Tubes

What if you could actually see the Internet? Not the glowing icons, search bars, and endless scrolls on your screen—but the real, physical places that make it work? This is the question Andrew Blum asks in Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, a book that turns the invisible architecture of our digital lives into a vivid, human-scale geography. He argues that the Internet is not an abstract cloud floating above us but a tangible, intricate web of machines, cables, and buildings. Once you know where to look, the Internet stops being magic and becomes something you can touch.

Blum’s journey began with a humble event: a squirrel chewing through a cable in his Brooklyn backyard, cutting his Internet connection. That absurd incident opened his eyes to how real the Internet’s infrastructure is—how it depends on physical systems vulnerable to rodents, geography, politics, and human hands. From that moment, he set out to track the Internet down—not as a user, but as an explorer. He wanted to climb into data centers, walk along undersea cables, and talk with the engineers who keep those blinking boxes alive.

The Internet as Geography, Not Metaphor

Blum dismantles the myth of the Internet as a nebulous, immaterial 'cloud.' The term suggests smoothness, ubiquity, and detachment from material constraints. But that idea, he insists, is dangerously misleading. The Internet has borders, choke points, and landmarks. It relies on massive hubs like Equinix in Ashburn, Virginia; DE-CIX in Frankfurt; AMS-IX in Amsterdam; and Telehouse in London. Its arteries—fiber-optic cables—line railroad tracks, highways, and the ocean floor. Its nodes are data centers humming with light and heat. The Internet is, quite literally, a city of light—vast, mechanical, and surprisingly earthbound.

What Blum discovers is a pattern as old as human civilization: where information flows, geography still matters. Just as ancient ports and trading posts once served merchants and sailors, today’s Internet exchanges connect engineers and algorithms. Frankfurt is a hub because it has always been a meeting point of Europe’s trade routes. London’s Docklands still draw network traffic because of the same global arteries that carried ships centuries ago. Technology didn’t replace geography—it rediscovered it.

From Invisible Wires to Human Hands

Behind every packet of data that travels across the Internet is a chain of relationships—a handshake between engineers, companies, and governments. Blum introduces us to this world of what he calls “network people”—the operators, cable layers, and peering coordinators who make sure your Google search reaches its destination. These are the unsung wizards who gather at operator meetups (like NANOG in Austin) not to dream up new gadgets, but to share beers, routes, and peering agreements—the social fabric behind the world’s digital connectivity.

This is not the 'disembodied' Internet we imagine. It’s a system maintained through friendships, rivalries, deals, and trust. The engineers talk about “peering,” the physical and moral pact that allows networks to exchange data freely. They speak of “cables” the way sailors once spoke of rope and rigging. By showing us this communal, competitive, occasionally secretive tribe, Blum humanizes the abstraction we call global connectivity.

Why Physical Reality Still Matters

Why does knowing where the Internet is matter to you? Because understanding its geography helps you understand its fragility and power. When Blum visits Equinix Ashburn—one of the network’s busiest intersections—he realizes that if a handful of buildings in Virginia were destroyed, huge parts of the world’s Internet traffic would slow or even stop. In an age obsessed with data privacy, speed, and dependency, realizing that the Internet has real doors, locks, and guards changes how you understand security. If your emails, videos, and personal memories live 'in the cloud,' they actually sit in a warehouse somewhere, powered by local electricity and cooled by fans humming in the dark.

Blum invites us to rethink the Internet as part of our physical environment—an infrastructure as awe-inspiring and as vulnerable as the power grid. He points out that the world connects through choke points: a handful of undersea cables, a few key exchanges, and a surprisingly small number of technicians. This realization reframes the Internet not as a boundless universe but as a fragile, handmade quilt stitched together by real people.

A Journey from the Edge to the Center

Over the course of the book, Blum travels from his local network in Milwaukee, through historic switching points in Virginia and California, to global Internet exchanges in Europe, and ultimately to the undersea cables that bind continents. Along the way, he discovers that the Internet is both shockingly robust and astonishingly intimate—a network built from thousands of small decisions by engineers across decades. His odyssey ends where much of our data is stored today: in enormous data centers in rural Oregon and North Carolina, places where digital clouds meet concrete and steel.

By the end of Tubes, you realize that understanding the Internet’s material world changes how you perceive your own. Every click, upload, or video call traces a route through real terrain, shaped by geography and human will. Blum’s mission—to teach us to see the invisible—becomes a moving reminder that even in an age of silicon and photons, place still matters.

Andrew Blum begins his exploration in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Internet takes on its first visible form in his journey: as lines on a map and tubes beneath the ground. Working with a cartographer named Markus Krisetya at TeleGeography, he watches as giant industrial printers churn out detailed maps of the planet’s fiber-optic cables—thin lines crossing oceans and continents. These maps reveal that the Internet’s skeleton mirrors geography: continental highways connect to oceanic bridges, and hubs cluster around ancient trade centers like New York, London, and Tokyo.

Through this process, the Internet transforms from an idea into an object, a thing you can trace with your finger. Blum’s account of the printing process—tinkering with inks, colors, and detail—becomes a metaphor for touching the Internet’s materiality. The map reminds us that every email, song, or photo must travel through real, physical routes.

Networks within Networks

When Blum talks to TeleGeography’s analysts, he learns that the Internet is best understood as three overlapping layers: the logical (the invisible protocols and addresses that send data), the physical (wires, routers, and fibers), and the geographic (the actual places those materials inhabit). Every digital connection we make moves through these intertwined layers. As one engineer tells him, “The Internet has a kind of depth.”

This multilayered view reveals the Internet’s paradox: it is both everywhere and somewhere. When you stream a video in New York, your packets might crisscross Chicago or Virginia before returning to a server just a few blocks away. The signals that seem instant are actually rooted in geography—subject to speed limits, costs, and physical risk.

Mapping the Invisible

TeleGeography’s engineers visualize the complexity of the network by tracing paths using a program called Traceroute. They send out digital 'pings' from one node to another, recording the routers each data packet touches—a process that produces lists of cities and routers like postcards from the Internet’s journey. These reveal an infrastructure that is both intricate and surprisingly intimate. Sometimes an email from one Wisconsin suburb to another travels all the way to Chicago and back. Sometimes a packet between Tokyo and Seoul crosses the Pacific before looping home again.

Blum’s discovery is simple but profound: the Internet’s geography is not abstract or random. Its routes follow the same physical and economic logic that shaped railroads, telegraphs, and shipping lanes. Geography, he writes, “is destiny, even on the Internet.”

To understand how networks connect, Blum delves into the Internet’s history. He traces its roots back to the ARPANET in 1969, when Leonard Kleinrock’s team at UCLA successfully linked two computers in California—the first 'breath' of the Internet. The original interface message processor (IMP), a refrigerator-sized machine built by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, became the seed from which the entire network’s architecture grew. These early engineers, idealistic and curious, envisioned a decentralized communication system that could survive breakdowns—an ethos that still shapes the Internet’s design.

The Culture of Connection

Blum meets Kleinrock, who reminds him that the Internet’s foundation wasn’t born from business ambition but from academic collaboration and military pragmatism. The early ARPANET maps looked like constellations—points of light loosely linked across the United States, connecting universities like UCLA, Stanford, and MIT. Yet what made this system endure wasn’t just cables and code: it was trust. Each node shared data freely, guided by a simple rule coined by pioneer Jon Postel: “Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.”

Trust, Blum learns, is baked into the Internet’s DNA. Every router agrees to announce its presence to every other router, advertising which computers lie behind it. This cooperative structure allows information to flow without central control—but it also leaves the network open to chaos, as when a misconfigured router in Pakistan once rerouted YouTube traffic for the entire world. The Internet, Blum concludes, works not because it’s sealed, but because billions of interactions rely on restraint, openness, and good faith.

An Unplanned Architecture

By the 1980s, the ARPANET evolved into a web of autonomous systems—thousands of independent networks using a shared protocol called TCP/IP. This transformation decentralized the Internet forever. No one owns it, yet everyone depends on it. The result is what Blum calls “a city that planned itself”: organic, messy, and full of personality. The Internet is not an invisible utopia; it’s more like New York at rush hour—bustling, unpredictable, but spectacularly alive.

When Blum visits the bustling data hubs of Palo Alto and Ashburn, he finds that the Internet isn’t governed by machines but by people. Engineers, tech entrepreneurs, and network operators keep this vast organism alive through cooperation, rivalry, and shared beer. The human dimensions behind every fiber connection are as critical as the wires themselves.

From MAE-East to Equinix

In the 1990s, as the Internet exploded commercially, physical interconnection points like MAE-East in Tysons Corner, Virginia, became its beating hearts. Feldman’s tales of routers stuffed into parking garages feel almost comically humble: half the world’s online traffic once passed through a single suburban basement. The chaos drove innovators like Jay Adelson and Eric Troyer to create Equinix—purpose-built “telecom hotels” designed to let rival networks connect securely and efficiently. These centers, illuminated by blue LED light and filled with humming racks, became the Internet’s cathedrals.

Adelson’s genius lay in realizing that neutrality and trust mattered as much as technology. At Equinix, competitors plug into each other’s cages through 'cross-connects,' literal cables that symbolize cooperation. The Internet runs on physical collaboration between humans who must choose to share.

Peering, Friendship, and Rivalry

At conferences like NANOG in Austin, Blum meets the 'peering community'—engineers who negotiate interconnections between networks over coffee and beer. Their exchanges can be both friendly and cutthroat. A handshake can connect millions of users; a disagreement can 'de-peer' entire regions, as when a feud between Sprint and Cogent once temporarily split the global Internet. Yet the underlying culture remains surprisingly idealistic: engineers see themselves as stewards rather than owners. This ethos contrasts sharply with the secrecy of tech giants like Google, whose guarded data centers make the Internet’s openness feel compromised.

Blum’s portrait of this tribe evokes the early spirit of the Internet—an ecosystem built on mutual dependence. The Internet isn’t automated; it’s human. And it survives because people keep showing up, reconnecting, and saying, 'Let’s peer.'

Stepping deeper into the Internet’s architecture, Blum visits the massive exchanges that tie continents together. In Frankfurt, he meets engineers at DE-CIX, home to the world’s busiest Internet 'switch.' In Amsterdam, he tours AMS-IX, where Job Witteman presides over what he calls a modern marketplace for digital trade. On these visits, Blum observes how physical geography—roads, rivers, and history—continues to shape digital topography.

Frankfurt and Amsterdam: Digital Empires

DE-CIX’s origins lie in Germany’s academic networks, yet it grew because Frankfurt sat at Europe’s crossroads—already the center of rail and finance. Its 'core switch,' hidden inside an Interxion warehouse, is a machine pulsing with over 800 gigabits per second—Blum’s own twenty-first century version of Henry Adams’s 'dynamo.' He realizes it’s the same mix of power and banality: a black box that quietly directs vast oceans of data.

In Amsterdam, AMS-IX embodies a different philosophy—openness and liberalism. Witteman, its founder, boasts that the exchange operates by a simple rule: “Do whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t bother anyone else.” Dutch culture and technical pragmatism blend here into a global hub. Thousands of networks plug in because Amsterdam treats bits the way it once treated tulips and ships: as trade.

London’s Telehouse and the Spirit of Place

In London’s Docklands, Telehouse provides a striking counterpoint—a fortress of steel where the Internet is as tightly guarded as gold. Inside, the London Internet Exchange (LINX) channels streams of global traffic through its routers. Security is so strict that a terrorist plot once targeted it, confirming that the Internet’s most powerful spots are both sacred and vulnerable. Standing amid the humming servers, Blum sees that the network’s pulse mirrors the cities that host it: efficient in Frankfurt, free-spirited in Amsterdam, rigidly controlled in London. The Internet, he concludes, is not postnational—it’s deeply, vividly local.

Beneath the oceans, Blum finds the Internet’s most poetic and precarious threads—undersea cables. Each one, no thicker than a garden hose, carries nearly all intercontinental data, connecting human lives across vast distances. He follows these cables from Tata Communications’ headquarters in New Jersey to cable stations in Cornwall and Portugal, revealing a world that combines high engineering with maritime adventure.

Underwater Power and Fragility

These cables—like SAT-3 along Africa’s coast or SEACOM linking South Africa to India—are feats of engineering and collaboration. Each one extends thousands of miles beneath the sea, powered by voltage running through copper sleeves that feed tuna-sized amplifiers every fifty miles. They mirror the routes of ancient trade: Lisbon to Cape Town, New York to London, Mumbai to Marseille. Yet they are fragile. In one notorious incident, a 2006 earthquake off Taiwan snapped seven cables, cutting off Asia from the world for days. Repair ships spent months restoring them, proof that even in an age of light-speed travel, the world’s digital heartbeat depends on oceanic weather and undersea geology.

Cable Landings: Where Oceans Meet Earth

On the rugged Cornish coast, Blum visits Porthcurno, the historic hub of British telegraphy, and later stands in a Portuguese beach town as technicians haul a new cable—the West Africa Cable System—out of the surf. Watching engineers splice glowing glass threads the width of a hair, he feels the awe of seeing globalization made visible. Each splice binds continents together with light and nerve. What once were imperial shipping routes are now data veins, proof that technology doesn’t erase history—it electrifies it.

In the book’s final act, Blum climbs the mountain of data—to the colossal centers where our digital selves reside. These data centers, he writes, are the 'storehouses of the digital soul.' They are neither abstract clouds nor cold bunkers—they’re factories of information, consuming megawatts of power and acres of land. In The Dalles, Oregon, he visits Google’s super-secret data campus; down the road in Prineville, he finds Facebook’s open, community-oriented version.

Google’s Fortress

Google’s facility in The Dalles is guarded like a nuclear plant. Guards scan retinas; visitors are allowed only into the cafeteria. The company hides behind opaque explanations of 'security and privacy,' turning the myth of openness on its head. For Blum, this secrecy feels like betrayal—a contradiction of the Internet’s founding spirit. Google, he notes, is the world’s most omniscient company, yet its own operations remain invisible. The lesson is sobering: transparency built the Internet, but secrecy now protects it.

Facebook’s Cathedral of Openness

At Facebook’s Prineville data center, the mood flips entirely. Manager Ken Patchett—part engineer, part evangelist—gives Blum a full tour, describing every system that keeps Facebook alive. The building breathes cold Oregon air through massive louvers; tens of thousands of blinking blue lights represent billions of intimate human exchanges. Standing inside, Blum realizes that data centers are the new industrial revolution—factories of meaning rather than metal. Facebook’s decision to publish its building schematics under the 'Open Compute' project restores some of the Internet’s democratic ideals: sharing knowledge for collective benefit.

In these enormous warehouses, the Internet finally sheds its mysticism. The 'cloud' is brick, steel, and electricity—and you can stand inside it.

In his closing reflection, Blum returns home to Brooklyn, only to find that his personal Internet—the single wire running from his living room—contains the same complexity he’s traced around the world. The wire passes beneath streets, connects to a neighborhood node, and then into Cablevision’s network, linking directly to the global hubs he visited. The Internet’s grand geography converges right under his daughter’s window. The epic and the intimate merge.

Seeing the World Through the Network

Blum realizes that to understand the Internet is to understand our world anew. Each email, call, or cloud upload is grounded in dirt, politics, and human care. Knowing where data lives forces us to reimagine digital life as part of ecology and culture. He joins a long line of thinkers, from Thoreau to Emerson, who found transcendence in the material world; except Blum’s nature is made of glass and light instead of leaves and streams.

The journey changes how you see everything: cities become networks, oceans become data highways, and every click becomes a pilgrimage across the planet. Blum’s final insight is simple: the Internet isn’t a separate world; it’s ours, shaped by human hands, rooted in places, and filled with stories. Its tubes, cables, and lights are just another reflection of us.