At first glance, Google Maps’ bathymetric imagery is pretty fantastic. Unlike the satellite images that Google uses for overland maps, the world’s oceans are shown by their depth. The black spot where the Pacific Plate subducts beneath Asia looks almost like it could be the shadow cast by the Filipino Plate on the ocean floor until you realize that its blackness is the extreme depth of the Mariana Trench. In the Atlantic you can see the neat seam of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, zig-zagging from the North Pole to where Iceland blooms up from the mantle, and down past all the Pangean siblings.
Looking closer, you can also see some anthropogenic traces running in straight lines across the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, intersecting with one another at diagonals as they reconnect these estranged landmasses. These markings are the fiber-optic cables that allow the internet to flow between my computer and yours. They are the legacy of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, stretched from the western tip of Kerry here in Ireland to Newfoundland in 1858. That first cable was only capable of sending a few messages before breaking three weeks later. Today these cables move tens of terabits of data, a quantity so large it’s incomprehensible, across the ocean floor each second.
The games Bioshock and Bioshock 2 center around a modern Atlantis, a subterranean city called Rapture founded at the close of World War II as a playground for the rich and tax-averse. Rapture, fallen to ruin from vice and corruption by the time you arrive, is located somewhere between Iceland and Greenland, just north of where these undersea cables run. I like to think that these undersea cables are themselves a kind of Rapture, a difficult-to-regulate city of data, a place of vice and lawlessness, but also a place of refuge for people forsaken by landed society.
Digestable’s location, according to the email you’re reading, is “Someplace in the sky,” but in truth, the digital life of this column is entirely terrestrial and a large part aquatic. In some ways, in its current state, Digestable lives somewhere along an undersea cable, between Lena’s computer in Burlington and mine in Dublin. The newsletters and the drafts we share back and forth across the ocean floor also live in various data-centers, located in similarly difficult-to-regulate places where electricity is cheap, and tax law is forgiving.
Ireland is one of these places where the internet’s “clouds” come to settle on the ground. Despite the island’s small population, Ireland uses a massive amount of electricity, 14% of which comes from data centers. Playing host to the world’s internet has become less popular with the current energy crisis. As the threat of winter blackouts looms, there is a debate around the power of municipalities to block the construction of new data centers while Ireland’s multinational landlords threaten to withdraw investments in retaliation. Ireland’s coal-burning power plant on the north side of the Shannon estuary was slated to close in 2025 to meet Ireland’s CO2 emissions targets, but will now stay open indefinitely given increased demand.
On the Shannon’s other bank, negotiations have been reopened by New Fortress Energy for a bid to build a LNG terminal after Hess’s bid failed in 2014. And from there we can see transatlantic connections surfacing somewhere in the distance. In Point Comfort, Texas a gigantic LNG terminal is being built, one of several primed to drain the entire Permian Basin into European ports. A direct line can be drawn, both in geography and intention, between developments in Texas’s Bay of Formosa and Ireland’s Shannon estuary, one that precedes energy shocks from the war in Ukraine.
From a distance the internet looks clean because electricity is good at hiding its carbon connections. But looking closer, you can see the Texas fossil energy pouring into the growing vacuum of Ireland’s data centers, then feeding back across the Atlantic through the undersea pipeline, from your computer to mine as a series of sanitized 1s and 0s. I don’t know what powered the fictional city of Rapture, whether they tapped undersea vents or had a pipeline running from North America. But the submarine city where Digestable lingers is the secret seat of a new kind of fossil empire.
