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.
我主要的著作都有關建築學、或建物 而寫這些建築時 都要從一個特定的假設開始 有一個建築師設計了一座建築,然後變成一個地點 或是許多建築師設計許多建築,然後成為一個城市 而無論這些造就了這些地方的文化或社會力量、經濟 有多麼的錯綜複雜 在最終,變成一個你能去的地方 你能拜訪各處,你能繞著他們走 你能聞到這些建築、你能感覺到這些建築 你能感覺這個地方的氛圍
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.
但這幾年嚇到我自己的是 我越來越少走出外面的世界 取而代之的是越來越常坐在電腦螢幕前面 特別是2007年開始,我買iPhone以後 我不只是整天坐在電腦螢幕前 我還開始在每天結束前爬起來 看著我口袋裡帶著的那塊小螢幕 令我驚訝的是 我與外在世界的關係改變得如此迅速 在如此短暫的時間內 不管你認為這個線上時代是在十五年前 或是四、五年前開始 我們與外在的關係已經改變 我們的注意力也時常地被分散 我們都在往螢幕裡看 去看我們身處的世界
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.
而更令我震驚的是,也讓我真正 開始注意的是,這個螢幕裡頭的世界 似乎自己沒有一點實際的存在 如果你想看一張網路的圖 你會找到這張由Opte計畫所生成的著名圖片 把網路看作銀河一般,這樣無限 好像我們沒辦法身在其中任一處 我們好像永遠無法完全掌握它 這張圖總讓我聯想到阿波羅號上看到的地球 那張藍寶石的圖片,而它的相似度也暗示了 我認為,我們永遠無法完全整體地去了解它 我們永遠會是它擴張中的一小部分
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.
所以如果有這麼一個世界和這塊螢幕 好像現實世界這樣圍繞著我的話 我永遠無法把他們放在一起
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?
然後這件事發生了 有一天,我網路如同偶而會發生地,壞了 工程師前來維修 然後他從沙發後沾滿灰塵的一團線開始 然後他跟著那條線到了我大樓前面,下了地下室,然後再出了後院 那兒有個很大的集線區安在牆上 然後他看見一隻松鼠在電纜上跑著 然後他說,"這就是你的問題 有一隻松鼠在咀嚼你的網路"(笑聲) 這看來挺驚人的 網路是個形而上的概念。網路是種囊括 購物到約會到革命等等的各種東西在上面的交換協議 這本來不是個 松鼠能咬的東西(笑聲) 但事實上看來如此 一隻松鼠真的咬了我的網路(笑聲) 然後我腦袋就開始幻想這樣一個圖像 如果你把網路線扯出牆壁 然後開始跟著它走,它會走到哪? 網路是否真的為一個你能拜訪的地方 我能到那嗎?,我會遇到誰 你懂?就是網路是否是否真的在"外面"?
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."
而這個答案,按照認知來說,應該是沒有 這該是網路,有著紅燈亮著的黑箱子 如同喜劇"The IT Crowd所呈現的樣子 通常會設在大笨鐘的頂層 因為是收訊最好的地方 但他們在協商後把它借到了大學校園裡 所以當天下午的簡報能夠使用 網路的管理者們願意短暫的把它借出 然後她看著這個盒子然後說 這就是網路?整個網路?它重嗎? 他們說,當然不重,網路一點重量都沒有
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.
然後我尷尬了。我像是笨蛋一樣 在找一個不存在的東西 網路要麼不是無形的一小滴 要麼就是一個有著會閃紅燈的小黑盒 網路之外好像沒甚麼實際形體
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,事實上,它有的。網路外有個實際的形體 而我花了大概兩年派訪這些網路的「地點」 我拜訪了大型資訊中心 那個中心的電力消耗和它所坐落城市的電力消耗相同 我還拜訪了這種地方,紐約哈德遜街60號 它是世界上的其中一棟 一種為數不多的建築,大約十來棟左右 網路在那編織成網、互相連通 量比其他地方都大 裏頭的連接是靠著實際的物理運作的 這大約是一個網路架構的路由器,如臉書 或是Google、BT、Comcast或是Time Warner,不管是甚麼 都通常是用黃色的光纖電纜牽入天花板 然後走進路由器去連接其他網路 那是實際的物質,也看來意外地親切 如哈德遜街60號這樣的建築,或是其他十幾個 都有著比身邊一排建築物 相加起來的十倍連接量 這些地方並不多 而哈德遜街六十號特別有趣的地方在於 它是好幾個非常重要網路的家 那些網路通聯著 在海裡蜿蜒的海底電纜 牽起歐美,和我們所有人 這些特別的電纜就是我想要專注的地方
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.
如果網際網路是種全球現象 如果我們住在一個地球村,就是因為海底的網路 像這樣的電纜 在這樣的特點下,它們微不足道 你能將他們握在手中,他們像是花園水管一樣 但在另一個面向來看,他們不可思議的廣布 你能想像有多廣布就有多廣布 他們爬佈滿海底。 大概是三、五或八千英里長 要說這項材料科學和電機記算數學 是極為複雜的,但它的物理過程 又驚人地簡單,光從海洋的一端傳入 然後從另外一端傳出。 它通常在下水前進入一個叫做陸地站的建築 通常很不起眼地座落在海邊的一小區 然後在海床上會有增幅器 長的有點像藍鰭鮪魚 每五十英里他們就會強化訊號, 當他們以如此快的速度傳遞,最小單位是每道光每秒內傳遞10G 速度或許是你網路的一千倍 或是能夠下載10000部影片的流量 旦不只如此,你能在光纖中放入不只一道光 一條光纖能大概放入 50、60、70條不同長短或是顏色的光波 然後一條電纜之中 大概會有八條光纖,來去各四條 他們非常細,如髮絲一樣細小
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.
然後他們連接到大陸的某地 他們會連接到像這樣的沙井,實質上的 5000英里路的電纜最後會插在這裡 這在哈利法克斯(Halifax),中間有條連接到愛爾蘭(Ireland)的電纜 整體地貌也在都改變。三年前 當我開始琢磨這些東西時,在西非海底下 有一條電纜,在Steve Song畫的這張地圖中 看來就像一條小黑線 現在那裏有六條電纜,三條會分別鋪設在東西岸,接下來還有 因為只要插入了一條電纜 那個國家就會意識到根本不夠 如果們他們想在附近發展產業 他們得確保連線是穩定而非不穩定的 因為如果電纜壞了,你得送艘船下水 然後伸出鉤子,把電纜溝起來,在找到另一端 然後把兩邊焊接後,再丟回水里 這是極度、極度精密的物理處理
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.
所以我和我的朋友Simon Cooper 這個最近在Tata電信工作的朋友, Tata是一個印度大工業企業集團的通訊部門 我從未真正見過他 我們只能透過電話聯絡,而這總是讓我去想像 他是一個住在網路裡的人(笑聲) 而他是英格蘭人。海底電纜工業是 被英國人主導,而且好像都是四十二歲 (笑聲)因為他們都是在20年前 這項工業開始發展時加入 而Tata就從買下兩條電纜開始他們的通訊營運 一條通過大西洋 一條通過太平洋,然後一段一段加建 直到他們建立了圍繞整個世界的紐帶 這表示他們能夠將你的資訊位元送過整個地球 他們已經,這是實際光線在世界傳導的樣子 如果電纜在太平洋斷掉,資訊能繞往其他方向 而他們在完成了這個建設後 就開始找下一個鋪設纜線的地方 他們想找沒鋪設過的地點,代表 北方和南方,大抵上是通往非洲 但是我覺得很驚奇的是,Simon對地理不可思議的想像 在他的思考世界裡充滿著無限的廣闊
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)
而我特別感興趣因為我想要去看 電纜建設的過程,你知道,一直以來 我們在線上所體驗到那些瞬間連接的快感 這些短暫的銜接,一封推特文或者是臉書更新 或是電子郵件,這看來是有個實際的推移過程 看起來像是在某個時機 陸地之間會被電纜插入,我就想看那個 而Simon正忙於新的電纜 WACS,西非光纖電纜系統 從里斯本(Lisbon)延伸到西非海岸 到柯特狄瓦(Cote d'Ivoire)、到迦納(Ghana)、奈及利亞(Nigeria)、卡麥隆(Cameroon) 然後他說工程日期將近, 看天氣如何,但時候到了他會讓我知道 所以大概工程四天前,他通知了我 去里斯本南方的海岸,而大約九點過後不久 這傢伙會從水中走出來(笑聲) 然後他會帶著一條綠色的尼龍線、很輕的線 叫做傳輸線,然後那就是 陸地和海洋的第一次接觸,這個連接之後將會 光經過九千英里路後的連接橋梁 然後一台推土機開始將電纜從 特製的電纜登陸船上拉下,並會在 定好位之前靠著這些浮標飄在海面 接著就能看見這些英國工程師在旁看著 然後,一旦它就定位,這傢伙 拿著一把大刀回到海中,然後把每個浮標砍下 浮標飄出水面,然後電纜 沉入海底,那個男人一路砍到船那端 當他到船那端時 他們給他一杯果汁和一塊餅乾 之後他跳回海中,游回岸邊 然後他開始抽起菸來了(笑聲)
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.
一旦電纜到了海岸上 他們開始準備把它連接到另外一端 因為電纜那時已經開始有點被扯離陸地站 他們先拿了一把鋼鋸,他們開始 用像是廚師的手法開始刮除塑膠內皮 接著他們終於開始用像珠寶商的手法 把這些髮絲般細的光纖排成一束 跟牽來電纜一起 然後他們用這些打洞機把它們焊接起來 當你看到這些工人用鋼鋸來處理這些電纜時 你不會再去把網路想做雲朵 它開始看來像個非常真實存在的東西 同樣讓我驚訝的 除了這樣一項高度精密的技術,和這個 不可思議的新工藝外 是它的操作手法已經存在了很久,連同其中蘊含的文化也是 你會看到當地勞工,在後指揮的英國工程師 還有更重要地 都還在同樣的地點,這些電纜連接的 仍是一些古老的港都,像是里斯本,蒙巴薩 孟買、新加坡、紐約
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.
而接下來這些海岸邊的工程大概需要三四天 當一切完成時,他們重新填上沙井 他們用沙重新覆上 直到大家都忘了它
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)
就我看來,我們花很多時間在談論雲端 但每當我們能夠將東西放到雲端之上 我們便放棄了一些責任 我們就更少與它連結,我們讓別人去操心 這好像不大對勁 Neal Stephenson有句名言 他說:「被連接的人應該熟知連接他們的橋樑」 而我們也該知道,我認為,我們應該知道 我們的網路從何而來,而我們該知道 實際上、物理上連接著我們的東西是甚麼 謝謝各位(鼓掌) (鼓掌) 謝謝(鼓掌)