Andrew Blum, the author of “Tubes — A Journey to the Center of the Internet,” is an appropriate person to appear at the November 14 dedication of the Lam Cloud data and business continuity center.
A correspondent for Wired Magazine, Blum has researched the inner workings of the Internet and its many connections — the components that make up what people now call “the cloud.”
Among Blum’s observations: “I have confirmed with my own eyes that the Internet is many things, in many places. But one thing it most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of tubes. There are tubes beneath the ocean that connect London and New York. Tubes that connect Google and Facebook. There are buildings filled with tubes, and hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and railroad tracks, beside which lie buried tubes.
“Everything you do online travels through a tube. Inside those tubes (by and large) are glass fibers,” the author continues. “Inside those fibers is light. Encoded in that light is, increasingly, us.”
