Stephenson’s piece is a classic, but it was written in 1996, when things were very different in the tech industry and geopolitically. Much more up to date (and with an explicit debt to Stephenson) is Samanth Subramanian, The Web Beneath The Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect our World. Well worth a read to see what’s changed since Stephenson.
Many of the weirder geopolitical parts like how large numbers of cables are all laid across Egypt to get from Europe to middle east -> south asia still remain significant factors. The part that is most dated is the cables being built by exclusively by big traditional telecom companies, when this was written in 1996 the idea of Microsoft or Google or Facebook or others bankrolling a submarine cable from Brazil to Europe was very far away.
The new and novel thing in 1996 from the author's perspective is cables being built not by a PTT type "telephone company" (the Bell System/AT&T, BT, France Telecom, etc) but a new entity that intended to build the cables to sell capacity to multiple telcos.
I've been using Hacker News to get book recommendations. Recently I started checking out the books mentioned in comments on topics I'm interested in learning more about.
I've added this book to my list, and it looks like a short read.
> The British involvement, then, was more catalytic than anything else. They didn't own the rubber plantations. They merely bought the rubber on an open market from Chinese brokers who in turn bought it from producers of various ethnicities. The market was just a few square blocks of George Town where British law was enforced, i.e. where businessmen could rely on a few basics like property rights, contracts, and a currency.
In 2026 this is a surprisingly non-pearl clutching take on British influence abroad.
Two notes of interest, it only covers "British influence abroad" at one specific location for a relatively short interval of time, and it neatly avoids looking too deeply into a classic of British colonialism; the divide and conquer approach of strategically favouring some over others to push any resulting unrest at arms length away from the actual British.
But it does mention the most classic classic: the outcomes of post-British colonies are incredible compared to either no colonialism or another power colonising.
> the outcomes of post-British colonies are incredible
By what metric? Recall that not all people value the same things.
The outcome of British colonialism in Tasmania was 100% extinction of locals - I mean sure, you can call that incredible as you did, but that was never a word used by Truganini
Jamaica, sure, greatest Winter Olympic team ever .. but hardly the poster child for colonialism and impossible to claim as "better off" than sans or alt colonialism.
Uganda, well, ... enough said.
We can likely agree that the expanding British Empire had a tremendous eye for real estate, resources, and location. The bulk of places colonised by the British had plenty of potential for exploitation and exploited they largely were.
The arc of such colonies once the sun set and the Empire retracted was varied, the lucky ones were able to reclaim local control of their own resources and relations, a good many were largely stripped and left to flounder locked into ongoing situations not of their making.
I’d say India has done really well, and that’s partly in credit to the British. A lot of the infrastructure that India used to succeed was inherited from the Raj, such as a professional Army that has never interfered in politics, a competent Civil Service, a Parliamentary style system where minorities have had a reasonable say.
Most important of all, and directly attributable to British influence was getting rid of princely states that owed their allegiance to the British crown. Britain made it clear that they would not accept independent states and every princely state would have to accede to India or Pakistan.
Britain really tried to help India (and Pakistan) succeed. The blame for some of the failures and mistakes can’t be attributed to the British (Indian economic policy before 1991, Pakistani policy towards Bengali speakers), but they deserve partial credit for the political and economic success of India.
People who aren’t Indian can’t understand how remarkable it is that India has stayed united and functional. Even Indians who haven’t lived outside India underestimate it. Indians have diversity within similar to Europe, but the country remains united. A big part of that is that the current Indian state is a successor to the British Raj, which in turn was a successor to the Mughal Raj. The longer India is ruled from Delhi, the more normal it feels.
This unity is the source of Indian success. Without it India would resemble Africa more than Europe. More resources would have been wasted fighting wars within India and all of India would still be struggling with poverty, famine and starvation instead of manufacturing iPhones.
People often caricature this argument by saying sO wHaT iF tHeY bUiLt RaIlWaYs. The Railways don’t matter, they could have been built earlier or later. But once a polity fractures and blood has been spilt, there’s no fixing that.
China, the country was never a colony under British rule - perhaps you're thinking of the island leased to Britain, Hong Kong.
China did have interactions with Britain, disputes over trade, access, addictive drug running, gunboat diplomacy et al. but these usually fall under British Imperialism rather than British Colonialism.
I think that's the previous posters point. The OP argued that countries were better off in the long run with British colonialism than without. I think China vs India is the counter example.
I wouldn't count China as a third world country to compare to, so that's fair enough, but also China is only doing well because it coccooned some capitalism based on English common law and its derivatives, and a limited imitation of the liberal tradition thereof. Of course it's a facade, but it works well enough to lift them out of poverty.
India you should compare to India's trajectory had British rule not occurred.
Given generally we measure poverty by how many things Western countries have invented and built, and not look to India as the leading edge of development, it's not hard to deduce India's trajectory had it never met the West. Overwhelming caste system, low tech. Hitting a local maximum and never getting out of it. A bit like what the UK might've been had the Romans never colonised it.
$3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine, sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie, golf, marathons, collectibles, etc.
It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of people that care more about computing than other stuff.
I live in America, I am very well compensated. Have been for 15 years now. $3500 is a lot of money. A lot. There is a tiny bubble of us tech folks who think it is accessible to most people. It is not. It is also the same reason Macs are still a niche. Don't take your circles to be the standard, it is very very far from it, especially if you think $3500 is not a lot of money.
It is easy to confirm this, just look at the sales number of these $3500 devices. It is definitely not an enthusiast price point, even in the US.
It's not nothing for most people... it's more than a month of rent/mortgage for a significant number of Americans even. But if it's your primary hobby, it's not completely out of reach, and it's not something you necessarily spend every year. A lot of people will upgrade to a new computer every 3-5 years and maybe upgrade something in between those complete system upgrades.
I know plenty of people who don't make a lot of money (say top 25% or so) that will have a Boat or RV that costs more than a $3500 computer, and balk at the thought of spending that much on a computer. It just depends on where your interests are.
The first words I said: "$3.5k is a lot of money..."
There are tens of millions of top 10% income adults in America. So something can be both unaffordable to most people, and also easily accessible to very many people.
It’s a midrange to upper expense in the US if it’s your hobby. Most people don’t have a serious computer hobby but they golf, trade ATVs, travel, drink, etc.
Mac has about 15% of the market share in the US. It's not really a niche.
$3500 is more than I would spend on a hobby too, but there are, in absolute terms, a large number of Americans who can spend this much on their hobbies.
There is no Apple device priced above $3k that has done 1 million in annual sales. The US population is >300M. <0.3% of the population. Don't take your bubble to be representative of society. $3500 is a lot of money, even in the US.
$3500 would have been 3–4 months' discretionary spending as a PhD student in Finland 15 years ago. A sum you might choose to spend once a year on something you find genuinely interesting.
Some people succumb to lifestyle creep or choose it deliberately. Others choose to live below their means when their income grows. The latter have a lot more money to spend on extras, or to save if that's what they prefer.
In June 1977, the base Apple II model with 4 KB of RAM was $1,298 (equivalent to about $6,900 in 2025), and with the maximum 48 KB of RAM it was $2,638 (equivalent to about $14,000 in 2025).
Wow, 48k for $14000. Now you can get a MBP with a million times more memory for $3500 or so. Whereas that CPU was clocked at 1 MHz, so CPUs are only several thousand times faster, maybe something like 30,000 times faster if you can make use of multi-core.
I'd argue that some of those are more consumption and activity than hobby depending on how they're engaged with, and that people use the word "hobby" too loosely, but would agree that Americans in-particular consume at obscene rates.
Golf equipment, mountaineering equipment, skiing and snowboarding lift tickets and gear, a single excessive graphics card that's only used for increasing frame rates marginally, or basically a single extra feature on a car, are all things that accumulate quite quickly. Some are clearly more superfluous than others and cater to whales, while some are just expensive by nature and aren't attempting to be anything else
Those are the prices for just buying equipment, which at least retain some kind of value. 3 million+ American kids are enrolled in competitive soccer with annual clubs dues between $1K and $5K, and that money is just gone at the end of the year. Basically none of those kids are going to have a career in soccer, so it's clearly a hobby, and everyone knows it. And soccer isn't even the most popular sport!
"The Biden Pardon immunizes everyone from future prosecution"
He pardoned specific individuals that had already been targeted and attacked by Trump and conservative media, who were extremely likely to be persecuted by a potential (and now realized) 2nd Trump term. There's a big difference between investigating January 6th and, you know, doing January 6th.
You're making an argument for why its use is defensible. I find it not unconvincing, especially since it's pretty much just Analects 13:18. But Trump can use the Biden Pardon (shorthand for broad large-period pre-emptive pardon) too, and he's pioneered the use of the Trump Pardon (shorthand for plausibly deniable pay-to-pardon). The combination of the two pardon techniques signals the end of Rule of Law for sufficiently well-connected individuals in the US. Plausibly Jeffrey Epstein was just caught a decade early. He wouldn't be in trouble today.
I find the notion that Trump would have used discretion if not for Biden’s pardons pretty curious. At no point has precedence or decorum stopped Trump. Biden’s actions had zero effect on how Trump uses his pardon power.
He had the same ability the first time and didn’t do it. But certainly one cannot live the counterfactual. Perhaps this technique had already struck him and he just hadn’t used it yet. Hard to tell.
I don’t see him or his administration as all knowing even if I think they have great disregard for the law.
They certainly liked the distraction, but the invasion of MN allowed them to 1) catch some illegal immigrants, 2) intimidate legal immigrants, encouraging them to "self deport", 3) flex their power and demonstrate the ability to cause pain and harm to political enemies, and 4) give agents practice and training for the next city they invade. So far they have had these "surges" in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and Minneapolis. There are plenty more cities in blue states and plenty of money left in their budget, and almost 3 years left in this administration.
Back when the Internet was America online and some CGI bin perl scripts, there were a lot of very lofty things said about the potential of the Internet in the future. I don’t remember any of them predicting the power of the tech would have over business, politics, media, and hours of every single day for billions of people. Even without AGI, it’s quite possible that were still underestimating. The effects of predictive, probabilistic computing 20 or 50 years from now.
The internet alone didnt change sh!t. Without smartphones, unified app stores, cellular network innovation et al internet traffic would not be so high.
Funny how people leave this stuff out. Yawn. Basic simpleton analysis and takes.
The Internet created the backbone that allowed for rapid experimentation in communications technologies, and created the ability for anyone to create and share technologies and reach a huge audience very quickly.
Without the Internet, most consumer electronics would have been far more expensive to build, and would have been strictly controlled walled gardens, but the Internet in general and the Web in particular allowed so many inventors to flourish. Ever since that Genie was let out of the bottle, corporate and government interests have been trying to put it back in, and most companies are trying to build and reinforce walled gardens under the banner of unified app stores that extract insane rents.
A Neal Stephenson long read about undersea cables. So good!
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