The Best Thing WIRED Ever Published

Mother Earth Mother Board, a mini-monograph masterpiece of “hacker tourism” by Neil Stephenson in the December 1996 issue:

In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired.

Yep, if you followed the link you read that right: page 1 of 56. It’s a whopper. And the photographs, which the electronic version does not include, capture a kind of industrial exoticism that amazingly lives up to the above text. This is a kind of companion to Stephenson’s other major piece of non-fiction, In the Beginning was the Command Line—but it makes that book, which I’ve never loved, seem positively tedious by comparison. It’s also the prequel to Cryptonomicon, which in turn is the prequel to the Baroque Cycle. Anyway, I just replaced my original copy of the issue, which I lost in a move at some point, with one from eBay. Why is this not a classic of digital studies? Anyway, the article, coupled with the introduction to Friedrich Kittler’s Grammophone, Film, Typewriter (which begins with the trenchant pronouncement: Optical fibre networks) will be the opening reading in my graduate seminar on Inscribing Media next spring.