pandered to the big banks and set up considering public interest. and this author's thoughts on the obama administration, obamacare, bailouts, and guantánamo bay. his book is the corruption chronicles. in global weirdness, we talk about the relentless drought, rising seas and the weather of the future. climate central control analyzes the big questions regarding climate change. ..

[applause] >> thanks, thank you. in addition to the surveys, you'll find ipads under all of your seats if you want to look right now. [laughter] the, it's wonderful to be here. it's an honor to be here at town hall, and i love being in seattle to see friends. beautiful city. i started, as you can probably tell, a little bit from that bio, i have written in the past mostly about architecture, about buildings. and the thing about that is when you write about architecture, you can look at the history of the place and the history of the building, and you can talk to the architect, but then most importantly at the end of the

process or the middle of the process, you can go and you can see the building, and you can hear what it sounds like, what it smells like and actually go and experience it. or there are lots of buildings that form cities, and you can regardless of the sort of complicated history of politics and culture that's made a city, you can still go walk around it, and that's a kind of crucial part of the experience. it's something that's completely embodied, that you can go there. but about, urge, over the last several years though what i realized was that writing about architecture meant more and more i was sitting in front of my laptop screen. and then at the end of the day particularly since it was around 2007 when i got an iphone, i would get up and look at the smaller screen i carried in my pocket, and that disconnect was incredibly striking to me. i was, ostensibly, supposed to be out in the world looking at things, but instead i was always in front of my screen. and even more striking, that

world behind my screen seemed not to be a world at all. there were places to shop or talk to friends that were kind of a land scape of the mind, but there was no physical presence to them as all. this is no way of understanding what was actually back there. the one kind of image we have of it, the consistent image of ma world behind the screen was always this, was the internet was some sort of amorphous blob that was infinite and unknowable, and it wasn't supposed to be that descriptive about what this place was which always kind of reminded me of the blue marble picture of the earth sort of float anything be space. that's both meant to say that this is where we are, but it's also too much to understand in some form. and that was what the internet was. it was this big, amorphous blob. and that was all i could sort of know about the physical reality behind the glass as much as i

was trying to look at, you know, to get a sense for the place that i was in. and this amount today a kind of low-grade existential crisis because how could i sort of know who i was if i didn't know what that world was behind the screen? and, um, and then, and then one day this happened. [laughter] my internet at home broke as it occasionally does, and the cable guy came to fix it and sort of started at the dusty clump of cables behind my couch and then followed it out to the front of my building in brooklyn and under to the basement and down to the backyard. there's this other big clump of cables. and then there was a squirrel running alonging the wire. and he said i think a squirrel is chewing on your internet. and this was, obviously, surprising because, um, the internet was a transcendent idea, you know? [laughter]

it wasn't something a squirrel could chew on. but more striking than that, if a squirrel could chew on that piece of the internet, there must be other pieces that a squirrel could chew on. so i got this image of what would happen if i kind of yanked the cable from the wall and started to follow it, you know, where would it go? it must go somewhere. all i knew was that amorphous blob. but the thing was when i started to think about what, you know, when i started to sort of ask what that place was and could i go visit it, the answer was unequivocally no. only fools try to visit the internet, um, like in this episode of south park where the internet breaks, but there's no internet to find out if the internet is broken. so they all become internet refugees in california because that's where there's internet. and it becomes very "grapes of wrath," and then eventually they

find the internet, this big version of the router you might have at home, and they play the close encounters of the third kind song at it to try to wake it up, but that doesn't work. and venn eventually they, one of the little guys climbs up the ramp and unplugs the giant plug in back and plugs it back in. [laughter] and then he says, the flashing yellow light is steady green, and they're saved. [laughter] you know, salvation. or if that's not the internet, then this is the internet. this single box with a red light on it which is represented in the i.t. crowd where they convince their colleague that they have arranged with the elders of the internet for her to borrow the internet for her office presentation. and normally it lives at the top of big ben because that's where you get the best reception. [laughter] but she's -- they've managed to, you know, procure it for the

afternoon so she can show it off. and she says, she says this is the internet? the whole internet? is it heavy? and they laugh and say, of course not, the internet doesn't weigh anything, it's wireless. but that's the implication, that's what we all think. or they're the poets who also have their own perceptions, and my favorite is christine smallwood who points out the history of the internet is a history of metaphors about the internet, all stumbling about this dilemma: how do we talk to each other about an invisible god? and then she weighs the merits of describing the internet as a tootsie roll, a hot tub or a plane, and then she realizes that, actually, the internet is probably quite ugly, and she wishes, she says, that it looked like matt damon or like lines of light written in an invisible sky. and so we're back to that amorphous blob.

we can't sort of get away from the lines of light in the sky, the sort of, you know, infinite, uncontainable universe that's impossible to understand. but fortunately, there was one guy that did understand that the internet was a place or at least could be something else, and that was senator ted stevens of alaska. [laughter] who, um, who said when he was chair of the senate commerce science and technology committee and, therefore, responsible for legislating the internet; the internet is not something you just dump something on, it is not a big truck, it's a series of tubes. and we all laughed at this. we sort of thought this was completely hilarious. [laughter] and i made fun of him. i mean, again, the internet isn't a series of tubes, it's this transcendent idea. but for those of us who are preoccupied with the physical world, then it seemed like he was a little bit right.

there must be something out there. and it was those tubes that i sort of set out to see. so i want to talk about those tubes, but first a caveat which is that logically speaking the internet is incredibly complicating, and any given web page you load will have thousands and thousands of processes behind it. but physically the kind of the reality of it is relatively straightforward. it's, you know, the basic unit is at the center of an internet is a 10 gigabit per second wave of light through fiberoptic cables that are then over long distances buried along the railroad tracks in places like this which is in the middle of kansas which is a place that came about where i encountered it after working on a photo essay for "wired" a few years ago and was asked to find, you know, pieces of the internet that we could photograph. and was on the phone with a pr person for one of the big internet backbones and said, so,

is there like a hut in the middle of the country where, you know, where this, you know, where the fiber is, you know, the signals are regenerated, and she said let me find out and got on the phone a guy with a pickup truck in kansas city, the middle of the country, with the responsibility for all of the regeneration huts in a 500-mile radius. and then proceeded to sort of surreally asked him which was the most beautiful hut. [laughter] and this was the place that came up. but the key, the key thing still is that basic idea that there's light, you know, light pulsing through fiber. and this is the kind of, this is the even sort of smaller unit. this is a fiberoptic jumper cable that's literally filled with light. when you bend it, light comes out. and what's remarkable is if the basic piece today is a 10 gigabit per second, already they're testing 100-gigabit per

second, and even more remarkably, you'll have situations where there are multiple waive lengths or colors of light through single strands of fiber. so immediately it does become these sort of massive numbers, but also there are these yellow fiberoptic cables. and can then they come together and in buildings. this building is one of my favorites. this is 60 hudson street in new york. and if the internet is a network of networks u it's all about these places where one network can connect to another, you know, where you have the router of one network, a comcast or a time warper connected -- warner connected to another network of facebook or google or microsoft, and, you know, that's a very physical process. it's about, you know, a big refrigerator-like machine with blinking lights and a yellow cable connected to it and strung up in the ceiling of a building like this and down into the router of another network.

and there aren't as many of these places as you might think. there are about a dozen of these buildings in the world that are by far important measured by the fact that they are the places where more networks meet than any other. in seattle that's the westin building which i did not visit and don't know a whole lot about, but i know if it is not in the top dozen, it's sort of the very next tier of most important buildings. but this thing that's interesting about it is that they are, there's a kind of publicness to fit, you know? yes, the buildings are highly secure, and you can't just walk in, and there aren't at least yet kind of, you know, brewery-style tours of the internet, but you can because they're the places where networks meet, there's a lot of conversation about where you are, where one network is and where another network is, and where are we in the same place so we can physically connect one router to another? and a lot of that conversation happens among about very

relatively small group of 300 network engineers who gather under the banner of a group called the north american operators' group who, a, if you talk about going to conferences to network, they literally go to conferences to network, and they do it about three times a year. they meet, their annual meeting is three times a year because those social ties are so important, and they drink a lot of beer, and they figure out -- they trust even -- each other, and they figure out if you're clueful or not, being the opposite of clueless. and if so, does it make sense for me to connect my network to your network? or perhaps i should pay you as well, you know, we'll enter into some business arrangement. but it is all about the detached space in between, it is all about trusting the other engineer to make sure things are working properly in order to create this network of networks. and it all happens in these sort of enormous building-size jumbles of these yellow

fiberoptic cables. and then the part that i love the most is that then at some point it hits the dirt. you know, at some point the internet, these buildings are connected to the earth. you know, they're immovable. their geography's very specific, and that's what this room is. it's called a fiber vault. and if the rest of these buildings are like walking into a machine, are sort of loud and cold to keep the machines cool, and, you know, over the hard floors and high ceilings and, you know, just incredibly sort of overwhelming environment, when you walk into this room, t hot, and it's still, and it smells like dirt because this is where the fibers come out of the ground. and this in particular is in a building in ashburn, virginia, which is a strange place because if most of these -- most of, you know, the most important buildings are in world capitals,

frankfurt and amsterdam and london and new york. there are a few outliers, and ashburn, virginia, right near dulles airport is one of them s so you end up talking about ashburn as if it were one of these big cities when it's an unincorporated suburb. and the key building there is the building owned by a company named eqinex. you can see the runways. and because this is because so many networks are meeting and bandwidth becoming so abundant and cheap, you end up with this parasitic activity where data centers which i'm sort of describing as the places where data is stored gather around these distribution depots, these places where all the networks meet. you can see those aircraft carrier-like buildings around the handful of buildings at the center. and then a piece of the book was excerpted a few weeks ago with the sensational headline, the bull's eye of america's internet

with a map of this and sort of a red concentric circle around it, and the company that owns this building, all week they were tweeting we are the bull's eye of america's internet. because this is what they do. they provide space and a sort of environment with the proper care and feeting for -- feeding for network equipment and networks can come and connect one to the other. and then the other piece, sort of even more poetic piece s the undersea cables. the cables that literally connect continue innocents. and if finish continue innocents. and if satellite is around here and satellite is a technology of last resort for international traffic and instead you have these cables across the ocean, not that many of them depending on how you count, about 10 or 12 across the atlantic and even fewer across the pacific that are the thickness of a garden

hose and easy to come prehe say in that dimension. -- comprehend in that dimension. and suicide are four, eight or six strands of fiber and then a plastic wrapper and a copper wrapper that sends electricity through the wire to power the repeaters that exist every 50 miles or so, these big sort of blue fin tuna-like things that sit on the ocean floor. and the principle is incredibly simple. so there's all this fantastically complex materials, technology and processing technology, forward error correction, all these complicated algorithms, but the basic geography is incredibly clear. you have a handing station on one shore of the ocean usually tucked away in some kind of seaside neighborhood, and then a tube under the ocean. and it's that other dimension the one that, you know, if it's the thickness of a garden hose, it's the 5,000 mile length or the 8,000 mile length that seems

almost impossible to comprehend. and then there's a manhole like this, this being a particularly beautiful one. which, again, came out of the question is there a manhole on the beach where the cable ends? and the answer is, yes, there is actually a manhole on the beach where the cable ends. and what's so remarkable is the cables up stretch between the same places they've always stretch inside the sort of 150-year history of telegraph cables and iewn between classic port cities from new york to lisbon to hong kong to singapore. it's always tracing the same path. sort of historic trade routes. so i wanted to see one of these cables being built. which was a sort of kind of rare, historical moment. there hasn't been a new transatlantic cable built in ten years. there will be one next summer. but, um, this is my friend simon cooper whom i've never actually met. we've only communicated through

telephone and his video conferencing link. he worked until recently for top deck communications which is the, um, the communications wing of tata, big indian industrial conglomerate based in singapore. and the undersea cable industry is dominated almost entirely by englishmen, and they're all 42 because they all started with the beginning of the boom, about 20 years ago. and he has this incredibly expansive, geographic imagination. he says things like this, and tata had sort of been born out of when they bought a network out of bankruptcy, a link across the atlantic and the pacific, and then they started adding pieces to it until they had, essentially, a continuous loop around the world. so you can buy a wave.of light one election or the other, and if the cable breaks on one side, they will send it around the other way which seems like an incredible amazing way of thinking about the geography to

have earth. but because the prices are always falling on the transatlantic and trans-pacific routes was to find places that weren't wired which had meant primarily in the persian gulf and in africa. so three years ago africa had, essentially, one cable down the west coast, and now there's three down the west coast and three down the east coast. and it was one of those cables that i wanted to see be installed. but when i said i really, you know, can i -- do you have any cables landing, being constructed soon, and he said, yeah, we'll keep you posted, and i was worried he would say guam, or they were also building a cable in somalia which seemed like a bad place to watch, go sit on the beach. [laughter] and, instead the -- it was a cable from lisbon. so a little after 9 on a monday morning this guy walked out of the water carrying a lightweight nylon line that was the first link between land and sea.

and so they pulled the line on the beach, and the bulldozer started -- and then brought it out to this special ship, and then a bulldozer started to pull the cable in. and then it was floated on these orange buoys. you can see the english engineers looking on. and then once the cable was in place, the guy in the wet suit who was a spanish underwater construction worker like a pirate with a big hoop earring walked back into the surf with a big knife and started cutting the beauties off. and the cable -- buoys off. the cables would pop up out of the water, and the cable would drop, and the skiff would chase them down. and he would do that the whole way, the whole kilometer out to the ship. and then they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie, and he jumped back in and swam back, and then he had a cigarette when he got back to the beach. but that was the first piece that put the cable in place. and then once it sort of came

ashore, they had to strip back the kind of extra layers of steel coating that are on the cable close to shore to keep bankers from going, you know, running over it and breaking it which meant that these, you know, big guys with tattoos and hacksaws start hacking away at the cable, you know, first getting the steel mesh out and then working more delicately to take the sort of plastic sheathing and then finally working with the fibers like jewelers where they're fusing them together with the cable that comes down the hill from the landing scaition and fusing them with a hole punch machine that sort of heats them together. so when you see these guys going at the internet with a hacksaw, it starts to seem a lot less like an amorphous blob and starts to seem a lot, a lot, you know, like a lot more physical thing. and then when the tide gets -- goes out, they sort of put the steel case around it and try to get it as buried as possible

without having to put on their scuba gear for those first dangerous feet in the water. and what's remarkable is that it's the, it's, you know, the technology again is, you know, the astounding and the capacity that you can put through a single fiber. but the both physically in gross terms and culturally, it's the same as it's been for 100 years. this is the picture from the telegraph archives, museum and archives, which, essentially, is the exact same thing right down to the english engineer, the guy in the hat in the back pointing. and the local laborers and the ship and the, you know, and the cable coming up on the beach in hong kong. and then when the process is done over the course of three or four days, the ship steams off, you know, 8,000 miles down the coates of africa paying -- coast of ca paying the cable off over the back, and the people in the

village near lisbon, you know, life then goes back to normal. they put the manhole cover back on, they cover it with sand, and then it's kind of there forgotten, and nobody talks about it. but that seems, that doesn't seem right to me. it seems like, you know, we should be talking about this. there's a, um, every time, you know, we talk about the cloud, but obviously, the cloud isn't a cloud. and it seems like every time that we put more, you know, we give more to the cloud, we give up some respondent for it. we forget about it, we put the sand over it when, in fact, we should be having a conversation about what that is. neil stephenson said wired people should know something about wires. so i want to finish with a story about my visit to two data centers which are the first ground-up data centers of the number one and number two most visited web sites, facebook and google, both of whom made the same decision about five years apart which was to build their first data centers in central

oregon not quite in the same place, about 100, 150 miles away from each other, but for mostly the same reasons. you know, if the exchange points, the places where networks meet, are often, you know, in these major cities, places where data centers are sort of end up on two poles. they either gather where we are or around these exchange points in places like virginia or silicon valley, or they go to the place that it's absolutely most efficient for them to be which is often someplace cold with lots of cheap power. like central oregon, like quincy in washington which is where microsoft was one of the first to do that, to put their big data center in quincy. i'm sure somebody here has probably been here: but the thing that was so striking about my visit to these two places was, um, the degree to which facebook saw its data center in a place called pineville, oregon, as a showpiece. facebook embraced pineville,be

and pineville embraced facebook, coming in with this, essentially, enormous machine that was sort of definitely bringing a lot of spirit back to this town. and it turns out now apple has moved in directly across the street. and these are massive buildings. it's the first of three buildings planned, so 300,000-square-foot building, you know, the size of three walmarts, walmart being the measure of all things big. [laughter] and uses as much power as -- uses more power than the entire county that it fits in. and yet is sort of taking the place of the industry that had left. you get a sense of it sort of coming out of the earth, and coming out of the landscape, and if before i went i thought it was going to be a sort of, you know, industrial blight, the the opposite. it was the sort of surprisingly beautiful thing and this thing that the town had absolutely

embraced. and which for facebook has really become a showpiece. there's a joke to be made about that, you know, facebook is playing fast and loose with their privacy, and everybody can come on over and see. but it seems to me to embody the idea that this somewhat belongs to you, you know, that this is -- the things in here are in part yours, and there's a lot of pride in that. so you have a building that's a real hot rod that's sort of one of the most efficient data centers because it can be designed from the ground up and optimized to use as little energy as possible. and then it's really probably the most beautiful data center you'll ever see. most sort of look like a seamy underbelly, like an electrician went absolutely crazy. but facebook has lined everything up perfectly, and as each one of these blue lights represents a terabyte hard drive. and yet even being there, even sort of knowing that, it's difficult to make the leap

between sort of knowing the sort of emotional resonance of some of the things that this contains, you know, the announcements of new babies and new jobs and deaths and many more banal be things and knowing that it's actually here. there's still a big sort of leap of the imagination required to connect that abstraction with those things that it contains. but it's, but it's sort of a start, you know? it's nice to know that it's actually there. and the library analogy is a good one. this is the place that contains these things. but my experience at google was, essentially, the exact opposite where facebook had sort of opened wide the doors and, you know, spent the entire day, you know, answering questions and making sure i understood which had been the case as well in dozens and dozens of the other pieces of the internet that i had visited, at google i was, you know, i invited myself over. they said, sure, come on over. and then was, essentially, given a tour of the parking lot.

and when i said, well, can you tell me a bit about what's going on inside these buildings, they said i'm sure that's information we have internally, but it's not something we share. i'm sure they do know what's going on inside the buildings. and, um, it sort of continued to play out as farce with a visit to the googler's vegetable patch which was fallow because it was winter and then this delicious lunch of salmon, these great greens and peanut butter cups. and the invitation for each person in turn that had been invite inside lunch to tell me how much they liked working at google. and the degree to which this was the outlier among the dozens and dozens of places i visited was striking, and even more striking begin google's mission statement of organizing and distributing the world's information and the sense that i had that they should be held to a high or standard. that given how much we end trust them, that trust wasn't returned, and there was a sense

that, don't worry, we'll take care of you. all of you don't need to understand this. unlike the dozens of other network engineers who made sure that i understood this and could then share that. and then when i said, oh, i'm disappointed not to have gotten the chance to see inside these buildings, the response was that governors and senators have been disappointed too. which was a prescient comment because now governors and senators are investigating google for exactly these privacy things. [laughter] but it's, i mean s -- it's that exceptionalism that was so striking to me and equally so, the sense this doesn't have to be hidden behind closed doors, that there was another way of thinking about this. when i left google and drove down the hill to portland, i passed the bonneville dam which is a fortress. there are these huge gates off the highway, and you sort of go

through the gates, and then an army corps of engineer guard searches your car and waves you in. and once you're inside, there's a sort of museum and fish hadder where you can watch the fish go, and the sense that the 75-plus years of history are discussed and presented and considered and shared, that this is somehow public infrastructure. in the somehow belongs to all of us. and it seems as if that's, certainly, this is a sensitive place. certainly, this is a place that has a security issue of some sort, and that's very clear and sort of every piece of it. but what's equally clear is it somehow belongs to us, and there's a sense that we should know what goes on in there. of course, bag to be l's a private company -- google's a private company, and the argument that there's a competitive advantage from keeping their data center private makes a lot of sense. but t also cheer that, you know, this can't be a black box given

how much we've given to google and other companies and how much we give to the internet. so that's, it's that sense of openness that i sort of have kept in mind, and that's the kind of thing that i feel like a conversation about what the internet should be should consider. so thank you. [applause] i'm happy to take a few questions, and i guess you should come up to the mic as well if you want. >> in your book you allude to a couple different problems that came to mind like about the technology of being dinosaurs when the skin came off? when i've been learning the internet, i've always kept in mind an elephant's child.

there were six honest men that taught me all i knew, who, what, when, where and who? which one do you think honest men the internet needs now? >> sorry, the who? >> the who, what, where, when and why are the ones that teach us what's going on in the world. and the internet is treated hike as you pointed out as a cloud and all this type of stuff. what is the question people should be asking the most about the internet now? >> well, for me the first question was with, was where. you know, where is it. and then the second question was, what is it. and the third question was, why is it here? and the why is it here was amaze being in that it was a surprise -- amazing in that it was a surprisingly human story. you know, the buildings like 60 hudson and ashburn, there's always some sort of fact of

geography where 60 hudson is an important spot for telecommunications, and the first way out of town, the holland tunnel. but then this is always somebody who convinced the first two networks to come and made this building someplace that other networks would want to come. in the case of eqyiney, that was with these blue lights and really good snack bar all adhering to an aesthetic principle that the guy calls cyberfic. but for me, the sort of how of what el we could be asking of -- what else we could be asking of the internet that we have is really compelling. "tubes" is almost entirely, is entirely descriptive, but it's been interesting to start to think about what the prescriptive possibilities are. you know, at the moment you can

buy 30 different kinds of lettuce and a few different kinds of fish and coffee beans and anything you want, but you probably only have one choice of internet. so we're sort of all having the, eating the internet equivalent of iceberg lettuce. so i feel like there is a conversation that should be had about what a different, what more choices about where our internet comes from would look like. yeah. >> you mentioned that the thickness of the wire that gives us our internet is about that of a garden hose. what kind of precautions do they take to make sure this wire does not get damaged? >> yeah. the undersea cables are about that thick. you know, international. um, they do get severed and damaged. you know, whether by dragging anchors or by underwater landslides or earthquakes. and when one of the underwater cables is broken, and the most famous case was in 2006 often

coast of taiwan and lausanne, there was a major earthquake that severed six of the eight cables. supposedly, there was a major worldwide drop in spam, and trading was halted in korea, and there were major consequences. and to fix it you have to send a ship out and throw a grappling hook over the side, find the end of the cable, pick it up, fuse each strand of fiber together and throw it over the side, and in that instance, lausanne, this were multiple break on multiple cables, and it took a matter of weeks and months to fix i. in terms of precaution, it's interesting. because the biggest risk by far is from dragging anchors, there's a group called the international cable protection committee whose job it is to announce where the cables are. rather than hiding them, so anchors don't break them.

and this was definitely a disconnect between theceps of security and sort of risk of the cables that people who operate the cables have, first, this sort of -- often some higher ups, and the most striking example of that was i was getting ready to visit one of these cable landing stations, and i was asked to speak with the head of security. and he said, um, you know, we're happy to have you do this, we want to share how this works, but we ask that you not publish the location of the landing station. and if you enter the name of that company in the town that it's in, you know, a big red flag lands on google maps sort of on his desk. and not only that, but the fcc license, the landing license for all these cables is a matter of public record. so the secrecy is not very -- the secrecy isn't the key to it at all. >> go ahead.

>> what kind of vulnerabilities and are there for terrorist attacks? on these stations or cutting cables? >> the, um, well, the points of biggest concern are often the places where the networks meet, these major buildings. but, again, because these are -- they sort of have to, this is a kind of publicness between that connection with networks, these companies that own the buildings are eager to announce where they are so everybody can connect their networks. and it's not a very -- it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in that they're quite big buildings, they're difficult to destroy in the any wholesale way, and more than that it's not as many if, you know, hitting some piece of them would have a major impact on the internet. so you're perceived as trying to take town the global economy,

and you've perhaps slowed down a few networks from morning. i have $75,000 worth of equipment rather than for terrorist reasons, and it was interesting for me that the kind of higher up the food chain i got of the internet of people who operate the exchange points, the less concerned they were about talking about where they were because they recognized hiding them is not the way to do it. with the data centers, it's interesting. i mean google had until very recently not had the satellite image on google maps had been scrubbed. not just old, but it was scrubbed. um, i have to admit i was a little disappointed that they recently changed it because it seemed so perfect that google maps had been scrubbed, but now it's a clear image. there's no sign on the door, there's only a sign that says

voldemort industries, not google. facebook does have a big sign. so the security issues, you know, one of the most major cuts, you know, real successful attacks on the internet that actually had a big effect was, um, in silicon valley when a big, when somebody had clipped all the, essentially, all the right cables in a manhole, and it was determined to be out of a union dispute. somebody knew exactly which cables to cut. so the terrorist threat is, europe, certainly for attacks through the network is a lot greater concern than the physical infrastructure. yeah. >> could you talk a little bit about the economics? we're all interested in the cable, i see, undersea cables. could you tell us who? obviously, the company that lays them pays for it, but the

economics of leasing the usage and how long the cables last, etc. >> yeah. um, so the -- well, so everybody, you know, the internet is never free. somebody's always paying somewhere, and can we sort of lose sight of that because we pay at home in a lump sum, and we just assume we get the rest of the internet. and maybe that's capped or maybe it isn't. but embedded in that are all of these other payments for the connections between networks, and ideally two networks will connect in if a way that they call peering, that they're peers. so they'll exchange traffic on equal term, and they'll sort of each be giving to the other what it needs back. the transatlantic cables and trans-pacific cables, those are owned by a few different types. there are a couple big con consa of verizons and deutsche telecom that have, you know, a decade ago built these cables together

and put them in the water which is usually somewhere between $200, $300, $400 million. and then there are a couple of boutique firms and a couple backbone companies like level iii or tata that also own their own cables. and they're often the basic unit is they're renting, they're leading a certain number of 10-gigabit per second wave lengths of light. google or facebook both run big global networks of their own at a big enough level they're also lease ago 10-gigabit per second or 40 or 50 of them across the atlantic. and they'll all either have agreements or buy capacity on each other's cable, so if one cable is cut, they already have space reserved on another cable as backup. and the problem, the englishmen who run the cables like to say that the capacity is cheap as

chips, you know, it's always getting cheaper because, um, if at the moment the dominant unit is this 10-gigabit per second wave, you can switch out what are called the line cards, these things that look like a stick of, pack of wrigley's gum and, um, are incredibly dense and cost about as much as a laptop. so you can pop it out and put in the brand new 40-gigabit per second ones and spend a lot of time tuning the wavelengths so they all fit together like a cord until -- and then, suddenly, your cable has four times more capacity. so the new cable that's being built next year isn't because the other cables are filled, but is actually a shorter route. it's fewer miles which is meant to appeal to the wall street trading firms. that, essentially, arbitrage based on the price ditches between new york and london. so being two or three millie seconds closer to the other city

is worth a new $30 million cable. $300 million cable. any questions? yeah. >> could you speak to the beginning of the internet, where it began, how it was first connected? was it the same system we have today? >> yeah, sure. um, i've been -- in "tubes" i begin at the beginning. i begin with the first physical piece of the internet. there was a sort of intellectual history before it about packets which distributed networks and sort of this idea that what direct connection could pass in smaller bits between places. but my sort of relentless focus was on the physical places. and in that light there is, um, it turned out that the first piece of the internet, the first machine came, arrived on the campus of ucla labor day weekend, 1969, and the guy who

was the professor whose lab it was coming to is still there today. he's in the same office. the machine, the interface message processer was until recently under a bunch of coffee cups in the conference room across from his office, and he's finally succeeded in turning it into a reading room which i haven't had a chance to see. but it was, um, that is the kind of place where the internet, he likes to say, took its first breath with a connection from there to the stanford research institute in men menlo park whih was the first two nodes of the predecessor network to the internet or, rather, the first network that then became the internet when other networks were attached to it at this moment when the lingo was established between the different networks.

sorry, new year's eve 83 or '84 when tcip said the this is the way the internet is going to communicate, and with that it was a network of networks connected to, you know, the physicist network connected to the emerging banks internet, and then there was al gore. [laughter] no, no, who sponsored the key piece of legislation that, essentially, in a way privatized the internet and allowed all of the privately-owned, autonomous networks to bloom in the '94, '95, '96 period. yeah. >> you mentioned buildings for these networks where they come together. are there real estate companies that invest in building these buildings and leasing them? >> yeah, some very lucky ones. it's -- a couple of the

buildings i was in portland yesterday, and portland has this great internet building, and i was talking to the guy who managed it. um, i hadn't been to the internet in about a year, and i don't think i mentioned that the internet has this really specific smell, a sort of burnt toast kind of smell, and it was great to walk back into the building, and there was the same smell. home on the internet. but he talked about how lucky the owners feel that they sort of, they kind of happened into this building. this building sort of, this building became the key in our connection point in portland, essentially, the dominant spot in oregon where the networks of the internet meet which is incredibly valuable. you know, you're charging represent for both the cage, but also charging rent for what's called the cross-connect, the connection between one cage and the other. and so, you know, they're -- and his building is owned by, you know, i don't know who

precisely, but it's an investment company. and equinex is, essentially, in the real estate business. they own the land, and i wasn't surprised to see that in ashburn they paid off their underlying ground lease, you know, because this is not a campus that can be moved. they can't move it across the street. you know, it's like a coral reef. it's absolutely acreted in this place, and that piece of dirt is incredibly important. and then, of course, the land around ashburn has become incredibly valuable for that. so -- >> in if your book you quoted churchill about how we create our buildings and our buildings create us. in terms of not only the architecture of specific buildings, but this massive, interdependent architecture that has been created, these tubes, what are they doing to us?

>> hmm. um, the -- i mean, my starting point was certainly a concern that i was losing touch with the physical world who was living entirely in front of the screen. and one of the great pleasures of visiting the internet was when you visit the internet, you're not on the internet. i put my phone in my bag, and it stayed this, and i spent a day with these people, and that engagement was very satisfying. that's sort of one way of thinking about it. i mean, my sense of where the internet's going, well, i mean, another way of talking about it is as a philosophical idea of the network of networks. it seems sort of impossible to disappear. there's, you know, if it disappears in its current form, then two more networks connect, and that's a new internet in some way. there was a jonathan latham story about buy internet. i don't know if anybody saw

this, but he imagined there was another internet that split, and there were only 100 people on it, and anytime one person left, they invited one person on. but he was tired of it, so he was starting an internet within the internet. it's always these sort of plays of metaphor that you kind of come back to of what is this big thing that we spend all our day on. does that -- please. >> the thing i was concerned about principally was this acceleration of interdependence and interconnectedness and how this is changing us as human beings individually and collectively. >> one of the, um -- i don't know. it's a hard thing to answer. one thing that i was really struck by was, um, was the -- and you talk about the churchill quote about we shape our buildings, then our buildings

shape us, is the, i mean, all of this infrastructure's only 10 or 15 years old, you know? it's all relatively, incredibly new. and we're just, some of the newest buildings are the ones that are the most monumental, that seem to want to express in these places the ideals of the things that hold them both facebook's data center and also a great build anything london called telehouse -- building in london called telehouse that's meant to celebrate what's going on inside and is the kind of key building in london. but it, you know, the thing that is somewhat heartening, and this is complicated so i don't want to go too far with it, but i'm very struck by facebook's humanness. i'm very struck by the idea that the building seems to represent an ideal, you know, this ideal that it's about people, that it's about us, that that should be reflected in everything there. there should be a rig gore in that. and the contrast is a little bit

easy, but i was struck in the opposite direction by google's inhumanness, this is entirely a machine, this is entirely algorithm-driven, that this isn't about any sort of compassion but, instead, the search for some impossible, perfect information. so -- that's a big idea. i'm not sure that's all baked. [laughter] >> we're just about out of time, so we'll have this be our last question if that's all right. >> sure, thanks. >> oh, dear. [laughter] i'm one of these people who doesn't really understand a lot of the physics of this -- >> me too. >> and i sort of had the idea that there were spots where the signal was transmitted through the air and not through a fiberoptic fiber. but now what i'm hearing here is that all the way from the picture on the screen to the

picture on my cowz is sin in australia's -- cousin in australia's screen there's a fiberoptic wire connecting? >> yeah. >> is that true? >> certainly, yeah. >> okay. you taught me something. >> good. thank you. [laughter] i think we should stop there then. thank you. [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's web site, andrew blum.net. >> this weekend on booktv from new york city the harlem book fair. live coverage starts today at 12:30 eastern with a panel discussion on the future of african-american publishing. that's followed at 2 with a look at public education. at 3:30, cornel west sits in on a panel examining the next presidential election. and at 5 neil irvin painter joins a panel celebrating the

150th anniversary of the emancipation prola mission. and sunday at 2 p.m. eastern, authors including katie pavlich, john fund and phyllis schlafly. the harlem book fair and eagle forum collegians leadership summit this weekend on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

♪ ♪ [inaudible conversations] >> ladies and gentlemen, i'm david young, i am chief executive of the hatchette group. well done. thank you, colleagues. always difficult to tame a crowd of publishers, that i know. it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the 175th-year

celebration of the wonderful little, brown and co. in print. to celebrate 175 years of great authors, great books and great publishing, is really absolutely something special, and i hope you all are enjoying the party so far. it's great that this evening we are, we have in the room not only wonderful authors, but we're joined by our book-selling partners, by literary agents, by the media and publicists who help spread the great word of books. and importantly, i am -- we also have in the room many, many of my esteemed colleagues from little, brown and hatchette, both past and present in this fabulous setting. they are a fantastic team of committed, creative people.

what links us all tonight, i think, is our absolute joy about the importance of storytelling and great writing, and i think little, brown absolutely exemplifies the very top of publishing, and can it's led by the -- it's led by the inestimable michael peach who will now -- [cheers and applause] who will now continue our greeting. >> thank you. hello! >> hello! >> thank you for being here tonight. this gives me delight beyond imagining. i'm so happy that i'm even relaxed. [laughter] it was in 1837 when two elaborately-side burned bostonian booksellers decided there was more to life than importing books from england, that they could print some and find readers for them

themselves. and here we are nearly two centuries later in this wonderful, elaborate dance that we all do together; publishers, writers, literary agents, book season sellers, producers, reviewers, bloggers, librarians all working towards putting the amazing thing a writer made into the hands of a reader who might be changed by it. in this 175 years, little, brown has been owned by a succession of gentlemen, by a family, by its employees, by time warner and now owned by the second largest book-publishing enterprise in the world whose roots are even older than ours. the publishing company called little, brown has persisted, an ever-evolving group of writers and a staff of people entrusted with bringing those book into the world. i want to send a thanks from all of us to the writers who trust us with their books, without whom the company would not have

made it past the civil war, much less to 2012. [laughter] many of them are here tonight. emily dickenson, emily? [laughter] louisa may? kevin powers, maria temple, matthew perk, megan abbott, lawrence block, charlotte williams, rick moody, george, kathleen kent, jeffrey to brine, jodi kantor, jodi shields and perhaps others i've failed to remember, but what joy to work with these writers, what extraordinary admiration and gratitude we have for them. [laughter] i want to thank a few people who have been essential to conveying little, brown toward to this very happy moment. my esteemed colleagues, the