Mini golf. Pancake houses. Kids digging with plastic shovels. And somewhere under the sand at Myrtle Beach, a cable that started nine thousand miles away in Argentina, carrying the internet out of the ocean. We found it on a map, and we zoomed in three or four times before we believed it.
So we called Samanth Subramanian. His book, The Web Beneath the Waves, began with a volcano and an island that dropped off the internet. He walked us through what a cable actually is, how a route across an ocean gets chosen, and how small the world that keeps all of it running turns out to be. Sixty ships, for the whole planet.
The stranger part is what has grown up around this glass. Governments now worry about who might cut it and who might listen in. Navies patrol for it. And one strand of it comes up through the sand at a beach in South Carolina. Somebody chose that beach.
Samanth’s book is short and very good. Read it today!
