Cable And Internet Quotes

I know that I am lucky to be alive at the same time as you. I know that finding you was a cosmic needle in a haystack, a joke of Internet cables and telephone wires. But I also know that you are more afraid of opening up than losing me.

But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.

There’s a lot of dirty theology out there, the religious counterpart to dirty politics and dirty business, I suppose. You might call it spiritual pornography—a kind of for-profit exploitative nakedness. It’s found in many of the same places as physical pornography (the Internet and cable TV for starters), and it promises similar things: instant intimacy, fantasy and make-believe, private voyeurism and vicarious experience, communion without commitment. That’s certainly not what we’re after in these pages. No, we’re after a lost treasure as old as the story of the Garden of Eden: the...

That may be true," I thought, "But they don't have digital cable or Internet access, so really what's the point of being alive?" Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb-filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: "I Love the 80s on VH1.

We do not need to plug a fiber optic cable into our brains in order to access the Internet. Not only can the human retina transmit data at an impressive rate of nearly 10 million bits per second, but it comes pre-packaged with a massive amount of dedicated wetware, the visual cortex, that is highly adapted to extracting meaning from this information torrent and to interfacing with other brain areas for further processing.

This was what was keeping me awake at night,' Walter said. 'This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV- there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.

Zook peeked into the living room. “This house has high speed Internet, right?” “Sure, we got cable,” Grandma said. “We’re not in the Stone Age here. I blog and everything.

The last wire to disappear will be the power cable, driven by advances in wireless power and power management.

Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture. The Bush era is inextricable from the failures of cable news; the executive overreaches of the Obama years were obscured by the internet’s magnification of personality and performance; Trump’s rise to power is inseparable from the existence of social networks that must continually aggravate their users in order to continue making money. But lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so politically determinative—and why are all those questions asking the same thing?

If the world’s 223 international undersea cable systems were to suddenly disappear, only a minuscule amount of this traffic would be backed up by satellite, and the Internet would effectively be split between continents.

The common man pays for the internet,” he went on. “He pays for cable, for Christ’s sake! Because he needs more and more and more! Like anyone could watch one hundred channels. What good is a life if you live it like that? Glued to a lightbox showing you pictures. Telling you when to laugh and what to fear. The common man lives this way because he has lost the intuition of our ancestors. All you need in order to live is this.” He took two fingers and pressed them to my mother’s wrist.

As much as 25 per cent of the world’s current internet traffic crosses British territory via the cables, en route between the US, Europe, Africa and all points east. Much of the remaining traffic has landing or departure points in the US. So between them Britain and the US play host to most of the planet’s burgeoning data flows.

If you're too young to remember the Time Before Pong, then you probably can't appreciate the momentousness of its arrival. Bear in mind the game emerged in a very different world. It was a time before home computers, cable television, cell phones, game consoles, the Internet--everything we take for granted today. For many of my formative years, we still watched TV in black and white, and had to get up to change the channel. This was the technological Dark Ages. Had we been less culturally enlightened, we would have denounced Pong as witchcraft and burned its inventors at the stake. For those of us who were there--who had never played, let alone seen, a video game--we knew we were witnessing something extraordinary, a groundbreaking achievement in home entertainment. However, none of us knew that we were participating in the birth of a revolution.

You don't watch many movies, do you?" "Fraid not," he said. "I never had much interest in movies. 'Sides that, the nearest cinema was almost two hours from my home." "What about cable TV?" "No cable." "Satellite?" "Nope." "No Internet either?" He shook his head. "Are you serious?" she asked, incredulous. "How did you ever survive?" "Where I come from, there was always something more interesting to do outside." "And where was that?" she asked. "Mars?

I still remember the day I first came across the Internet. It was back in 1993, when I was in high school. I went with a couple of buddies to visit our friend Ido (who is now a computer scientist). We wanted to play table tennis. Ido was already a huge computer fan, and before opening the ping-pong table he insisted on showing us the latest wonder. He connected the phone cable to his computer and pressed some keys. For a minute all we could hear were squeaks, shrieks and buzzes, and then silence. It didn’t succeed. We mumbled and grumbled, but Ido tried again. And again. And again. At last he gave a whoop and announced that he had managed to connect his computer to the central computer at the nearby university. ‘And what’s there, on the central computer?’ we asked. ‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘there’s nothing there yet. But you could put all kinds of things there.’ ‘Like what?’ we questioned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘all kinds of things.’ It didn’t sound very promising. We went to play ping-pong, and for the following weeks enjoyed a new pastime, making fun of Ido’s ridiculous idea. That was less than twenty-five years ago (at the time of writing).

We’ve been lunching on a lie since high school. The lie was this: those wishing to take away your freedom would come in the form of some massive monolithic, soulless government. We had to worry about faceless bureaucrats and faceless, armed mobs with mysterious insignias busting our doors in the dead of night, scooping us out of our beds, where we’re vanned to reeducation camps somewhere underground, a place with no internet, no cable, no sushi—not unlike certain parts of New Jersey. Which would be fine with me, because I hate sushi. But the “no internet thing” would be a problem. Because I love cat videos.

Even in a forest, there are loners, would-be hermits who want little to do with others. Can such antisocial trees block alarm calls simply by not participating? Luckily, they can't. For usually there are fungi present that act as intermediaries to guarantee quick dissemination of news. These fungi operate like fiber-optic Internet cables. Their thin filaments penetrate the ground, weaving through it in almost unbelievable density. One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these "hyphae." Over centuries, a single fungus can cover many square miles and network an entire forest. The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping the trees exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers. Science has adopted a term first coined by the journal Nature for Dr. Simard's discovery of the "wood wide web" pervading our forests. What and how much information is exchanged are subjects we have only just begun to research. For instance, Simard discovered that different tree species are in contact with one another, even when they regard each other as competitors. And the fungi are pursuing their own agendas and appear to be very much in favor of conciliation and equitable distribution of information and resources.

PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, including email, photos, video and audio chats, Web-browsing content, search engine queries, and all other data stored on their clouds, transforming the companies into witting coconspirators. Upstream collection, meanwhile, was arguably even more invasive. It enabled the routine capturing of data directly from private-sector Internet infrastructure—the switches and routers that shunt Internet traffic worldwide, via the satellites in orbit and the high-capacity fiber-optic cables that run under the ocean.

Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT’S NOT AS though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities, so when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it’s rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations. Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry. Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.” A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.” Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.” Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. I have a name for the principle at work here: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

It’s easy to underestimate how profound and holistic Roddenberry’s vision of the techscape of the future was. By today’s standards, the available technology of 1964 was downright primitive. Doors did not open automatically when we approached them. The first handheld calculator was still in the future, as were microwave ovens and cell phones. 1964 was a year before most Americans had even heard of a place called Vietnam, five years before man walked on the moon, 25 years before anyone ever surfed the Internet. Your phone had a curly cord, and the new innovation of “touchtone” dialing was merely a year old. Even the television sets that viewers watched would be considered positively prehistoric today. Most TVs were black-and-white models, and the majority of those sets had no remote control. There was no cable or satellite; rabbit ears and roof-top antennas were the norm. The world looked, and was, different.

Paper wallets can be generated easily using a tool such as the client-side JavaScript generator at bitaddress.org. This page contains all the code necessary to generate keys and paper wallets, even while completely disconnected from the internet. To use it, save the HTML page on your local drive or on an external USB flash drive. Disconnect from the internet and open the file in a browser. Even better, boot your computer using a pristine operating system, such as a CD-ROM bootable Linux OS. Any keys generated with this tool while offline can be printed on a local printer over a USB cable (not wirelessly), thereby creating paper wallets whose keys exist only on the paper and have never been stored on any online system. Put these paper wallets in a fireproof safe and “send” bitcoin to their bitcoin address, to implement a simple yet highly effective “cold storage” solution. Figure 4-8 shows a paper wallet generated from the bitaddress.org site.

Online’ sales on the Internet are only an improvement of the old mail order catalogues, which were introduced in . . . 1850; they do not represent a structural change. Similarly, the Internet, multimedia cell phones, cable television, smartcards and the general computerisation of society — even genetic engineering — do not represent structural changes. They are all only developments of what already existed. There is nothing in all this to compare with inventions that really turned the world upside down, the real techno-economic metamorphoses introduced between 1860 and 1960 that revolutionised society and the framework of life: internal combustion engines, electricity, the telephone, telegraph, radio (which was more revolutionary than television), trains, cars, airplanes, penicillin, antibiotics, and so forth. The ‘new economy’ is behind us! No fundamental innovation has taken place since 1960. Computers only allow us to accomplish differently, faster and more cheaply (but with much greater fragility) what was already being done. On the other hand, the automobile, antibiotics, telecommunications and air travel were authentic revolutions that made possible what before had been impossible.

and broadcast internet ethics promotions advertisements through terrestrial and cable TV (shown in newspapers also). It also

marketing costs for cable and wireless internet by 22% of the sales in 2010. Accordingly, the KCC established and

meeting. An inspection of 2010 marketing costs showed that while cable Internet marketing

ID when making an internet phone call using a FMC terminal. This is expected to contribute to the promotion of the cable/wireless

quality of cable high-speed internet services (All-IP broadcasting and communications

Usually, it is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain—from a tiny blog to Gawker to a website of a local news network to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I “leak” a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that. Really, it can be anything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the Internet are exploited to change public perception—and sell product.

by the FCC’s own reckoning, the cable companies will soon enjoy an uncontested monopoly over broadband Internet in much of the United States beyond the East Coast, and they are also seeking control of more Hollywood studios and television networks.

Creating new cultural narratives for undersea cables is critical to an informed public participation with the transnational Internet, especially in a privatized cable system where, as described in chapter 1, public perception can affect the development of new networks.

Before she was evicted, Larraine had $164 left over after paying the rent. She could have put some of that away, shunning cable and Walmart. If Larraine somehow managed to save $50 a month, nearly one-third of her after-rent income, by the end of the year she would have $600 to show for it—enough to cover a single month’s rent. And that would have come at considerable sacrifice, since she would sometimes have had to forgo things like hot water and clothes. Larraine could have at least saved what she spent on cable. But to an older woman who lived in a trailer park isolated from the rest of the city, who had no car, who didn’t know how to use the Internet, who only sometimes had a phone, who no longer worked, and who sometimes was seized with fibromyalgia attacks and cluster migraines—cable was a valued friend.

The telegraph not only linked the world in real time but became a bridge to subsequent international communications breakthroughs—the radio in the 1920s, the telephone in the 1950s, the Internet in the 1990s. Even the magic of the wireless Internet rests on a solid foundation of wire cables, just like the magic of the telegraph.

Reform might begin with the phone, cable, and Internet providers who hook up our homes and mobile devices and have carved the United States into noncompetitive fiefdoms, enabling them to extract enormous rewards from what are essentially natural monopolies.

Google Fiber was launched to connect homes in Austin, Kansas City, and Provo (Utah) with internet service that’s one hundred times faster than broadband. Google never intended to become an Internet Service Provider. Rather, this is about forcing the established providers in each market—Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, Verizon, Charter—to lower their prices and increase their bandwidth. In developing countries, a similar strategy is in play. Google is helping to build out fiber backbones for entire cities, such as Kampala, Uganda. Where the ground or the local government proves tricky, there is Project Loon. Laying a massive backbone would be an expensive proposition for a rural community, hence those giant floating balloons.

Update Garmin Maps using Garmin Express | +44-808-196-8120 If you have a Windows operating system, follow these steps to update Garmin maps with Garmin Express. Note that you must have Garmin Express installed on your device to perform a Garmin GPS update. If you have not installed Garmin Express yet, install it by following the steps provided in the Garmin Express installation section, and then follow these steps to perform the Garmin GPS update. Steps to update Garmin Maps using Garmin Express on Windows 1. Open Garmin Express. 2. If you have not registered your Garmin device, first register it by adding the device in Garmin Express and follow the steps. To register your device, connect your device to the computer with a USB cable, open Garmin Express, click "Add a device" and select your device name. Once your device has been registered, you can easily check for updates through these steps. 3. Click on the "Settings" icon at the top right. 4. From the available options, click on "About" 5. Click "Check for Express Updates." 6. If there are new updates available, you will see the option "Install now". Click Install Now. 7. Once you click Install, the update will download and then install on your device. Yes, it is that easy to update Garmin Maps with Garmin Express. However, please make sure the internet is working well and your device storage has enough space before updating. This will avoid unnecessary errors while downloading Garmin Express and installing Garmin Express. For help with updating your Garmin GPS, contact the Garmin contact number at +44-808-196-8120.

To Setup ASUS AC1900 extender, during this article we are getting to learn step by step procedure. Wireless extenders are basically referred to as wireless repeaters. It can boost the WiFi signals in order that one can utilize the high speed internet in every single corner during a big coverage area. ASUS AC1900 extender is an optimum product by ASUS and is capable of working perfectly with any Wi-Fi router, modems or cable routers. It can deliver high speed Wi-Fi signal to the whole home network. This range extender comes with various other features that make it unique among other extenders

Mark my words: one day, cable will be gone. So will satellite. You’ll walk into Circuit City and you’ll buy a TV that’s internet-ready.

In a world without cable channels and satellite television, videos and DVDs, movies and the Internet, an artist’s creation was the one ever-present object that had to serve as a source of pleasure and inspiration over and over again, year after year, without becoming stale.

There are many small charges that are tacked on to your monthly bill statements, such as credit cards, cable, Internet, utilities, and ATM fees. All of them seem like a small amount, but when you add them up, the total amount wasted each month can be startling. They are the proverbial death of a thousand cuts. By creating a monthly habit to review these bills, you can identify opportunities to reduce or eliminate your recurring expenditures. Description: Once a month, go through each statement and highlight any questionable item. Also, if you feel that you’re spending too much money in a specific category, then earmark that expenditure. You’ll call this company and negotiate a lower price, which we’ll talk about next.

Cable was born commercial, while the Internet was born with no revenue model, or

Net wages: “It’s not what you make, but what you net” after paying the FIRE sector, basic utilities and taxes. The usual measure of disposable personal income (DPI) refers to how much employees take home after income-tax withholding (designed in part by Milton Friedman during World War II) and over 15% for FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) to produce a budget surplus for Social Security and health care (half of which are paid by the employer). This forced saving is lent to the U.S. Treasury, enabling it to cut taxes on the higher income brackets. Also deducted from paychecks may be employee withholding for private health insurance and pensions. What is left is by no means freely available for discretionary spending. Wage earners have to pay a monthly financial and real estate “nut” off the top, headed by mortgage debt or rent to the landlord, plus credit card debt, student loans and other bank loans. Electricity, gas and phone bills must be paid, often by automatic bank transfer – and usually cable TV and Internet service as well. If these utility bills are not paid, banks increase the interest rate owed on credit card debt (typically to 29%). Not much is left to spend on goods and services after paying the FIRE sector and basic monopolies, so it is no wonder that markets are shrinking. (See Hudson Bubble Model later in this book.) A similar set of subtrahends occurs with net corporate cash flow (see ebitda). After paying interest and dividends – and using about half their revenue for stock buybacks – not much is left for capital investment in new plant and equipment, research or development to expand production.

Canceling my cable TV service has provided many extra hours a week that I use for study, reading and learning new skills, and working in my studio, all things that keep me motivated creatively. Sure we still watch television, but that content comes from internet services such as NetFlix, and DVDs where we control when we watch. Most importantly, I have more time to spend with my family , read more books, and get out in nature, which is so key to a balanced life in general. And best of all, I feel I’m making better use of my time on day to day basis.

For Microsoft’s productivity applications, the break came when the world transitioned from text-based DOS applications to graphical user interfaces, in the mid-1980s. But as the industry shifted from text to graphical interfaces, it created an opening, as every application needed to be rewritten to support the new paradigm of dropdown menus, icons, toolbars, and the mouse. While Microsoft redesigned and rethought their applications, their competitors were too stuck in the old world, and so Word and Excel leapfrogged their competitors. Then in an ensuing stroke of product marketing genius, it was combined into the Microsoft Office suite, which promptly became a colossus. Much effort was put toward making each application within the suite work with each other. For example, an Excel chart would be embedded within a Microsoft Word document—this was called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)—which made the combination of the products more powerful. In other words, the product really matters, and bundling can provide a huge distribution advantage, but it can only go so far. It’s an echo of what we now see in the internet age, where Twitter might drive users to its now-defunct livestreaming platform Periscope, or Google might push everyone to use Google Meet. It can work, but only when the product is great. This is part of why the concept of bundling as been around forever—the McDonald’s Happy Meal was launched in the 1970s, and cable companies have been bundling TV channels since their start. But at the heart of these bundling stories are important, iconic products that reinvent the market.

the speed of change has been accelerating. While the telephone took seventy-five years to reach 50 million users, TV took thirteen years, and the internet took only four years.13 As environments change fast and faster, and innovations are copied more and more quickly, employer-imposed scripted and repetitive behaviors are no longer a way for leaders to gain a competitive advantage. Organizational survival today comes from employees being proactive—using creativity and ingenuity to solve problems without waiting for instruction. The most valuable employees think like owners and develop new approaches to solving problems, instead of waiting until management works out a full-blown solution and teaches them the new procedures.

In a groundbreaking study published in the journal Nature, Dr Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia discovered communication networks in stands of Douglas firs, which she dubbed the ‘Wood Wide Web’, suggesting the connectivity of trees. This research has been popularized by German naturalist Peter Wohlleben in his bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees. He describes how oaks and beeches share information using microscopic fungal filaments, comparing these to fibre-optic Internet cables. ‘One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these “hyphae”. Over centuries a single fungus can cover many square kilometres and network an entire forest. The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping them exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers.

The internet may be mankind’s greatest tool, but it’s also our most dangerous gateway to behavioral addiction. With cell phones being its most potent delivery vehicle. Now we have a wide variety of addictive products and activities that never existed before. Online pornography. Texting and emails. Virtual reality. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Cable and internet news that never sleeps. Video games. Numerous streaming services with endless bingeable offerings. “And advertisements. Everywhere. Finely tuned to your exact interests. Chasing you wherever you roam.

They didn’t have cable, internet, or even cell phones. Papa had all the entertainment he and Maddy could ever need.

The message left Kiel at a speed of 300,000 kilometres per second. The sequence of words keyed into Erwin Suess’s laptop at the Geomar Centre entered the net in digital form. Converted by laser diodes into optical pulses, the information raced along with a wavelength of 1.5 thousandths of a millimetre, shooting down a transparent fibreoptic cable with millions of phone conversations and packets of data. The fibres bundled the stream of light until it was no thicker than two hairs, while total internal reflection stopped it escaping. Whizzing towards the coast, the waves surged along the overland cable, speeding through amplifiers every fifty kilometres until the fibres vanished into the sea, protected by copper casing and thick rubber tubing, and strengthened by powerful wires. The underwater cable was as thick as a muscular forearm. It stretched out across the shelf, buried in the seabed to protect it from anchors and fishing-boats. TAT 14, as it was officially known, was a transatlantic cable linking Europe to the States. Its capacity was higher than that of almost any other cable in the world. There were dozens of such cables in the North Atlantic alone. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of optical fibre extended across the planet, making up the backbone of the information age. Three-quarters of their capacity was devoted to the World Wide Web. Project Oxygen linked 175 countries in a kind of global super Internet. Another system bundled eight optical fibres to give a transmission capacity of 3.2 terabits per second, the equivalent of 48 million simultaneous phone conversations. The delicate glass fibres on the ocean bed had long since supplanted satellite technology.

How do you think it’s possible for a stoned college dropout behind the counter at Starbucks to live in more luxury than any Roman emperor? You think he works harder than the wetback who picked the beans for his vanilla latte? Hell, no. But he goes home to Internet porn and cable TV and more calories in a single meal than that bean-picker sees all week. Other countries struggle. We consume. America is the biggest, fattest kid at the party, gobbling all the candy. But someone has to break the piñata.

[T]he DSM alone does not establish standards. Physicians, other mental health workers, drug companies, advocacy groups, school systems, the courts, the Internet, and cable TV all get to vote on how the written word will actually be used and misused.

Followers of Jesus have endured torture and given their lives in obedience to Him. And we’re whining about giving up cable? When Jesus called us to take up our crosses and follow Him (see Matthew 10:38), didn’t that imply sacrifices greater than forgoing Internet access?

percentages, that’s a Big Win toward a Rich Life. ☐  Fixed costs (50–60%) ☐  Investments (10%) ☐  Savings (5–10%) ☐  Guilt-Free Spending (20–35%) ☐  Reassess current subscriptions (cut if necessary). ☐  Renegotiate cable and internet bills. ☐  Revisit spending goals: Are they accurate? Are you actively saving for them? ☐  If your fixed costs are too high, it may be time to look at a cheaper rent (or AirBnB’ing a room out,

there are fungi present that act as intermediaries to guarantee quick dissemination of news. These fungi operate like fiber-optic Internet cables. Their thin filaments penetrate the ground, weaving through it in almost unbelievable density. One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these “hyphae.”8 Over centuries, a single fungus can cover many square miles and network an entire forest. The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping the trees exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers. Science has adopted a term first coined by the journal Nature for Dr. Simard’s discovery of the “wood wide web” pervading our forests.

In 2011, a 75-year-old woman sliced through a fiber-optic cable, cutting 2 entire countries off the internet.

This hybrid of two seemingly unrelated inventions—the concentrated, orderly light of lasers, and the hyper-clear glass fibers—came to be known as fiber optics. Using fiber-optic cables was vastly more efficient than sending electrical signals over copper cables, particularly for long distances: light allows much more bandwidth and is far less susceptible to noise and interference than is electrical energy. Today, the backbone of the global Internet is built out of fiber-optic cables. Roughly ten distinct cables traverse the Atlantic Ocean, carrying almost all the voice and data communications between the continents. Each of those cables contains a collection of separate fibers, surrounded by layers of steel and insulation to keep them watertight and protected from fishing trawlers, anchors, and even sharks.

The Story of the Telegraph and a History of the Great Atlantic Cable, in which they breathlessly proclaimed, How potent a power, then, is the telegraphic destined to become in the civilization of the world! This binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.46

And just like the Soviet Union bankrupted itself trying to keep up with the United States technologically, the West was almost there. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus an out of control security apparatus in most Western nations demanding more and more funding to protect against a perceived threat, had almost bankrupted the mighty Western economies. A few more attacks, each using different methods, would soon tip them over the edge, and into the abyss of a global Great Depression the likes the world had never seen. The Dirty Thirties were terrible, but people were never used to living well. A good life meant food on the table and a warm bed to sleep in. Now a good life meant two cars, a large house, multiple televisions, computers, cellphones, tablets, Internet, cable, restaurants and vacations. This time when the economy collapsed, they would have a hell of a time trying to get out of it. And Islam would continue to spread. Hassan knew their birthrate was two to three times that of the West, and they would eventually win. But in the meantime, the West would be looking for a way out of their economic calamity. And a way would be offered, by the military industrial complex and the security apparatus that had sprung up around 9/11. War.

Another scenario is possible, and that is the e-book will succeed and that books will be downloaded from the Internet. But at the same time, it may be the case that the digital network and the terminals that tap into it will become saturated as limits to growth of computer memory and speed of operation are reached at the same time that electronic traffic becomes gridlocked with e-mail and World Wide Web use. If that were to happen, there would likely be pressure to keep older books in print form, and perhaps even continue to issue newer books that way, rather than clutter the Internet with more and more information. Under such a scenario, older books might not be allowed to circulate because so few copies of each title will have survived the great CD digital dispersal, leaving printed editions that will be as rare as manuscript codices are today. In spite of potential problems, the electronic book, which promises to be all books to all people, is seen by some visionaries as central to any scenario of the future. But what if some electromagnetic catastrophe or a mad computer hacker were to destroy the total electronic memory of central libraries? Curious old printed editions of dead books would have to be disinterred from book cemeteries and re-scanned. But in scanning rare works into electronic form, surviving books might have to be used in a library's stacks, the entrance to which might have to be as closely guarded as that to Fort Knox. The continuing evolution of the bookshelf would have to involve the wiring of bookstacks for computer terminal use. Since volumes might be electronically chained to their section in the stacks, it is also likely that libraries would have to install desks on the front of all cases so that portable computers and portable scanners could be used to transcribe books within a telephone wire's or computer cable's reach of where they were permanently kept. The aisles in a bookstack would most likely have to be altered also to provide seating before the desks, and in time at least some of the infrastructure associated with the information superhighway might begin again to resemble that of a medieval library located in the tower of a monastery at the top of a narrow mountain road.

Internet media networks are proving that the money no longer has to come from cable subscribers. Netflix didn’t originate House of Cards. Independent studio Media Rights Capital took bids from a handful of networks, including HBO, Showtime, and AMC (where you can see Mad Men). Netflix outbid them all.

One might think that the explosion of new media outlets produced by the digital revolution would multiply checks on government power and that increased competition among different news outlets might encourage them to adopt higher standards. The reverse seems to be true, alas: instead of an ever-more vigiliant “fourth estate,” the growing role of cable news channels, the Internet, online publishing, the blogosphere, and social media seems to be making the media environment less accountable than ever before. Citizens can choose which version of a nearly infinite number of “realities” to read, listen to, or watch. Anonymous individuals and foreign intelligence agencies disseminate “fake news” that is all too often taken seriously, and such “news” sites as Breitbart, the Drudge Report, and InfoWars compete for viewers not by working harder to ferret out the truth, but by trafficking in rumors, unsupported accusations, and conspiracy theories. Leading politicians—most notoriously, Donald Trump himself—have given these outlets greater credibility by repeating their claims while simultaneously disparaging established media organizations as biased and unreliable.77 The net effect is to discredit any source of information that challenges one’s own version of events. If enough people genuinely believe “The New York Times is fake news,” as former congressman Newt Gingrich said in 2016, then all sources of information become equally valid and a key pillar of democracy is effectively neutered.

Should the old federal broadcast rules have been abolished? Maybe, maybe not, but in any case, cable TV was making them iffy and the Internet was just about to start rendering them moot. In any case, when the Washington gatekeepers decided to get rid of that regulatory gate, it was a pivotal moment, practically and symbolically. For most of the twentieth century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to. Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it. These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself.

In fact, the Internet would not exist if not for the fiber cables that vein the ground beneath our streets, through our sewers. There are around eighty major network junctions—known as IXPs, for Internet exchange points—throughout the country. These are the freeways that feed the domestic traffic as well as the international data that comes from undersea cables. They are nakedly unprotected. As are the fiber cables that branch off them and come together—at pinch points, spaghetti junctions—within the data centers.

checked my phone, remembered that there’s no signal worth a damn on Lammergeier Lane, and spent five minutes trying to make it talk to the house internet. (Which is also terrible out here, don’t get me wrong. Nobody is running cable down rural roads unless they have a pressing reason.) My phone informed me that it was absolutely talking to the internet, it was happy to talk to the internet, it loved talking to the internet, then as soon as I tried to check my email, it told me it had never heard of the internet and wasn’t entirely sure it existed.

In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot-plastic-scented wiring closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel agent in the most banal imaginable disco-era office building in Los Altos, California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of the same stuff, you’d be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the information reaches Randy’s computer, which spews noise back. The modem in Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand, which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now. They turned its monitor off about seven months ago because it was just wasting electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc., and made arrangements to put it in the company’s closet) borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest upgrade of Ordo needed a second screen. Later, Randy disconnected the keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off-white obelisk with no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark landscape of empty pizza boxes. But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet. Randy’s computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy’s little laptop is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.