In his book ‘Tubes’ Andrew Blum tries to find and define the physical manifestation of the internet, once looked at crudely as a pile of tubes the internet has evolved from old telegraph wires to an industrial machine. Blum follows the trail with a knack for bundling packets of data into memorable observations.
“I have confirmed with my own eyes that the Internet is many
things, in many places. But one thing it most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of tubes. There are tubes beneath the ocean that connect London and New York. Tubes that connect Google and Facebook. There are buildings filled with tubes, and hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and railroad tracks, beside which lie buried tubes. Everything you do online travels through a tube.”
“Inside those tubes (by and large) are glass fibers,” the author continues. “Inside those fibers is light. Encoded in that light is, increasingly, us.”
Full article at Nytimes.com
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