Download Now Tubes: A Journey To The Center Of The Internet Fashioned By Andrew Blum Supplied As Electronic Format

this is bad. I thought this was a book about the internet, but it's about the author who injects himself in the narration way too much, Goes on for pages about his hotel rooms and looking things up on the internet, Unbelievable.

I think this book falls under "literary" nonfiction, I really hate those books, The factual information was interesting, but the non stop poetic waxing about the physical geography of the internet got really old really quickly, I pretty much vowed I would not read any more articles this guy ever wrote, You can tell the author writes about architecture and it helps,
The internet isn't just wireless and ubiquitous, It resides in data centers, fiber optic cables, and internet exchanges, There are places you can actually touch it and that knowledge makes TUBES worth the read,
As a side note Google is totally like the book The Circle, Everywhere the author went was open, transparent, and teeming with information except Google, Poorly written in every way, If I was to rate this on the quality of writing alone, Blum could win a high, maybe a, for the richness of his descriptive passages, particularly in the parts on the cable landing stations in Cornwall or the modernization of The Dalles in Oregon.
Let's face it, Blum can write well and engagingly, Nevertheless, even in the writing style there are a few nagging problems, His tendency to use quotes from literary sources like Emerson or J, G. Ballard is OK when limited to once or twice in a single book, but after a while the use of such quotes sounds a little too gradstudent for my tastes.


There were passages that were just trite or silly, as well the squirrel chewing up cable, complete with exclamation points in the text the description of Silicon Valley as startup mecca, when that description even seemed dated and pedestrian in thes and the reference to The Dalles as a digital Kathmandu.
Don't get me wrong, I like the Zen aspects of Blum's search, it's just that one must be careful in using these analogies at getting too starryeyed.
Also, he gets a trifle overdramatic in confronting the secrecy of Google and other companies in dealing with data center locations, If Blum was like James Bamford, chasing down the location of snooping centers of intelligence agencies, he'd have reason to feel paranoid, Here, his fears just seem silly,

But there is another aspect of Blum's work that makes me rank the book in the high's, albeit moving closer to, I disagree with the nature of his quest and the way he chooses to pursue it, I know, I know, that sounds like a reviewer for a travel book who says he wished the writer had gone to Spain instead of Kazakhstan, But bear with me.

Blum rightly sees a certain spiritual quest in examining the communication protocol layers of the Internet, and there's an argument to be made for treating the Open Systems Interconnect sevenlayer stack as a mysterious bardo.
But Blum sees the bottom two layers, physical and datalink, as representing physical macrogeography, And that's where network engineers raise their eyebrows at his quest, Does it matter whether the data center is in The Dalles or Prineville Does it matter whether a Cisco or Brocade router sits at the center Does it matter the locations on the planet where networks aggregate Some might talk about planetary magnetic fields and ley lines and say, "Oh yes it does.
" Maybe so, but by spending too much time on largescale geography, you miss the spiritual layers underneath,

To really make some good analogies of the type Blum strives for, you need to understand the underlying chip architectures and middleware software responsible for dissecting packets and putting them back together.
You need to understand the Zen of Ethernet switching, multiprotocol label switching, and dense wavedivision multiplexing, Then you need to be able to translate that in a way your grandmother can understand, Does that mean one needs a BSEE or geekdom certification No, but it means one needs to go deeper into the technology than Blum did,

A similar problem exists when he equates the physical backbone of the Internet with fiber optics, This is true today, but the optics might some day be replaced by millimeterwave radio or some sort of quantumcomputing "weird action at a distance, " The key to the Internet's center is bandwidth itself, and optical switching is merely the best current manifestation,

The reason this matters is that several books that made a technology deepdive on the history and nature of the Internet were releasedtoyears ago, such as Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's "Where Wizards Stay Up Late".
A lot has happened to the Internet since then, but Blum had to show he could tackle the more recent nuances and still come out with something that moved beyond the Hafner/Lyon book.


I still think this book is worth a read for learning some details of specific place the paranoid secrecy of Google officials in discussing their data centers, for example, teaches us that Google is a lot creepier than Facebook in its own way.
Blum's talents could be put to future use he would be a great candidate to join with James Bamford in dissecting the new NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah, for example.
But I can't help but feel this book would have been a lot more interesting if Blum had used his Zen quest to dive deeper into the underlying chips and software that make the Internet hum.
Describing clearly and vividly the physical infrastructure of the Internet is a great idea, and it's well done here, I think everyone should get at least a little more familiar with this topic, and this is a great way to do it, The author is sometimes a bit overwrought, and sometimes says the same thing in two or three different ways at a time, but generally does a very good job of conveying pretty complex and esoteric stuff, and especially humanizing it all.
A very fun read. Started at afun book about mapping infrastructure got a little boring no problemreally started to feel repetitivetalks about how Facebook is more transparent company than google and how nice that isSTARS!! It wasbut oof this didnt age well Blum makes an entertaining travelogue out of a map and history of the internet.
Other reviewers are dissatisfied with the depth of detail, I think Blum meant to provide a sense of what the internet means to humanity along the way of explaining what it actually is, The internet is a thing, not an idea, not the virtual, not psychology, not a medium, All these tropes have been exhausted in all the other similar inventions preceding it such as radio, phones, TV, or satellites, As a matter of fact some of those infrastructures that comprise the other objects at one time or another were justified by acting as a means to transmit the internet.
But Andrew Blum in Tubes diagrams and explains all the ways in which the internet becomes a thing, This book is basically a technical history of the internet and its actually not bad, Blum uses metaphor lots of it, humor, prose, pop culture, and emotion to consider this thing we call the internet, Blum begins at the starting point for any individual on the internet, at the terminal, and traces the lines through the various stages of internet architecture including transmission infrastructure, topographic structure, and logic to create as human a story of the internet as one can get.


Although I do have high praise for the story there are some interesting missteps, The biggest gripe I have is the constant need to contextualize the internet into ideas that people can consume, The explanation of the volume of data passing through an exchange or the speed of data transmission across continents on undersea data lines can never just pass on its on merits, it must be compared to some other more relatable concept.
I understand the need for comparison, but over and over and it sort of creates a cognitive dissonance that this thing which actually exists that is not conceptual must constantly be explained in terms of things that it absolutely isnt.
Also, the last chapter of this book to me is very problematic, The last chapter goes into quite some detail on data centers specifically two storage centers, both in Oregon, one controlled by Google and the other by Facebook.
Here a bit of ideology seems to seep into what was previously an unbiased assessment of an industry that was basically built on ideology, Blum seems to basically slam Google for not being invited into their The Dalles Data Center, He recreates the encounter step by step which is basically a nonencounter with a data center and it clearly wrecks his narrative, yet he still felt compelled to include the whole event.
Meanwhile, he has glowing descriptions of Facebook albeit muted glowing for being allowed to tour their Prineville Data Center, The whole thing was enough to sour the experience for me, All I can say is that Blum's criticisms of Google are founded, which is all the more reason why they might not have wanted to let him into their Data Center.


Regardless, Blum raises some important points on what the internet is, and even some on what it isnt, In so doing, much of the confusion and misconception surrounding the net is put to rest, The bottom line is if you ever wondered

where that packet of information you upload goes when you post to a blog or login to do your online banking then this book may just open your eyes to the reality of the internet.
Tubes is an eyeopening page turner about the cables, routing stations, and data centers that make up the internet, From the nondescript routing stations on the edges of suburban towns to vast lengths of cable strewn along the sea floor, the author shows that this ethereal internet, 'the cloud', is actually very tangbile and human.
In the book, the author takes you on a journey to these router stations, introduces you to the people that lay the underground cables, and even attempts to get into a Google data center.
One of the facts I learned that boggled my mind the most is that much of the communication that goes on between America and Europe is done through juststrands of fiber optic cable.
Imagine, millions of computers communicating using juststrands! I know what the speed of light is, but obviously can't comprehend such vast numbers asmillion meters per second because it still seems incredible that millions of people can communicate through justseperate channels sending light pulses atmillion meters per second.
The Tubes's title, Tubes, is a reference to senator Ted Stevens' metaphor of the internet as a series of tubes, We ridiculed the statement, but actually when you look at the fibers and underground sea cables that make up the backbone of the internet, you will realize that Stevens might deserve a bit more credit.
This book detailed beautifully the infrastructure behind the internet, and made me wish I knew more about the protocols that govern the internet, and about other types of infrastructure that we take for granted such as sewage systems, the electric grid, and public transit.
Overall, I would recommend this book to anybody who likes learning about the gritty underbellies of complex systems, and wants to know more about what are the physical components the make up the internet.

Part memoir, part travelogue, part history, this book provides insight into the physical infrastructure of the internet, The author went on a personal quest to understand its physical presence, He visits locations around the world and takes the reader along for the ride, It is not for techies, It is more for everyday people who think of “the internet” as ubiquitous presence that has no physical reality, In fact, it includes many tangible pieces and parts tubes, wires, fiber optic cables on the ocean floor, servers, routers, buildings that house a multitude of connection points, and much more.
Recommended to those who enjoy books on “how things work, ”.