Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Literature, #U.S.A., #American Literature, #21st Century, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #v.5, #Amazon.com, #Retail
Bell founded the telephone industry. His legacy was the Bell System, and his monument was strung up on poles for all to see: the network of telephone wires that eventually found its way into virtually every building in the developed world. Bell founded New England Telephone Company, which eventually was absorbed into the Bell System. It never completely lost its identity, though, and it never forgot its connection to Alexander Graham Bell — it even moved Bell’s laboratory into its corporate headquarters in Boston.
After the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, New England Telephone and its sibling Baby Bell, New York Telephone, joined together to form a new company called Nynex, whose loyal soldiers are eager to make it clear that they see themselves as the true heirs of Bell’s legacy. Now, Nynex and Cable & Wireless, the brainchildren of Bell and Kelvin, the two supreme ninja hacker mage lords of global telecommunications, have formed an alliance to challenge AT&T and all the other old monopolies.
We know how the first two acts of the story are going to go: In late 1997, with the completion of FLAG, Luke (“Nynex”) Skywalker, backed up on his Oedipal quest by the heavy shipping iron of Han (“Cable & Wireless”) Solo, will drop a bomb down the Death Star’s ventilation shaft. In 1999, with the completion of SEA-ME-WE 3, the Empire will Strike Back. There is talk of a FLAG 2, which might represent some kind of a
Return of the Jedi
scenario.
But once the first FLAG has been built, everyone’s going to get into the act — it’s going to lead to a general rebellion. “FLAG will change the way things are done. They are
setting a benchmark,” says Dave Handley, the cable layer. And Mercogliano makes a persuasive case that national telecom monopolies will be so preoccupied, over the next decade, with building the “last mile” and getting their acts together in a competitive environment that they’ll have no choice but to leave cable laying to the entrepreneurs.
That’s the simple view of what FLAG represents. It is important to remember, though, that companies like Cable & Wireless and Nynex are not really heroic antimonopolists. A victory for FLAG doesn’t lead to a pat ending like in
Star Wars
— it does not get us into an idealized free market. “One thing to bear in mind is that Cable & Wireless
is
a club and they are rigorously anticompetitive wherever they have the opportunity,” said Doug Barnes, the Cypherpunk. “Nynex and the other Baby Bells are self-righteously trying to crack open other companies’ monopolies while simultaneously trying to hold onto their domestic ones. The FLAG folks are merely clubs with a smidgin more vision, enough business sense to properly reward talent, and a profound desire to make a great pile of money.’’
There has been a lot of fuss in the last few years concerning the 50th anniversary of the invention of the computer. Debates have raged over who invented the computer: Atanasoff or Mauchly or Turing? The only thing that has been demonstrated is that, depending on how you define
computer
, any one of the above, and several others besides, can be said to have invented it.
Oddly enough, this debate comes at a time when stand-alone computers are seeming less and less significant and the Internet more so. Whether or not you agree that “the network is the computer,” a phrase Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems recently coined, you can’t dispute that moving information around seems to have much broader
appeal than processing it. Many more people are interested in email and the Web than were interested in databases and spreadsheets.
Yet little attention has been paid to the historical antecedents of the Internet — perhaps partly because these cable technologies are much older and less accessible and partly because many Net people want so badly to believe that the Net is fundamentally new and unique. Analog is seen as old and bad, and so many people assume that the communications systems of old were strictly analog and have just now been upgraded to digital.
This overlooks much history and totally misconstrues the technology. The first cables carried telegraphy, which is as purely digital as anything that goes on inside your computer. The cables were designed that way because the hackers of a century and a half ago understood perfectly well why digital was better. A single bit of code passing down a wire from Porthcurno to the Azores was apt to be in sorry shape by the time it arrived, but precisely because it was a bit, it could easily be abstracted from the noise, then recognized, regenerated, and transmitted anew.
The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.
It’s tempting to observe that, so far, no one has gotten sufficiently excited over a hot new Web page to go out and burn down a major building. But this is a little too glib. True, that mob in the streets of New York in 1858 was celebrating the ability to send messages quickly across the Atlantic. But, if the network is the computer, then in retrospect, those torch-bearing New Yorkers could be seen as
celebrating the joining of the small and primitive computer that was the North American telegraph system to the small and primitive computer that was the European system, to form The Computer, with a capital C.
At that time, the most important components of these Computers — the CPUs, as it were — were tense young men in starched collars. Whenever one of them stepped out to relieve himself, The Computer went down. As good as they were at their jobs, they could process bits only so fast, so The Computer was very slow. But The Computer has done nothing since then but get faster, become more automated, and expand. By 1870, it stretched all the way to Australia. The advent of analog telephony plunged The Computer into a long dormant phase during which it grew immensely but lost many of its computerlike characteristics.
But now The Computer is fully digital once again, fully automatic, and faster than hell. Most of it is in the United States, because the United States is large, free, and made of dirt. Largeness eliminates troublesome borders. Freeness means that anyone is allowed to patch new circuits onto The Computer. Dirt makes it possible for anyone with a backhoe to get in on the game. The Computer is striving mightily to grow beyond the borders of the United States, into a world that promises even vaster economies of scale — but most of that world isn’t made of dirt, and most of it isn’t free. The lack of freedom stems both from bad laws, which are grudgingly giving way to deregulation, and from monopolies willing to do all manner of unsavory things in order to protect their turf.
Even though FLAG’s bandwidth isn’t that great by 1996 Internet standards, and even though some of the companies involved in it are, in other arenas, guilty of monopolistic behavior, FLAG really is going to help blow open bandwidth and weaken the telecom monopolies.
In many ways it hearkens back to the wild early days of the cable business. The first transatlantic cables, after all, were constructed by private investors who, like FLAG’s investors, just went out and built cable because it seemed like a good idea. After FLAG, building new high-bandwidth, third-generation fiber-optic cable is going to seem like a good idea to a lot of other investors. And unlike the ones who built FLAG, they will have the benefit of knowing about the Internet, and perhaps of understanding, at some level, that they are not merely stringing fancy telephone lines but laying down new traces on the circuit board of The Computer. That understanding may lead them to create vast amounts of bandwidth that would blow the minds of the entrenched telecrats and to adopt business models designed around packet-switching instead of the circuits that the telecrats are stuck on.
If the network is The Computer, then its motherboard is the crust of Planet Earth. This may be the single biggest drag on the growth of The Computer, because Mother Earth was not designed to be a motherboard. There is too much water and not enough dirt. Water favors a few companies that know how to lay cable and have the ships to do it. Those companies are about to make a whole lot of money.
Eventually, though, new ships will be built. The art of slack control will become common knowledge — after all, it comes down to a numerical simulation problem, which should not be a big chore for the ever-expanding Computer. The floors of the oceans will be surveyed and sidescanned down to every last sand ripple and anchor scar. The physical challenges, in other words, will only get easier.
The one challenge that will then stand in the way of The Computer will be the cultural barriers that have always hindered cooperation between different peoples. As the globe-trotting cable layers in Papa Doc’s demonstrate,
there will always be a niche for people who have gone out and traveled the world and learned a thing or two about its ways.
Hackers with ambitions of getting involved in the future expansion of The Computer could do a lot worse than to power down their PCs, buy GPS receivers, place calls to their favorite travel agents, and devote some time to the pursuit of hacker tourism.
The motherboard awaits.
~
Live as of May 2003: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
Editor’s note:
This conversation with Neal Stephenson is actually a pasticcio of interviews conducted — by publications ranging from the science fiction magazine
Locus
to the UK newspaper
The Guardian
— during the author’s 1999
Cryptonomicon
book tour, with the odd bit from Neal’s own website thrown in for good measure. A complete list of sources is
below
.
Reporter:
Why write about crypto?
Neal Stephenson:
Crypto is math, which is the least likely subject for a novel that’s going to achieve any kind of mass popularity. Occasionally, I just feel this impulse to write something that’s very weird. And it seemed that writing a novel with math at the center of it was a good way to relieve that impulse. And it’s important: It’s obscure, and it’s hard to understand, but I just thought it was worth taking a crack at.
Reporter:
More than a crack at —
Cryptonomicon
is the first volume in a trilogy, right?
Neal Stephenson:
We’re trying to avoid the “T-word.” Not that there’s anything wrong with trilogies, but we’re using words like “cycle” or “series” instead, partly because the term “trilogy” implies a closer linkage between books. I’m trying to write these in such a way that you could read any one in the series and not have any idea that the others existed.
But there is a big tangle of interrelated themes here: crypto, language, computers, and money. It is pretty fertile ground and I have come up with a few possible storylines,
set in different historical epochs. There is a future one that didn’t fit into this novel, and another farther in the past that I’m playing around with now. There are always a few strange little corners of the story that may not make sense outside of the context of the full series, but ninety-nine percent of it can stand on its own reasonably well, I hope.
Reporter:
Till now, you’d been thought of primarily as an author of science fiction.
Cryptonomicon
isn’t SF.
Neal Stephenson:
It might seem strange, but genre doesn’t even enter my mind until moments like this. Selling and distributing books isn’t my job, and assigning particular categories to books is something that’s necessary and desirable when you come to that part of the business. But when you’re in the writing part of it, it just never comes up. To me it’s all one thing that I do, and I’m not really that conscious of whether I’m currently writing science fiction or something else.
And note that, occasionally, SF writers have taken on things that aren’t typically what you think of as science fiction — historical novels, for instance. One of the most prominent examples of that was the “steampunk” novel by [Bruce] Sterling and [William] Gibson,
The Difference Engine
. That’s kind of what I’m doing in
Cryptonomicon
— it’s just that the historical period I’m looking at is recent, WWII.
An SF writer working on a historical novel tends to see the real world as only one of many possible worlds, and a fairly bizarre and exotic one at that. Also, SF writers tend to be interested in how their worlds are informed by the available science and technology. It can be quite interesting to bring the same point of view to bear on this world — and particularly the era of WWII, which was so heavily shaped by technologies such as crypto, radar, and nuclear weapons.
There is a particular science fiction approach to the world, and it has nothing to do with the future. It doesn’t have to be in the future at all. I used to read anthologies
of science fiction stories when I was a kid — there’d be ten stories about rocket ships and ray guns, and then there’d be some strange Robert Bloch story set in some town in the 1950s that had no science, no traditional SF content, but it was clearly science fiction. It had that SF approach: an awareness that things could have been different, that this is one of many possible worlds; that if you came to this world from some other planet, this would be a science fiction world.
In
Cryptonomicon
, some of the characters have been going along and they’ve discovered a little crack in the sidewalk; it splits wide open, they fall through it, and they’re in this whole universe that they didn’t imagine. It happens for them in different ways. The clearest case is Bobby Shaftoe, who is minding his own business, having a career in the Marine Corps, and suddenly everything becomes very, very strange for him. It takes him a long time to figure out what’s going on, and he never totally gets the whole story.