Tubes by Andrew Blum

From The Week of October 08, 2012 As much as our egos may steer us to think otherwise, we generally know very little about the machinery that keeps civilization afloat. How many non-chemistry majors could create a battery? How many non-mechanics could build a car? How many non-architects could design an office tower? Every day, we rely on the expertise of millions just to get to work in the morning, let alone to take a successful flight to some other point on the globe. Many argue that there is nothing amiss with this form of specialization. And yet, how ignorant can we be about our world and still expect it to function? Is there not a point at which the general knowledge of the workings of the world become not just valuable but essential? Mr. Blum thinks so. For he has endeavored to learn the innerworkings of perhaps the least understood platform for our every day lives.

Born in the late 1960s but brought to the general public in the 1990s, the Internet has utterly transformed our world. In little more than a decade, it revolutionized the way we consume and disseminate everything from news to music, from friendships to obsessions. It has connected a species which was designed to operate best in small social groups and plugged nearly seven billion souls into a global system, a network of commerce and socialization, of research and opinion, that has welded a kind of superculture atop our nationalism, a globalism upon our regionalism. It has made information and its distribution vital to our lives.

But what is the Internet? And beyond that, where is it? Does it live in some top-secret building somewhere, or is it distributed across too many different systems for the answer to be meaningful? Is the Internet a thing, an object, with quantifiable capacities and measurable limitations? Or has it transcended the purely physical to become something more, something that lives inside us as much as it does in the world? Mr. Blum departs his comfortable home in New York City to trot the globe for answers to these fascinating and existential questions. And though the answers he gleans aren't necessarily conclusive, it turns out that the widely ridiculed statement of Ted Stevens, the United States senator from Alaska, was true after all. The Internet is "a series of tubes."

From routers to internet exchanges, from undersea cables to fiberoptic hubs, Tubes is a fascinating journey to discover the heart of the Internet. Mr. Blum travels across much of the United States and Europe, with informative stops in Frankfort, Amsterdam, London and Palo alto, his doggedness turning up complex and fascinating truths about what must be considered to be the most well-used system in human history. Rather than dispel whatever magic the Internet has managed to accrue over its brief life, the author succeeds in charming us with its kluge-like construction and enchanting us with its metaphysical elements which cannot be reduced to simple, dumb numbers. For as much as the Internet is composed of harddrives and data centers, cables and modems, it is also the gestalt of human experience and communication, an immeasurable pool into which humanity pours its passions and its sorrows. Such a thing can never be quantified.

This is memorable work. Mr. Blum adopts a light, characteristically British tone which relies on humor and self-deprecation to tell the story of his journey. But what this method sacrifices by way of sober analysis it gains by way of entertainment, humanizing the technicalities of routers and exchanges and transforming them into objects of understandable, if awesome, significance. Moreover, Mr. Blum's chronicle could have served to be 50 pages longer. The brevity of his examination left me wanting more detail, with numerous opportunities to expand the layman's knowledge of the Internet's systemic workings past up for the sake of a breezy narrative. However, in every other respect, this is lovely work.

The Internet will probably never be perfectly comprehended. Every day, it grows faster than we can even reasonably measure it. But to the extent that we can glimpse the foundations upon which it rests, Tubes succeeds in enlightening us. (3/5 Stars)