We call it the Web because Internet pioneers imagined a decentralized series of links between computer networks. Indeed, “Tubes’’ works best as a rumination on the limits of metaphor. There, in an Austin, Texas, Hilton, he finds people “networking” in the metaphorical, flesh-and-blood sense: human beings selling each other on the benefits of physically hooking up their networks, or “peering.”
These “cross-connects” are negotiated ad hoc, and Blum sets his most bravura scene at a meeting of the North American Network Operators’ Group. At a handful of central Internet exchanges, technicians roam acres of router racks, literally stringing cables between banks and Internet service providers, governments and Facebook and porn sites. In these buildings, “Tubes’’ uncovers an Internet that resembles nothing so much as a fantastic steam-punk version of itself. the fifth floor of 8100 Boone Boulevard in Tysons Corner, Va. on the West Side of Manhattan 529 Bryant St. Instead, you are likely to end up at specific locations: 60 Hudson St. Ultimately, he discovers that if you follow those wires through walls and past squirrels, you do not actually disappear into a swarming hive or planet-encircling cloud. It turns out the High Performance Computing and Communications Act, sponsored by US Senator Al Gore in 1991, really did shape Internet infrastructure as we know it today, even if “nvent is undoubtedly the wrong word.” Along the way, Blum takes no small pleasure in redeeming the ultimate e-gaffes. At UCLA, he visits computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock, one of the more plausible “fathers of the Internet,” and the actual IMP (interface message processor) he installed in 1969. Across continents and oceans, Blum, a writer for Wired magazine, describes the brick-mortar-and-metal “exchanges” and “silos” that house our virtual lives.
“Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet’’ is Andrew Blum’s travelogue through the physical reality of cyberspace.
A particularly stubborn and troublesome breed of gaffe, we might add, is one uttered about the Internet, which inadvertently reveals how little even plugged-in flaks, hacks, and pundits understand about the technology underlying their news cycles. A gaffe, the Washington press corps likes to say, is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.
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