10 minute read
coding light: lockdown reflections on fibre optics, genesis, and paul virilio
Rachael Chan
This has probably happened to you on Zoom in the past year: [User]’s internet connection is unstable. Frozen frame. “Sorry, my internet got cut off! I should probably change my broadband provider …” Cue two seconds of sheepish laughter.
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Lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic has made us increasingly reliant on high-speed internet technologies to stay connected. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler speaks of a posthuman agency whereby the human is co-constituted with the technological.1 This pandemic has seemingly brought our cyborgian tendencies to the fore. (As I munch on a digestive, I’m pondering, “Am I a cyborg as I type this?”) This has made me reflect on three aspects of high-speed internet technologies: how fibre optic communications make use of light and darkness, the material formations of these networks, and how we might understand the uneven proliferation of such technologies in the context of the Christian faith.
‘0’ AND ‘1’, DARKNESS AND LIGHT
Internet technologies are redefining how we experience space and spatiality. The human geographers James Ash, Rob Kitchin, and Agnieszka Leszczynski theorise that cities are “circuits of digitality”. They explain, “as we adopt and ubiquitously embed networked digital technologies across physical landscapes, they come to enact progressively routine orderings of quotidian rhythms, interactions, opportunities, spatial configurations, and flows.”2
In recent years, high-speed, long-distance communication has been augmented by fibre optics, which transfers data at the speed of light. These “circuits of digitality” also transcend urban spaces, becoming the new normal in the UK. The catchphrase “full fibre” has been gaining traction, and the UK government has promised £5bn to roll out gigabit-capable broadband to thousands of rural homes.3
Transmission of data at the speed of light is possible with fibre optics because what travels through these cladded glass cables is light itself. It’s an elegant design, making use of the binary number system of ‘0’s and ‘1’s. Information is coded into a binary string, and light pulses are sent down the fibre optic cable like Morse code—pulse on 1; no pulse on 0. Most of us transmit and receive information through intricate rhythms that separate light from darkness, reminiscent of the first few verses of the Book of Genesis:
As many other writers in this issue also note, the motif of light and darkness permeates God’s word. In the Gospel of John, Jesus describes himself as the “the light of the world” (John 8:12). The writer of the same gospel also alludes to this: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (1:5).
The active separation of light and darkness by God after He speaks light into existence mirrors a Hegelian dialectical framework, which Hegel had borrowed from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. By this, I reference Hegel’s three-step thesis of being-nothing-becoming in “The Science of Logic: The Doctrine of Being”:
Hegel believed that the tension between light and darkness arose not only from the fact that one defined the other because of each other’s existence. Rather, the transition from one into another is also critical. He explains, “But it is a familiar fact that light is dimmed to grey by darkness; and besides this merely quantitative alteration it suffers also the qualitative change of being determined to colour by its relation to darkness.”5 I am cautious in drawing a connection between God’s design and Hegelian logic because I don’t think Hegel had that in mind. But I find Hegel’s writing an interesting frame to understand the relationship between the two—light and darkness both posit and negate each other, and when doing so simultaneously, they preserve one another. Moreover, there is a spectrum between light and darkness. The assertion that “darkness has not overcome light” is a reminder that Jesus has triumphed over death on the cross, but also that darkness still exists alongside light. This coexistence allows us to celebrate the promise of the new creation and lament the continuing pain of the old.6 We gain a greater appreciation of the messy shades, moving tints, and ombré of our reality—there is a continuum between light and darkness that we as sinful humanity are mostly unable to visualise. The Apostle Paul tells us this in his letter to the Corinthian church—“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror” (1 Cor 13:12). (Or in the King James translation, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”)
WIRED COMMUNICATION
Fibre optic communication offers a contemporary case study of these messy shadings. On one hand, this technology has brought about immense benefits to us in the form of efficiency and speed. In The Undersea Network, Nicole Starosielski describes the extent and magnitude of fibre optic cables: “They transport 99 percent of all transoceanic digital communications, including phone calls, text and e-mail messages, websites, digital images and video, and even some television (cumulatively, over thirty trillion bits per second as of 2010).”7
On the other hand, Starosielski draws attention to the materiality of these networks and how they are embedded in deeply political and uneven geographies which reproduce existing inequalities. One aspect we tend to overlook is that fibre optic cables are mapped along the contours of violent and exploitative colonial histories. This link can be seen from oceanic islands that are landing points for cables. Starosielski explains, “As signals move between Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Africa, they intersect numerous networked islands:Fiji, New Zealand, and O‘ahu in the Pacific; Bermuda, the Canary Islands, St. Helena, and Puerto Rico in the Atlantic; and Sicily and Cyprus in the Mediterranean.”8 Many fibre optic cables are in the same zones as telegraph cables laid by colonial powers from the early twentieth century. Starosielski writes that there is a “continuity between the light waves that transmit information and the ocean waves that have carried islanders across the Pacific.”9 I would add that these waters also carried fleets of colonisers who created such information networks to speed up the circulation of labour, goods, and capital.
The invisibility of cables obscures the conflicts that accompany its installation and maintenance. The cultural geographer Gillian Rose tells us that we live in a hyperindustrial society saturated with “exteriorizations” calculated to satisfy desire in the shortest possible time.10 In achieving this, the priorities of the voiceless are ignored: “As the uses of marine space have identified, cable companies have had conflicts with fishermen and boaters, environmental advocates, and local developers, all of whom need to be informed of cable routes in order to avoid them.”11
It is important to remember that these patterns of exclusion, silencing, and marginalisation are all in the name of speed. Paul Virilio was a French technology theorist who converted to Christianity following the Second World War, and he was highly critical of the idolatry of speed. Virilio uses the concept of “dromology” from the Greek word dromos (running or racetrack) to argue that the logic of speed dominates our conception of cities, and that speed is power. He speaks of a simultaneous experience of virtual and real environments known as stereoscopy: Internet technologies at the speed of light have in principle eradicated the horizon of human experience by inserting an absence of duration between individuals at a distance. There is a dromocratic revolution where speed is fabricated, and this imprints on our cities and our lives. However, the key point to note is that while the rhetoric of empowerment accompanies increased access to such technologies, most people other than the elite do not feel more empowered by the effects of these high-speed networks. The Western cultural pursuit of proliferating internet technologies prompted Virilio to comment, “The technologies of virtual reality are attempting to make us see from beneath, from inside, from behind … as if we were God.”12
A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE?
Fibre optic technologies are a testament to the miracle of God’s first speech recorded: “Let there be light.” Yet, like other created things He has deemed as good, fibre optics demonstrate how many of us have abused our power at others’ expense. There is an injustice when time speeds up for the elite few and slows down for the rest depending on where they are located, and whether their mobilities and dwellings intersect with communication infrastructures such as fibre optic networks. The “hidden labour, economics, cultures and politics that go into sustaining everyday intercontinental connections”13 are embodied experiences.
The issues that surround the invisibility of cables and patterns of exclusion highlighted above problematise our (lack of dis)comfort as the people of God. We live in a city situated within the “circuit of digitality”, a city that boasts historic privilege. More broadly, I follow Jung Mo Sung’s lead and ask: should theology and Christian churches assume these macro-socioeconomic concerns? Or should we just leave it to the academic and political spheres?14 José Comblin advocates that “there is no more urgent task than the one of reuniting once again what was separated for so long, the ‘political’ and the ‘religious’, the ‘social’ and the ‘mystic’. It is a practical rather than a theoretical task, although theory has to contribute to anchor and to orient an effective practice.”15
You might be conscious that, so far, I have not offered any suggestion on how our Christian communities should respond or do things differently. And to be honest, I don’t really know. A possible orientation is to challenge the logic of dromology. Jon Bloom, co-founder of Desiring God, writes against our tendency to pursue haste in our lives: “[T]his is not a biblical assumption. If we look at creation, redemptive history, and our own spiritual growth, we see a God who is not in a hurry. We see a God whose patience almost exasperates us at times.
If we look carefully, we see that the most important things take a long time to grow andmature. They can’t be rushed.” 16 In Genesis 1, after God separates light from darkness, we read that God orders astrategic rhythm: “God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” And later we see that on the seventh day, God rests.
The next time I’m about to comment on the speed of Eduroam, I will pause to thank God for speaking light into being. I will then ask Him to guard me against the desire to live at lightspeed. Finally, I ask God to extend His grace towards our brothers and sisters who are oppressed by these invisible cables, networks of power which we are blind to.
Rachael is a third year Geographer at Mansfield. As you are reading this, she is either taking a nap, watching a Korean drama, or fangirling over some Mahler symphony.
1 B. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. R. Beardsworth & G. Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
2 J. Ash, R. Kitchin, & A. Leszczynski, “Digital turn, digital geographies?” Progress in Human Geography, 42, no. 1 (2018): 25–43.
3 J. Wakefield, “Three million homes have access to full-fibre broadband.” BBC News, 20 December 2019.
4 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969): 132–134.
5 Ibid., 436.
6 N. T. Wright, “What the New Testament really says about heaven.” Time, 16 December 2019.
7 N. Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015): 1.
8 Ibid., 178.
9 Ibid., xii.
10 G. Rose, “Posthuman agency in the digitally mediated city: Exteriorization, individuation, reinvention.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107 (2017): 779–793.
11 Starosielski, 10.
12 L. Wilson, “Cyberwar, God and television: Interview with Paul Virilio.” CTheory, 21 October 1994.
