The Undersea Network

Ninety-nine percent of intercontinental internet traffic travels through submarine cables, yet almost no one outside the telecommunications industry writes seriously about them. Starosielski combines ethnography, media theory, and geopolitical analysis to trace the routes these cables follow — routes that often repeat the paths laid by telegraph companies in the nineteenth century. The book examines how landing sites are chosen, how local communities negotiate with global infrastructure, and how the physical vulnerability of a cable on an ocean floor shapes the politics of connectivity. Her argument is that networks are not abstract topologies but material systems embedded in specific landscapes, economies, and power relations. For product leaders, the book makes vivid the infrastructure dependency chain that sits beneath every cloud service and every global user base. It is a reminder that distribution is always, in the end, a physical problem.