Starosielski, N. (2015) The Undersea Network. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network dismantles the fantasy of digital communication as immaterial, wireless, and placeless by revealing that global connectivity depends upon submarine fibre-optic cables embedded in specific oceans, shores, colonial histories, military geographies, and local conflicts. Her central argument is that the Internet does not float in an abstract “cloud”; it travels through fragile, routed, and politically saturated infrastructures that carry almost all transoceanic digital communication. By following cable routes across the Pacific, Starosielski shows that networks are not smooth vectors between neutral nodes, but territorial systems shaped by beaches, cable stations, fishing grounds, environmental regulations, indigenous claims, corporate secrecy, and geopolitical strategy. The book’s case studies of Hawai‘i and Tahiti are especially illuminating: in O‘ahu, cable landings intersect with militarisation, economic deprivation, and local resistance, while in Papenoo, Tahiti, the Honotua cable is publicly memorialised as a continuation of ancient oceanic connections rather than a purely technological innovation. This contrast demonstrates that infrastructure acquires meaning through the cultural environments it enters. Starosielski therefore proposes concepts such as turbulent ecologies, strategies of insulation, strategies of interconnection, and traction to explain how cable companies both protect signals from disruption and anchor them within existing social and environmental circulations. In conclusion, The Undersea Network shows that digital flow is possible only through material fixity: beneath the rhetoric of speed, openness, and dematerialisation lies a dense submarine world of labour, vulnerability, history, and contested space.