Culture August 7, 2012

The Internet, originally known as ARPAnet, was first constructed for specialized use by educational and government professionals, but when the idea took off, the small infrastructure could not handle the sudden explosion of users. So in the 1990s, private companies built huge amounts of their own Internet infrastructure, mostly across a few locations in the United States and Europe. Wired journalist Andrew Blum’s first book, Tubes, is an entertaining travelogue that takes him through these sites—from Silicon Valley conference rooms to Oregon datacenter warehouses to ships laying underseas cables—in search of the physical places that create the virtual space we