We can all joke about when former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens referred to the Internet as a “series of tubes,” but what exactly is the physical infrastructure that enables us to carelessly surf the Web and stay connected? Fear not. With Andrew Blum’s new book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, which just came out today, we can get a better handle on just that. In our recent interview with Blum, our discussion touched on resilience, the theme of our 2012 conferences, as it relates to the fragility and robustness of this infrastructure we’ve grown to depend upon. We looked at the correlation between the physicality of the Web and access to broadband, a topic of PopTech’s upcoming Lab. And Blum equated our limited network capabilities to, well, iceberg lettuce. Read on to learn more.
thisartisyours George Platt Lynes - Salvador Dali, 1939.Gelatin silver print with applied pigment
(Source: metmuseum.org)
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