"Tubes": What he Internet is Made Of

    If you think your data lives in the cloud and
    flies through the air, you're wrong

By Laura Miller
Salon
May 27, 2012

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/28/tubes_what_the_internet_is_made_of/singleton/

The title of Andrew Blum's "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of
the Internet" is a ricocheting joke. When Alaskan Sen. Ted
Stevens described the Internet as a "series of tubes" back in
2006, he was roundly mocked for not understanding the online
world despite being chairman of the Commerce, Science and
Transportation Committee and therefore instrumental in
overseeing it. Stevens may not have known what he was talking
about, Blum (a correspondent for Wired magazine) acknowledges,
but he wasn't wrong, either. In writing this account of "the
Internet's physical infrastructure," Blum found that "one
thing [the Internet] most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is,
in fact, a series of tubes."

The average resident of the developed world uses the Internet
constantly, contemplating its impact on contemporary life and
exploring its numberless delights, temptations and annoyances
on a daily basis. Yet, for most of us, any notion of how all
this information arrives in our homes and workplaces is
weirdly immaterial. Stevens was ridiculed for his hopelessly
old-fashioned reference to the physical world and the movement
of palpable objects, while smart kids and late-night comics
grasped that the Internet has zipped beyond all that to become
the disembodied essence of human communication.

Only it's not, and "Tubes" is about the actual, physical
things - many of them tubes - that make up the pathways of the
Internet. For all their significance to contemporary life,
governance, commerce and industry, these conduits aren't an
alluring topic. Like a lot of important things, they are
superficially dull and trivial: bundles of cables; deserted
stations ringed in cyclone fencing beside lonely highways;
featureless, windowless buildings in old warehouse districts
and, above all, rooms filled with metal boxes, blinking lights
and cool, dry processed air. This is not the stuff that dreams
are made of - and at the same time it is, because dreams of
every sort thrive online.

Fortunately, Blum is a smart, imaginative, evocative writer
who embraces the task of making his readers feel the wonder
represented by these unprepossessing objects. In the Cornish
seaside town of Porthcurno, he's shown a black cable emerging
from the floor, "spooled into steel trays the size of merry-
go-rounds, like something stolen from Richard Serra's
storehouse," and pictures the thousands of miles it extends,
through the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, all the way back to
Long Island, where, in the form of light shining down strands
of glass, it will carry home the email he writes to his wife
from his hotel room that night. (Another cable, running from
Portugal to Africa is a "nine-thousand-mile path of light...
that would transform a continent.") Swathes of cables lifted
from beneath the streets of Manhattan by workmen are likened
to "giant squid under the streetlights."

This book is more than a electrical engineering travelogue,
however; in the course of his research Blum interviewed
representative examples of the people who make the Internet
work and a smattering of those who helped build it in the
first place. The computer science professor at UCLA who, in
1969, used a phone line to connect that university's computer
network with Stanford's shows Blum the IMP (Interface Message
Processor) used for the task: a file-cabinet-sized box - the
first piece of the Internet! - now shoved into the corner of a
shabby conference room. He attends a meeting of network
operators, the people who, among other things, negotiate the
direct, plug-in, network-to-network connections that are the
building blocks of the net, and hears a Dutch woman imitating
an old-school street hawker: "I have eyeballs, eyeballs,
eyeballs. For all of you with content, please send me an
email."

So ingeniously beguiling is Blum's way of conveying all this
that, before you know it, you have acquired a sense of the
basic structure of Internet - from old-school exchanges to
fiber-optic regeneration stations. The Internet turns out to
be not quite what Blum (and a lot of other people, including
myself) assumed. "I expected to find a loose arrangement of
little pieces," he writes, expressing an idea probably shared
by many of his readers. "It was all supposed to be
distributed, amorphous, nearly invisible." True, information
can travel via a variety of routes, but most of the time it
makes its way along major thoroughfares. While the Internet
doesn't exactly have a center, it certainly has nodes and
backbones where most of the connections are made and the data
stored. Blum tried to lay eyes on as many of these as he
could.

It wasn't always easy. Having arranged to visit a brand-new
Google data center in rural eastern Oregon, Blum never gets
closer to the servers than the lunchroom, and his interviews
are supervised so oppressively it's like taking an official
tour of North Korea. (Perhaps ironically, a Facebook center in
the same region proved much more open.) For months,
Cablevision, his own Internet service provider, dodged his
requests for an overview of how data got from their network to
his home in Brooklyn. While the more secretive of the
organizations he contacted often attributed their caution to
security concerns, Blum was skeptical. He compares a stopover
at the friendly visitor center at nearby Bonneville Dam to the
"Orwellian atmosphere" at Google; both are important,
strategically sensitive resources, but only one is shut up
tighter than Fort Knox. Blum questions whether it's wise to
hand over "so much of ourselves" to corporations that are not
obliged to return the trust.

Part of the utopian romance of the Internet is that it has no
weight, no friction, no footprint, no smell. The buzzword of
the moment - "cloud" - promises ethereality, pure information,
a dream with almost supernatural intimations. Yet as one of
Blum's data-center tour guides explains, "This is the cloud.
All those buildings like this around planet create the cloud.
The cloud is a building. It works like a factory." It needs
power, raw materials and staff. And its roots are in the
earth.

______________

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author
of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and
has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.

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