Behind the Scenes
A couple of months ago, I went on a camping trip with a couple of my friends and their family. We rented a cabin, which was only about a five to ten minute walk to the clear blue lake. One of my friends brought his wife and two kids along on the trip. As we pulled up to the driveway of this beautiful cabin, we all started to unload and prepare for the fun and relaxing weekend that was waiting ahead of us. As we entered and admired the beautiful cabin, my friend’s kids stormed into the cabin very enthusiastically. As they ran around the cabin going through every single room, they finally settled and sat on the couch. To my surprise, the first thing they said was, “what’s the wifi password?”
In our current generation, the Internet has consumed all of our lives. Many schools, universities, and even workplaces won’t simply run without it. We become so dependent on the Internet that it has truly shaped how society functions. We use the Internet to stay connected with friends, for entertainment, for research, or just to kill time between classes. But who exactly is responsible for your Internet connection. It has been so normalized to have it that we don’t really think of who exactly is behind in allowing us to use the Internet.
During our lecture, we were to pull a certain topic out of a bag. From the bag, I pulled out the topic of “underwater Internet cables”. I had absolutely no knowledge of what that was or how it was possible. From my previous knowledge, my understanding was that the Internet is possible through satellites in space or the AT&T worker doing some black magic to get my Internet up. Either way, an underwater Internet cable was not an option. But as I started doing research (on the Internet), I found out that these cables were actually more common and practical than that of a satellite.
According to an article by Mental Floss,
Ninety-nine percent of international data is transmitted by wires at the bottom of the ocean called submarine communications cables. In total, they are hundreds of thousands of miles long and can be as deep as Everest Is tall.
In order for these cables to fully function and for us to actually receive Internet connection, there are many aspects behind the scenes. In Christian Fuchs’s text Social Media: A Critical Introduction, he describes this as a type of digital labour; in which he defines as
The relatively high-paid wage work of software engineers, low-paid proletarianized labour in Internet companies, the unpaid labour of users, highly-exploited bloody Taylorist work, highly-toxic e-waste labour that disassembles ICTs, and slave work in developing countries producing hardware and extracting “conflict minerals” (147).
These cables that can be stretched out for thousands of miles long, are also very difficult and expensive work. In order to install these long cables into the ocean, workers must use specific types of boats called “cable-layers”. Despite having advanced technology, this work is very tedious as workers must run the cables flat on the ocean floor; avoiding coral, rocks, sea life, and other debris that may be in the way. These underwater cables can cost hundreds of millions of dollars as they charge per-mile for just installations.
Other problems include underwater life interfering with both during the installation process and after. Videos online have shown that ocean life such as sharks have been seen to mistake these cables for food, often gnawing and chewing through the cable resulting in broken Internet connections. These cables are not easy to repair as they can run as deep as over 6,500 feet underwater. As if repairing your broken headphone cables were hard enough, try imagining repairing a huge cable underwater.
But if these cables seem so much of a hassle, why don’t we just stick with satellites? Well with thousands of satellites already orbiting the earth, sending more does seem like a practical solution. But despite the cost of installation and all of the risks in having thousands of miles of cable underwater, it is still actually a lot cheaper than it is to create a satellite and have it flown into space. Not to mention, because the cables are direct and do not have any disruptions, underwater Internet cables actually perform a lot faster as well.
But despite all of this information, we are missing the key ingredient to how Internet is able to perform; digital labour. As mentioned above, Fuchs and his definition of digital labour directly reflects this situation. We don’t take into account the workers who work long hours with little to no pay making these cables. Workers who work long hours in grueling environments installing these cables. Workers who work tediously repairing these cables. And on the other side, workers of big corporations making huge pay checks sitting behind a computer screen in the comfort of their own office. Everything from the workers to even me writing a blog on the topic is a type of digital labour. I think Fuchs says it best when he says,
There is a class conflict between capital and labour, that is constituted through exploitation (147).
