Netflix and Chill: Antarctica as Infrastructure, Connecting the Last Continent

Keywords: antarctica, internet, infrastructure
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 75

Abstract

Antarctica is the only continent on earth not connected with fibre optic internet cable. Antarctic internet speeds are glacial. Data from scientific research are stowed on hard disk and flown out by aircraft, which are unable to land in the polar winter. Each satellite sent email costs $3. McMurdo Station internet might run 1.79 Mbps download speed and upload of 0.82 Mbps with a ping of 1969ms - when it’s not overloaded.

The era of frozen screens might soon be history. A consortium, including Vint Cerf and Google, are leading a coordinated proposal to roll out fibreoptic cable from Invercargill, New Zealand to wire up the ice stations to the rest of the planet. The moment is a critical juncture in hominid-Antarctic relations. Antarctica has had several stages of human colonisation. Antarctica’s next great human Age is Data Science: ice floes contiguous with data flows.

This paper explores how an Antarctic is a more-than-human infrastructure of the Earth. Antarctica’s icy circumference expands and contracts with the seasons, its frozen heft distorts the planet’s shape. It harbours life and low-pressure cells which feed a massive ecology. I will consider questions that we might ask before we connect the last cyber frontier to the planetary scale infrastructure of the internet. Does a continent have the right not to be connected? Should humans keep some areas of Earth unconnected and even deliberately isolated, in the event of a global cyber meltdown? Life on Earth relies upon continental scale infrastructures of non-human connectedness.