Tubes - Andrew Blum

Tubes

By Andrew Blum

  • Release Date: 2012-05-29
  • Genre: Internet
Score: 4
4
From 53 Ratings

Description

“Andrew Blum plunges into the unseen but real ether of the Internet in a journey both compelling and profound….You will never open an email in quite the same way again.”
—Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times bestselling author of Traffic

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.

Reviews

  • Tubes

    5
    By CCgood very offi
    Great book! So this is where the internet plugs into the ground. Living and selling real estate in Ashburn VA for the last 25 years i watched the Internet infrastructure being built one data center at a time. Thanks to Blum I now have real understanding of how it all works together. CC
  • An informative book, for nerds like me!

    4
    By whydoineedanickname??!??
    Blum breaks down the physical internet for the tech minded and the curious as well. It started out slow, and has some dry moments, but this yarn is quite technical and informative. While reading, I found myself doing things like searching for a used Brocade mlx-32 on eBay and googling 56 Marietta, the closest "Internet" in my city.
  • Tubes

    5
    By UGoLong
    I greatly enjoyed this book. I suggest you use Google Earth while you read it so you can find the various sites around the world that the author describes so well.
  • Reads like a great essay

    5
    By Iconolater
    Love it so far, can't wait to finish reading. Thanks to Terry Gross for her interview of the author.
  • Tubes

    5
    By rblum55
    It's amazing! Tubes really does make me think of the Internet in a totally different way. There is just enough technical detail to be informative and easy to read. It's like a travelogue to the important sites of the Internet. It makes a great Father's Day present.