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