kot si lahko predstavljate. Raztezajo se preko oceana. Dolgi so pet, osem ali deset tisoč kilometrov. In čeprav sta znanost o materialih in računska tehnologija neverjetno zapleteni, je osnovni fizični proces presenetljivo preprost. Svetloba vstopi na enem koncu oceana in pride ven na drugem. Ponavadi pride iz stavbe, ki se imenuje sprejemno-oddajna postaja in se pogosto skriva v manjši obmorski naselbini. Na dnu oceana pa so ojačevalci, ki so podobni modroplavutemu tunu in vsakih 80 kilometrov ojačajo signal. Ker je hitrost prenosa podatkov neverjetno hitra, je osnovna enota prenosa valovne dolžine svetlobe 10 gigabitov na sekundo, kar je morda tisočkrat več kot vaša domača povezava, in je zmožna prenosa 10.000 video posnetkov. Toda to ni vse, saj ne bo potovala samo ena valovna dolžina skozi eno izmed vlaken, ampak bo skozi potovalo 50, 60 ali 70 različnih valovnih dolžin ali svetlobnih barv skozi eno samo vlakno. V enem kablu bo na primer osem vlaken, po štiri bodo usmerjene v vsako smer. In ta vlakna so zelo tanka, imajo debelino lasu.
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.
In potem se povežejo nekje s kontinentom. Povežejo se v takšen jašek. Dobesedno. To je dejanska lokacija, kjer je priključen 8.000 kilometrski kabel. To je posnetek iz Halifaxa, kabla, ki povezuje Halifax ter Irsko. Arhitektura se ves čas spreminja. Pred tremi leti, ko sem se prvič osredotočil na to tematiko, je bil na zahodni obali Afrike en kabel, kot je prikazan na zemljevidu Steva Songa s črno črto. Zdaj je tam šest kablov in jih bo še več, po trije ob vsaki obali. Ko se neka država priključi z enim kablom, se zave, da to ni dovolj. Če želi okrog tega razviti industrijo, se mora zavedati, da njihova povezava ni šibka, ampak je dolgotrajna. Če se pretrga kabel, je potrebno na vodo poslati ladjo, čez krov vreči kavelj, kabel dvigniti, poiskati drugi konec, oba konca je potrebno zopet spojiti in kabel spustiti nazaj na morsko dno. To je zelo, zelo fizično naporen postopek.
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.
Torej, to je moj prijatelj, Simon Cooper, ki je do nedavnega delal za Tata Communications, ki je komunikacijski oddelek podjetja Tata, velikega Indijskega industrijskega konglomerata. Nisva se še nikoli srečala. Pogovarjala sva se le skozi teleprisotnostni sistem. Zaradi tega nanj vedno pomislim kot moža znotraj interneta. (Smeh) Je Anglež. Znotraj industrije podmorskih kablov prevladujejo Angleži. In vsi so stari okrog 42 let. (Smeh) Ker so vsi z delom začeli ob istem času, ko je trg doživel razcvet pred 20 leti. Podjetje Tata je zagnalo komunikacijsko poslovanje, z nakupom dveh kablov. Eden se je raztezal čez Atlantski in drugi čez Tihi ocean. Nadaljevali so z dodajanjem delov, dokler niso zgradili pasu okrog sveta. Kar pomeni, da vaše bitne podatke pošiljajo na vzhod ali na zahod. Dobesedno imajo ta svetlobni žarek, ki obkroža ves svet. Če se okvari kabel v Tihem oceanu, bo poslal žarek v drugo smer. Ko so s tem zaključili, je podjetje začelo iskati nove kraje do katerih se lahko poveže. Iskali so kraje brez povezave. Zato so se osredotočili na sever in jug. V glavnem so to bili ti kabli do Afrike. Najbolj pa me je presenetila Simonova geografska domišljija. On vidi svet kot nekakšno neverjetno razsežnost.
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)
Predvsem mi je bilo to zanimivo, ker sem želel osebno videti izgradnjo takšnega kabla. Skozi naš čas na spletu, izkusimo te bežne trenutke povezanosti. To kratkočasno zbližanost. Sporočila na Twitterju, Facebooku ali elektronski pošti. In pričakoval sem neko fizično povezanost. Pričakoval sem takšen trenutek ob priključitvi kontinenta in sem ga želel izkusiti. In Simon je delal na novem kablu, WACS, Zahodnoafriški Kabelski Sistem, ki se je raztezal od Lizbone do zahodne obale Afrike, do Slonokoščene obale, Gane, Nigerije, Kameruna. Povedal mi je da bo gradnja kmalu, odvisno od vremena, in mi bo sporočil kdaj. Tako mi je približno štiri dni vnaprej povedal, da naj grem na obalo na jugu Lizbone. In se bo malo po deveti uri iz morja sprehodil ta mož. (Smeh) In bo imel v roki zeleno vrv iz najlona, lahko vrv, ki se imenuje kurirska vrv. In to je bil prvi člen med morjem in kopnim Ta člen, ki se bo kasneje razvil v to 11.000 kilometrsko pot svetlobe. Potem je buldožer začel vleči kabel s te posebne desantne ladje za kable, ki so ga potem zvlekli na te boje, dokler ni bil pravilno nameščen. Vidite lahko tudi angleške inženirje kako delo opazujejo. Ko je bil kabel nameščen, se je moški vrnil v vodo z velikim nožem in je boje odrezal, ki so se dvignile na površje. Kabel pa se je spustil na morsko dno. S tem je nadaljeval, dokler ni prispel do ladje. In ko je prispel do nje, so ga postregli s kozarcem soka in piškotom. Potem je skočil nazaj v vodo in odplaval do obale, kjer si je prižgal cigareto. (Smeh)
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.
Ko je kabel prispel na obalo, so ga začeli pripravljati za priključitev z drugim koncem, s kablom, ki so ga napeljali s sprejemno-oddajne postaje. Začeli so ga obdelovati z žago, nato so nastrgali plastično notranjost z ... nekakšno spretnostjo kuharjev. In potem so se končno dela lotili kot zlatarji, da so lahko ta tanka vlakna, poravnali s kablom, ki so ga napeljali s postaje, in so ga spojili z luknjačem. Ko opazuješ, kako se ti možje kabla lotijo z žago, interneta ne vidiš več, kot oblak. Začne ti delovati kot nekaj izredno fizičnega. Presenetilo me je še nekaj. Čeprav vse to temelji na zelo visoko razviti tehnologiji, čeprav je to nekaj povsem novega, je fizični proces že dolgo v obstoju. Tudi kultura je enaka. Vidiš domačine pri delu. Vidiš angleške inženirje, ki dajejo napotke v ozadju. Najbolj pomembno pa je, da so kraji ostali enaki. Ti kabli se še vedno povezujejo do ustaljenih obmorskih mest. Kot so Lizbona, Mombasa, Mumbaj, Singapur, 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.
Za postopek na obali je potrebnih tri do štiri dni. In ko je delo končano, luknjo pokrijejo s pokrovom in ga prekrijejo s peskom in nanj vsi pozabimo. In zdi se mi, da veliko govorimo o oblaku,
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)
toda vsakič, ko na oblak nekaj odložimo, se obenem tudi deloma odpovemo odgovornosti do te stvari. Nismo več z njo tako povezani. Pustimo, da se z njo ukvarja nekdo drug. In to se mi ne zdi prav. Obstaja odlična izjava Neala Stephensona, ki je dejal, da morajo ljudje, ki so povezani prek žic, o žicah tudi nekaj vedeti. In morali bi vedeti, mislim, da moramo vedeti, od kod prihaja naša internetna povezava. In moramo se zavedati, kaj nas vse fizično, fizično povezuje. Hvala. (Aplavz)