‘Twist’ Explores Sabotage, Repair and the Hidden Cables Connecting Us
57:42 Share

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union, now offering real-time money movement with instant pay. Make transfers and payments instantly between financial institutions, online or through Star One's mobile app. Star One Credit Union, in your best interest.

Looking to save on internet and mobile? Get the best of both with Xfinity. Because now you can get Xfinity internet with unlimited mobile included for $25 a month for the first year. And get a free 5G phone. Switch today. Xfinity. From KQED.

From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, National Book Award-winning author Colm McCann says he chooses what to write about based on what he most wants to know. His latest novel, Twist, comes from his fascination with the underwater fiber optic cables, no thicker than a garden hose, that carry more than 95% of the world's data and communications.

McCann's protagonist is a journalist who investigates a cable break off the coast of Africa. We'll talk to McCann about breaks, attempts at repair, and sabotage, both in the abyssal zone and in our lives. Join us.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. You'd be forgiven if you thought most of our data travel through pings from satellites or a cloud. It's little known that nearly all the world's information and communications, our internet searches, text messages, financial transactions, move along cables on the ocean floor. This also means they can break and cause major disruptions to the functioning of modern life or to a nation's security.

These cables inspired acclaimed author Colin McCann's new novel, Twist. It explores what happens when a journalist eager to investigate cables goes on a ship to repair a break off the coast of Africa and encounters more questions than answers.

Colin McCann joins me now. Welcome to Forum. It's such a pleasure. Thank you. A real pleasure to have you on too. A lot of writers are told to write what they know, but I've heard you say you write toward what you want to know, which in this case are these underwater cables. So Colin, what fascinated you about them?

Well, it was shortly after the pandemic and I think we were all sort of squabbling around trying to figure out what was going on with the world. I had written a novel called A Paragon, which was set in Israel and Palestine about two fathers who had lost their daughters and a book

Prior to that was about the Irish peace process and then prior to that about 9-11. And so these were all some fairly heavy subjects. And I was thinking, you know what?

what are we going to be looking for in the next few years, particularly, you know, post this pandemic, if at that stage it was ever going to end? And I thought, well, the theme of the Times is going to be healing, which really means it's going to be repair, repair.

And then I was looking at some newspapers and I saw this item that said that the internet off the west coast of Africa and South Africa was down. And it was in certain parts it was in slowdown. In certain parts it was completely out. But there was a ship there.

on the way to fix it. And like you, I'd always thought that there was something, you know, celestial about my email messages and whatever tech stuff. They sort of went up there in the fluffy white cloud and rained a little dark ink down. But I didn't know that 95% of the world's intercontinental information travels on the seafloor.

Yeah, pretty incredible. And also the fact that they're privately owned, too. Well, there you go. So not only do the companies that have all our, you know, access to all our emojis and

our financial transactions and our movements and our Google searches and all that sort of thing. Not only do they have that information, but they own the hardware that guide these across the world. Now, there's about...

450 working cables. And there's about anywhere from 25 to 50 boats that are capable of going out and repairing if, say, there's some damage close to shore with a fishing trawler that dragged its anchor or one of those big mammoth cruise ships that drops its anchor on top of a cable supposedly by mistake.

But then there's those other things that happen, like these massive underwater landslides and earthquakes, because these cables go way, way, way down into the abyssal zone, into the hadal zone, where actually no other human being has ever really been. So the bizarre thing to me as I began to realize this was,

Oh, you know, all our voices, you, me, everybody out there, we're actually visiting places.

where nobody has gone. And we're appearing there in billions of pulses of light. So what happens when these things get ruptured? Now, I thought that was going to be a nice story about repair and all these wonderful people who go out and keep our internet afloat. But the further I got in,

the more I realized that I was sort of delving into, you know, the heart of darkness and the way that the Internet sort of governs our lives and how these cables actually follow all these old colonial networks and slave shipping networks

roots across the world it was um the further i got in the darker it became it was as if i was descending down into the abyssal zone myself yeah because you you write about or even found examples of breaks where there's a lot of speculation that they're from sabotage oh yeah

Right now, over the course of the last six months, there have been several cases of breakages in the Baltic Sea, for instance. There have been Russian ships that have gone out and Chinese ships that have gone out. Now, this sounds vaguely conspiratorial, you know, these ships going out and ripping up these cables and trying to isolate places like Estonia and Sweden and so on.

But there's a deep political intent behind all of that. And with NATO, you know, the questions around NATO, questions about what's happening in the Ukraine, in Ukraine, you know,

that, you know, there's a lot of sabotage. And then I talked to a British admiral and he said to me, look, Colm, you know, everybody talks about the next war and how it's going to go and everyone thinks it's going to be in the air because we have all these drones and we have all this, you know, supersonic flight and et cetera, et cetera. He

He said, but really, the next major war is going to begin, at least begin, underwater. And that will be the clipping of cables because they can manage information and then they can also manage disinformation or misinformation at the same time too. And maybe that the war will actually go on extensively afterwards.

underwater. So I actually had some friends who when I published the novel they said how did you get the Russians to do your marketing campaign for you?

But it is serious. It is very, very, very serious. And we are, you know, under threat. Now, here in the U.S., you know, it doesn't seem so bad because there's so many cables coming in all at once. But if you're talking about the continent of Africa, where there are two major cables, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast,

And if you disrupt one, there's a real slowdown overall. But if you disrupt both of them, you are in serious, serious trouble. And also Ireland, where I'm from originally, Ireland can be cut off very easily. Britain can, even Europe, and guess what? Honestly,

If you really wanted to and you wanted to take down the East Coast or the West Coast here with a little bit of imagination,

And believe it or not, you know, and I'm a Luddite. I'm not not very good at this stuff. I had a flip phone up until a couple of years ago. I figured out a way that that you could actually, you know, take out the landing stations and then take out strategic cables. And we would be in serious, serious trouble without the Internet for months on end.

Well, let me ask our listeners to join the conversation. What questions do you have about these undersea cables that Colm McCann is talking about? And what comes up for you as you learn the vulnerabilities of the system that we all rely on for information and communications? I mean, we're talking about our text messages and emails, but also our financial transactions that can take down an economy, right, Colm? For sure. And our military economies.

communications as well. So listeners, share them at the email address forum at kqed.org. Find us on our social channels at KQED Forum or call us at 866-733-6786. 866-733-6786. And you've described them as no bigger than a garden hose, right? You can just imagine why they are so easy to clip full of these little fiber optic...

Cables. You also said the word landing stations. What are landing stations? This is where the cables come on? Yeah. Exactly. Landing stations are those buildings where the cables come into shore. Now, most of us don't know about these. They look like little bungalows. They're along the coast. They're generally north or south of a city, maybe about 10 kilometers outside major cities.

And the cable comes in there. There's no windows. There's maybe a chain link fence and there's maybe a camera. And the one distinguishing characteristic of them all is that they have a generator out to the side because in case the electricity goes out, they need the generator to kick in. And so...

And everything comes in there. Now, I have been at landing stations in Long Island, in New Jersey, in Ghana, in South Africa, in Ireland, in England. And literally, I have been able to walk up to the door and near the manhole covers where the cables come into the building. And if I had a crowbar with me, though I'm not in the

I don't carry crowbar with me all the time, but if I had a crowbar with me, I could have lifted up the manhole cover and I could have reached in and touched all...

You know, these voices that are going, you know, and these transactions that are going all around. And if I wanted to, I could have sabotaged it fairly easily. These spots where these cables come on land. But you also said that, you know, a break here would not be maybe quite as devastating because we have a lot of them. You've described the Internet as self-healing. Correct.

So you had a lot of fun, I imagine, or maybe not so much fun, trying to imagine what a break was like in South Africa, how people would respond. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you came up with that? Yeah, well, I did have a lot of fun with it. In fact...

Because, you know, what's amazing to me is that, you know, all the information is traveling, as we said, in these, you know, the small tubes. But within the tubes are the fiber optic cables that are no bigger than your eyelash. And these are hollow tubes and they carry, you know, all this light and this pulsing light. And I always imagined at the moment of the break, say when the cable shattered,

and was stretched and pulled and all that light leaked out into the darkness. What was the actual email or what was the financial transaction or what was the photograph or video that was traveling through at that time

absolute particular moment and how does it leak out into the water and was it recoverable and the internet is self-healing in the sense that if a message doesn't get to the place where it's supposed to go it will go and it will snake around in another direction like traffic really and

But if you disrupt too many of them, the traffic will really back up and it'll become like, you know, Los Angeles on a Friday afternoon or even worse, New York City in the middle of a rush hour. And then you'll have a lot of unhappy people. We're talking about underwater cables that carry our information, the world's information, and about Colin McCann's new novel about them. Stay with us. This is Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Berkley Rep. Presenting here, there are blueberries. Unearth the chilling truths hidden within a Nazi-era photo album and what they reveal about our own humanity. Playing April 5th through May 11th. Learn more at berkeleyrep.org. Fast and reliable solutions from Comcast Business can help turn your business into a reliably up-and-running...

Cyber securing. Performance boosting. Storm preparing. Reliably connected. Modern business. Powering the engine of modern business. Powering possibilities. Get started for $49.99 a month for 12 months. Plus, ask how to get a $500 prepaid card on a qualifying gig package. Call today.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour with author Colm McCann. His new book is Twist. You may know his other novels called A Paragon, Transatlantic, and Let the Great World Spin, which won a National Book Award. This book is about the vulnerability of the underwater cable system that makes global communications possible. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your questions about them. And what comes up for you as you learn the vulnerabilities of the system we all rely on

to send, as Colin McCann describes, our petty desires and inanities, as well as our emails, phone calls, financial transactions, and so many other important pieces of information. The number 866-733-6786, the email address forum at kqed.org. And we're on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum. Let me go to

caller Matt in Oakland. Hi, Matt. You're on. Yes. I thank you for taking my call. I was interested in, this is a topic I've been interested in for some time, and one of the things I've understood is that I know that Russia is doing a lot of investment in subsea cables in the Arctic and kind of militarization of the Arctic and potentially creating a situation in which they would be able to kind of have an internal internet that is disconnected from the rest of the world in that way as kind of a strategic solution.

That's my first, I guess, question or observation. Another is, number two is, if something does happen to that subsea cable network, we would then become reliant on things like satellite connections. And there are only a few providers that now do.

offer that. And we've already seen how systems like Starlink, for example, can just be turned on and off at the whim of potentially a single person as they were in Ukraine. And so, you know, to me, that doesn't seem like a really great alternative either.

Yeah. I was just wondering about your thoughts around that. Yeah, Matt, thanks. Thanks for that. Colm, I did learn from you that there really are no other comparable means of global telecommunication at this point, and that satellites are actually quite a bit slower than cables, too. Anyway, curious about your thoughts on Matt's question. Yeah, no, that's a great question. And satellites are indeed, like, they're five times slower and five times more expensive than

And, you know, people are looking at the subsea cables as a form of, you know, political engagement and also isolation and so on. And Matt is absolutely correct when he says that the Russians are or have been charted, you know, looking at the Arctic area in particular, also the Baltic Sea, looking at how they can lay their own military cables there.

and indeed communication cables so that they would be, you know, be able to look after themselves in the case that they went out and cut off other cables around the world. Right now, if they went out to sabotage cables, they'd also be sabotaging themselves. This would be a way for them to look after themselves. And it's very, very, very, you know, it's all top secret sort of stuff, but nothing really is a secret

anymore and in relation to the satellites the fact of the matter is we will be using cables even if we're using quantum if we're making quantum leaps where it's like close to the speed of light we will be using cables

for at least the next 25 years. And also, the satellites are really vulnerable to a form of sabotage too. And we've been sort of sticking our heads in the sand, not thinking about this for quite a while. And we've

I stumbled upon it, and I'm a novelist, but I know that scientists have been thinking about this. Military people have been thinking about this. Even politicians have been talking about it for the past few years. But there's been very, very, very little action that has taken place. So let's talk about your novel. Your protagonist is a journalist, Anthony Fennell, who gets an assignment –

about the cables on a cable repair boat. Tell us about him. Tell us about our narrator. Our narrator is a middle-aged Irishman, go figure. But he's a broken man. I mean, he's very different to me. He's a novelist and a playwright, but in those respects, the sort of similarities exist.

and he's kind of like a figure like Prufrock from the T.S. Eliot poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock he's one of these lonely men in shirt sleeves hanging out of windows his wife has left him his son is living down in South America he's in

Ireland. He's drinking himself into oblivion and he stumbles upon this story and in stumbling upon the story he feels that he can get his own form of repair. When he goes out to sea on one of these boats going from Cape Town up the west coast of Africa, he gets on the boat with another Irishman who's much more mysterious. This guy, his name is Conway and he is the chief of mission and

Conway's in love with this South African actress who has moved to London and in many ways you know it's a sort of great Gatsby type tale because

because my narrator, Fennell, speaks in that sort of Nick Carraway sort of voice. You know the way Nick Carraway said, you know, in my younger and more vulnerable years, my father said to me, you know. And so my narrator speaks in similar sorts of tones. And he is in pursuit of information,

about a beautiful and sort of mysterious man, except this time they're out there on a ship in the middle of nowhere. And the job at hand is to repair a very serious break at the mouth of the Congo, where the Congo River has actually slid. There's been a landslide from the Congo River because of climate change. And the landslide goes all

the way out and snaps the cable into and basically these men on the boat because it's primarily men and very seldom do women appear on boats but sometimes they do but

They go out and basically they're trying to find a needle in a haystack. Believe it or not, you know, you think that we'd be able to pinpoint these things nowadays. No, this is a darkness that's so impenetrable. And if there's been a landslide covering the two ends of the cable, they basically have to go out with a rope and believe it or not, a grappling hook.

like 150 years ago, using a grappling hook to scour the ocean floor to find the cable, to bring it up, and then to join it back together again with a repair. It's really quite startling stuff. It's an old story and a new story at the same time. Yeah, so easy to break, so difficult to repair. The methods you're describing sound so sort of

Simple and also imprecise as well. And you spent a few days on a cable boat, right? Or a cable repair boat?

and then suddenly there's another break north of there, say in Ghana, and then there's another break up by Algeria, and you could be gone for many, many months. So I didn't go out for any extended period of time, but I went out long enough to meet these people, and they're quite fascinating. The crews come from all over the world. You have a captain, then you have a chief of mission, but then you have these...

you know, wonderful engineers who do fusion techniques because they have to fuse the cables together. At the same time, you have the engine room guys who are, you know, doing the hard work of keeping the engines chugging along. And it's a fascinating little microcosm. And also at sea, what's interesting, we know it from literature, I suppose, but it's quite easy to go mad out

there because people who want to go out to sea they have this great desire to go out to sea and the minute they get out to sea the first thing they want to do is get home again and so if you have a challenge that's out at sea whether it be catching a great white whale or whether it be

a small cable, these challenges bring out the best and the worst in us as human beings. Yeah.

Listener Valerie writes, I'm thrilled that Colin McCann is your guest this morning. He's one of my favorite authors. I have read Twist and I loved it. What I especially like about McCann's work is how he goes deep into the research of the topic he is exploring. He takes me places I wouldn't have ever imagined and I learned so much. Every sentence he writes is lyrical and crafted with special care. Each word matters.

I heard you say, Colm, in an interview that you were actually annoyed that Fennell was a journalist. You'd hoped you could have made him something like an engineer. That's right. That's a beautiful email, by the way. Yeah, from Valerie. And I'm very deeply, deeply grateful to Valerie. You know, yeah, because, you know, you want to make the story special and different. And the obvious way was to, you know, to bring someone out and make them into a journalist. Yeah.

And, you know, Nabokov says that his characters are his galley slaves. In other words, he can make them do whatever he wants them to do. Not me. My characters, they're there and they drag me down alleyways and they push me in the wrong direction. And, you know, they're stubbornly making me do things that I don't necessarily want to do. I wanted him to be a chaplain or something, you know, more interesting than a journalist. But in the end...

The journalist is the one who's seeking, you know, all the information and also trying to make it clear to the rest of the world. And make no mistake, I have massive respect for journalists, particularly in this day and age when it is one of the most dangerous jobs. I am a journalist myself. My father was a journalist himself.

you know, come from that background. But in certain ways, I just wanted, you know, to break the mold. In the end, he had to be. And I'm grateful that he was a journalist because he has this sort of inquisitive mind in seeking to find out how exactly does this stuff happen? How, by the way, do our voices...

get translated from the microphone down into a black box and then down into these tiny fibers and then they bounce across the world in pulses of light in these tiny tubes that are no bigger than your hair and then the big tube itself is just, as we said, a garden hose or potentially even better metaphor is, you know those pipes that you have at the back of your toilet?

They're about that size. And they're so ordinary. And yet they're so extraordinary at the same time, too. I think this is one of the miracles. They're beautiful, and yet they're just deeply functional and covered in slime and muck.

Yeah. And as you say, a journalist is a good person to play an explanatory role. And I'm sure in that way, helping us move along through the story, something that I imagine Valerie appreciated as well. So the character Conway that Fennell forms sort of a fascination with is dealing with his own kind of break, a romantic rupture with his partner, Zanelli. Right.

Can you talk about that? Because, you know, of course, all of this, when we talk about the cables, it reminds me so much of relationships, that something so central to our lives can also be so fragile. Right. You know, this whole idea that we are connected and we are disconnected at the same time.

And we have these webs of connection all around the world, and yet we break all the time. And that the local can become the global and that the tiny can become the epic.

And in certain ways, you know, this love affair that Conway, the Irishman, has with this black South African actress becomes a sort of microcosm in itself of what happens when we're away from one another. What happens when celebrity in...

intrudes? What happens when we can't really communicate with one another? What happens when we actually don't really understand what's going on? And she is this amazing actress who is brought up in the townships and then she gets famous and she moves to London to perform Samuel Beckett's

it play, waiting for Godot. And we're, of course, all waiting for Godot in many forms. She uses it again as a climate change metaphor. But there's a lot of these sort of moving parts that you find that, you know, it's like cog wheels, you know, that they move one another. And this is how a story is made and forms. And you hope that the cogs, you know, that the teeth of the cogs click together.

in at the exact right place so that the novel sort of propels itself forward. And it looks like something simple or, you know, and it looks elegant. But can I just assure you that in the process of making this, you do not want to see the sausage being made, the sausage of the novel making I'm talking about. Because, oh my gosh, I was...

There were so many times I was in like, I was in despair. I got to give this up. I don't know anything about cables. I'm not very good on technology. I'm not sure why she wants to move to London. Why is this character reacting in the way that he's doing? And yet in the end, I mean, one of my things that I talk about is you got to keep your rear end in the chair, right?

And you've got to fight it, even the terror of the blank page as it's there in front of you. And eventually the story will begin to emerge. And while a lot of this particular book, a lot of it is actually left mysterious at the end because...

I do feel that you and all of my readers are much more intelligent than I could ever be. And in fact, readers truly finish a book. I don't really ever finish a book. It's the readers who get into it.

they finish it and they bring their own intelligence, their emotional intelligence and their deep inquisitiveness into a story. And that's what's beautiful to me about the literary experience. That's why people like Valerie are so valuable when they engage with a book and it means so much to them. And I think in certain ways,

you know, at times I'm afraid it's a dying art and there are other times I think it is the only thing that's holding us together because the world is maybe held together with atoms but it really is held together with stories and storytelling and that's how we know each other. Yeah, so it's almost like what I just heard you describe is a metaphor for the process of writing a book. Yes. Like,

You know, the break, the going away from it, the coming back to it, the repair. Getting mad at it. It's like, you know.

It doesn't love me anymore. I'm leaving you now. And then you go away, work on another topic. And then suddenly it's just like, oh, I really miss that other book that I was writing. Let me see if I can sort of like go back again and try to reinvigorate it.

You know, I'm not one who believes that we should talk about how difficult it is to be a novelist because I feel so lucky and I know so many people have other jobs that I don't know how they get through a day. And being a novelist or a storyteller is a great, great, great privilege. But there are times when you think,

This whole thing is never going to hold together. And in the end, you hope that it does. But it's the reader who becomes the glue for all of those pieces. Yeah.

We're talking with Colin McCann. His novel, Twist, is about the vast system of underwater cables that transmits 95% of the world's information, our emails, our phone calls, financial transactions, and all the sort of inanities of life, as Colin McCann says, and what happens when a journalist tries to investigate information.

a cable break and learns a lot about the many types of breaks in both his and many other characters in the novel's lives as well. And listeners,

Do you have a story of repair or thoughts about repair as well? Maybe you've experienced a rupture or tried to repair a severed connection, as well as, of course, questions you have about these undersea fiber optic cables, which Colm again did a lot of research about. Or what comes up for you as you learn about this very vulnerable system that we all rely on for information and communication. 866-733-6786, the number is.

We're at Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or threads at kqedforum. And you can email us, forum at kqed.org. Stay with us. I'm Nina Kim. Hear that? Spring is back. And so is Church of Seafood. With eight-piece shrimp, surf and turf, or fish sandwich. Each starting at $3.99. Offer valid at participating locations. Fast and reliable solutions from Comcast Business can help turn your business into a reliably up-and-running business.

Cyber securing. Performance boosting. Storm preparing. Reliably connected. Modern business. Powering the engine of modern business. Powering possibilities. Get started for $49.99 a month for 12 months. Plus, ask how to get a $500 prepaid card on a qualifying gig package. Call today.

This is Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking with Colm McCann, whose work you may recognize, A Paragon, Transatlantic, and Let the Great World Spin, which won a National Book Award. His new book is called Twist, and we're talking about what happens when there's a break in the global underwater cable system.

which Colm McCann calls a metaphor for our fractured times. Valerie writes it again with Mr. McCann's book, A Paragon Profoundly Changed My View of the Middle East and is especially pertinent today. He showed me there is a third way forward and has given me a framework for expressing my desire for peace during these challenging and complicated times.

Colm, do you think we live in broken times? I'm thinking about Zanelli when the character utters this really great line in your book. And she says, the disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface. Mm-hmm.

Well, I do think that we live in broken times, but I also think that we've always lived in broken times. So that if I go back 200 years, you can find people, you know, writing about, you know, the best of times, the worst of times.

You know, I can go back in my own family and see my grandfather talking about, you know, the world falling apart for World War One. And then my father talking about the world falling apart, you know, in the 1960s and so on. But I do think there's a difference here.

Yes, we've always had the breaking and yes, we've always had the people who want to, you know, lean down, pick up the shattered pieces and repair them. The problem now, and I think it's really, really acute and we see it in amongst young people. The problem now is that we're living in the exponential age and over time,

And all of this stuff is happening faster and faster and faster. And we can't lean down quickly enough to pick up the shattered pieces because when we do so, the shattered piece itself shatters. And suddenly we have so many other things to repair at the exact same time. And so I think

think we have to look at ourselves. I think we have to look at our relationship to technology, our relationship to storytelling and ask ourselves, you know, how is it possible to fix this brokenness that's going on, this sense of loneliness, this sense of isolation, this sense of disconnect and

that we, I mean, certainly I'm feeling it. I think most people that I meet are a little stunned and concussed at what's happening. Is there a way for us to sort of come together and sort of reanimate our relationship to time and deal with that exponential nature of how things are changing? I think we can do so

through storytelling. In fact, I have a, I'm involved with an organization called Narrative 4, which brings young people together to tell stories to one another, tell their stories to one another, and they get told back to them in the first person. And this is an extraordinary thing because these young people, almost for the first time ever, get a chance to not only tell their own story, but to tell the story of somebody else. And I think

think that's the key curiosity into other people's lives because what do you think that does i i think it helps us repair i think it makes us understand that we're more than ourselves i think it it we we spread our wings emotionally uh socially politically all sorts of ways we realize that we're not

alone in all of this. And I think that's a really powerful way for us to start thinking about, you know, bringing this stuff back together again. It happens in schools. It can happen across classrooms, across cities, across countries, across continents.

You know, but, you know, that nothing can beat that moment when you look somebody in the eye and you say to them, oh, your story is valuable and you might be different to me. You know, you might come from a completely different background.

But if I can understand your story and you can understand mine, maybe then we don't have to do all these violent and awful things that we do to one another to break one another and to force us away from that sense of repair. At least that's what I hope. Does it sound naive and sort of sentimental? And if it does to people, that's okay. I don't care. I think it's true. I think it's powerful.

powerful and I think it's absolutely necessary.

Well, given the power imbalances in our world, it feels like the only way you can push back is, you know, collectively. So I can understand why that makes sense. Actually, I'm thinking about how, you know, the second time Fennell loses his connection to the internet is when he's at sea and because he's apparently crossed Conway in some way who then takes away that access, you know, which makes me think about sort of that feeling of helplessness that we can sometimes have as professionals.

as part of this system using this technology, but we're almost like surfs at the mercy of, you know, tech overlords or something like that sometimes. I do think, I mean, look, you know, is the problem the phone or is the problem the computer or is the problem the wire itself? Not really. I mean, the phone, if you look at it, is plastic and sand and silicon and wires and a few other magical little things that are in there. You know, it's,

Our relationship to that phone or that computer or that wire, that's different. And look, are we entirely at fault? No, but we're somewhat at fault. I'm at fault for gazing in my phone, you know, four hours a day. But I also know that there are men behind the curtain.

who have access to these droplets of dopamine that they can drop down into our brains via these algorithms that they so neatly construe and allow and they're so innocent, quote-unquote, innocent of. They know exactly what's going on because it's filling their pockets full of gold. And we have to be aware of that.

You know, that this stuff is happening, that people, you know, are benefiting from the way that our sort of ennui and despair and again, loneliness is operating in the world and we've got to somehow come back here.

and reconfigure the way we're looking at this sort of digital, well, it's a form of digital colonialism in many ways. And, you know, who are the people that we can talk to? And where are the voices that are going to do this? I think they're out there. Yeah. I love this way you described how the people responded when they had lost, you know, their digital connections, you know,

We were like stunned birds. We had flown into the glass. We had to check ourselves for damage. We stood up. The uncertainty hummed. Right. I mean, isn't that how, like, have you ever been without your phone for hours on end? I tried to imagine it after reading this book. In fact, I thought of a listener question of, how do you think you would react to a sudden wide-scale loss of internet access? You know, I think...

You're real hard. It's kind of freaky. I mean, but there are a lot of people out there who are doing good things, who are deciding, okay, you know, I'll leave my phone down for the weekend or for, you know, for a week. And frankly, I really admire these people who want to get the phones out of schools. I think that's a very important step.

in us beginning to realize. My son says to me, look, dad, do you see that phone you have in your hand? They're going to be, 20 years from now, they're going to be the cigarettes of the time. They're going to say that that was really bad for your health.

And maybe he's right. And maybe it's his generation because he says to me, look, I'm on no apps. I don't want to go on any apps. I'm going to leave my phone at home. And he goes off on his bicycle and is much happier, I think.

Well, Martha writes, this conversation reminds me of Colm McCann's knowledge of a different kind of cable and let the great world spin. Thanks, Colm, for attending North Charleston School of the Arts 16 years ago when they dedicated their new auditorium. I heard you speak to the students there and their wonderful teacher who also published a biography about you. Wow. Yes.

The effect you have. Anne writes, this is fascinating. What's the history of this system before fiber optics? Was it always privately owned or is it like the internet originally funded by the government? And are there any original coaxial cables left?

Wow, lots of different questions. First of all, Charleston was such an amazing thing 16 years ago. And I was just there a couple of months ago and I met with John Casadas, who was the man who wrote a book about some of my work. And the students are just as vibrant and as brilliant as they were 16 years ago, which gives me a lot of hope.

In relation to the history of the cables, guess what? The original cables were laid down in the 1850s and the 1860s, telegraph cables. The buzzwords for the entrepreneurs who were there at the time, Cyrus Field and others, were faster, faster, faster.

So, so much life changes, so much it actually stays the same. Then they moved into coaxial cables, you know, the phone cables that were carrying all our phone conversations. These cables have been around for a long, long time. And then in relation to the cable that spanned between the World Trade Center towers in Let the Great World Spin that Philippe Petit

teeth so elegantly beautifully walked across what 20

No, 50 years ago. It's 50 years ago that he did so. All of that was spanning this act between creation and destruction. And I think that's what a lot of cables do. They go from one point to the next and they carry our lives as we know them. And in many cases, they go from creation to destruction or destruction.

from destruction to creation. And I'm still an optimist in the face of all the evidence. Well, Robert writes, Hi, Colm. I'm a solution architect with a global data center provider. Did you get a chance to see the subsea termination point with a data center? It's quite fascinating to see the infrastructure associated with thousands of miles of fiber.

Yeah. Those, you know, you walk into these places and the lights are blinking and the fans are blowing and the heat is there and it's fascinating to watch. And there's these people who are hurt

heroic, who keep all these things going. They watch all these things. They watch the gradations, the movement in information. They're like musicians in certain ways. They're able to figure out what's going on. And yes, so there's a lot of really good stuff happening

and a lot of really good people looking after the hardware and indeed the software that's behind all of this. And this is really important to say. You know, technology is not bad, and technology is not necessarily good. It is both of these things and many other things all at the exact same time. So people who are working in those places, I think they're really fantastic. And I give kudos to them all.

We are talking with Carla McCann about his new book, Twist, and you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Let me go next to caller Brenda in the dog patch. Hi, Brenda, you're on. Okay, thanks. This is a comment that's a little not underground water, but I was at my warehouse really late in the morning, late at night, and I looked out the window. I had heard an explosion, and there was a manhole cover that was bouncing on fire.

Wow.

Yes, I can. Underwater. But they have that same kind of like, oh, my God, these things are connected. Yeah, I can see how you would connect to that and listening to this conversation, Brenda. Thanks so much for sharing. Go ahead, Colin. I think, yeah, I think there's so much going on underground. And you push down above ground on one place, it's going to have pressure constantly.

come up in other places. Yeah, I mean, that could have to do with gases, it could have to do with air pressure, there's all sorts of different things going on. But what she's accessing there, and wonderfully so, is that there's so much that we do not

know in a world where we think we have all the answers there is so much that's still sort of uh mysterious and and and we have to try and try and figure it out but it's also dangerous what we don't know can be dangerous to our health and dangerous literally physically dangerous and and and uh you know the more we investigate it and the better off i suppose will happen to be

Would you talk about the title Twist? Because it has so many potential meanings, you know, but I'm just curious what drew you to that. There are loads of meanings in Twist, but I will tell you this. I wrote a novel called Aparagon, which was the last one. And an aparagon is a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. So the CEO of my publishing house,

She called me and she said, Colin, we love your book. It's great. And et cetera, et cetera. But please change the title. And I was like...

I can't change the title. I don't want to change the title. I got called in a second time. Please change the title. But I thought the title was so, really, really fit in. One of the things that I kind of did as I talked with her, and she was very generous and kind, she allowed me to use the title. But one of the things I said, okay, next time around, I promise you I'll give you a really simple title. So Twist is a very, very simple title. But I like it because it could talk about plot twists.

But it also, like a lot of us think that the cables, well, the cables can twist around themselves. And of course, the information within can twist around themselves. I, when I first came to it, thought the cables would be twisted inside. They're actually concentric. So at the very core, you have these little tiny fiber optic cables, and then you have Kevlar, and then you have copper, and then you have more protective stuff inside.

And, you know, they're kind of beautiful if you cut them and slice them. They look like a tree ring almost. And it's almost like it's giving us information about, you know, who we happen to be right now. But twist for me was, you know, the psychological twists.

the social twist, the information twists, all of these different things that were going on, as well as me thinking about the cables and how they might, you know, twist around themselves. Yeah, you know, there was this moment when the character Fennell is also...

Sort of it feels like twisting himself into knots when he's contemplating his own role of being an Irishman in South Africa. Sort of struggling to rationalize the roles that people played who look like him. Right.

Was that something?

edge of Europe. We were considered, you know, the very poor neighbor. There were lots of bad jokes that were being told and certainly in the British mainland about, you know, Ireland. And of course, then there was a war that was unfolding. There were a lot of things that were going on. But Ireland now, in that short, like 50, 60 years, has

become a completely different place and you know there's so much tech power there's so much you know there's so much wonderful stuff there's great literature and great music and Ireland is admired we almost forget that back you know in the 60s and 70s we were

considered the shuffling poor cousin that came up knocking on the door looking for something from someone else. So nowadays, my character goes down to South Africa and he's a white male and he's looking around and he thinks, oh, I've got to make sure that they know I'm Irish, that I was colonized too because I don't want to be one of the colonizers. And he feels guilty about it all.

Yeah, so many twists in Colin McCann's novel, Twist. Thank you so much for talking with us about it. Thank you so much. And thank you to listeners and thank you to our forum team, which includes Caroline Smith, Mark Nieto, Francesca Fenzi, Jennifer Eng, Danny Bringer, Christopher Beale, Brendan Willard, Jim Bennett, Catherine Monaghan, and Brian Douglas, Jesse Fisher, Brian Vo, and also Susie Britton produced this segment. Have a great weekend. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Hey, it's Glenn Washington, the host of the Snap Judgment podcast. At Snap, we tell cinematic stories that let you feel what it's like inside someone else's skin. Stories that let you walk in someone else's footsteps. Storytelling like you've never heard before.

The highs, the lows, the joys, the pain, the twists, the turns, the laughs, the life. Snap Judgment drops each and every week. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Looking to save on internet and mobile? Get the best of both with Xfinity. Because now you can get Xfinity internet with unlimited mobile included for $25 a month for the first year. And get a free 5G phone. Switch today. Xfinity.