The Physical Internet
A Review of "Tubes" by Andrew Blum
The question, “What is the Internet?”, has meaning because, despite our daily engagement with it, we often have no idea just what constitutes it. We are aware that its superficial reality — what we actually engage with via sophisticated UX/UI — is radically not the same as its physical reality. I have often wondered whether a better grasp on the Internet’s physical reality might help to alleviate the alienation that occurs when we are living primarily in that superficial realm.
That’s what makes this book so delightful.
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum explores the exact intersection that I am interested in: the material underpinnings of the digital ecosystem in which we live and breathe. The book gets its title from a famous speech by U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, in which he described the Internet as a “series of tubes.” Although he was roundly mocked for the metaphor, Blum says that the statement was actually sort of accurate! When you get down to the nitty-gritty of what the physical infrastructure of the Internet is made of: it’s mostly tubes.
Blum’s curiosity is infectious, and the connections he makes are compelling. He freely (and effectively) makes use of, he also drops several great quotes from writers such as Wallace Stevens, Walter Benjamin, E.M. Forster, E.B. White, and others. His writing is often quite striking as well. Packets that travel along the fibre cables are “clumps of math.” A router is “a lonely machine in a cold room.” His view out of an airport window witnesses “a line of jets land on top of their shadows.” Perhaps ironically, these rhetorically rich descriptions help to ground what he reminds us has been an overly abstract understanding of this technology. I wonder if he takes this approach partly because the use of rhetoric and tropes is such a deeply human (and ancient) means of enlivening the world around us.1
Another way he keeps things concrete is by sticking to real, live places. The number of locations he visits is overwhelming: Milwaukee; Ashburn, Virginia; Penwith Peninsula in Great Britain; New York City; Frankfurt; Amsterdam; The Dalles in Oregon; and, of course, Silicon Valley. As he writes early in the book:
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.
Some of my favourite parts are when he connects the history of a place with its current role in making the Internet possible, such as when he mentions that most of the fibre between New York and Washington was installed along the railroad alignment. At another point, he talks about how fibre was lain in Chicago’s old coal tunnels. These interesting factoids are scattered throughout the book.
Blum also anchors his survey with three-dimensional characters: the real-life people who invented, constructed, and operate “the Internet” itself. These are people like Leonard Kleinrock, the leader of the team that sent the first message over the proto-Internet, or Steve Feldman, chair of the NANOG Steering Committee, or Jay Adelson, co-founder of Equinix. Blum does a great job describing these people so that, as we encounter them at various points throughout the book, we can recall them quickly.
I especially loved anytime we were hearing about some random inventor of some really useful, physical aspect of the Internet. He mentions a cable layer at one point, for example, named John Pedro, who earned a patent for developing a cascading cable tray system to facilitate cable management in one of the enormous internet exchange buildings he visited. I hadn’t thought of patents as being a way into the history of the Internet, but it attaches a name and a kind of lineage to the individual objects that are involved in a way that I think could benefit from further observation.
In terms of criticisms of the book, I personally found that Blum spent a bit too much time describing the negotiations and arrangements that had to be made in order for the Internet to make the move from a network mainly located on government and academic servers to one that is private and therefore commercial. This is obviously an important part of the “real world” background that informs our day-to-day usage of the Internet, but, for me, I was much more interested by the descriptions of the physical infrastructure: the cables and buildings that must be built — handled literally by a human stringing these along through conduits and catwalks.
For example, there is a great section where Blum applies his talent for analogy to routers:
The biggest and dumbest of a router’s four basic parts is the “chassis,” the file-cabinet-like enclosure that gives the machine its grossest physical structure, like the chassis of a car. Slightly smaller and smarter is the ‘backplane,’ which in an MLX-32 is a steel plate bigger than a pizza, etched with copper traces like a garden labyrinth.
The book is a delight and bears re-reading. It is also showing its age somewhat, given that it was published in 2012. Still, in light of what it is trying to accomplish, I think each passing year helps to strengthen its effect. I almost want to describe this effect itself as a kind of alienation — but it is an alienation that, rather than taking us out of the world, puts us back into it. It is an alienation that removes us from the abstract space — what Blum calls that false image of “a silky web in which every place is equally accessible to every other place” — and situates us once more in “real places on the map: their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there.”
One final thought: I generally try to capitalize “the Internet” when I write about it — something Blum also does in the book (on purpose). Partly There’s something about that capital letter “I” and about how it draws attention to the Internet’s thing-ness. I bet if we dropped the definite article (i.e., the “the”) from the noun, we’d perceive it even more…
Owen Barfield’s observation that the word “window” literally means the “wind’s eye” reminds us that words do not become poetic, but are in fact poetic from the beginning. The application of poetic language to an abstract entity such as the Internet has the effect that all language has: it uncovers an object’s spirit. Heidegger — and Blake — would agree.