Mare Medium : Imaginaries of Connectivity and Disruption Surrounding Submarine Cable Networks

Abstract

As widely publicised in recent years, a significant portion of the infrastructure supporting the Internet is submerged in the ocean depths. In order to transmit information efficiently and reliably, the global system of interconnected computer networks depends upon a vast submarine network of fibre-optic cables that carry more than 95% of all international data traffic. This paper analyses a specific case, interrogating the imaginaries present in official and public relations communications regarding the planning and implementation of the newly installed EllaLink undersea internet cable linking Europe and Latin America. Planned since 2015 as part of the BELLA infrastructure initiative, this new transatlantic connection started operating in 2021. The cable, spanning 6,000 km between Fortaleza (Brazil) and Sines (Portugal), has the potential to advance the development of IT services and provide a low-latency signal route for European and South American companies, services, and users. But discourses are also under dispute around the landing of cables such as the EllaLink, as these operations often involve a roster of interested stakeholders, including infrastructure investment firms, telecommunication conglomerates, and government entities from the regions being connected. As the complex "extrastatecraft" of contemporary cable consortia recovers motifs from the history of transoceanic flows, one can observe a prominence of imaginaries of organisational control and governance dynamics framed through undersea communication. These imaginaries oscillate anachronistically, from sanitised metaphors reminiscent of colonial-era discourses of a so-called "Age of Discovery" to the modern narrative structure portraying a "digital divide" that ought to be reduced. Reimagined as geoengineered swift undersea data and energy routes, transoceanic contact is organised epistemologically as connective or otherwise disruptive information traffic, allegorising the decentralised control structure that governs communication and interactions among transcontinental network systems.