Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

June 20, 2012
Andrew Blum | Wired & Metropolis

Everyone thinks they know the Internet. The most powerful information network ever conceived—an indispensable tool and constant companion in both our professional and personal lives. We’re all connected but connected to what?
As Andrew Blum explains, the Internet exists: it fills buildings, converges in some places in the world and avoids others, and it flows through tubes, along train lines and highways, and under oceans. You can map it, you can smell it, and you can see it. Blum goes behind-the-scenes of our everyday lives and combines first-rate reporting, engaging and lucid explanation into a fast-paced quest to explain the world we live in. From the room in L.A. where the Internet began to the busiest streets in Manhattan as new fiber optic cable is laid down; from the coast of Portugal as a new transatlantic undersea cable that connects West Africa and Europe is laid down to the Great Pyramids of our time, the monumental data centers that Google and Facebook have built in the wilds of Oregon—Blum visits all the hot spots to chronicle the dramatic story of the Internet’s development and explain how it all works.

Speaker Details

Andrew Blum is a journalist and the author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, the first book-length look behind the scenes of our digital lives, at the physical heart of the Internet itself. Before falling into the Internet’s depths, Blum was writing about architecture, design, technology, urbanism, art, and travel–all subjects arising out of his interest in the relationship between place and technology. Since 1999, Blum’s articles and essays have appeared in Wired, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Business Week, Metropolis, Popular Science, Gizmodo, The Atlantic, Architectural Record, and Slate, among many other publications. He has degrees in literature from Amherst College and in human geography from the University of Toronto, and lives in his native New York City with his wife and daughter