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Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
Andrew Blum
June 2013
On Sale: May 28, 2013
309 pages
ISBN: 0061994952
EAN: 9780061994951
Kindle: B006FOHWDI
Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
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Hardcover (June 2012)
Non-Fiction History
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.
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