The internet
The internet is a real place you could touch
When you save a photo to "the cloud," where does it really go?
The internet feels like magic. It is not.
It is built from real wires, cables, and machines.
You could walk up and touch those machines.
They sit in real rooms in real cities.
All of it is the internet's infrastructure.
A writer named Andrew Blum went to find the internet.
He visited the cables, cities, and machines himself.
He wrote a book about what he saw.
He called it Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet.
“For all the talk of the placelessness of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it.”
Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (2012)
Blum found the room in Los Angeles where the internet first flickered on.
He also saw giant data centers in the Pacific Northwest.
Google, Microsoft, and Facebook built those buildings.
"The cloud" is just floating data with no real home.Tap to reveal
The friendly word "cloud" hides the truth. Your data sits on solid computers in real buildings you could visit.