Tubes

Blum has created a lively guide to the very physical-world upon which our cyber-lives depend.—The Globe and Mail

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, has been unexplored territory. Until now.

InTubes, 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 h∧ where glass fibres pulse with light and where 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 busy hub in downtown Toronto that links Canada to the world; from the coast of Portugal, where a 10,000 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 centres, 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 world.