The Undersea Network (Nicole Starosielski, Duke University Press, 2015) – Reviewed by Gabby Miller

Book Review
Nicole Starosielski
The Undersea Network
Duke University Press, 2015. 312 pp.
ISBN 978-0-8223-5740-7 (hbk. : alk. Paper)

In The Undersea Network, media and communications scholar Nicole Starosielski deftly navigates the enormous task of rendering visible a largely invisible and literally underwater infrastructure: the network of ocean spanning  cables which 99% of data on the global internet run through. Starosielski traces the material environments of the internet through tulleric and oceanic environments. Conceptualizing undersea cables as “technologies of environmental transformation” (pg 202),  Starosielski takes a multi-disciplinary and multi-sited ethnographic approach to her research,  moving from cable stations to landing points and through the deep seas. Framing her inquiry as a contribution towards “network archeology”, Starosielski  draws on archives, and historical narratives, “excavating” the cultural practices, institutional installations, and projects of militarization and colonization through which, she persuasively argues, the construction, operation and contestations of the laying and maintenance of undersea cable networks are entangled.

The Undersea Network  has arrived at a time where awareness and anxiety over the physicality, and material consequences of the internet is growing in both popular and academic discourses. Controversies over Facebook data-gathering, NSA surveillance, the safety of “the cloud” and data servers,  the large amount of energy expended mining bitcoins – these are just some of the arenas where debates over how the internet is mediated in the world and through us, are being played out. The Undersea Network delivers contributions to these questions on a planetary level, “surfacing” the physical infrastructure and the geo-political histories and ecologies in which, as Starosielski would argue, these discussions must be “grounded”.  Starosielski’s lucid writing, and thorough research will change the way readers see the sea and their screens.

In chapter one Starosielski delineates three major eras of undersea cable development by material, situating each technological shift within a “historically specific social and environmental imagination” (Pg. 29).  In this schema, the 1850s-1950s is the era of “copper plate colonization”, the switch to coaxial cables from the 1950s-1980s is linked to post-war and Cold War era strategies of security and international cooperation, and the 1980s to present is the age of fiber optics, associated with financialization, deregulation and privatization in an age of imagined transnationalism. A cogent example Starosielski uses in situating material in a socio-political context is during the 1800s, in the first era of undersea cable development.  British companies dominated the field in part because British control of Malaysian colonies gave way to a cheap and abundant supply of gutta-percha, a rubber like gum that was crucial to insulating the wires underwater (pg. 33). The copper wiring laid under the sea to connect colonial capitals to colonized territories laid the groundwork, both literally (or aquatically) and ideologically, for new cable technologies sedimented atop the original colonial networks. A parallel example is from the coaxial era we are in today. New technologies of transoceanic cables allow for oceanographers to monitor the ocean floor, adding to current research on the rising temperatures and levels of the sea due to climate change. These technologies of surveillance, developed in conjunction with military research and fossil fuel industries exploring potential sources for deep sea oil extraction, allow for the gauging of global warming while feeding into it. The entanglements are circuitous.

The conceptual framework of the majority of the books chapters are mapped onto these three eras, making her arguments clear to follow. Chapter two acts as a survey of discourses around undersea cables in popular media. In this chapter, Starosielski’s traces the emergence of narratives of connection and disruptions from the Post War and Cold War Era. Starosielski goes on to argues that narratives of connection and disruption, which are engaged as strategies of insulation and interconnection have obscured undersea cables in the public imagination throughout all three eras.  Chapter three explores “Gateways”, tracing the shift from cable colonies to network operations. Chapter four “A Network of Islands” examines interconnectivity in different islands through the pacific. Chapter five “Cable Depths,” as discussed briefly, explores the entangled relationships between oceanographic, militarization and fossil fuel industries. Throughout the book, in “re-introducing an environmental consciousness to the study of digital systems” (pg. 3), undersea cables are traced through pressure points, which Starosielski argues smooths turbulent ecologies into frictionless surfaces, and is what keeping the “flow of power flowing” (pg. 65).  

What The Undersea Network could use more of is a deeper theoretical grounding in power and ideology that Starosielski directs us in her assertion that it is the invisibility of cable systems in the public sphere keeps power flowing. Framing herself as an archeologist of networks, it is difficult to not think of Foucault’s  treatment of history as an “archeology of the present,” an excavation of the processes that have led to the present day. Although he is not the sole proprietor of the term, Foucault can be credited with re-inventing the idea of archeology for critical theory, especially in The Order of Things. To avoid chronology, in attempting to give an account of something and instead to give a spatial model of archeology and to dig into substrata. Effectively, he advocates for examining not how things stretch out in time so much as materially in space. Foucault’s concept of biopower being mediated through the body could have also been an interesting addition to Chapter three’s discussion of colonial transmissions being mediated through the bodies of cable workers.  Starosielski hints towards discussions of power and makes a singular mention of hegemony, and does this in relation to a warning of our lack of resilience in the potentially precarious times ahead. A more grounded discussion of hegemonic powers and institutions, and examination of the notions of colonization, imperialism and empire that permeate the book would add interesting insights to this project.

Overall, there is much to be admired about The Undersea Network. This is a meticulously researched project, that follows through with it’s goal to ground the wireless world in material, social, political and cultural environments. The Undersea Network counters popular understandings of an increasingly wireless, de-materialized world, presenting instead wired, semi-centralized, territorially entrenched, and precarious ecosystems in overlapping social, political, and geographical environments. Advocating for infrastructural literacy, Starosielski develops the concepts of nodal and transmissive narratives as alternative modes of representation to make more accessible and resilient network structures possible.

Starosielski does a superb job of giving a physicality and geography to the construction and maintenance of the internet. Rendering these processes visible is a key goal in Starosielski’s mission to increase infrastructure literacy, a foundational step in making new structures and uses of the undersea network imaginable. In taking a multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach to disseminating her research, using illustrations, drawings, photographs and the surfacing.in website as interdependent tools for creating a more informed public, and the potential for imagining alternative access to and uses of The Undersea Network.

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