What the Internet Is Made of

The title of Andrew Blum’s “Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet” is a ricocheting joke. When Alaskan Sen. Ted Stevens described the Internet as a “series of tubes” back in 2006, he was roundly mocked for not understanding the online world despite being chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and therefore instrumental in overseeing it. Stevens may not have known what he was talking about, Blum (a correspondent for Wired magazine) acknowledges, but he wasn’t wrong, either. In writing this account of “the Internet’s physical infrastructure,” Blum found that “one thing [the Internet] most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of tubes.”