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.
我主要会写些关于建筑 关于楼房的东西 那些作品是基于某些假设。 建筑师设计一座大楼 变成一个地点 或很多建筑师设计很多座大楼 变成一个城市 先不去考虑这些复杂的力量掺杂在一起 比如政治的 文化的 经济的, 它们塑造 这些地点, 最终你都能 去参观它们。 你可以在它们周围走一走 你可以闻一闻它们的气息。 你可以感受一下它们 你可以体验一下它们的存在
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.
但近年来让我吃惊的是 我越来越少出门走向世界 越来越多地坐在我的电脑屏幕前 特别是从大概2007年开始,那时我有了一台iPhone 我不止整天坐在自己的电脑屏幕前面 我还在一天结束的时候 盯着我放在口袋里带着的这个小屏幕 让我吃惊的是 我和实体世界的关系多么迅速地发生了改变 在很短的时间里,你知道, 不管你是说过去在线的15年 或是近期总是在线的四五年 我们和周围的关系已经大为改变: 我们的注意力一直受到分散 我们既看着这些屏幕 我们也看着身边的世界
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.
让我更加吃惊 更不安的是 屏幕里的世界 似乎没有任何实体存在。 如果你去找因特网的影像 这就是你会找到的 这张非常有名的欧普特影像 就像银河系一样 无限延伸 我们似乎不在上面 我们永远都不能抓住它的整体 它常让我想起阿波罗号所拍的地球照片 那张蓝色大理石也似乎意味着 我认为,我们不能真正的理解地球这个整体 我们在无限之下显得非常渺小
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.
所以即使存在这样的网络世界和这屏幕上的世界 如果它真的是围绕着我的实体世界 我甚至不能在同一个地方找到它
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?
然后发生了一件事 我的因特网某天断线了 它有时会这样 电线维修员来修理 他开始着手 先从沙发后面的布满灰尘的电线堆里 沿着它到了我房子的前面下了地下室到了后院外面 墙上有很大一捆杂乱的电线 然后他看到一只松鼠沿着电线跑动 他说 “那就是问题所在 有松鼠在咀嚼着你的因特网“ (有松鼠在咀嚼着因特网的事)(笑声) 真让人吃惊 因特网是 一个卓越的构思 它是一系列的协议改变了 一切从购物到约会到革命的事 它绝然不是 一只松鼠可以咀嚼的事(笑声) 但事实上情况就是如此 真的有只松鼠在咀嚼我的因特网(笑声) 我头脑中就有这么一幅将可能发生的画面 如果你从墙上把电线扯下来 如果你试着 沿着它走 会到哪里呢 因特网真是一个你可以到达的地方吗 我能到那吗 我会和谁见面 真的有这么一个地方吗
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."
答案是人人都说没有 这就是因特网 这个带着红色灯的黑盒子 正如情景喜剧“IT狂人”里所显示的 通常它会放在大笨钟的最高处 因为那里是接收信号最好的地方 但他们谈到过他们的同事可以 在某个下午将它借去在办公室展示的时候使用 因特网的资深用户愿意和它分开 一会儿 她看着盒子说 ”这就是因特网吗 整个因特网 它重吗“ 他们回答 ”当然不重 因特网没有任何重量“
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.
我感到很羞愧 我正在找的东西 只有傻瓜才会去寻找 因特网是无形的 或者它是 一个闪着红灯的黑盒子 它不是一个真实的世界
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.
但事实上它是一个真实的世界 确实有因特网的真实世界 也就是我花费了过去两年时间到访的 因特网的所在地 我在大型的数据中心 它们使用和所在城市一样多的能源 我参观了类似这样的地方,比如纽约的哈德逊街60号 它是一栋大楼 名单中仅有的十几座中的其中一座 那里是大量的网络连接彼此 的地方——比别处的连接更多 这样的连接确实是个有形的过程 那关乎着网络的路由器 比如面书或 谷歌或B.T.或康卡斯特或时代华纳 不管是什么 通常连接着黄色的光纤电缆 上至天花板一直到其他网络路由器 那通常都是有形的且是密切联系的 像哈德逊街60号的大楼和其他十几栋或其他大楼 里面有超过十倍那么多的网络连接着它 相较其他大楼而言 这些大楼不是很少 哈德逊街60号特别有趣是因为它是 近六个重要网络连接的总部 这些网络连接海底电缆 网络穿过海底 连接欧洲和美洲 连接我们所有人 我特别想谈谈那些电缆
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.
如果因特网是个全球现象 如果我们活 在地球村里 那是因为有电缆 在海底 像这样的电缆 从这个角度看 他们真的非常小 你可以用手握着它们 他们就像花园软管一样 但从另一个角度看 他们非常广阔 就如你能想象的那般广阔 它们在大海里延伸 它们有三或五 或八千英里那么长 如果说材料科学和计算机技术 是无比复杂的 当中的基本物理过程 却是惊人的简单 灯光从海的一边进去 再从另一边出来 通常是从 一座叫作坐落站的大楼出来 常在临近海边不显眼的地方妥善保存起来 在海床设有增强器 它们看起来像蓝鳍吞拿 每50英里 它们会增强信号 由于传播速度 无比迅速 基本单位是每秒10千兆比特 光波 也许是你连接速度的一千倍 或能承载1万个视频流 但不止那样 你不会只把一个光波 放在一条光纤里 你也许会在一根光纤里放 50或60或70个不同波长或颜色的光波 然后你也许会 在一个电缆里放8个光纤 四个又分散到不同方向 它们很细小 就像头发那么粗
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.
它们可以连接到大陆的某个地方 它们会在沙井里面连接起来 像这样。 实际上 这是5千英里电缆接入的地方 这里是哈利法克斯 电缆从这里延伸到爱尔兰 景观在变化 三年前 当我开始思考这个问题的时候 有一条电缆 连接到非洲的西岸 也就是Steve Song这个地图上的小黑线 现在已经有六条电缆 还会有更多 三条连接到东岸 因为一旦一个国家连接了一条电缆 他们会意识到这是不足够的 如果他们想在 电缆周围建立工业 他们需要知道他们的连接 不是脆弱的而是永久的 因为如果一个电缆断了 你得派船到海中央 扔个抓钩 钩起一头电缆 再勾起另一头 然后把两端焊接在一起 再把它丢到海里 这真是个很折腾的物理过程
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.
这是我的朋友Simon Cooper 他最近 在Tata通讯公司工作 Tata通讯部 大型印度工业企业集团 我和他没有见过面 我们只是 视频通话 这常让我觉得 他是因特网里面的人 (笑声) 他是英国人 海底电缆工业 是由英国人主导的 他们大多看起来像42岁 (笑声) 因为他们都在同一时间入行 从20年前的兴盛时期开始的 Tata是以通讯业起家的 一开始他们买了两条电缆 一条横跨大西洋 一条横跨太平洋并继续完善它们 直到它们连接了整个世界 这意味着他们会把你的比特信息传送到东方或西方 他们有真的是有一束环绕地球的光 如果有电缆在太平洋中断开了 它会把光发送到 另一个方向 这么做以后 他们就开始寻找下一个连线的地方 他们会寻找没有连线的地方 那意味着 北方或者南方 首先要连去非洲 让我惊奇的是Simon有非凡的地理想象力 他想象中的世界无限延伸
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)
我非常好奇是因为我想看看 这些电缆是怎么建起来的 一直以来 上网的时候我们可以体验到这种一闪而过的迅速连网 这些轻易连接 一个推特或 一个面书贴子 或是一封电邮 似乎都有一个实体存在 似乎有这么一个时刻当大陆 被连接起来 我想看看那个过程 Simon在负责者一条新电缆 西非电缆体系(WACS) 从里斯本延伸到非洲西海岸 到科特迪瓦 加纳 奈及利亚 及喀麦隆 他说很快就会开始搭建 取决于 天气 他会告诉我具体时间 大概提前4天 他通知我前往 里斯本南部的这个海滩 大概9点以后 有个人从海里走出来(笑声) 他会带着绿色的尼龙绳 非常轻的绳子 那叫做悬缆线 那线首先连接 大海和陆地 接着会被 连接到这9千英里的光的通道 接着推土机开始把电缆拉起来 通过这艘专门的电缆安装船 电缆会浮动在 这些浮标上直到它在正确的位置 接着你会看见一个英国工程师在探视 一旦电缆放对了地方 他就回到 水中手握一把大刀 切掉每个浮标 浮标升上天空 电缆 掉进海床 他沿途一直这么做 直到船变边 到了船边 他们递给他一杯果汁和一块曲奇 接着他再跳到水中 游回岸边 然后他点了根烟 (笑声)
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.
当电缆拉到海岸边 他们准备把它连接到另一端 连接从陆地站拉过来的电缆 一开始他们带着钢锯 然后刮掉塑料内层 像厨师一样工作 最后 他们像珠宝商一样把像头发般细小的纤维绑在 拉下来的电缆上 用这台打孔机把他们焊在一起 当你看到这些人用钢锯处理电缆的时候 你不会把因特网想象像云一样虚无 它似乎变成了非常有形的东西 让我同样吃惊的是 基于这无比复杂的技术 这是无比新兴的事物 它的物理过程 本身是需要很长的时间 背后的文化是一样的 你看到了当地的劳工 你看到英国工程师 在后方给出指示 更重要的是 很多地方是一样的 电缆依旧连接着 这些经典的港口城市 像里斯本 蒙巴萨 孟买 新加坡 纽约
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.
岸上的过程需时三或四天 做好后 他们把沙井盖 盖上 把沙推到上面掩盖 把这一切都忘掉
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)
似乎我们老在讲云端的东西 每次我们把一些东西放到云端里 我们丢下了一些责任 我们很少去关注它 我们让其他人去担心它 那是不对的 著名的尼尔·斯蒂芬森曾经说过 连网的人应该知道网线的事 我们应该知道 我认为 我们应该知道 我们的英特网从哪里来 我们应该知道 是什么东西实体上连接着我们所有人 谢谢(掌声) (掌声) 谢谢(掌声)