Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Roberts, and I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. Joining me today is Ben Tarnoff. He is the author of the book, Internet for the people.

The fight for our digital future is also the co-founder of Logic magazine.

Ben Tarnoff, thank you for joining us on Current Affairs.

Hey, Nathan, thanks so much for having me.

Your book, Internet for the People, begins in an unexpected place.

It begins the preface is called Among the Eels.

And I just want to read a couple of sentences.

At the bottom of the ocean, there's a garden hose stuffed with glass. Life is difficult at this

depth. The lack of light means there's no photosynthesis. Plants are unknown. Oxygen is scarce.

There are fish with very large eyes and fish that glow. There are octopi with no

ink and eels with very large mouths. All these creatures have to eat is each other, and the nutrients

are the ocean floor. In this inhospitable place, miles under sea, they have found a way to make a world.

A beautiful beginning, but an unusual beginning for a book that is about the

internet. So tell us, Ben Tarnoff, why does internet for the people begin among the eels?

Well, I suppose there are a couple reasons. First is that I wanted to denaturalize the internet

for people, and that's one of the aspirations of the book as a whole,

but in particular to begin in a place where something they thought they knew well, something that

would ordinarily seem quite familiar to them, which is the internet, familiar by virtue of

the fact that we use it all the time every day would seem strange.

And I think that to me was a useful entry point to trying to bring readers to the realization

that there are a lot of things about the internet that they actually don't know.

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