I’ve finally settled into the new job and have some free time now to catch up on my RSS feeds and reading list. About three weeks ago, I uninstalled all the social media apps from my phone. I was simply spending too much time on them and thought a break would be nice.
I reinstalled them yesterday, but while I was “away”, I read some amazing articles able the fragility of the web and how easily one of our most important utilities could crumble.
Links
- The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
- What happened to Brooklyn’s disaster-proof mesh Wi-Fi network?
- How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service
- The System That Actually Worked
- The Wi-Fi only works when it’s raining
Notes
I’ve known for some time that the world is connected via a massive network of deep-sea fiber cables. What I didn’t know was that the maintenance of this network is so poorly managed and lacking resources. This reinforces the idea in my head that the internet is anything but resilient. It’s honestly a miracle anything works at all.
And it doesn’t get any better the lower down the ladder you get. I’ve written about the lack of basic internet access in some communities here in the US. And how some people are simply taking matters into their own hands and building community managed networks.