What is the Internet really Andrew Blum
I’ve always written primarily about
architecture about buildings and writing
about architecture is based on certain
assumptions and architect designs a
building and it becomes a place where
many architects design many buildings it
becomes the city and regardless of this
complicated mix of forces of politics
and culture and economics that shapes
these places at the end of the day you
can go and you can visit them you can
walk around them you can smell them you
can get a feel for that you can
experience their sense of place but what
was striking to me over the last several
years was that less and less was I going
out into the world and more and more I
was sitting in front of my computer
screen and especially since about 2007
when I got an iPhone I was not only
sitting in front of my screen all day
but I was also getting up at the end of
the day and looking at this little
screen that I carried in my pocket and
what was surprising to me was how
quickly my relationship to the physical
worlds had changed in this very short
period of time you know whether you call
it the last 15 years or so of being
online or the last you know four or five
years I’d be online all the time our
relationship to our surroundings had
changed and that our attention is
constantly divided you know we’re both
looking inside the screens and we’re
looking out in the world around us and
what was even more striking to me and
what I really got hung up on was that
the world inside the screen seemed to
have no physical reality of its own if
you went and looked for images of the
Internet this was all that you found
this famous image by opti of the
internet it’s the kind of Milky Way this
infinite expanse where we don’t seem to
be anywhere on it we can never seem to
grasp it in its totality so he’s
reminded me of the Apollo image of the
earth the blue marble picture and is
similarly meant to suggest I think that
we can’t really understand it as a whole
we’re always sort of small in the face
of its expanse so if there was this
world in the screen and if there was the
physical world around me I couldn’t ever
get them together in the same place and
then this happened
my internet broke one day is it
occasionally does and the Cable Guy came
to fix it and he started that the dusty
clump of cables behind the couch and he
followed it to the front of my building
into the basement now to the backyard
and there was this big jumble of cables
against the wall and then he saw a
squirrel running along the wire and he
said there’s your problem
a squirrel is chewing on your internet
and this seems astounding the Internet
is a transcendent idea it’s a set of
protocols that has changed everything
from shopping to dating to revolutions
it was unequivocally not something a
squirrel could chew on but that in fact
seemed to be the case a squirrel had in
fact chewed on my internet and then I
got this image in my head at what would
happen if you yanked the wire from the
wall have you started to follow it where
would it go was the internet actually a
place that you could visit could I go
there who would I meet you know was
there something actually out there and
the answer by all accounts was no this
was the Internet this black box with a
red light on it as represented in the
sitcom The IT Crowd normally it lives on
the top of Big Ben because that’s where
you get the best reception but they had
negotiated that their colleague could
borrow it for the afternoon to use an
office presentation the elders of the
internet were willing to part with it
for a short while and she looks at it
and she says this is the Internet the
whole internet is it heavy
just this of course not the Internet
doesn’t weigh anything and I was
embarrassed I was looking for this thing
that only fools seemed to look for the
internet was that amorphous blob or it
was a silly black box with a blinking
red light on it it wasn’t a real world
out there but in fact it is there is a
real world of the internet out there and
that’s what I spent about two years
visiting these places of the internet I
was large data centers that used as much
power as the cities in which they sit
and I visited places like this 60 Hudson
Street in New York which is one of the
buildings in the world one of a very
short list of buildings but a dozen
buildings were more networks to the
Internet connect to each other than
anywhere else and that connection is an
unequivocally physical process it’s
about the router of one
network of Facebook or Google or a BTR
Comcast or Time Warner or whatever it is
connecting with usually a yellow
fiber-optic cable up into the ceiling
down to the router of another network
and that’s unequivocally physical and
it’s surprisingly intimate these build a
building like 60 Hudson and the dozen or
so others has ten times more networks
connecting within it than the sort of
next tier of building so there’s a very
short list of these places and 60 Hudson
in particular is interesting because
it’s home to about a half dozen very
important networks which are the
networks that serve the undersea cables
that travel underneath the ocean they
connect Europe and American connect all
of us and it’s those cables in
particular that I want to focus on if
the Internet is a global phenomena if we
live in a global village it’s because
there are cables underneath the ocean
cables like this and in this dimension
they are incredibly small you can hold
them in your hands they’re like a garden
hose but in the other dimension they are
incredibly expansive as expansive as you
can imagine they stretch across the
ocean they’re three or five or eight
thousand miles in length and if the
material science and those computational
technology is incredibly complicated the
basic physical process is shockingly
simple light goes in on one end of the
ocean and comes out on the other and it
usually comes from a building called the
landing station that’s often tucked away
and conspicuously a little seaside
neighborhood and their amplifiers this
to the ocean floor that looked kind of
like bluefin tuna and every 50 miles
they amplify the signal and this is the
rate of transmission is incredibly fast
the basic unit is a 10 gigabit per
second wavelength of light maybe a
thousand times your own connection or
capable of carrying 10,000 video streams
but not only that but you’ll put not
just one wavelength of light through one
of one of the fibers but you’ll put
maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different
wavelengths or colors of light through a
single fiber and then you’ll have maybe
eight fibers in a cable for going in
each direction and they’re tiny they’re
the thickness of the hair and then they
connect to the continents somewhere they
connected a manhole like this literally
this is where the five thousand mile
cable plugs in this is in Halifax a
cable that stretches from Halifax to
Ireland and the landscape is changing
three years ago when I started
thinking about this there was one cable
down the western coast of Africa
represented in this map by Steve song as
at chin black line now there are six
cables and more coming three down each
Coast because once a country gets
plugged in by one cable they realize
that it’s not enough if they’re gonna
build an industry around it they need to
know that their connection is in tenuous
but permanent because if a cable breaks
you have to send a ship out into the
water and throw a grappling hook over
the side
pick it up find the other end and then
fuse the two ends back together and then
dump it over there’s an intensely
intensely physical process so this is my
friend Simon Cooper who until very
recently worked for Tata Communications
the communications wing of Tata the big
Indian industrial conglomerate and I
never met him we’ve only communicated
via this telepresence system which
always makes me think of him as the man
inside the internet and he is English
the undersea cable industry is dominated
by Englishmen and they all seem to be 42
because they all they all started at the
same time with with the boom of 20 years
ago and Tata had gotten start as a
communications business when they when
they bought two cables one across the
Atlantic and the piston one across the
Pacific and proceeded to add pieces onto
them until they had built a belt around
the world which means they will send
your bits to the east or the west so
they have this is literally a beam of
light around the world and if a cable
breaks in the Pacific that’ll send it
around the other direction and then
having done that they started to look
for places to wire next they looked for
the unwired places and that’s meant
north and south primarily these cables
to Africa but what amazes me is Simon’s
incredible geographic imagination he
thinks about this the world this
incredible expanse of this and I was
particularly interested because I wanted
to see one of these cables being built
see all the time online we experienced
these fleeting moments of connection
these sort of brief adjacencies a tweet
or a Facebook post or an email and it
seemed like there was a physical
corollary to that