Mother Earth Mother Board (1996)

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

by qb • 12 years ago

67 15 12 years ago

archive.wired.com

fulafel• 12 years ago

This is my favorite Wired article from its golden years.

stblack• 12 years ago

This article is listed high among the Best Magazine Articles Ever http://kk.org/cooltools/best-magazine-articles-ever

And rightly so.

Neal Stephenson has also written some of the best geek books ever. My personal favourite: Cryptonomicon which is in the same general vein as the article.

ampersandy• 12 years ago

Thank you so much for posting this! This was the list where I originally found the Mother Earth Mother Board article, but I only just remembered that after seeing your post.

jtms• 12 years ago

My e-reader copy of Cryptonomicon has a copy of this article at the end of the book... LOVE both of these pieces of writing!

cju• 12 years ago

It's a pity Neal Stephenson has not written more of this kind of "hacker tourist" coverage.

nkoren• 12 years ago

God that article was/is riveting. I still recall the first time I read it, in one sitting, this ridiculous fat magazine in my hands. The world would be a better place if it had more journalism like this.

skmurphy• 12 years ago

These are two great paragraphs that give a flavor

We first met Jim Daily and Alan Wall underneath that big Carlsberg sign, sitting out in a late-afternoon rainstorm under an umbrella, having a couple of beers – “the only ferangs here,” as Wall told me on the phone, using the local term for foreign devil. Daily is American, 2 meters tall, blond, blue-eyed, khaki-and-polo-shirted, gregarious, absolutely plain-spoken, and almost always seems to be having a great time. Wall is English, shorter, dark-haired, impeccably suited, cagey, reticent, and dry. Both are in their 50s. It is of some significance to this story that, at the end of the day, these two men unwind by sitting out in the rain and hoisting a beer, paying no attention whatsoever to the industrial-scale whorehouse next door. Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together. They are the very definition of a complementary relationship, and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula.

Since these two, and many of the others we will meet on this journey, have much in common with one another, this is as good a place as any to write a general description. They tend to come from the US or the British Commonwealth countries but spend very little time living there. They are cheerful and outgoing, rudely humorous, and frequently have long-term marriages to adaptable wives. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters even when they are talking to a hacker tourist about whom they know nothing. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.

acheron• 12 years ago

Fantastic article of course.

This has been republished in Stephenson's book Some Remarks [1], which also includes a bunch of his other non-fiction (as well as a couple fiction short stories). Highly recommended.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Some-Remarks-Essays-Other-Writing/dp/B...

IvyMike• 12 years ago

Current undersea cable map explorer: http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

I think this is the one from the article: http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/flag-euro...

They've added a few more.

JunkDNA• 12 years ago

Makes me nostalgic for the early days of WIRED. This article was one of the best. It blew me away when I read it the first time-- so much so, I read it twice just for the sheer enjoyment of it.

liotier• 12 years ago

Never gets old... I read it every decade !

secabeen• 12 years ago

Definitely awesome. I have a signed copy of this article floating around my house somewhere.

sedev• 12 years ago

I was an Impressionable Teen when this article was published, and by howdy it made an impression.

zhte415• 12 years ago

At a little over 42 thousand words, each of them documenting a fascinating story, this is well on its way to a Masters (Research) thesis in a sociology related field, and superior to many I've read.

Gravityloss• 12 years ago

Why don't they just put more light fibers in there while they're at it, as they're small and cheap?

Mother Earth Mother Board (1996)

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