Tubes

Published June 7, 2012 / Viking Trade Paperback and ebook, £12.99

A book about the people and places that make our virtual world actual.

"Every web site, every email, every instant message travels through real junctions in a real network of real cables. It's all too awesome to behold. Andrew Blum's fascinating book demystifies the earthly geography of this most ethereal terra incognita."
Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein

In April 2011, a seventy-five year old woman deprived Armenia of its internet access when she sliced through a buried cable with her garden spade. Earlier that year, Egyptian authorities simply switched off 70% of the country's internet connections in an attempt to quell a revolution. In 2009, a squirrel chewed through a wire in Andrew Blum's backyard, slowing his broadband to a trickle and catapulting him on a quest to find out what this so-called 'internet' actually is.

This is the Internet as you've never seen it before. It's not a concept. It's not a culture. It's most certainly not a “cloud”. It's a bunch of tubes. But what kind of tubes? Hundreds of thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable, criss-crossing the globe, pulsing with trillions of photons of light, linking us via anonymous exchanges in secretive locations with vast data-warehouses. Andrew Blum explains where it is, how it got there, what it looks like, how it works - and crucially, what happens when it breaks. This book takes us behind the scenes of this hidden world and introduces us to the remarkable clan of insiders and eccentrics who design and run it everyday.

Andrew Blum is a correspondent at Wired (U.S.) magazine whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. This is his first book. He will be in the UK for publicity at the end of June and is available for interview and to write pieces.