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: an architect designs a building, and it becomes a place where many architects design many buildings; it becomes the city. Regardless of this complicated mix of forces of politics, 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. 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.

What was surprising to me was how quickly my relationship to the physical world 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. Our attention is constantly divided. You know, we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking out at the world around us.

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, it reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth, the blue marble picture, and it 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, as it occasionally does. The Cable Guy came to fix it, and he started at the dusty clump of cables behind the couch, and he followed it to the front of my building, into the basement, and then to the backyard. There was this big jumble of cables against the wall, and then he saw a squirrel running along the wire. He said, "There's your problem! A squirrel is chewing on your internet!"

And this seemed 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 of what would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall. If 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?

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 in an office presentation. The elders of the internet were willing to part with it for a short while. She looks at it and she says, "This is the Internet? The whole internet? Is it heavy?"

"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 at 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—where more networks to the internet connect to each other than anywhere else. That connection is an unequivocally physical process. It's about the router of one network—of Facebook or Google, or ABTR, 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 buildings, like 60 Hudson, and the dozen or so others, have ten times more networks connecting within them 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 America, connect all of us, and it's those cables in particular that I want to focus on.

If the internet is a global phenomenon, if we live in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath the ocean—cables like this. 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 technologies 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. It usually comes from a building called the landing station that's often tucked away conspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood, and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles, they amplify the signal.

This is the rate of transmission; it's incredibly fast. The basic unit is a 10 gigabit per second wavelength of light—maybe a thousand times your own connection—capable of carrying 10,000 video streams. But not only that; you'll put not just one wavelength of light through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light through a single fiber. Then, you'll have maybe eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction. And they're tiny; they're the thickness of a hair.

And then they connect to the continents. Somewhere, they connect to 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. 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 that thin 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 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.

This is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate. 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. He is English. The undersea cable industry is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42 because they all started at the same time with the boom of 20 years ago.

Tata had gotten start as a communications business 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. This is literally a beam of light around the world. 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 meant north and south, primarily these cables to Africa.

But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination. He thinks about this world, this incredible expanse of this. I was particularly interested because I wanted to see one of these cables being built. See, all the time online, we experience 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.