The "cloud", an increasingly vogue word, seems an apt if inaccurate description of the internet. Beyond the screens of their smartphones and laptops, most people have only the foggiest idea what it is. Andrew Blum was among them until his internet connection stopped working one day and he was strangely compelled to find out more. Tubes is his account of the journey that followed.
Blum's investigation is partly historical in an early chapter, he sketches out the origins of the internet as a collaboration between the military and academia but his main interest is in the physical geography of cyberspace. What happens to an email when it leaves your computer? Where do websites reside? To answer those questions, Blum takes to the road, visiting what he calls the internet's "monuments", the most important bits of its infrastructure, in America and Europe.
What may surprise many readers is just how few shrines the internet has. It takes Blum only several trips to get around most of the world's big "exchanges", the meeting points for networks, dispelling any notion that the internet's virtual ubiquity has a physical equivalent. He excels at rooting the internet in real-world locations, explaining why Frankfurt and London's Docklands have become such an integral part of it. Tubes also features some colourful observations about the cultural precedents for the infrastructure of the digital age. "Access to the open sea was in the time of the East India Company a decisive factor for success," Blum quotes from a Dutch op-ed written in 1997. "Providing access to the digital arteries of the global network will be decisive today."
Blum has an engaging, boyish fascination for his subject (indeed, the malfunction that provides the excuse for his trip starts to seem disingenuous). His prose is mostly crisp, full of memorable images that make the internet's complex architecture easier to comprehend. But when he reverts to writing about the technical details of the facilities he visits, he risks losing the attention of his readers. Surely only the geekiest engineers, for whom this book is not intended, would show interest in the dimensions of data centre racks?
The physical internet, Blum emphasises, is as much about human connections as wires and cables (the tubes that give the book its name). And his encounters with some of the people behind it, from the pioneers to the technicians landing a submarine cable on a Portuguese beach, provide material for the book's most entertaining and illuminating anecdotes. In Silicon Valley, he meets the man who persuaded telecommunications companies to expand into the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, revolutionising the industry, by lying that rivals had already done so. At a conference in Texas, he runs into Google's Sylvie LaPerrière, whose job is to ensure other companies can link, or "peer", with Google, and whose understandable willingness to connect free of charge makes her a so-called "peering slut" (a designation that would apply even if she were a man, the author quickly points out).
But he saves some of the best for the final chapter, describing his attempts to explore the vast data centres run by the world's internet giants. In a frustrating visit to Google's facility in Oregon, he gets no further than the lunchroom. The search engine's secrecy, which even extends to scrubbing the image of its data centre from Google Maps, is at odds with its public support for openness. Facebook, meanwhile, is delighted to show Blum around its own data centre nearby. Does this simply mean Google has greater respect for the privacy of its customers' details? Blum leaves readers pondering questions that would not have occurred to them before and better informed about an innovation most of us take for granted.
