Starosielski’s “Against Flow” argues that the apparently immaterial, wireless and deterritorialised Internet is in fact sustained by undersea fibre-optic cables whose routes are material, political, ecological and historically sedimented. Rather than treating global communication as frictionless circulation, the chapter insists that signals move through grounded infrastructures shaped by coastal politics, cable stations, fishing practices, military interests, colonial histories, environmental risk and corporate secrecy. Its central intervention is to replace the fantasy of digital flow with an account of networked transmission as precarious, territorial and dependent on extensive labour. The maps of transpacific cable routes from 1922, 1982 and 2012 visually reinforce this argument, showing that contemporary systems do not simply dissolve geography, but often repeat older telegraph, telephone, trade and military pathways. Starosielski’s case of Arctic Fibre synthesises the chapter’s method: the proposed Arctic route appears innovative, yet its feasibility depends on climate change, indigenous and governmental relations, oil interests, ice movements, fishing activity, cable protection, interconnection points and maintenance logistics. Through this example she develops key concepts such as turbulent ecologies, pressure points, strategies of insulation, strategies of interconnection and traction, all of which show how networks must both separate themselves from and attach themselves to their environments. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that digital media systems are not abstract diagrams of nodes and vectors, but ecological infrastructures embedded in rural, aquatic and coastal worlds. Its decisive claim is that the experience of global fluidity depends on fixed, vulnerable and unevenly distributed routes whose histories and material conditions must be made visible.
