The Undersea Network by Nicole Starosielski (review)

This book will frustrate historians of technology. It is primarily a cultural history of the cabling of the Pacific. The author’s training is in film and media studies. Nicole Starosielski’s key points are that the modern world is almost totally dependent on fiber-optic cables for its telecommunications, not on satellites, and that the fiber-optic network is fragile. Her strengths are in the way she brings film and media material into play. Her weaknesses are that one needs to become familiar with some of the jargon of her trade and that her grounding in other disciplines is occasionally shaky. Paul Kennedy’s masterwork on the geopolitical complexity of the Pacific in the late 1800s, The Samoan Tangle (1974), is notably absent.

Starosielski identifies three periods of submarine cable-laying in the Pacific: submarine telegraph cables laid between 1902, when the All-Red Line was completed to unite the British Empire, and the 1940s; coaxial telephone cables laid during the cold war from the 1950s through the 1980s; and since the 1990s, when a neoliberal network of fiber-optic cables has been installed. Starosielski notes that the last two systems have been little studied. Her work is a valuable contribution to the research on the evolution of the fiber-optic network.

The reader needs to be cautious in accepting her dismissal of what she calls the wireless system based on satellites. There have been three major global wireless systems with strong geopolitical pressure driving them and Starosielski confuses the last two while ignoring the first. The first was the low-frequency network installed by 1919 by the United States Navy using Poulsen arc transmitters in an attempt to break the British cable monopoly. The second, which plays a role in chapter 5, was a British recovery using Marconi’s high-frequency system of beam antennas installed from the late 1920s on; it figured heavily in the success of the British company Cable & Wireless. The third was the satellite-based system, again an American geo-political construct.

Chapter 1 sets out a minimal technological history. Chapter 2 focuses on Starosielski’s film and media skills. The account of the Felix the Cat cartoon of 1924 where Felix becomes the telegraphic signal transmitted along the cable is a gem (pp. 88–89). At the end of the chapter Starosielski comments that “this book is structured as a transmission narrative—it attempts to connect virtual worlds with their surrounding social and natural environments and reveal . . . the importance of material and cultural ‘drag’ to the growth of networks” (p. 93). Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on the shifting geography and history of the repeater stations needed on the long Pacific routes, then the “turbulent ecologies” of the cable landing points, then the shifting networks of the island connecting points. These chapters draw heavily on Zodiac, the house magazine of Cable & Wireless, the company that ran so many of the “cable colonies.” Starosielski’s account of these is nuanced. Such “colonies” interacted constantly with the local populations on which they often depended for everything from food to social life.

In the cold war period such interactions with local populations ceased. Many critical nodes in the network had their cable stations “hardened” with underground bunkers designed to resist nuclear attack and enough supplies of food and water for their personnel to be able to keep operating for some time. In the neoliberal period the need for personnel has markedly diminished and stations are merely walled off with little human traffic. Islands serve as connectors in this system, but the geopolitics of the Pacific Basin have shifted over time: Hawaii and Guam are now the most important island nodes, as befits a period of American hegemony. Chapter 6 introduces the reader to a totally different technological use of deep-sea cables, for oceanographic research.

Starosielski claims that the neoliberal system is fragile, most significantly through the loss of institutional memory as the older monopolistic forms of industrial organization have shifted...