Your internet access is dependent on the security and resiliency of garden-hose-sized underwater cables. More than 800,000 miles of these cables criss-cross the oceans and seas. When just one of these cables breaks, which occurs about every other day, you may not notice much of a change to your internet speed. When several break, which is increasingly possible, the resulting delay in internet connectivity can disrupt a nation’s economy, news and government.
If there were ever a bipartisan issue it’s this: protecting our undersea cable system.
Nearly all internet traffic goes through this cable system. The fiber optic glass at the core of the cables allows the internet to operate at incredible speeds. The alternative — relying on satellites — is nearly five times slower. That’s why protecting these cables is essential, especially for countries with fewer cables.
The hundreds of cable systems around the world are not equally distributed. Whereas the United States has dozens and dozens of cables on both coasts, some countries have less than a handful, or none at all. Those latter countries are especially vulnerable to diminished internet upon a cable break. Take, for example, Japan in 2011. The tsunami that struck the island nation caused seven of its 12 transpacific cables to break. If one more cable had been severed, internet traffic between Japan and the U.S. may have come to a halt.
Reducing the vulnerability of this system is not easy. It’s not a matter of governments simply laying more cables. For lack of a better phrase, governments are not in the cable laying business. Nearly all undersea cables are privately owned. Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are the ones laying cables at a historically unprecedented rate.
It’s also not as simple as sending out more repair ships. There’s only a couple dozen ships outfitted to repair cables. This small fleet is made up of a small, aging labor force.
Finally, it’s not as straightforward as hiding cables from bad actors who might want to intentionally break them. Making cables harder to find might actually increase the number of breaks. The plurality of breaks are caused by fishers accidentally dropping nets, anchors and other equipment on cables. If fishing boats do not know where cables are laid, they may cause breaks on an even more frequent basis.
All potential ways to make the undersea cable system more resilient come with tradeoffs. New Zealand and Australia, for example, have developed cable protection zones, in which all cables must fall. These zones decrease the odds of unintentional breaks by making more actors aware of cable locations. Yet, by concentrating cables in a single area, the odds of a single storm or bad actor causing several breaks increase. Cables made of more resilient material may withstand more severe storms, but upon a break may be even harder to repair. This is just a short list of proposals that come with pros and cons but merit more investigation.
While the next best step to protecting undersea cables is unclear, what’s obvious is that the status quo cannot persist. The public must make this an issue. Elected officials on both sides of the aisle ought to prioritize this critical infrastructure. And, cable owners like Google should embrace the public service they are performing by making the cable laying and repair process more transparent and participatory. That’s a tall order for each set of actors; it’s also one that should inspire and motivate us all to rally in defense of the undersea cable system.
Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.