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.
Oduvek uglavnom pišem o arhitekturi, o zgradama i pisanje o arhitekturi se zasniva na određenim pretpostavkama. Arhitekta projektuje zgradu i ona postane mesto ili kad mnogo arhitekata projektuje mnogo zgrada, nastane grad i bez obzira na ovu komplikovanu mešavinu političkih, kulturoloških i ekonomskih sila koje oblikuju ova mesta, na kraju vi možete da odete i posetite ih. Možete da se šetate između njih. Možete da ih omirišete. Da osetite. Možete da iskusite njihovo postojanje.
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.
Ono što me je zainteresovalo poslednjih nekoliko godina je da kako sve manje izlazim napolje u svet, sve više i više provodim vremena pred ekranom kompjutera. Posebno pošto sam 2007. godine nabavio iPhone, nisam samo sedeo pred ekranom po ceo dan, nego kad bih pred kraj dana ustao, gledao sam u ovaj mali ekran koji sam nosio u džepu. Ono što me je veoma iznenadilo je kako se brzo moja veza sa fizičkim svetom promenila. U ovom veoma kratkom periodu, bez obzira da li je to biti onlajn 15 godina ili sve vreme biti onlajn četiri ili pet godina, naš odnos prema našem okruženju se promenio tako da je naša pažnja stalno podeljena. Mi gledamo i u ekrane i u spoljni svet oko 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.
Ono što je ostavilo još veći utisak na mene i na šta sam se zaista navukao, je ideja da svet u ekranu izgleda nije imao sopstvenu fizičku pojavu. Ako potražite slike interneta sve što ćete naći je ova Opteova slavna slika interneta gde je predstavljen kao Mlečni put, ovaj bezgranični prostor gde jednostavno nema nas. Izgleda da to nikada nećemo potpuno razumeti. To me stalno podseća na sliku Zemlje sa Apoloa, slika plavog klikera i ta sličnost kao da upućuje na to da nikada nećemo razumeti internet kao celinu. Mi smo nekako veoma mali u odnosu na prostor koji zauzima.
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.
Ako imamo taj svet i taj ekran i ako postoji taj fizički svet oko mene, nikada ne bih mogao da ih povežem na jednom 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?
A onda se dogodilo ovo. Jednog dana mi je pukao internet, kao što to ponekad biva i momak iz kablovske je došao da ga popravi i počeo je prvo među prašnjavom gomilom kablova iza kauča, da bi nastavio do lica moje zgrade, u podrumu i na kraju u dvorištu iza i tamo je bila ta velika zbrka kablova naslonjena na zid. A onda je video vevericu kako trči uz žicu, i rekao je: "Evo ga vaš problem. Veverica vam gricka internet." (Smeh) Ovo se činilo neverovatnim. Internet je tako transcendentna ideja. To je set protokola koji je promenio sve od kupovine preko druženja do revolucija. To definitivno nije nešto što bi veverica mogla da sažvaće. (Smeh) Ali, sve je ukazivalo na to da jeste tako. Veverica je zaista grickala moj internet. (Smeh) I onda mi se javila slika, šta bi se desilo kada bi izvukao žicu iz zida i počeo da je pratiš. Kuda bi te vodila? Da li je internet u stvari mesto koje biste mogli da posetite? Da li bih i ja mogao tamo? Koga bih sreo? Da li tamo zaista ima nečega?
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."
Odgovor je, po svim tačkama, ne. Ovo je internet, ova crna kutija sa crvenom lampicom, kao što je predstavljeno u humorističkoj seriji "The IT Crowd". Obično, živi na vrhu Big Bena jer je tamo najbolji prijem signala, ali uspeli su da srede da ga njihova koleginica pozajmi za to popodne i iskoristi u prezentaciji na poslu. Internetsko Veće staraca je bilo voljno da im udovolji nakratko i onda je ona, gledajući u tu kutiju rekla: "Ovo je internet? Ceo internet? Je li težak?" Oni odgovaraju: "Naravno da nije, internet nema težinu".
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.
Bilo mi je neprijatno. Tražio sam nešto za čim izgleda samo budale tragaju. Internet je ta neka bestelesna masa ili zaista samo blesava crna kutija sa crvenom lampicom koja treperi. To tamo nije bio stvarni 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.
Ali, u stvari, jeste. Tamo negde postoji stvarni svet interneta i tamo sam proveo oko dve godine, na internet mestima. Bio sam u velikim centrima podataka koji koriste energiju koliko i oveći gradovi u kojima se nalaze i posetio sam mesto poput ovog, u ulici Hadson broj 60 u Njujorku, što je adresa jedne od zgrada na svetu, jedne od malog broja zgrada, oko tuce zgrada, gde se sastaje i spaja više internetskih mreža nego bilo gde na svetu. Taj spoj je nepobitno fizički proces. Tu se ruter jedne mreže, recimo Fejsbuka ili Gugla ili B.T.-a ili Comcasta ili Time Warnera, bilo šta da je, spaja sa uobičajeno žutim optičkim kablom na tavanici i dole u ruter neke druge mreže i to je nepobitno fizička manifestacija koja je iznenađujuće intimna. Ova zgrada nalik zgradi Hadson 60 i desetku drugih zgrada, ima 10 puta više mreža koje se u njoj spajaju nego celi sledeći niz zgrada. Lista ovih zgrada je jako kratka. A ova zgrada na Hadsonu je interesantna jer udomljava oko šest vrlo važnih mreža, koje su nakačene na podvodne kablove koji putuju ispod okeana, koji povezuje Evropu i Ameriku i sve nas. To su kablovi na koje posebno hoću da se osvrnem.
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.
Ako je internet globalni fenomen, a mi živimo u globalnom selu, to je zbog toga što postoje ti kablovi ispod okeana, kablovi poput ovih. U ovoj dimenziji oni su veoma mali. Možete ih držati u ruci. Nisu veći od baštenskog creva. Ali u drugoj dimenziji oni su veoma ekspanzivni i rastežu se koliko god možete da zamislite. Rastežu se preko celog okeana. Dugi su 5 ili 8 hiljada kilometara i ako su nauka i računarska tehnologija iza toga vrlo komplikovane, osnovni fizički proces iza toga je vrlo jednostavan. Svetlo uđe na jednom kraju okeana i izađe na drugom i obično dolazi iz zgrade koja se zova "dolazna stanica", obično je ušuškana negde kraj obale i postoje pojačivači koji su na okeanskom dnu koji izgledaju malo poput tune i na svakih 80 km, oni pojačavaju signal. Pošto je brzina signala veoma velika, osnovna jedinica je 10 gigabita u sekundi što je verovatno bar hiljadu puta brže od vaše konekcije kod kuće, a što može da nosi 10 000 video strimova, ali ne samo to, tu ne ide samo jedan svetlosni talas kroz jedno vlakno, već ćete staviti verovatno 50 ili 60 ili 70 različitih talasnih dužina ili boja svetlosti kroz jedno jedino vlakno i imaćete verovatno osam vlakana u jednom kablu, po četiri u oba smera. Oni su sićušni. Nisu deblji od dlake.
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.
Onda se oni spoje negde na kontinentu. Spoje se u šahtu poput ovog. Bukvalno, ovo je mesto gde se uključuje kabl dugačak 8 000 km. Ovo je u Halifaksu, kabl koji se proteže od Halifaksa do Irske. I sam pejsaž se menja. Pre tri godine, kada sam počeo da razmišljam o ovome, bio je jedan kabl uz Zapadnu obalu Afrike, predstavljen na ovoj mapi Stiva Songa u vidu te tanke crne linije. Sada ima šest kablova i biće još, po tri niz obe obale. Kad se jedanput zemlja uključi sa jednim kablom, oni shvate da to nije dovoljno. Ako hoće da prave industriju oko toga, moraju da znaju da njihova veza nije slaba, već je stalna. Ako se kabl prekine morate da šaljete brod u vodu, bacite kuku, podignete ga, pronađete drugi kraj i onda osigurate njihovu vezu i ponovo bacite u vodu. To je jako težak fizički posao.
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.
Ovo je moj prijatelj Simon Kuper, koji je doskora radio za Tata komunikacije, komunikaciono krilo Tate, velikog indijskog industrijskog konglomerata. Nikad ga nisam sreo. Samo smo komunicirali preko sistema teleprezentacije, koji me uvek natera da mislim o njemu kao o čoveku unutar interneta. (Smeh) On je Englez. U industriji podvodnih kablova Englezi dominiraju, izgleda da svi imaju 42 godine. (Smeh) Zato što su svi počeli u isto vreme kad i bum pre dvadesetak godina. Tata je počela kad i biznis u komunikacijama kad su doneli dva kabla, jedan preko Atlantika i drugi preko Pacifika i nastavili su da dodaju deliće na njih, dok nisu napravili pojas oko sveta, što znači da će poslati vaše bitove na istok ili zapad. To je bukvalno svetlosni zrak oko sveta i ako se kabl prekine na Pacifiku, oni će ga poslati u drugom pravcu. Kad to urade počinju da gledaju mesta koja bi još umrežili. Tražili bi neumrežena mesta, a to je sever i jug, uglavnom kablovi za Afriku. Ono što me zadivljuje je Simonova neverovatna geografska mašta. On razmišlja o svetu neverovatno ekspanzivno.
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)
Bio sam posebno zainteresovan jer sam želeo da vidim kako se pravi jedan takav kabl. Vidite, sve vreme provedeno onlajn, doživljavamo ove prolazne trenutke povezanosti, nekakvu kratku bliskost, tvit ili Fejsbvuk post ili mail i deluje da postoji fizička dimenzija toga. Delovalo je kao da je postojao momenat kada se kontinent uključio i želeo sam da to vidim. Simon je radio na novom kablu, WACS, Zapadno afrički kablovski sistem, koji se prostirao od Lisabona do zapadne obale Afrike, do Obale Slonovače, Gane, Nigerije, pa do Kameruna. Rekao je da dolazi uskoro, zavisi od vremenskih uslova, javiće mi kad i otprilike četiri dana unapred, rekao mi je da odem na tu plaži južno od Lisabona i malo posle 9 ovaj momak će izaći iz vode. (Smeh) Nosiće zelenu najlonsku nit, laganu nit koja se zove linija poruka, to je bio prvi link između mora i zemlje, taj link će imati moć nad putem svetlosti od 15 000 km. Onda je buldozer počeo da vuče kabl iz ovog specijalizovanog broda za dolazne kablove i on je plutao na bovama dok nije došao na pravo mesto. Onda možete videti pregled engleskih inženjera. A zatim, kad je bio na pravom mestu, on je otišao nazad u vodu držeći veliki nož, odsekao svaku bovu koja je zatim odskočila u vazduh i kabl je pao na morsko dno. To je radio sve vreme izlaska sa broda i kad je završio dali su mu čašu soka i kolač, a zatim je ponovo skočio u vodu i otplivao nazad na obalu i zapalio cigaretu. (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.
Onda kad je kabl bio na obali, počeli su sa pripremom povezivanja sa drugim krajem, sa kablom koji je donet sa dolazne stanice. Prvo sa testerom za metal, pa su počeli da ga na neki način ogoljuju od plastike sa - nalik kuvarima u kuhinjama, na kraju su radili kao draguljari da bi dobili ova vlakna tanka kao dlaka kose da bi ih poravnali sa kablom koji je upravo spušten i sa ovom mašinom za varenje ih povezali i osigurali. Kad vidiš ove momke sa ovom testerom za metal prestaješ da misliš o internetu kao o oblaku. Počinje da bude vrlo fizički. Ono što me je takođe iznenadilo je da ma koliko je to bazirano na sofisticiranoj tehnologiji, ma koliko je to neverovatno nova stvar, fizički proces je tu oko nas vrlo dugo kao i njegova kultura. Vidite lokalne radnike. Vidite engleskog inženjera koji daje uputstva u pozadini. Još važnije, mesta su ista. Ovi kablovi još uvek povezuju klasične gradove luke, mesta kao Lisabon, Mombasu, Mumbai, Singapur, Njujork.
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 obali traje tri-četiri dana, a onda kad je gotov, postavljaju poklopac na šaht preko toga pesak i zaboravimo na to.
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)
Deluje mi kao da pričamo mnogo o oblaku, ali svaki put kad stavimo nešto na njega, damo mu neku odgovornost. Manje smo povezani sa njim. Puštamo druge ljude da brinu o tome. To nije u redu. Postoji jedna rečenica Nila Stivensona da bi umreženi ljudi trebalo da znaju nešto o žicama za mrežu. Mislim da bi trebalo da znamo odakle internet dolazi i treba da znamo šta je to što nas sve fizički povezuje. Hvala vam. (Aplauz) (Aplauz) Hvala. (Aplauz)