TUBES: A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE INTERNET Order
Today
When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where
does it go? 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? Our mental map of
the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that
Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet,
its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory.
Until now.
In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the
Internet's 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 a special caste of engineer who
pieces 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 a
ten–thousand–mile 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 all
works, 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 real, 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 Ted Stevens, the
late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How
can we know the Internet's possibilities if we don't know
its parts?
Like Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine or
Tom Vanderbilt's recent bestseller Traffic, Tubes combines
on–the–ground reporting and lucid explanation
into an engaging, mind–bending narrative to help us
understand the physical world that underlies our digital lives.
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy