Download Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet AudioBook Free
When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where should it go? Almost everything about our day-to-day lives - and the broader design of human culture - are available on the web. But what is it in physical form? And where could it be really? Our mental map of the network is really as empty as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. THE WEB, its material nut products and bolts, can be an unexplored territory. As yet. In Pipes, journalist Andrew Blum should go inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flips on the lighting, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. It really is a shockingly tactile world of unmarked substances, populated by a special caste of engineer who pieces together our sites yourself; where glass fibers pulse with light and creaky telegraph buildings, tortuously rewired, become communication hubs once more. From the area in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered alive to the caverns beneath Manhattan where new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the shoreline of Portugal, where a 10,000 mile undersea cable just two thumbs extensive connects Europe and Africa to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers, Blum chronicles the dramatic report of the Internet's development, points out how it all works, and requires the first-ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments. This is a booklet about real places on the map: their tones and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and people who live there. For all the talk of the "placelessness" in our digital age, the web is as set in real, physical spaces as the railroad or phone. You are able to map it and touch it, and you can visit it. Is the Internet in reality "a series of pipes" as Ted Stevens, the past due senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet's options if we have no idea its parts? Like Tracy Kidder's common The Soul of a fresh Machine or Tom Vanderbilt's recent best vendor Traffic, Pipes combines on-the-ground reporting and lucid reason into an engaging, mind-bending narrative to help us understand the physical world that underlies our digital lives.
