From glowing glass fibers to ten-thousand-mile undersea cables, “a charming look at the physical infrastructure that underlies the Web” (Scientific American).
Almost everything about our day-to-day lives—and the broader scheme of human culture—can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go?
Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The material Internet is unexplored territory—until now. In Tubes, Andrew Blum goes inside its physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. It is a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, populated by engineers who piece together our networks by hand; where glass fibers pulse with light and creaky telegraph buildings, tortuously rewired, become communication hubs once again. From the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan where new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where an undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa; to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers—Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet’s development, explains how it functions, and takes the first-ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments.
This is a book about real places on the map: their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there. For all the talk of the “placelessness” of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it. Is the Internet in fact a series of tubes, as a senator from Alaska once famously described it? And how can we know its possibilities if we don’t know its parts?
“An engaging reminder that, cyber-Utopianism aside, the internet is as much a thing of flesh and steel as any industrial-age lumber mill or factory [and] an excellent introduction to the nuts and bolts of how exactly it all works.” —The Economist
“Plunges into the unseen but real ether of the Internet in a journey both compelling and profound.” —Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times–bestselling author of Traffic
“Clever, enterprising . . . Tubes uncovers an Internet that resembles nothing so much as a fantastic steam-punk version of itself.” —The Boston Globe
