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

[riontel]

Explaining to people what I do can be difficult. In most people's view bits get from point A to point B by magic and a network engineer is that geeky and rumpled looking guy who comes to fix your computer when you can't get to your e-mail or see your favorite web site, basically, when you declare your internet to be broken. So I decided to read something that's positioned as "going inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flipping on the lights" just to see what we look like to an outside inquiring mind.

The proclaimed goal of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet was to find and describe the "real" internet, the one composed of cables and fibers and big routers, as opposed to the amorphous cloud that the internet is to most people. Blum traveled widely and researched extensively in fulfillment of his goal but the result as set in the book is quite shallow. He obviously didn't want to scare a layman with too many technical details, but all the gushing about locations and geography, pseudo-philosophical and poetical asides and, most annoyingly, extensive descriptions of people completely defeated the purpose. Who cares what he had for dinner the day he saw Tata land a new undersea cable on a beach in Portugal or what the engineer who gave him a tour of a telecom hotel was wearing? You are trying to figure out the physical layout of the internet not put a human face to it, stick to the technology! Talking of technology, there was very little of it. Somebody who is already familiar with the subject matter can find tiny little nuggets of actual relevant information scattered about, but I doubt anybody else would even recognize them as such. Then again, maybe that's not why a normal person would be reading this book? Then why?

On the positive side, I found his Google bashing a bit amusing (they allowed him on their data center campus, but refused to let him into the data center). And I did enjoy his very respectful attitude toward network engineers, he never once confused them with network administrators :)

Comments

[spamsink]

most annoyingly, extensive descriptions of people

I share your sentiment. Those annoying descriptions of people seem to be a journalistic tradition here.

[a-lazy-legend.livejournal.com]

I'll have to read this thing to form an opinion on "people descriptions", but my current guess is he was trying for "technology with a human face" idea :) showing that perhaps not all geeks are grumpy fat white guys with questionable hygiene habits.

[riontel.livejournal.com]

I hate "technology with a human face" idea. The whole reason I went into technology is that it has very few human faces attached to it. And his descriptions were more of a perpetuating cliche type anyhow.