Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet Read online

  TUBES

  A JOURNEY

  TO THE

  CENTER

  OF THE

  INTERNET

  ANDREW BLUM

  Dedication

  For Davina and Phoebe

  Epigraph

  It is not down in any map; true places never are.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE

  Somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.

  —WILLIAM GIBSON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1 / The Map

  2 / A Network of Networks

  3 / Only Connect

  4 / The Whole Internet

  5 / Cities of Light

  6 / The Longest Tubes

  7 / Where Data Sleeps

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  On a bitterly cold day a few winters ago, the Internet stopped working. Not the whole Internet, only the section that resides in a dusty clump beside my living room couch. There’s a black cable modem with five green lights, a blue telephone adapter the size of a hardcover book, and a white wireless router with a single illuminated eye. On good days they all blink happily at one another, satisfied with the signals coming through the wall. But on that day their blinking was labored. Web pages loaded in fits and starts, and my phone—of the “voice over IP” variety, which sends calls over the Internet—made everyone sound like a scuba diver. If there were little men inside these boxes, then it was as if they had suddenly become prone to naps. The switch itself had fallen asleep.

  The repairman arrived the next morning, full of assurances. He attached an electronic whistle—it looked like a penlight—to the living room end of the cable, and then began to trace its path, searching for clues. I followed him, first outside to the street, then down into the basement and through a hatch to the backyard. A rusty switch box was caught in a web of black cables and bolted to a brick wall. Disconnecting them one at a time, he screwed a tiny speaker into each one until he found the one that whistled: audible proof of a continuous path between here and there.

  Then his eyes lifted ominously to the sky. A squirrel scampered along a wire toward a battleship gray enclosure affixed like a birdhouse to a pole. Anemic urban vines wrapped around it. Animals chew on the rubber coating, the repairman explained. Short of rewiring the whole backyard there was nothing he could do. “But it might get better on its own,” he said, and it did. But the crude physicality of the situation astonished me. Here was the Internet, the most powerful information network ever conceived! Capable of instantaneous communication with anyplace on earth! Instigator of revolutions! Constant companion, messenger of love, fountain of riches and beloved distraction. Stymied by the buckteeth of a Brooklyn squirrel.

  I like gadgets. I will happily discuss the Internet as a culture and a medium. My mother-in-law calls me for tech support. But I confess that the substance of the thing—a “thing” that squirrels can nibble at—had escaped me. I may have been plugged in, but the tangible realities of the plug were a mystery to me. The green lights on the box in my living room signaled that “the Internet”—a singular unnuanced whole—was, to put it simply, on. I was connected, yes; but connected to what? I’d read a few articles about big factory-sized data centers filled with hard drives, invariably someplace far away. I’d unplugged and plugged back in my share of broken cable modems behind the couch. But beyond that, my map of the Internet was blank—as blank as the Ocean Sea was to Columbus.

  That disconnect, if I can use that word, startled me. The Internet is the single biggest technological construction of our daily existence. It is vivid and alive on the screens all around us, as boisterous as a bustling human city. Two billion people use the Internet, in some form, every day. Yet physically speaking, it is utterly disembodied, a featureless expanse: all ether, no net. In the F. Scott Fitzgerald story “My Lost City,” the protagonist climbs to the top of the Empire State Building and recognizes, crestfallen, that his city had limits. “And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.” I realized that my Internet had limits too. Yet, oddly, they weren’t abstract limits but physical ones. My Internet was in pieces—literally. It had parts and places. It was even more like a city than I had thought.

  The squirrel outage was annoying, but the sudden appearance of the Internet’s texture was thrilling. I’ve always been acutely attuned to my immediate surroundings, to the world around me. I tend to remember places the way a musician does tunes or a chef, flavors. It’s not merely that I like to travel (although I do), but more that the physical world is a source of constant, sometimes overwhelming, preoccupation. I have a strong “sense of place,” as some people describe it. I like to notice the widths of the sidewalks in cities and the quality of light in different latitudes. My memories are almost always keyed to specific places. As a writer, that’s often led me to the subject of architecture, but it’s never been the buildings themselves that interest me most, rather the places the buildings create—the sum total of construction, culture, and memory; the world we inhabit.

  But the Internet has always been a necessary exception to this habit, a special case. Sitting at my desk in front of a computer screen all day, and then getting up at the end of the day and habitually looking at the other, smaller screen I carry in my pocket, I accepted that the world inside them was distinct from the sensory world all around me—as if the screens’ glass were not transparent but opaque, a solid border between dimensions. To be online was to be disembodied, reduced to eyes and fingertips. There wasn’t much to do about it. There was the virtual world and the physical world, cyberspace and real places, and never the two shall meet.

  But as if in a fairy tale, the squirrel cracked open the door to a previously invisible realm behind the screen, a world of wires and the spaces in between. The chewed cable suggested that there could be a way of stitching the Internet and the real world together again into a single place. What if the Internet wasn’t an invisible elsewhere, but actually a somewhere? Because this much I knew: the wire in the backyard led to another wire, and another behind that—beyond to a whole world of wires. The Internet wasn’t actually a cloud; only a willful delusion could convince anyone of that. Nor was it substantially wireless. The Internet couldn’t just be everywhere. But then where was it? If I followed the wire, where would it lead? What would that place look like? Who would I find? Why were they there? I decided to visit the Internet.

  When in 2006 Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska described the Internet as “a series of tubes,” it was easy to ridicule him. He seemed hopelessly, foolishly trapped in the old way of knowing the world, while the rest of us had skipped merrily into the future. Worse, he was supposed to know better. As chair of the US Senate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Stevens had oversight for the telecommunications industry. But there he was behind the lectern of the Hart Building on Capitol Hill, explaining that “the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck, it’s a series of tubes, and if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled, and if they’re filled when you put your message in and it gets in line it’s going to be delayed—by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material… Enormous amounts of ma
terial!” The New York Times fretted over the senator’s cluelessness. Late-night comics showed side-by-side pictures of dump trucks and steel tubes. DJs mixed mash-ups of his speech. I made fun of him to my wife.

  Yet I have now spent the better part of two years on the trail of the Internet’s physical infrastructure, following that wire from the backyard. 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. Inside those fibers is light. Encoded in that light is, increasingly, us.

  I suppose that all sounds improbable and mysterious. When the Internet first took off, in the mid-1990s, we tended to think of it as a specific kind of place, like a village. But since then those old geographic metaphors have fallen out of favor. We no longer visit “cyberspace” (except to wage war). All the “information superhighway” signs have been taken down. Instead, we think of the Internet as a silky web in which every place is equally accessible to every other place. Our connections online are instantaneous and complete—except when they’re not. A website might be “down” or our home connection might be wonky, but it’s rare that you can’t get to one part of the Internet from another—so rare that the Internet doesn’t appear to have any parts at all.

  The preferred image of the Internet is instead a sort of nebulous electronic solar system, a cosmic “cloud.” I have a shelf filled with books about the Internet and they all have nearly the same picture on the cover: a blob of softly glowing lines of light, as mysterious as the Milky Way—or the human brain. Indeed, thinking of the Internet as a physical thing has fallen so far out of fashion that we’re more likely to view it as an extension of our own minds than a machine. “The cyborg future is here,” proclaimed the technology writer Clive Thompson in 2007. “Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.”

  I know what that feels like, but I’m left wondering about all that “silicon around us.” Clearly Thompson means our computers and smartphones and e-readers and whatever other devices we hold at arm’s length. But it must also include the network behind them—and where’s that? I’d feel better about outsourcing my life to machines if I could at least know where they were, who controls them, and who put them there. From climate change to food shortages to trash to poverty, the great global scourges of modern life are always made worse by not knowing. Yet we treat the Internet as if it were a fantasy.

  The Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly, faced with this chasm between the physical here and the missing virtual there, became curious if there might be a way to think of them together again. On his blog he solicited hand sketches of the “maps people have in their minds when they enter the Internet.” The goal of this “Internet Mapping Project,” as he described it, was to attempt to create a “folk cartography” that “might be useful for some semiotician or anthropologist.” Sure enough, one stepped forward out of the ether two days later—a psychologist and professor of media at the University of Buenos Aires named Mara Vanina Osés. She analyzed more than fifty of the drawings Kelly collected to create a taxonomy of the ways people imagined the Internet: as a mesh, a ring, or a star; as a cloud or a radial like the sun; with themselves at the center, on the bottom, the right or the left. These mental maps mostly divide into two camps: chaotic expressions of a spidery infinity, like Jackson Pollock paintings; or an image of the Internet-as-village, drawn like a town in a children’s book. They are perceptive, revealing plenty of self-consciousness about the way we live on the network. What strikes me, though, is that in no case do the machines of the Internet actually appear. “All that silicon” is nowhere to be found. We seem to have exchanged thousands of years of mental cartography, a collective ordering of the earth going back to Homer, for a smooth, placeless world. The network’s physical reality is less than real—it’s irrelevant. What Kelly’s folk cartography portrayed most vividly was that the Internet is a landscape of the mind.

  This book chronicles my effort at turning that imagined place into a real one. It is an account of the physical world. The Internet may seem to be everywhere—and in many ways it is—but it is also very clearly in some places more than others. The single whole is an illusion. The Internet has crossroads and superhighways, large monuments and quiet chapels. Our everyday experience of the Internet obscures that geography, flattening it and speeding it up beyond any recognition. To counter that, and to see the Internet as a coherent physical place all its own, I’ve had to tinker with my conventional picture of the world. At times this book’s attention oscillates between a single machine and an entire continent, and at other times I simultaneously consider the tiny nano scale of optical switches and the global scale of transoceanic cables. I often engage with the most minute of timetables, acknowledging that an online journey of milliseconds contains multitudes. But it is a journey nonetheless.

  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. To stitch together two halves of a broken world—to put the physical and the virtual back in the same place—I’ve stopped looking at web “sites” and “addresses” and instead sought out real sites and addresses, and the humming machines they house. I’ve stepped away from my keyboard, and with it the mirror-world of Google, Wikipedia, and blogs, and boarded planes and trains. I’ve driven on empty stretches of highway and to the edges of continents. In visiting the Internet, I’ve tried to strip away my individual experience of it—as that thing manifest on the screen—to reveal its underlying mass. My search for “the Internet” has therefore been a search for reality, or really a specific breed of reality: the hard truths of geography.

  The Internet has a seemingly infinite number of edges, but a shockingly small number of centers. At its surface, this book recounts my journey to those centers, to the Internet’s most important places. I visited those giant data warehouses, but many other types of places as well: the labyrinthine digital agoras where networks meet, the undersea cables that connect continents, and the signal-haunted buildings where glass fibers fill copper tubes built for the telegraph. Unless you’re one of the small tribe of network engineers who often served as my guides, this is certainly not the Internet you know. But it is most definitely the Internet you use. If you have received an email or loaded a web page already today—indeed, if you are receiving an email or loading a web page (or a book) right now—I can guarantee that you are touching these very real places. I can admit that the Internet is a strange landscape, but I insist that it is a landscape nonetheless—a “netscape,” I’d call it, if that word weren’t already taken. For all the breathless talk of the supreme placelessness of our new digital age, when you pull back the curtain, the networks of the Internet are as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.

  In basest terms, the Internet is made of pulses of light. Those pulses might seem miraculous, but they’re not magic. They are produced by powerful lasers contained in steel boxes housed (predominantly) in unmarked buildings. The lasers exist. The boxes exist. The buildings exist. The Internet exists—it has a physical reality, an essential infrastructure, a “hard bottom,” as Henry David Thoreau said of Walden Pond. In undertaking this journey and writing this book, I’ve tried to wash away the technological alluvium of contemporary life in order to see—fresh in the sunlight—the physical essence of our digital world.

  1

  * * *

  The Map

  On the January day I arrived in Milwaukee, it was so cold that the streets themselves had blanched white. The city was born in 1846 out of three competing settleme
nts at the edge of a broad harbor on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Four years after its founding, the Milwaukee & Waukesha Railroad linked the lake with the hinterland, and the rich wheat fields of the Midwest with the growing populations of the east. Before long, Milwaukeeans weren’t only moving materials but processing them, making beer from hops, leather from cows, and flour from wheat. With the growing success of this industry—and the help of an influx of German immigrants—those first processing plants encouraged the growth of a broad range of precision manufacturing. The heart of the activity was the Menomonee Valley, a miasmic swamp that was steadily filled in to accommodate what was soon a coal-choked industrial powerhouse. “Industrially, Milwaukee is known across the face of the earth,” the 1941 WPA Guide to Wisconsin rhapsodized. “Out of the city’s vast machine shops come products that range from turbines weighing 1,200,000 pounds to parts so minute as to be assembled only with the aid of magnifying glasses. Milwaukee steam shovels dug the Panama Canal; Milwaukee turbines harnessed Niagara Falls; Milwaukee tractors are in the fields of most of the world’s agricultural regions; herring-bone gears made in Milwaukee operate mines in Africa and Mexico, sugar mills in South America, and rolling mills in Japan, India, and Australia.” Milwaukee had become the center of a far-reaching industrial colossus—known everywhere as “the machine shop of the world.”

  It didn’t last forever. After World War II, the fixed steel lines of the railroads gave way to the more flexible movement of rubber tires over new roads. The hard networks became softer. And the Menomonee Valley started a steady decline, paralleling that of the nation’s manufacturing more broadly. The United States became a country that produced ideas more than things. The “machine shop of the world” became the buckle of the Rust Belt. Milwaukee’s factories were left abandoned—and then, only more recently, turned into condominiums.