Men walk in clockwise circles, coiling thick cable around two reels on a ship in Calais. It will set sail to lay this optic fibre along the Atlantic bed for the West Africa Cable System’s 14,000km length. So that you might enjoy faster internet. Douglas Coupland’s brief description of this laborious activity, involving eight men working six months on and six months off, is a perfect fulcrum for this book of images and text. He makes the invisibility of the internet perceptible, its darkness visible.
Coupland spent time on the trail of Alcatel-Lucent, a French corporation he believes you are unlikely to have heard of. He visits subsidiaries such as Bell in New Jersey, and plants in Paris, Ontario and Shanghai. A visual artist, writer and technology conceptualist, he titles sections Past, Present and Future, drawing attention to how such "old" distinctions are rendered artificial by the internet he is interrogating.
Alcatel-Lucent makes cables. Cables are the conduits for the substance and speed of the internet. Coupland talks to dozens of people within its vast corporate reach, quizzing them about the silent accelerator of information and hidden agent of interaction and alienation. He has a healthy respect and nostalgia for predigital ways but admits susceptibility to the reformulation of how we think and act.
Olivia Arthur, a British photographer, plays a key role as parallel can-opener of this world. Her interwoven images corroborate his descriptions of dowdy offices, industrial carpets and an ambiance far removed from Silicon Valley glamour. They reveal shabbily dressed workers as they crouch down for plugs, stretch into signal panels and reach behind machine towers. Everywhere there are wires, those familiar colour-coded arteries of the predigital world: they look like escaping spaghetti as they spew out of cabinets. They suggest dirty analogue secrets best ignored in our rush to become digitally civilised.
Speaking to engineers and managers on three continents, Coupland formulates questions for the perturbed internet user. Where is all this taking us as a species?
He is fascinated by invention and by his fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that humanity exists as the reproductive agent of technology. And so we evolve to propagate technology. Speed becomes a delivery mechanism for data.
This is a work of research, clarity and reactive imagination. It imparts a sense of community unspooling; of people assaulted by so much data at such accelerating speeds that we may be just what we eat bytewise. It imparts vivid concepts such as “latency” – the microsecond lag between data delivered via straight fibre-optic cable and that delivered instead through wire angled to accommodate obstacles. The minuscule time difference allows fortunes to be made on stock exchanges. The moralist in Coupland declares that such profiteers are parasites.
Coupland has enjoyed fame for coining "McJob" and as the writer of Generation X. He is a thoughtful sociologist whose apparent linear quest across the width of this corporate terrain is riddled with interventions, loopbacks to previous pages, fictional flights of fancy, and leaps into the future to imagine the descendants of inventors. His message seems to be that just as the internet relies on a grid of cabled infrastructure, as its users we are also in the constant process of being rewired.
With chilling insight, Marcus Weldon, Alcatel-Lucent’s chief technology officer, tells him that “the future is a machine that learns you. It’s a machine that knows all your preferences.”
John Fleming writes fiction and is an Irish Times journalist
