what's a telephone bill?

Long distance telephony is controlled by several enormous cables, snaking underwater across oceans which hug the earth like a centerless octopus. The octopus is like old antitrust cartoons, a huge tentacled beast covering the earth, except that there is no head. No John D. Rockefeller or oil baron controls these protrusions, so perhaps they are not so like an octopus after all. Perhaps we are all the head of this octopus which has made the earth its home. When a cable is severed, there is great upset on both sides, like an arm which has been severed and hurts and cries as much as its owner. Perhaps any analogy is wrong and global communication is necessarily senseless. To understand it in any true way is inhuman, because it is an organism far too complex for any biologist.