Today, cables make heavy landfall in Guam, where a cottage industry of landing stations has emerged. For The Web Beneath the Waves, journalist Samanth Subramanian visits some of the essential nodes of this huge system, including Guam, Tonga, and New Caledonia, where an undersea cable repair company is based; aboard cable-laying and repair vessels out at sea; and the Google and Facebook engineers who work on cable-laying projects, providing a vivid and compelling snapshot of the internet's--and, by extension, the world's--most essential and yet most invisible infrastructure.

The Web Beneath The Waves reveals the recent history of humankind's ambition to communicate across huge distances for next to nothing and in next to no time, and also explores the consequences of that ambition--some of which have yet to play out.