Don't Be Fooled by "The Cloud"!
Can you remember the first time you heard mention of The Cloud? For me it was a TV ad presenting a woman working on family photos—for some reason The Cloud was the answer to all her problems. Since then, this catchy concept has been wholeheartedly embraced by purveyors of convenience. And today almost all electronic goods and services make mention and use of it. But isn’t it an interesting notion! Clouds are light, filmy, puffy, billowy, they are almost immaterial, further perpetuating the illusion that cyberspace is unworldly, not tangible, vague, just out there somewhere in another dimension.
Today you’ll hear about the very physical nature of The Cloud. We will take a journey to the center of the Internet with author Andrew Blum. His writings about architecture, design, technology, urbanism, art, and travel have appeared in numerous publications such as Wired, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Popular Science, and Metropolis, where he is a contributing editor. The book you’ll be hearing about on is called Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, which has been published globally and translated into ten languages. Mr. Blum has degrees in literature from Amherst College and in human geography from the University of Toronto.
What first got Andrew interested enough in this subject to research and write a book about it? He grew increasingly intrigued about what was real in a tangible, physical sense, about the Internet. Maybe it was the squirrel that nibbled through a cable in his Brooklyn backyard, interrupting his service, who started it all. That was certainly a physical aspect to the Internet! Finally, some time later, he learned that from there the cable went underground to a big brown metal box a few neighbors away to join other cables at a junction box, where they were combined into a few strands of glass (fiber optic cable). This process continued toward a “head-end” where resides a cable modem termination system (CMTS), then toward “master head-ends” and the biggest hubs, of which there are only 12 to 13 on earth!
Who maintains these cable gathering stations where different network companies agree to cooperate with others, their competitors, in a process called “peering”? Network engineers who work in the dark, cold, lonely, concrete world of wire cages containing racks of servers with eerily blinking lights. A few times a year they gather together for face-to-face networking and discussion at NANOG (North American Network Operators Group). They not only have to be great trouble-shooters when something in their network of networks goes wrong, they must be diplomats, negotiating sharing agreements between the competing networks they work for.
At the time of recording, it’s been almost two years exactly since Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of eavesdropping NSA has been doing. Before that watershed event, Andrew caught a glimpse of the global and physical nature of the phenomenon. At the central Internet hub of Germany, his guide explained to him that national security “siphoned off” 10% of the traffic passing through it. The information kept going, but was copied to be examined. Although the significance of this information escaped him at the time, he now appreciates that eavesdropping on a mammoth scale has been standard operating procedure for years among a variety of governments.
Throughout Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Mr. Blum encounters the small world of giant data centers and the humans who run them. Does it resemble a cloud? One of his guides stated, “This has nothing to do with clouds. It has everything to do with being cold!” “The cloud is a building. It works like a factory.” Not to leave us entirely without romance, Blum concludes, “What I understood when I arrived home was that the Internet wasn’t a physical world or a virtual world, but a human world.”
Andrew Blum is the author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, the first book-length look at the physical infrastructure of the global Internet. Blum’s writings about architecture, design, technology, urbanism, art, and travel have appeared in numerous publications, including Metropolis, where he is a contributing editor, Architectural Record, Wired, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Popular Science. Tubes has been published globally and translated into ten languages. Blum has degrees in literature from Amherst College and in human geography from the University of Toronto, and lives in his native New York City with his wife and two children. He is currently writing a new book about the infrastructure of the weather.
You can learn more about Andrew on his website