Over on the Progressive Realist, there’s an interesting point made that the notion of strategic geography, which used to be based on refueling ports for ships and right-of-way for railroads, is shifting to right-of-way for pipelines, be they for oil or for bits. It really doesn’t take that much distance for the speed of light to start becoming a factor in how fast you can do things over the wire.

What’s really interesting, though, is the link to “an extremely long article on the subject by Neal Stephenson, the well-known writer of extremely long things”, a 62-page epic Stephenson wrote for Wired about the places in the world which are important only because of the cables which run through them. The article was published in December of 1996, three years before Cryptonomicon, and seems to be, if not the root, an early cut of many of the ideas which feature prominently in the novel.