1.
Under the Atlantic Ocean runs a fiberoptic cable named “Amitié,” which means “friendship” in French. She is owned by a consortium that includes Meta and Microsoft.
A map of the world showing all the subsea cables, including Amitié, appears busy. Dozens of colorful lines trace the coasts of each continent and span the seas. According to pictures and articles, the cables are about as thick as a fist and carefully unspooled off the back of boats. Coated in tar and protective plastic to keep them safe (because, apparently, sea creatures sometimes chew on them and storms will dislodge them from the sea’s bottom) these cables are filled with long strands of glass, each about one-tenth as thick as a piece of human hair.
The slender glass strands have been braided together, stretching over vast distances. Each instantaneously carries thousands of phone calls, weeks of streaming footage, volumes of text.
Metaphors come to mind. These cables are veins, and the data running through them is blood. Each phone or computer on either side of the ocean is a capillary filling with data’s fresh bloom and then draining out again, channeled over to the other side. The metaphor breaks down when you try and reckon where the heart lies.
Amitié begins on one end in Bordeaux and reaches Lynn, Massachusetts on the other. I have been to the sea by Lynn briefly: a long gray beach under a long gray sky. I also once met a street musician who said the best tips in France are in Bordeaux, if you’re playing guitar for passersby.
These cables are music-strings. Sending a meme on Instagram plucks one, the reply plucks another — melody! Companies have tuned and wired the continents, running an AUX under the water. Metaphors come to mind. The word “metaphor” means “to carry across,” in ancient Greek. The cables carry things across—they are metaphors?
2.
In 1723, when he was nineteen years old, Jonathan Edwards — who would later say in the famous sermon “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God” (which I had to read in eleventh grade American Literature) that the Lord “holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire,” wrote a letter about the wonder he felt observing spiders in the woods.
“Although everything pertaining to this insect is admirable,” young Edwards wrote, “yet there are some phenomena relating to them more particularly wonderful.” (I always enjoy the way this older English sounds, all loose and vibe-y). “Their marching in the air from one tree to another… (their) vast multitudes of little shining webs and glistening strings, brightly reflecting the sunbeams, and some of them of a great length, and at such a height that one would think that they were tacked to the vault of the heavens…” Edwards marvels at “spiders sailing in the air… doubtless with abundance of pleasure, though not with so much as I have beheld them and shown them to others.”
If you’ve spent time in thick East Coast woods in the summer, you might know these spiders and their long webs as an annoyance. They catch on your face as you pass between trees and you brush them aside.
Edwards conducted a series of experiments, all of which sound very FAFO, to learn more about the spiders and their long webs. He described his findings in the 1723 letter to a friend of his father’s, likely in attempt to get it published in a scientific journal (at that time, science was as loose and vibe-y as the language itself was). The spider discovery, for him, is crucially important because it is another proof of “the exuberant goodness of the Creator, who hath not only provided for all the necessities, but for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects.”
Metaphors come to mind. Subsea internet cables are long strands of web, spun from the flight of our thoughts, crossing from continent to continent like the spiders cross from tree to tree in the dense forests of New England. We are insects, under a Creator who has provided for all necessities, pleasure and recreation. An older Edwards says: we are horrible insects, living in Puritan New England in 1741— the development of which, like our own development, is a crime.
The establishment doesn’t like Edwards because he preaches that the body may be overcome by the ecstasy of grace. Jonathan Edwards says we may show “distinguishing marks” of salvation: swooning, convulsing, singing with joy at one of his revivals. Edwards says it is okay and even good for women to speak in church. Edwards says that to be damned is horrible, but we may know by the witness of our own spirits that we are not damned. “God may save any sinner whatsoever,” anybody, no matter how bad. “She’s so saved,” Edwards says, “Who?” you ask. “The girl reading this,” Edwards replies. His “this” is the Bible, not a Tumblr post. Historians call the movement Edwards led the First Great Awakening, essentially the founding moment of American Evangelical Christianity.
3.
The internet is for convulsions, for the ecstasy of grace, for the promise of revival. Like the forest, which is for the spiders to sail through, the cable under the sea is for “all the necessities… (and) for the pleasure and recreation of all.” She is named Amitié, French for “friendship.” But is she really?
Metaphors come to mind. Amitié is a false friend, she is a plastic anaconda wrapped around the Earth’s throat. Data centers on either end guzzle fossil fuels (although, the French ones are powered by nuclear reactors filled with stuff looted from Niger). Users connected to Amitié leverage the data she feeds to plan how they may drain rivers and blow up villages.
One Friday night my roommate called me urgently to come out to the front porch, and we watched a rigid line of puny, twinkling lights crossing the sky. I wondered why the stars marched like that, and then it occurred to me: UFOs. I felt kind of spiritual as I said it.
“No, that’s Starlink,” they said, “it’s just Elon Musk.”
Each evening I am aware of the processes humming around me, billions and billions, more even than people on Earth, more even than cricket-chirps at night when you walk in an East Coast forest. These processes are, in general, bad for the planet and bad for most people on Earth. I am frequently convinced that we deserve the hell-fire, that I will justly be thrown into it — but then I am unconvinced the next moment. I wouldn’t call this unconvincing hope, but I might call it grace.
The logical sum of all the acts and deeds, cables and wires, processes and platforms, is something bad. But around the edges, a freakier kind of energy hops in, an irrational gust that everybody feels. I see it in memes—the spiders sail through the air, the sinner stands in spirit’s witness at the revival.
Amitié, the cable under the sea, hums along.