TUBES: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum, HarperCollins, NY, 2012

            It is not down in any map; true places never are.       -Herman Melville

Somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.             -William Gibson

Prologue

4

Sitting at my desk in front of a computer screen all day, and then getting up at the end of the day and habitually looking at the smaller screen I carry in my pocket, I accepted that the world inside them was distinct from the sensory world all around me, as if the screens’ glass were not transparent but opaque, a solid border between dimensions.  To be online was to be disembodied, reduced to eyes and fingertips.  There wasn’t much to do about it.  There was the virtual world and the physical world, cyberspace and real places, and never the two shall meet.

But as if in a fairy tale, the [cable eating squirrel: see story on 1,2] cracked open the door to a previously invisible realm behind the screen, a world of wires and the spaces in between.  The chewed cable suggested that there could be a way of stitching the Internet and the real world together again into a single place.  What if the Internet wasn’t an invisible elsewhere, but actually a somewhere?  Because this much I knew: the wire in the backyard led to another wire, and another behind that, beyond to a whole world of wires.  The Internet wasn’t actually a cloud; only a willful delusion could convince anyone of that.  Nor was it substantially wireless.  The Internet couldn’t just be everywhere.  But then where was it?  What would that place look like? Who would I find? Why were they there?  I decided to visit the Internet

           

8         

The network’s physical reality is less than real, it’s irrelevant.   . . .   the Internet is a landscape of the mind.

9-10

In basest terms, the Internet is made of pulses of light.  Those pulses might seem miraculous, but they’re not magic.  They are produced by powerful lasers contained in steel boxes housed (predominantly) in unmarked buildings.  The lasers exist.  The boxes exist.  The building exist.  The Internet exists, it has a physical reality, an essential infrasture, . . .

12

After World War II, the fixed steel lines of the railroads gave way to the more flexible movement of rubber ties over new roads.  The hard networks became softer.  And the Menomonee Valley near Milwaukee] started a steady decline, paralleling that of the nation’s manufacturing more broadly.  The United States became a country that produced ideas more than things.  The “machine shop of the world” became the buckle of the Rust Belt.  Milwaukee’s factories were left abandoned, and then only more recently, turned into condominiums.

13-14

[about: Kubin-Nicholson: silk screening, Tele-Geography: GIG (Global Internet Geography) $5,495 ea.]

15

a cartography class taught by Mark Monmonier, author of the cult favorite How to Lie with Maps.

18

The maps were themselves like the dyes that trace fluid dynamics, their mere presence highlighting the currents and eddies of the physical Internet.