TEDGlobal 2012
Andrew Blum: Discover the physical side of the internet
Filmed:
Readability: 3.8
1,521,702 views
When a squirrel chewed through a cable and knocked him offline, journalist Andrew Blum started wondering what the Internet was really made of. So he set out to go see it -- the underwater cables, secret switches and other physical bits that make up the net.
Andrew Blum - Network author
For his new book, "Tubes," Andrew Blum visited the places where the internet exists in physical form: the cables and switches and servers that virtually connect us. Full bio
For his new book, "Tubes," Andrew Blum visited the places where the internet exists in physical form: the cables and switches and servers that virtually connect us. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:16
I've always written primarily about architecture,
0
827
2031
00:18
about buildings, and writing about architecture
1
2858
2525
00:21
is based on certain assumptions.
2
5383
2741
00:24
An architect designs a building, and it becomes a place,
3
8124
2458
00:26
or many architects design many buildings, and it becomes
4
10582
2480
00:28
a city, and regardless of this complicated mix of forces
5
13062
3274
00:32
of politics and culture and economics that shapes
6
16336
2397
00:34
these places, at the end of the day, you can go
7
18733
3003
00:37
and you can visit them. You can walk around them.
8
21736
2656
00:40
You can smell them. You can get a feel for them.
9
24392
1673
00:41
You can experience their sense of place.
10
26065
3493
00:45
But what was striking to me over the last several years
11
29558
2349
00:47
was that less and less was I going out into the world,
12
31907
3375
00:51
and more and more, I was sitting in front of my computer screen.
13
35282
3229
00:54
And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone,
14
38511
4320
00:58
I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day,
15
42831
1876
01:00
but I was also getting up at the end of the day
16
44707
2097
01:02
and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket.
17
46804
3300
01:06
And what was surprising to me was how quickly
18
50104
2859
01:08
my relationship to the physical world had changed.
19
52963
2937
01:11
In this very short period of time, you know, whether you
20
55900
1775
01:13
call it the last 15 years or so of being online, or the last,
21
57675
3456
01:17
you know, four or five years of being online all the time,
22
61131
2959
01:19
our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that
23
64090
3174
01:23
our attention is constantly divided. You know,
24
67264
1799
01:24
we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking
25
69063
2564
01:27
out in the world around us.
26
71627
1832
01:29
And what was even more striking to me, and what I really
27
73459
2527
01:31
got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen
28
75986
3002
01:34
seemed to have no physical reality of its own.
29
78988
3789
01:38
If you went and looked for images of the Internet,
30
82777
2768
01:41
this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte
31
85545
3118
01:44
of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse
32
88663
3130
01:47
where we don't seem to be anywhere on it.
33
91793
2096
01:49
We can never seem to grasp it in its totality.
34
93889
2424
01:52
It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth,
35
96313
3617
01:55
the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest,
36
99930
2730
01:58
I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole.
37
102660
2697
02:01
We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse.
38
105357
3685
02:04
So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was
39
109042
3365
02:08
the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them
40
112407
2857
02:11
together in the same place.
41
115264
2981
02:14
And then this happened.
42
118245
3207
02:17
My Internet broke one day, as it occasionally does,
43
121452
2598
02:19
and the cable guy came to fix it, and he started with
44
124050
2734
02:22
the dusty clump of cables behind the couch,
45
126784
2127
02:24
and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard,
46
128911
3210
02:28
and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall.
47
132121
2876
02:30
And then he saw a squirrel running along the wire,
48
134997
2554
02:33
and he said, "There's your problem.
49
137551
2791
02:36
A squirrel is chewing on your Internet." (Laughter)
50
140342
4421
02:40
And this seemed astounding. The Internet is
51
144763
3127
02:43
a transcendent idea. It's a set of protocols that has changed
52
147890
3374
02:47
everything from shopping to dating to revolutions.
53
151264
3455
02:50
It was unequivocally not something
54
154719
2629
02:53
a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter)
55
157348
3311
02:56
But that in fact seemed to be the case.
56
160659
1878
02:58
A squirrel had in fact chewed on my Internet. (Laughter)
57
162537
3202
03:01
And then I got this image in my head of what would happen
58
165739
2187
03:03
if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started
59
167926
2180
03:06
to follow it. Where would it go?
60
170106
1604
03:07
Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit?
61
171710
3508
03:11
Could I go there? Who would I meet?
62
175218
1349
03:12
You know, was there something actually out there?
63
176567
3376
03:15
And the answer, by all accounts, was no.
64
179943
3037
03:18
This was the Internet, this black box with a red light on it,
65
182980
2780
03:21
as represented in the sitcom "The IT Crowd."
66
185760
3430
03:25
Normally it lives on the top of Big Ben,
67
189190
3559
03:28
because that's where you get the best reception,
68
192749
3082
03:31
but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it
69
195831
3305
03:35
for the afternoon to use in an office presentation.
70
199136
3172
03:38
The elders of the Internet were willing to part with it
71
202308
2374
03:40
for a short while, and she looks at it and she says,
72
204682
2866
03:43
"This is the Internet? The whole Internet? Is it heavy?"
73
207548
3390
03:46
They say, "Of course not, the Internet doesn't weigh anything."
74
210938
3960
03:50
And I was embarrassed. I was looking for this thing
75
214898
2317
03:53
that only fools seem to look for.
76
217215
2296
03:55
The Internet was that amorphous blob, or it was a silly
77
219511
2835
03:58
black box with a blinking red light on it.
78
222346
2246
04:00
It wasn't a real world out there.
79
224592
2328
04:02
But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there,
80
226920
3312
04:06
and that's what I spent about two years visiting,
81
230232
1766
04:07
these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers
82
231998
3545
04:11
that use as much power as the cities in which they sit,
83
235543
2645
04:14
and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York,
84
238188
3189
04:17
which is one of the buildings in the world,
85
241377
1708
04:18
one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings,
86
243085
2898
04:21
where more networks of the Internet connect to each other
87
245983
2644
04:24
than anywhere else.
88
248627
1358
04:25
And that connection is an unequivocally physical process.
89
249985
2617
04:28
It's about the router of one network, a Facebook or
90
252602
2485
04:30
a Google or a B.T. or a Comcast or a Time Warner, whatever it is,
91
255087
2942
04:33
connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into
92
258029
2431
04:36
the ceiling and down into the router of another network,
93
260460
2694
04:39
and that's unequivocally physical, and it's surprisingly intimate.
94
263154
4377
04:43
A building like 60 Hudson, and a dozen or so others,
95
267531
3293
04:46
has 10 times more networks connecting within it
96
270824
2326
04:49
than the next tier of buildings.
97
273150
1848
04:50
There's a very short list of these places.
98
274998
2068
04:52
And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home
99
277066
2908
04:55
to about a half a dozen very important networks,
100
279974
2589
04:58
which are the networks which serve the undersea cables
101
282563
2298
05:00
that travel underneath the ocean
102
284861
2348
05:03
that connect Europe and America and connect all of us.
103
287209
2253
05:05
And it's those cables in particular that I want to focus on.
104
289462
3587
05:08
If the Internet is a global phenomenon, if we live
105
293049
3860
05:12
in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath
106
296925
2440
05:15
the ocean, cables like this.
107
299365
2105
05:17
And in this dimension, they are incredibly small.
108
301470
2886
05:20
You can you hold them in your hand. They're like a garden hose.
109
304356
2942
05:23
But in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive,
110
307298
4063
05:27
as expansive as you can imagine.
111
311361
1640
05:28
They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five
112
313001
2555
05:31
or eight thousand miles in length, and
113
315556
2611
05:34
if the material science and the computational technology
114
318167
2609
05:36
is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process
115
320776
3533
05:40
is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean
116
324309
3780
05:43
and comes out on the other, and it usually comes
117
328089
3285
05:47
from a building called a landing station that's often
118
331374
2633
05:49
tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood,
119
334007
2947
05:52
and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor
120
336954
2734
05:55
that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles
121
339688
2520
05:58
they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission
122
342208
3657
06:01
is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second
123
345865
3206
06:04
wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own
124
349071
2498
06:07
connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams,
125
351569
3184
06:10
but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light
126
354753
3278
06:13
through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe
127
358031
2957
06:16
50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light
128
360988
3019
06:19
through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe
129
364007
2868
06:22
eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction.
130
366875
2602
06:25
And they're tiny. They're the thickness of a hair.
131
369477
3490
06:28
And then they connect to the continent somewhere.
132
372967
1829
06:30
They connect in a manhole like this. Literally,
133
374796
2338
06:33
this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in.
134
377134
3089
06:36
This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland.
135
380223
4490
06:40
And the landscape is changing. Three years ago,
136
384713
2981
06:43
when I started thinking about this, there was one cable
137
387694
1896
06:45
down the Western coast of Africa, represented
138
389590
3167
06:48
in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line.
139
392757
2874
06:51
Now there are six cables and more coming, three down each coast.
140
395631
4845
06:56
Because once a country gets plugged in by one cable,
141
400476
2631
06:59
they realize that it's not enough. If they're going to build
142
403107
1800
07:00
an industry around it, they need to know that their connection
143
404907
2816
07:03
isn't tenuous but permanent, because if a cable breaks,
144
407723
2710
07:06
you have to send a ship out into the water, throw
145
410433
2067
07:08
a grappling hook over the side, pick it up, find the other end,
146
412500
2915
07:11
and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over.
147
415415
3043
07:14
It's an intensely, intensely physical process.
148
418458
4540
07:18
So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently
149
422998
4298
07:23
worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing
150
427296
2672
07:25
of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate.
151
429968
2998
07:28
And I've never met him. We've only communicated
152
432966
2982
07:31
via this telepresence system, which always makes me
153
435948
3457
07:35
think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter)
154
439405
3896
07:39
And he is English. The undersea cable industry
155
443301
3197
07:42
is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42.
156
446498
3645
07:46
(Laughter) Because they all started at the same time
157
450143
3175
07:49
with the boom about 20 years ago.
158
453318
2500
07:51
And Tata had gotten its start as a communications business
159
455818
3260
07:54
when they bought two cables, one across the Atlantic
160
459078
2465
07:57
and one across the Pacific, and proceeded to add pieces
161
461543
3160
08:00
onto them, until they had built a belt around the world,
162
464703
3544
08:04
which means they will send your bits to the East or the West.
163
468247
2097
08:06
They have -- this is literally a beam of light around the world,
164
470344
2223
08:08
and if a cable breaks in the Pacific, it'll send it around
165
472567
2211
08:10
the other direction. And then having done that,
166
474778
3185
08:13
they started to look for places to wire next.
167
477963
3944
08:17
They looked for the unwired places, and that's meant
168
481907
2490
08:20
North and South, primarily these cables to Africa.
169
484397
2794
08:23
But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination.
170
487191
3771
08:26
He thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness.
171
490962
2959
08:29
And I was particularly interested because I wanted to see
172
493921
3313
08:33
one of these cables being built. See, you know, all the time
173
497234
2852
08:35
online we experience these fleeting moments of connection,
174
500086
2320
08:38
these sort of brief adjacencies, a tweet or a Facebook post
175
502406
3294
08:41
or an email, and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that.
176
505700
3840
08:45
It seemed like there was a moment when the continent
177
509540
2076
08:47
was being plugged in, and I wanted to see that.
178
511616
2347
08:49
And Simon was working on a new cable,
179
513963
2285
08:52
WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched
180
516248
2511
08:54
from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa,
181
518759
2121
08:56
to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon.
182
520880
2869
08:59
And he said there was coming soon, depending
183
523749
2333
09:01
on the weather, but he'd let me know when,
184
526082
2194
09:04
and so with about four days notice, he said to go
185
528276
3201
09:07
to this beach south of Lisbon, and a little after 9,
186
531477
2831
09:10
this guy will walk out of the water. (Laughter)
187
534308
3696
09:13
And he'll be carrying a green nylon line, a lightweight line,
188
538004
4320
09:18
called a messenger line, and that was the first link
189
542324
2713
09:20
between sea and land, this link that would then be
190
545037
2553
09:23
leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light.
191
547590
3863
09:27
Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this
192
551453
2590
09:29
specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated
193
554043
3357
09:33
on these buoys until it was in the right place.
194
557400
2748
09:36
Then you can see the English engineers looking on.
195
560148
2742
09:38
And then, once it was in the right place, he got back
196
562890
2813
09:41
in the water holding a big knife, and he cut each buoy off,
197
565703
3359
09:44
and the buoy popped up into the air, and the cable
198
569062
2299
09:47
dropped to the sea floor, and he did that all the way out
199
571361
1905
09:49
to the ship, and when he got there,
200
573266
1873
09:51
they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie,
201
575139
2413
09:53
and then he jumped back in, and he swam back to shore,
202
577552
2419
09:55
and then he lit a cigarette. (Laughter)
203
579971
7160
10:03
And then once that cable was on shore,
204
587131
2712
10:05
they began to prepare to connect it to the other side,
205
589843
3504
10:09
for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station.
206
593347
2957
10:12
And first they got it with a hacksaw, and then they start
207
596304
2858
10:15
sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a --
208
599162
2936
10:17
sort of working like chefs, and then finally they're working
209
602098
2062
10:20
like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up
210
604160
2708
10:22
with the cable that had come down,
211
606868
1677
10:24
and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together.
212
608545
2991
10:27
And when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw,
213
611536
3331
10:30
you stop thinking about the Internet as a cloud.
214
614867
2643
10:33
It starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing.
215
617510
3937
10:37
And what surprised me as well was that as much as this
216
621447
2508
10:39
is based on the most sophisticated technology, as much
217
623955
2847
10:42
as this is an incredibly new thing, the physical process
218
626802
2905
10:45
itself has been around for a long time, and the culture is the same.
219
629707
3767
10:49
You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer
220
633474
1989
10:51
giving directions in the background. And more importantly,
221
635463
3175
10:54
the places are the same. These cables still connect
222
638638
2643
10:57
these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa,
223
641281
3050
11:00
Mumbai, Singapore, New York.
224
644331
3159
11:03
And then the process on shore takes around three or four days,
225
647490
4086
11:07
and then, when it's done, they put the manhole cover
226
651576
4191
11:11
back on top, and they push the sand over that,
227
655767
2971
11:14
and we all forget about it.
228
658738
3082
11:17
And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud,
229
661820
2251
11:19
but every time we put something on the cloud,
230
664071
1910
11:21
we give up some responsibility for it.
231
665981
2202
11:24
We are less connected to it. We let other people worry about it.
232
668183
3864
11:27
And that doesn't seem right.
233
672047
1283
11:29
There's a great Neal Stephenson line where he says
234
673330
2342
11:31
that wired people should know something about wires.
235
675672
4397
11:35
And we should know, I think, we should know
236
680069
2270
11:38
where our Internet comes from, and we should know
237
682339
2753
11:40
what it is that physically, physically connects us all.
238
685092
4822
11:45
Thank you. (Applause)
239
689914
2339
11:48
(Applause)
240
692253
2397
11:50
Thanks. (Applause)
241
694650
3610
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andrew Blum - Network authorFor his new book, "Tubes," Andrew Blum visited the places where the internet exists in physical form: the cables and switches and servers that virtually connect us.
Why you should listen
In his book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum wanted to capture the "spirit of place" of the Internet. Because as far-reaching and virtual as our connection to the Net is, the signals travel on good old-fashioned cabling, glass fibers jacketed in polymer, running through conduit under streets. The immaterial Internet runs on a very material, industry-like infrastructure. So that when Alaska senator Ted Stevens called the Internet "a series of tubes" ... well, he was kind of right, and he did inspire the title of this utterly fascinating book, which explores the switches, data centers, sea crossings and many, many tubes that make up our online reality.
Blum is a writer for Newsweek, and has written for Wired, Popular Science, Metropolis and more.
Learn more about Tubes:
Read excerpts on submarine cables and Internet exchange points (like 60 Hudson in NYC).
Browse book club materials (from the Amherst Reads book club)
Listen to Andrew Blum's audio interview on Fresh Air
Andrew Blum | Speaker | TED.com