CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The Infrastructures of the Global Data Economy: Undersea Cables and International Law

Beaver Infrastructure

"[S]tructural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to study of their unconscious infrastructure" Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1945 #InfrastructureStudies

In order for us to be successful and detect evidence of someone else’s technology, that technology has to be close to us — not only close in space, but close in time. That is, they have to be co-temporal with our technology over the ten-billion-year history of our galaxy. And statistically, the only way that that’s gonna happen is if, on average, technological civilizations last a long time, that their longevity is great. So from my point of view, that’s what a successful detection of someone else’s technology would tell us — that it’s really possible to have a long future, in spite of the challenges that we see, today. I think that’s the best message that the detection of someone else’s technology could bring to us — that it’s possible to survive your technological adolescence. They won’t tell us how, probably, but the fact that somebody else made it through, I think, is an important and motivating factor.

For Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, as well as a few smaller cloud competitors like Oracle and IBM, winning the IT spend of the Fortune 500 is where most of the money in the public cloud market will be made. And among those large companies, Big Oil sits at the top. Out of the biggest ten companies in the world by revenue, six are in the business of oil production. In order words, the success of Big Oil, and the production of fossil fuels, are key to winning the cloud race.