[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Blog #7/15] "The Internet's Invisible Skeleton"

Sharing something I came across while looking up Nicole Starosielski's works: an interactive mapping site surfacing.in. Represented visually are the undersea networks that connect major economic centers such as: California-Hawaii, Hawaii-Fiji, Fiji-New Zealand, New Zealand-Australia, and Australia-Singapore. It's almost bizarre that I have to remind myself of the infrastructural materiality our digital presences require, or as Starosielski calls it, shattering the “fantasy of dematerialization” — that stubborn belief that our phone conversations and emails are swirling somewhere above us, dispersed into the atmosphere. Just the sight of a small piece of fiber-optic cable can do this for many, according to her. 

Starosielski's research on undersea cables as resource and infrastructure provides penetrating insight into how the digital shapes global inequalities still today. Especially with how wired globalization is framed as liberal as well as liberating force of capitalist modernity, exemplified in Google's (distasteful) likening of its new Equiano submarine cable operations to liberated slaves (this liberal, neo-colonialist, and neo-imperialist narrative is analyzed by other scholars of distinct disciplines and methodologies such as Seb Franklin and Lisa Lowe), being able to ground the digital in its materiality seems to be a crucial and urgent project.