Tubes

Little Boxes

Tubes
Behind The Scenes
At The Internet
by Andrew Blum
Penguin Books ISBN: 9780141049090

Just a very short review of a book I thought looked pretty interesting. Tubes, subtitled Behind The Scenes At The Internet (on my Penguin edition, at least), is one man’s journey to find, see and chart the physical space that is the internet. Yes, I know that sounds like an odd thing to want to do (which is obviously what drew me to it) but this whole thing started when Andrew Blum’s internet went down. The culprit, as it turned out, was one of the squirrels near his garden, chewing through a magic cable. Inside his mind he tried to square the slow moving, sometimes non-existent internet signal he was getting as having been caused by something in the physical world. After all, isn’t the internet, aka cyberspace, an abstract brain made up of light and information? Well, it is and it isn’t. Everything, obviously, has to be beholden to a physical housing at some point, despite the fact that our computers and phones aren’t actually hard wired to the wall for a signal anymore. It’s still a vast physical network... or at least that was my understanding of it.

One of the first things I discovered as I read his two year, globe hopping journey to fix the internet into physical space in his mind was that it’s not one big network at all... it’s lots of little networks joined together to each other, owned by different companies leasing or building the physical connections with huge amounts of money involved.

So the book is very much a travelogue of a virtual world which is, in itself, a virtual journey (especially if you’re reading it on a kindle I guess... I prefer paper myself) of the physical space which allows the everyday virtual journey across the sea of information possible... which the majority of the population of the planet must travel every day.

Now, anyone who reads my blog regularly will know that I’m not even remotely technically savvy. So while many have said this account of the boxes, cables, internet exchanges etc is done in laymens’ terms... I’d have to beg to differ. There was a lot in this book that, despite having looked over these boxes and flashing lights in the place where I worked once... well... there was a lot I didn’t understand.

Luckily, the writing style of Mr. Blum was friendly and intriguing enough to tide me over the slightly brow distorting moments which came up and, I have to confess, I loved that he started his journey with a print firm in Milwaukee where, quite literally, an expensive map of the internet was being produced. Ink hitting blanket rollers, hitting paper is something I can at least understand.

Along the journey I discovered little gems of facts about the first ‘box’ at the University Of California in 1969, the Interface Message Processor (IMO), a little bit about packet switching, the transition from Network Control Protocol (NCP) to Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP - the essential gateway languages to allow various networks to talk to each other), got to virtually meet a lot of the people on the ground who really keep the internet afloat (plus their managing directors etc) and even got some descriptions of how the cables in the sea are fixed, maintained and what happens to them when they have crossed the ocean and landed on a beach somewhere.

I sucked up a description of the Docklands here in the UK being compared to J. G. Ballard’s novel High Rise and I learned how friendly a lot of these places in different areas of the world are... and just how less than friendly, obstructive and uninviting Google is. I learned about security systems and locations so that, if I were a terrorist, I could probably target some of the most important places on the planet to knock out... if I wanted to bring about the collapse of a civilisation now pretty reliant on the internet to exist (don’t try this one at home kiddies) and, above all, I got the reminder that the internet may be a hive mind but behind all the cables, connectors, wires, lights and fibres... it’s still a place which is inhabited by humans on the inside and maintained painstakingly with hard physical labour by humans on the outside too.

So yeah, while I struggled with parts (due to my own technical ignorance and through absolutely no fault of the writer), I did find Tubes - Behind The Scenes At The Internet to be a thought provoking and interesting book to read. I shall perhaps, every now and again when I’m waiting for a page to load up on my computer, hopefully remember to give a thought to the unbelievable physical journey the various bits of data are rushing through to keep me engaged with any of my internet activities, such as this blog for instance. If I had one criticism it’s that I would have liked an oversized coffee table version with loads of pictures of the various physical spaces and objects the author journeyed to, so I could fix them more easily in my mind but, barring that, this one’s definitely worth checking out if you are even remotely interested in how the thriving internet brain of the world is actually manifested in real life. A nice little tome to give some time to, I think.