SCIENCE fiction author William Gibson famously described cyberspace as a shared hallucination. Most people struggle to imagine what the internet’s physical structure looks like, but in Tubes, Andrew Blum sets out to find it. His first task is to disentangle our familiar, if not strictly accurate, conceptions about the internet from its actual cables, boxes and routers.
One such notion is the idea that the internet finds a route around censorship. This is true of the metaphorical overlay – take down a website and it can pop up elsewhere in an instant. But when it comes to the physical processes…
