Ruins across the Atlantic: speculations on the colonial and mythological genealogies of the internet’s submarine infrastructure

This paper centres around an interdisciplinary research on the Atlantis-2 undersea fibre optic cable, seeking to plot the deep entanglements between the internet’s material infrastructure, colonial history, and submarine ruins. Through connecting and interpreting a set of historical, archival, and narrative elements around Atlantis-2, this paper speculates on the deep genealogies of undersea telecommunication cables. Starting with a discussion on the route followed by Atlantis-2, the first sections plots a connection between colonial and digital networks that cross the South Atlantic. Then, the second section weaves a story that brings together the Atlantis-2 cable and the mythological city of Atlantis, speculating on the possible future of the internet as a submarine ruin. The historical and mythological speculations presented in this paper bring to the forefront the concealed colonial and material genealogies embedded in submarine cables, seeking to propose a new way of relating to the internet’s material infrastructure as a fragile ecosystem to care for.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 138-144

Affiliations

[0001]Department of Visual Arts

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Bogotá, Colombia

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.18

SO-VID: f9ee4269-7bca-4a80-988a-a3113237e031

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

History

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.18

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] P. Brodsky (2021) International Bandwidth Soars to New Heights, TeleGeography.

[2] S. Bruce (1999) Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines. Oxford University Press, London.

[3] D. Ferreira da Silva (2016) Fractal Thinking. http://accessions.org/article2/fractal-thinking/ (28 April 2021)

[4] C. Fuchs (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. Routledge, London.

[5] R. George (2013) Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, Food on Your Plate. Metropolitan Books, New York.

[6] D. J. Haraway (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham.

[7] P. Brodsky (2021) International Bandwidth Soars to New Heights. Available at: http://blog.telegeography.com/2021-international-bandwidth-trends-demand-global-networks (Accessed: 5 May 2021)

[8] Information Gatekeepers Inc. (2000) Embratel Launches International High-Capacity Fiber Optic Network. Submarine Fiber Optics Communications Systems (SFOCS), 8(5).

[9] B. Latour (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, New York.

[10] W. D. Mignolo (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press, Durham.

[11] J. Parikka (2015) A Geology of Media. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

[12] L. Parks and N. Starosielski (eds) (2015) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. University of Illinois Press, Chicago.

[13] Plato (2008) Timaeus and Critias. Edited by A. Gregory. Translated by R. Waterfield. Oxford University Press, New York.

[14] C. Sandvig (2013) The Internet as Infrastructure. In W. H. Dutton (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

[15] A. Sekula (1995) Fish Story. Rotterdam: Witte de With/Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf.

[16] S. L. Star and G. C. Bowker (2006) How to Infrastructure. In L. A. Lievrouw and S. Livingstone (Eds.) Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences of ICTs. Sage Publications, London.

[17] N. Starosielski (2015) The Undersea Network. Duke University Press, Durham.

[18] I. Wallerstein (1980) The Modern World-System. Bd. 2: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750. Academic Press, New York.

[19] S. Zuboff (2019) Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, London.

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