Cryptonomicon

One cannot merely pay the cable out at the same speed as the ship moves forward. If the bottom is sloping down and away from the ship as the ship proceeds, it is necessary to pay the cable out faster. If the bottom is sloping up toward the ship, the cable must come out more slowly. Such calculations are greatly complicated by the fact that the cable is stretched out far behind the ship — the distance between the ship and the cable’s contact point on the bottom of the ocean can be more than 30 kilometers, and the maximum depth at which (for example) KDD cable can be laid is 8,000 meters. Insofar as the shape of the bottom affects what the ship ought to be doing, it’s not the shape of the bottom directly below the ship that is relevant, but the shape of the bottom wherever the contact point happens to be located, which is by no means a straightforward calculation. Of course, the ship is heaving up and down on the ocean and probably being shoved around by wind and currents while all this is happening, and there is also the possibility of ocean currents that may move the cable to and fro during its descent.

  It is not, in other words, a seat-of-the-pants kind of deal; the skipper can’t just sit up on the bridge, eyeballing a chart, and twiddling a few controls according to his intuition. In practice, the only way to ensure that the cable ends up where it is supposed to is to calculate the whole thing ahead of time. Just as aeronautical engineers create numerical simulations of hypothetical airplanes to test their coefficient of drag, so do the slack control wizards of Cable & Wireless Marine use numerical simulation techniques to model the catenary curve adopted by the cable as it stretches between ship and contact point. In combination with their detailed data on the shape of the ocean floor, this enables them to figure out, in advance, exactly what the ship should do when. All of it is boiled down into a set of instructions that is turned over to the master of the cable ship: at such and such a point, increase speed to x knots and reduce cable tension to y tons and change payout speed to z meters per second, and so on and so forth, all the way from Porthcurno to Miura.”

  It sounds like it would make a good videogame,” I said to Captain Stuart Evans after he had laid all of this out for me. I was envisioning something called SimCable. “It would make a good videogame,” he agreed, “but it also makes a great job, because it’s a combination of art and science and technique — and it’s not an art you learn overnight. It’s definitely a black art.”

  Cable & Wireless’s Marine Survey department has nailed the slack control problem. That, in combination with the company’s fleet of cable-laying ships and its human capital, makes it dominant in the submarine cable-laying world.

  By “human capital” I mean their ability to dispatch weather-beaten operatives such as the Lan Tao Island crowd to difficult places like Suez and have them know their asses from their elbows. As we discovered on our little jaunt to Egypt, where we tried to rendezvous with a cable ship in the Gulf of Suez and were turned back by the Egyptian military, one doesn’t just waltz into places like that on short notice and get stuff to happen.

  In each country between England and Japan, there are hoops that must be jumped through, cultural differences that must be understood, palms that must be greased, unwritten rules that must be respected. The only way to learn that stuff is to devote a career to it. Cable & Wireless has an institutional memory stretching all the way back to 1870, when it laid the first cable from Porthcurno to Australia, and the British maritime industry as a whole possesses a vast fund of practical experience that is the legacy of the Empire.

  One can argue that, in the end, the British Empire did Britain surprisingly little good. Other European countries that had pathetic or nonexistent empires, such as Italy, have recently surpassed England in standard of living and other measures of economic well-being. Scholars of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it. Whether or not this is the case, it is quite obvious from looking at the cable-laying industry that the Victorian practice of sending British people all over the planet is now paying them back handsomely.

  The current position of AT&T versus Cable & Wireless reflects the shape of America versus the shape of the British Empire. America is a big, contiguous mass, easy to defend, immensely wealthy, and basically insular. No one comes close to it in developing new technologies, and AT&T has always been one of America’s technological leaders. By contrast, the British Empire was spread out all over the place, and though it controlled a few big areas (such as India and Australia), it was basically an archipelago of outposts, let us say a network, completely dependent on shipping and communications to stay alive. Its dominance was always more economic than military — even at the height of the Victorian era, its army was smaller than the Prussian police force. It could coerce the natives, but only so far — in the end, it had to co-opt them, give them some incentive to play along. Even though the Empire has been dissolving itself for half a century, British people and British institutions still know how to get things done everywhere.

  It is not difficult to work out how all of this has informed the development of the submarine cable industry. AT&T makes really, really good cables; it has the pure technology nailed, though if it doesn’t stay on its toes, it’ll be flattened by the Japanese. Cable & Wireless doesn’t even try to make cables, but it installs them better than anyone else.

  The legacy

  Kelvin founded the cable industry by understanding the science, and developing the technology, that made it work. His legacy is the ongoing domination of the cable-laying industry by the British, and his monument is concealed beneath the waves: the ever growing web of submarine cables joining continents together.

  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

  Press Conference

  * * *

  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 th
ere 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.