Book of the week: Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

(Ecco, $27)

It was a “notorious moment of senatorial buffoonery,” said Jonathan Liu in The Boston Globe. In 2006, Ted Stevens of Alaska became the source of endless late-night jokes when, during a Senate committee hearing, he declared the Internet to be a “series of tubes.” The late U.S. senator didn’t know what he was talking about, but as Andrew Blum notes in his “clever, enterprising, and a tad facile” new book, Stevens wasn’t exactly wrong. After a squirrel chewed through a wire and cut off Blum’s Internet connection, the Wired reporter went looking for the stuff the Internet is made of. Expecting some invisible web or “planet-encircling cloud,” he instead found metal boxes, acres of them, housed in locations you could map, and cables stretching thousands of miles. Up close, the medium of the future looks a lot like the telephone company.

So much for the “utopian romance of the Internet” as a decentralized network with “no weight, no footprint,” said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Though fiber-optic cables and brick-and-mortar data centers aren’t inherently sexy, Blum’s “imaginative, evocative” prose conveys “the wonder represented by these unprepossessing objects.” One of his “ingeniously beguiling” tactics is to trace the geographical path of an email he sends to his wife in Brooklyn from across the Atlantic. “Before you know it, you have acquired a sense of the basic structure of the Internet.” He even provides a smattering of intrigue. When Blum visits a Google data center, his visit is “supervised so oppressively it’s like taking an official tour of North Korea.” Later, he wonders about the wisdom of trusting corporations that don’t return the favor.

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Blum untangles misconceptions about more than the Web’s structure, said Sally Adee in New Scientist. The Internet is more vulnerable to censorship, for instance, than we like to think. If a government gets physical, it can be as effective at arresting the spread of information as the grandmother who “accidentally cut off Armenia” by slicing through a cable buried in her garden. One thin, 2,700-mile-long hose in the Atlantic carries every email and financial transaction sent between New York and London. Blum’s quest ultimately produces a history of the Web that’s “one of the most memorable I’ve ever read,” even in its disappointments. The so-called center of the Internet proves to be “as unremarkable as a router.” But if you have a taste for “postmodern” quests, that only makes Blum’s account more satisfying.