Sublime

The internet is a *really* suboptimal communication method for live events. Cable TV is orders of magnitude more efficient. Broadcast, by design, is one-to-many. Each client has a guaranteed amount of bandwidth, often divvied up into multicast streams within the network.... See more

Information moves, or we move to it. Moving to it has rarely been popular and is growing unfashionable; nowadays we demand that the information come to us. This can be accomplished in three basic ways: 1) moving physical media around, 2) broadcasting radiation through space, and 3) sending signals through wires. This article is about what will, for... See more

FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it... See more

Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space: the two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet. The cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the geometry of the world of commerce and politics and ideas that we live in. The... See more