Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
    Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
    Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
    Audiobook7 hours

    Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

    Written by Andrew Blum

    Narrated by Andrew Blum

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    “Andrew Blum plunges into the unseen but real ether of the Internet in a journey both compelling and profound….You will never open an email in quite the same way again.”
    —Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times bestselling author of Traffic

    In Tubes, Andrew Blum, a correspondent at Wired magazine, takes us on an engaging, utterly fascinating tour behind the scenes of our everyday lives and reveals the dark beating heart of the Internet itself. A remarkable journey through the brave new technological world we live in, Tubes is to the early twenty-first century what Soul of a New Machine—Tracy Kidder’s classic story of the creation of a new computer—was to the late twentieth.

    Editor's Note

    A demystifying journey…

    Ever wondered how your emails actually travel around the world? Blum’s journey to the physical center of the digital world demystifies the World Wide Web for its everyday users.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 29, 2012
    ISBN9780062189592
    Author

    Andrew Blum

    Andrew Blum is a journalist and the author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, the first book-length look at the physical infrastructure of the Internet. Tubes has been translated into ten languages, and has become a crucial reference for journalists, politicians, and entrepreneurs eager to understand how the Internet works. Blum’s writing about architecture, design, technology, urbanism, art, and travel has appeared in numerous publications, including Wired, Popular Science, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times.

    Related to Tubes

    Related audiobooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Every Grain of Sand

      Nov 25, 2022

      Every Grain of Sand
      12 min read

    • Article

      Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot: We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.

      Sep 10, 2015

      In early 1999, during the halftime of a University of Washington basketball game, a time capsule from 1927 was opened. Among the contents of this portal to the past were some yellowing newspapers, a Mercury dime, a student handbook, and a building pe

      9 min read

    • Article

      Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

      Oct 11, 2018

      In early 1999, during the halftime of a University of Washington basketball game, a time capsule from 1927 was opened. Among the contents of this portal to the past were some yellowing newspapers, a Mercury dime, a student handbook, and a building pe

      9 min read

    • Article

      Learning Curve

      Jul 1, 2023

      Learning Curve
      8 min read

    • Article

      Behold Invisibility

      Apr 21, 2022

      Behold Invisibility
      14 min read

    • Article

      Math’s Notes

      Dec 1, 2020

      Two decades ago, in 1999, I wrote a column predicting what I thought the future would be like in the coming 20 years and, as strange as it seems to me, it’s finally here. As it appears that the COVID-19 situation is still not well under control by th

      6 min read

    • Article

      Robots Can’t Dance: Why the singularity is greatly exaggerated.

      Jan 22, 2015

      Can a robot be creative? Advances in cloud robotics—machines connected to supercomputers in the cloud—have given self-driving cars, surgical robots, and other “smart” devices tremendous powers of computation. But can a robot, even one supercharged wi

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Magic In The Machine

      May 30, 2023

      The Magic In The Machine
      17 min read

    • Article

      What’s This Doing To My Brain?

      Mar 27, 2018

      A FRIEND OF THE WRITER Kim Stolz once jumped onto subway tracks to retrieve a dropped iPhone. Telling the story in Unfriending My Ex and Other Things I’ll Never Do, Stolz reports being horrified by the risk—yet adds, “If this same friend dropped her

      7 min read

    • Article

      Claire L. Evans Created An App, Leads The Band Yacht And Now Has Written A Book About Female Tech Pioneers

      Mar 28, 2018

      Claire L. Evans sang that she "thought the future would be cooler" as frontwoman of the L.A.-based pop band Yacht. In her first book "Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet" the musician, app developer and journalist looks th

      4 min read

    • Article

      Session Shenanigans

      Nov 18, 2020

      Session Shenanigans
      3 min read

    • Article

      Best-kept Secret On The Internet

      Nov 15, 2023

      In October, the slightly improbably named Vinton Cerf spelt out some internet-related home truths when he spoke at the Royal Society. Mr Cerf is one of the creators of the worldwide web, being part of the team who invented the way computers talk to o

      2 min read

    • Article

      Absurdist Dialogues with Siri

      Feb 12, 2018

      Absurdist Dialogues with Siri
      4 min read

    • Article

      Lexicon

      Jul 23, 2021

      Lexicon
      2 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Sep 9, 2021

      With regard to Nick Guitard’s letter pooh-poohing the possible existence of tiny aliens [FT405:71], I would like to make the following observations. David Bowie, may he rock on, once said that the Internet is like an alien being has landed and that w

      17 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Tubes

    3.5/5

    119 ratings16 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Andrew Blum is a journalist who wonders about the physical reality of the internet: How does his computer connect to the net? Where do the cables go to? How do they join up? Where are all the data centers? What pathway do the data packets take, and what does that look like on maps of the US and the world? Blum decides to travel around the US and Europe to talk to experts at various levels of complexity: the ISP centre, Internet Exchanges, and data centres belonging to Google and Facebook. Most of the facilities consist of drab, anonymous-looking box-buildings in out-of-the-way places. He is present when an underwater cable coming from West Africa is connected to one in Portugal; he also visits the location where a transatlantic cable arrives in Cornwall. This was interesting: Blum does a good job of leading us through his journey of discovery. What I didn’t like was his tendency to inject too much drama and pathos into his writings: he likes to draw conclusions that, when written up in the style of, say, the Time Magazine or Vanity Fair, spiral into Anthopology and Large-Scale Societal Impact Of Things. Several of his musings on those topics are fairly pedestrian, but the overwrought way he presents them makes them seem hollow sometimes.
    • 5/5
      Finally understand the internet! Great content and delivery-very enjoyable and informative!
    • 4/5
      An enlightening book about the physical reality behind the Internet. The book was slighter than it had to be, padding a relatively small number of revelations with anecdotes and a travelogue. But it's accessible, interesting and a brisk read.
    • 4/5
      A little dry at times but a fascinating idea and the author did a lot of research and went all over the world looking for the Internet. “To look for the Internet, I had gotten off the Internet. I had stepped away from my keyboard to look around and talk.”
    • 5/5
      A digerati travelogue, from an author who seems as much sociologist as infrastructure geek. Worth the read, even if you think you know the topic.
    • 5/5
      Phenomenally interesting book about the physical infrastructure of the cloud. Transcontinental fiber-optic cables. Data centers. Internet exchanges. All the good stuff that makes the internet possible.
    • 4/5
      This was very exciting, in an armchair tech sort of way. The author goes out and visits various physical places where "the internet" happens, like major switching hubs, content storage, and the points where submarine communications cables COME OUT OF THE OCEAN LIKE A KRAKEN. As you can probably tell, the last one was a special geeky thrill for me, because that is still something that boggles my mind, and now I want to go on a field trip to Porthcurno (the whole thing sounds delightfully mundane, not only the cable part, like you would go, and people would ask what you did, and you would say "I looked at a cable and then did nothing for a week. Nothing!" And not in a relaxing, spa nothing way, but literally nothing.). At any rate, the author then describes all of these places in a fairly accessible way with geeky enthusiasm.I did find it a little odd that he kept framing his descriptions with this theme that "the typical internet user never thinks about WHERE this stuff is happening," which I could believe is true, but rather don't think it's an accurate description that the typical internet user who bothers to read this book never thinks about it. I think about it all the time, and so do a lot of people I know.
    • 3/5
      This is a solid book with good journalism about a piece of our information infrastructure that is vital, but poorly understood and frequently ignored. Andrew Blum sets out with a project: follow the cable out of his house back to the physical structure of the Internet. What follows is a interesting and personable exploration of global networking. Blum avoids technical talk, I didn't have to use much of what I learned getting an ancient Network+ certification to follow him. {Tech: He briefly mentions TCP and IP and also the physical, network, and transport layers, but not in the context of the OSI model.} While Blum is no engineer, I think he make wise choices about how to frame his book. His story of following the tubes from his house to find the Internet is interesting. He identifies hidden parts of our global network structure and sheds some light on an industry that is usually obscure. Sure, we all heard about Global Crossing when they went bankrupt, but Blum explains how the undersea fiber business works in lay persons terms that is illuminating.

      I really enjoyed listening to Blum read Tubes. Many author-read books on Audible make me wish they'd have sprung for voice talent, but Blum does a good job here. I enjoyed the content and subject matter. I enjoyed his perspective, humor, and insight. Over all, this was very well done.

      So, if you have ever been curious about how fiber networks are structured or want to know how the internet gets to your house, read this. If you want to more about the OSI network model, router protocols, or packet switching, look elsewhere. If fiber networks and physical infrastructure bore you, avoid at all costs.
    • 2/5
      I was really annoyed by incessant "gee-whiz, the internet has a physical structure, who knew" commentary that is the majority of this book. Do people really think the internet comes to you via magical unicorns? Our internet service was interrupted when someone ran into a connection box in our neighborhood. My front yard was dug up by our service provider upgrading our cables. This book is slim on content, if you are really interested in the topic.
    • 3/5
      You know when you finish a long novel and think, this could have been a short novella? Well, Tubes could have been a 100-page non-fiction novella (is there a name for that? pamphlet, in the old sense?) I really wanted to learn about the physical existence of the components of the internet(s). And I did. But not much else here. Perhaps I knew more about the internet than I had thought, which clearly is no fault of Blum's.

      Ultimately, what was most interesting to me was the internet gossip. How Google was mean, and Facebook as open, but Google guarded privacy much more than Facebook, and who runs the exchanges, and who is connected to whom, etc. In the end, I don't think I needed to read Tubes to learn all that, not to mention that most of it was already old news, even for me.

      Unlike others, I did not find Blum's tendency to quote literary works annoying. And I liked learning about the haphazard way the internet developed and the way it followed the grooves and paths etches on Earth's surface by natural forces as well as historical events.

      What was lacking, I thought, was a real worldview. Yes, it fucking matters where the fiber runs through and where the data centers are. Proximity and fiber means cheap, good connectivity. Some parts of the world were and are still dark; and the cost of access is steep for the local income level. Blum touches on this briefly, but never with the awareness of the imbalance in the world. He emphasizes, over and over, how the most active and heavy internet traffic is between London and New York... Hmmm...

      I recommend this book for those who are not familiar with bits, fiber optics, routers, and who really do not understand what "the cloud" is. If you have a pretty good sense of these things, you can probably skip reading Tubes.
    • 5/5
      I was first alerted to this book when a short illustrative photo-essay was published in Wired, showing some of the facilities that the author had visited. Having embarked upon the information superhighway when geography still seemed like a relevant factor to the home user - UK game servers were always significantly faster than American ones - I was interested in a physical history of the internet.The author is mainly a writer on architecture, rather than technology, which was of great value to this book. It meant he was able to succinctly capture the physical essence of a building or place in evocative language. He was also very effective at maintaining the reader's interest in his quest to track down something which is actually of minor concern on a day to day basis and, as he says in the book, the physical reality of 'the internet' is rather non-descript and generic; it is the dream of all the information that flows through it that makes the hundreds of thousands of boxes and lights, and millions of metres of cables exciting.My only complaint was that some of the chapters jumped around a little bit, without it being clear why one episode was being left apparently incomplete. This was a minor quibble. I would definitely be interested in reading more of Mr Blum's books, and more books by 'physical' writers about the the manifestation of intangible things like the internet.
    • 5/5
      Many nonfiction books deal with fascinating topics and the information is enough to drive the story. Truly excellent books ,like this one, feature good writing. Blum tells a technical story with a narrative rich with humanity, personality and life while he explores the often stark inanimate word of the physical infrastructure of the internet.
    • 4/5
      blum delivers on the "center" of the internet as places. using (my terms) a graph-theory metaphor: edges and nodes, with equal attention to both. but only the stuff you can see. i.e. we don't hear much about the soft stuff. TCP/IP is mentioned, barely, HTTP not at all. email in terms of his sending pictures home. It would have been good to hear what the "UU" in UUNET stood for, for example. for me, the missing ingredients in this book are the invisible architectural components.
    • 2/5
      Sadly, I thought "Tubes" was really lame. The author sets up the book by erroneously positing that because the Internet is a placeless, virtual world, the physical infrastructure behind it must also be some kind of cosmic cloud. Then he spends the entire book knocking down his own silly scarecrow. "Tubes" is a liberal artist's exposition of ruminations on literature, historiography, painting, etc., which he somehow bolts onto an Internet-for-Dummies, not-detailed-enough description of fiber networks, data centers, peering sites, etc. Blum goes downright goofy at times, for example when he witnesses policemen boarding an airplane and writes of them coming for him in retribution for his having toured an important private Internet facility (as an invited guest) the previous day. Unsolicited advice to Blum: if your goal is to describe a super-geeky subject, write like a real geek; and drop all but the most incisive nuggets of extraneous observations and comments.
    • 1/5
      Every now and then I get taken in by a book based on a cool title with and equally cool looking cover. They say never judge a book by its cover. Blum's topic, the nuts and bolts of what constitutes the Internet worldwide, I thought would be interesting. In two words, it wasn't. In three, it really wasn't.In a rambling way Blum prods into unknown alley ways, manhole covers, and away cheaply tiled box rooms around the world. Stuff of not exactly spell binding excitement. If the thought of discovering large routers and winding tangles of cables arouses you then maybe this book is what you have been waiting for. Or maybe you are an aspiring network engineer.When I start a book it is rare I will not complete it regardless of how into it I am. This book I ended up parsing out by designating 'X' number of pages to get through each day to complete it. Once again I learned the lesson, don't judge a book by its cover.
    • 4/5
      A surprisingly compelling read about the hardware (tubes) or physical infrastructure that enables the Internet. Challenged at times by repeated descriptions of non-descript office buildings housing routers, wires and servers. At other times, though, almost mystical about the route our data takes over this physical infrastructure,