but over the last several years though what i realize 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 sensor 2007 when i got and i thought i would get up and look at the smaller screen i carried in my pocket, and the disconnect was an incredibly striking to me. i was supposed to be out in the world looking at things but instead i was always sitting in front of my screen. more striking, that world behind my screen seems not to be a world that all. there were places to shop or talk to friends or all these things that were kind of the landscape of the mind but there was no physical presence to them at all. there's no way of understanding what was actually back there. the one kind of image we have, the consistent image of the world behind the screen was always this, the internet is some sort of morphed this blog

that was infinite and you weren't really supposed to know where you were on it. it really wasn't supposed to be that specific and descriptive about what that place was, which always kind of reminded me of the blue marble picture of the earth, floating in space. that's both meant to say that this is where we are but it's also too much to understand in some form. what the internet was, it was this big amorphous blog. that was all that i could sort of know about the physical reality behind the class, as much as i was trying to do defense for the place that i was in. and this amounted to a kind of low-grade existential crisis because how could i sort of those who i was if i didn't know what that world was behind the screen. and then one day this happened. 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 up to the front of my building in brooklyn and under to the basement and out of the backyard. there's this other big clump of cables, and then there was a squirrel running along the water, and he said i think a squirrel is chewing on your internet. this was surprising because the internet was a transcendent idea. it wasn't something a school 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. and so i got this image what would happen if i can yank the cable from the wall and started to follow it. where would it go? it must go somewhere. there must be some physical path, but all i knew was that amorphous blog. but the thing was when i started

to think about, when i started to ask what the place was, could i go visit it, the answer was unequivocably know. only fools tried to visit the internet. like in this episode of south park where the and it 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 added to try to wake it up but that doesn't work, and then eventually one of the little guys climbed up the ramp and unplug the giant plug in the back and plugs it back in. [laughter] then he says, the flashing yellow light to steady green, and they are saved.

salvation. or if that's not the internet, then this is the internet. this single box with a red light on it, represented in the british -- were they convinced their college that they have arranged with the elders of the internet for her to borrow the internet for an office presentation, and then normally it lives at the top of big ben because that's where you get the best reception. but they've managed to procure it for the afternoon so she can show it off. and she says, she says this is the internet, the whole internet? isn't heavy? ever laughed at her and say of course not. the internet doesn't weigh anything from its wireless. that's the implication. that's what we all think. or the poets who also have their own conceptions of the internet, and my favorite is the writer christine smallwood who points

out the history of the internet is a history of metaphors about the internet, all someone along this dilemma, how do we talked which of other about an invisible god. and then she weighs the relative merits describing the internet as a two tuple. a hot tub, a highway or a plane. and then she realizes that actually the internet is probably quite ugly and she wishes it weren't. she says that it looked like matt damon, or like lines of light written in an invisible sky. so we're back to the amorphous blog. we can get away from the lines of light, the sky, the infinite universe that it's impossible to understand. but fortunately there was one guy who did understand that the internet was a place, at least could be something else other than this amorphous blog. and that was senator ted stevens of alaska, 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's not a big truck. it's a series of tubes, and we all laughed at this. we thought this was completely hilarious. and i made fun of them. again, the internet isn't a series of tubes. it's this transcendent idea, it is change absolutely everything. for those of us are preoccupied with the physical world, then it seems like he was a little bit right, that there must be something out there, and it was those tubes that i set out to see. saw want to talk about those tubes, but first a caveat, which is that logically speaking the internet is incredibly complicated in any given webpage logo thousands and thousands of processes behind it. but physically the reality of it is relatively straightforward. the basic unit is, at the center

of the internet, the 10 gigabit per second wave of light through fiber-optic cables that are been over long distance varied along the rail tracks in places like this which in the middle of kansas, which is a place that came about, or i encountered it after working on a photo essay for "wired" a few years ago and was asked to find pieces of the internet we could photograph. and was on the phone with a p.r. person or one of the big internet backbones and said, so is there like a hut in the middle of the country where the fiber, the signals are regenerated? and she said let me find out. got on the phone i 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 ask him which was the most beautiful hud. this was the place that came up.

but the key thing still is that basic idea that there is light pulsing through fiber and this is the kind of, this is the even smaller yo you know, the fiber-optic jumper cable that is literally filled with light when you've been did, light comes out. what's remarkable, 10 gigabit per second wave already someplace, that's a 40 gigabit per second wave. already their time testing 100 gigabits a second way. and even more remarkably you will have situations the our multiple wavelengths or colors of light through a single strand of fiber so you have 50 or 60 or even 75 different take a gigabit wavelengths to a single fiber. immediately it does become a sort of massive numbers, but always there are these yellow fiber-optic cables. and then they come together in buildings. this building is one of my favorites, 60 hudson street in

new york. and if the internet is a network of networks, it's all about these places where one network can connect to another where you have the router of one network of comcast or time warner connected to the router of another network, facebook, google or microsoft, and that's a very physical process. it's about big refrigerator like machine with blinking lights in the yellow cable connected to it and strung up to the seat of a building like this and down into the cage to the router of another network. and the art as many of these places as you might think. there are about a dozen of these buildings in the world that are by far the most important in order of magnitude, more important than the next tier measured by the fact there are places where more networks and meet than any other. in seattle it's the west building which action i did not visit. i know it is if not in the top dozen, sort of next, very next tier of most important buildings.

but the thing that's interesting about it, that there's a kind of publicness to it. yes the buildings are sort of highly security. you can't just walk in, and there aren't at least yet brewery style tours of the internet, but because they are the places where networks meet, there's a lot of conversation about where you are, one at work is, where another one is and where we are in the same place where we physically connect one router to another. and a lot of that conversation happens among about very relatively small group of about 300 network engineers, gather under the banner of a group called the north american network operators group, who if you talk about going to conferences to networks, they literally go to conferences to network and they do it about three times a year. they meet with the annual meeting is three times a year because the social ties are so important, and they drink a lot of beer and they figure out, they trust each other and they

figured out if you're clinical or not, glue holding the opposite of clueless. and if so, does it make sense for me to connect my network to your network, or perhaps i should connect my network to your note and opiate as well. will introduce a business arrangement, but it is all about the space between come all about trusting the other engineer to make sure that things are working properly in order to create this network of networks. and it all happens in the sort of enormous public has jobs of these yellow fiber optic cables. and then the part that i love the most is that then at some point it hits the dirt. at some point the internet, these buildings are connected to the earth. they are in movable. they are geography is a specific and that's what this room is. it's called a fiber fault, and if the rest of these buildings,

like walking into machine code are loud and cold, keep the machine school, and over the hard floors and high ceilings, just an ugly sort of overwhelming environment. when you walk into this room, it's hot and it is 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, those important buildings are in world capitals, frankfort, amsterdam, london and new york. there are a few outliers, in ashburn virginia right near dulles airport is one of the. so you end up with network engineers talk about ashburn as if it were one of these big cities, which in an unincorporated suburb. and they keep building there is a building owned by celtic called equinox, sort out, you can see the dulles airport runways. and then because this is a

place, because so many networks are meeting and bandwidth become so abundant and so cheap, you end up with a sort of parasitic activity where data centers, which i'm sort of described as the places where data is stored, gather around these distribution depots, these places were all the networks meet. you can see this kind of aircraft carrier like buildings around the handful of buildings at the center. and in a piece of the book was excerpted a few weeks ago with the sensational headline, the bull's-eye of america's intern internet. equinox, the company owns this bill, 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 sort of environment without proper feeding for network equipment and networks can come and connect one to the other.

and then the other piece, sort of, more poetic piece is the undersea cables. the cables that connect continents, and if, satellite is a rounding error. satellite is a technology of last resort for international traffic to and instead you have these cables across the ocean. not that many of them, depending on how many you count, tentacles across the atlantic and i think even fewer across the pacific, that are the garden hose and very easy to kind of comprehend in that dimension. and inside are usually four, six, eight strands of fiber and in a plastic then another copper wrapper that sends electricity through the wire to power the repeaters that exist every 50 miles or so. and the principle is incredibly simple, life goes in one end of

the ocean and comes out on the other. so there's all this fantastically complex materials, technology and processing technology and forward air correction and always coveted algorithms. but the basic geography that is incredibly clear, you have any station on one shore of the ocean, a house like structure, usually tucked away in some sort of seaside neighborhood, and then a tube under the ocean. and it's the other dimension, the one, it's the thickness of a garden hose, it's the 5000-mile length, or the 8000-mile length, that seems almost impossible to comprehend. then there's a manhole like this, a particular beautiful one which can get out of this question of is there like a manhole on the beach with the cable lengths. the answer is yes, there is actually a manhole on the beach where the cable lans. and what's so remarkable is the cables often stretch from, between the same place as they have always stretch, sort of a 100 year history of telegraph

cables and often between classic port cities from new york to lisbon, to hong kong to singapore, thomas a. it's always tracing the same path. the historic trade routes. so i wanted to see one of these cables being built, which was sort of a rare historical moment. there hasn't been a new transatlantic cable built in tenuous. there will be one this summer, but this is my friend simon cooper whom i've never actually met. we've only sort of communicate by telephone and through his view conferencing link, and he works, you just switch jobs but he worked until easily for the communications wing of the big address or conglomerate which is based in, big indian and that's a complex based in singapore. the undersea cable industry is dominant almost entirely by englishmen and they're all 42, because they all started with the beginning of the poem about 20 years ago.

and he has this incredibly expansive geographic imagination. he says things like this. and they had been born when i bought a network out of bankruptcy, a link across the atlantic and a link across the pacific and then they started adding pieces to it until they have a continuous loop around the world. so you can buy a wavelength of light one direction or the other, and if the cable break someone's eye they will send it around the other way. which just seems like an incredibly amazing way of thinking about the earth. but then his job, because the prices are always falling on the transatlantic and transpacific roots, we have to find new routes, for places that were not wired, which meant primarily in the persian gulf and in africa. and so three years ago africa had essentially one cable down the west coast and now there are three down the west coast and three down the east coast. and it was one of those cables that i wanted to see being installed. but when i said i really, do you

have any cables lend him any cables been constructive subcommittee said we will keep you posted and i was worried he would say guam or they were off building a cable or somalia which seemed like a bad place to go watch the beach. and instead it was a cable from lisbon, and so little after nine on a monday morning this guy walked out of the water carrying a light weight nylon lined that was the first link between land and sea. and so that hold the line on the beach and the bulldozer started, brought her out to the special ship and then a bulldozer to pull the cable end, and it was floated on these, these orange buoys. you can see the english engineers looking on. and then once the cable was in place, the guy in the wetsuit was a spanish underwater

construction worker, like a pirate with a big hoop earrings, walked back into the surf with a big knife and start cutting the buoys off, and the cable, the buoys would pop up out of the water and the cable would drop and this kid would chase them down. he would do that the whole way, the whole columba out to the ship, and then they gave him a glass of juice and the cookie and he jumped back in and swam back, 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 this sort of came ashore they had to strip back the kind of extra layers of steel coating that on the cable close to shore to keep it from being run over and getting broken. which meant these big guys with tattoos and ask us to hacking with the cable, first giving them a shout and then working more delicately to get, to take the plastic sheeting, and finally working with the fibers i could do there choosing the

fibers together with a cable does come down hill from the landing station and fusing them with like a hole punch machine that heats them together. so when you see these guys, when you see these guys going at the internet with a hack saw, it starts to seem a lot less like the amorphous blog and starts to seem a lot, like a lot more physical thing. and then when the tide goes out the sort of put this steelcase around it, and try to get it as varied as possible without having to put on their scuba gear for that sort of first dangerous feet in the water. what's remarkable is that it's, you know, that technology again, you know, is astounding in the capacity you can put through a single fiber, but both physically the sort of in gross terms and culturally, it's the same as it's been for 100 years but this is a picture from the

telegraph archives, museums and archives, which essentially is the exact same thing right down to the english engineer, the guy in the hat in the backbone to come and the local laborers and the ship 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 a thousand miles down the coast of africa laying the cable off the back, and then the people in this village near lisbon, you know, the last thing, life goes back to normal. they put the manhole cover back on can't think of it with sand and better it is kind of there and forgotten and nobody talks about it but that seems, that doesn't seem right to me. it seems like we should be talking about this. every time we talk about the plot, obviously the cloud isn't a cloud, and it seems like every time we put more, we give more to the cloud, we give up some

responsible for it. we forget about it. we put the sand over. in fact, we should be having a conversation about what that is but there's a great line that says 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 round of data centers of the number one and number two most visited websites, facebook and google. those of who made the same decision about five years apart, which was to build the first data centers in central oregon, not quite in the same place, 100, 150 miles away from each other but for most of the same reasons. if the exchange points, the places where networks meet are often in these major cities, that places where data centers are sort of end up on two polls. they either gather where we are, or around these exchange points, places like virginia or silicon valley, or they go to the place that is 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 sort of one of the first to do that, to put a big data center in quincy. i'm sure somebody here has probably been there. but to think it was so striking about my visit to these two places was the degree to which facebook saw its data center in a place called -- as a showpiece. facebook embrace it. big celebration for facebook coming in with this essentially enormous machine that was not bring as many do as it might have liked but what sort of deathless bring a lot of spirit pakistan and it turns out as well that apple has noted directly across the street. and these are massive buildings. the first of three buildings planned, 3000 square-foot building, just the size of three wal-mart. wal-mart being the measure of

all things big, and uses as much power come uses more power than the entire county that it sits in. and get it is for taking the place of the industry that had left. so you get a sense of it coming out of the earth, coming out of the landscape, and before i went out that is going to be sort of industrial light. it was the opposite. it was the surprisingly beautiful thing. this thing that the town and braced. which for facebook has really become a showpiece. there's a joke to be made about that, the sort of facebook is playing fast and loose with the privacy anyone can come on over and see, but it seems to me to sort of body nation embody the idea that this somewhat belongs to you. that the things in here are in part yours and there's a lot of pride in that. so you have a building that is a

real hotspot, one of the most efficient data centers because it can be sort of design from the ground up and optimize to use as little energy as possible. and then is really probably the most beautiful data center you'll ever see, most look like a steamy underbelly, like some electrocution went crazy, but facebook has sort of lined up everything perfectly and each one of these blue site represents a terabyte hard drive and a building has rows and rows of them like stacks in the library, and get even being there, sort of knowing that it's difficult to make the leap between knowing the sort of emotional resonance of some of the things that this contains. the announcement of new babies, new jobs and deaths and many more things, and knowing that it is actually a. are still a big sort of leap of imagination required to connect that abstraction with those things that it contains. but it sort of a start. it's nice to know it is 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 spent an entire day answering questions and making sure i understood, which had been the case as well and dozens and dozens of the other pieces of the internet that i have visited, at google i invite myself over. they said sure, come on over. and then was essentially given a tour of the parking lot. and when i said 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 it sort continue to play out as farce with a visit to the googlearchy vegetable patch, which was valid because it was wondered and in this delicious lunch of salmon, great screens

and peanut butter cups, and the invitation for each person in turn that had been invited to 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 which were striking and what's even more striking, if not hypocritical, given google's mission statement of organizing a disturbing the world's information, and the sense that i had that they should be held to a higher standard that given how much we trust them how much we entrust them, that trust was a return and it was a sense that don't work, we will take care of it, all of you don't need to understand this, unlike the dozens of other network engineers who make sure that i -- understood i understood. and do what i i'm disappointed not to have a chance to see inside these buildings, the response was governors and senators have been disappointed, to. which was depressing, because not governors and senators are

investigating google for exactly privacy things. i mean, it's that exceptionalism that was so striking to me, and equally so the sense that 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, the huge gates off the highway and you sort of go through the gates and in an army corps of engineers guard searches your car, you know, and then wagering. then once you are inside there's a sort of museum and fish ladder where you can watch the fish go, and a sense that they can't locate a 75 plus years of history are discussed and presented and considered and shared, that this is somehow

public infrastructure, this somehow belongs to all of us. and it seems as if thomas 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 was equally clear is it somehow belongs to us and there's a sense that we should know what goes on in there. of course, google is a private company and the argument that there's a competitive advantage in keeping their data center private mix a lot of sense, but it's also clear that this can't be a black box, given how much we have given to google and other companies, and how much we give to the internet. so it's that sense of openness that i sort of kept in mind, and that's the kind of thing that i feel like the conversation about what the internet should be, should consider. so thank you. [applause]

>> happy to take a few questions. i guess you should come up to the mic as well if you want. >> in your book you lived a couple different problems that came to mind, like about the technology of being dinosaurs when the skins came off. what i've been learning on the internet of always kept in mind a child, there were six on this minute that taught me all i knew, who, what, where, and who. which one, honestly, the internet means now? >> sorry, the who? >> the who, what, where, when and why are the ones what, whern and why are the ones that teach us what's going on in the world. and the internet is treated like

it, as you pointed out, a cloud. what is the question people should be asking the most about the internet now? >> , for me the first question was where, you know, where is it. and then a second question is what is it, and the third question was why is it here. and the why is it here it is amazing in that it was a surprisingly human story. you know, the buildings like 60 hudson or ashburn, there's always some sort of act of geography where the 60 hudson sits at the elbow of lower manhattan, always important spot for telecommunications, and the first way out of town, the holland tunnel. but then there's always a charismatic person, always somebody who convinced the first two networks to come and then made his billions and placement of the networks would want to come, the case of aqua next, ashburn, that was what this very dramatic lights and sort of very good snack bar all adhering to

an aesthetic prince with a guy called cyber rivet. and that was the important part. but i feel like now, i think, for me having looked at the where and the who, the sort of how of what else we could be asking of the internet, of the internet that we have is really compelling. tubes is almost entirely descriptive, but it's been interesting to start to think about what the prescriptive possibilities are good at the moment you can buy 30 different kinds of lettuce and 50 different kinds of fish and coffee beans, anything you want to meet but you probably only have one choice of internet if so we're sort of all eating the kind of internet equivalent of iceberg lettuce pics i feel like there is a conversation that could be had, there should be had about what more choices about where our internet comes from would look like.

>> you mentioned the thickness of the white it gives us the internet is about that of a garden hose. what kind of precaution do they take to make sure this wire does not get severed or otherwise damaged? >> the undersea cables are about that thick, international. and they do get and damaged, 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 up in 2006, the coast of taiwan it was on, there was a major earthquake that severed six of the eight cables connecting southeast asia, and the internet was essentially knocked off-line, supposedly there was a major worldwide drop in spam and trading was halted in korea and there were major consequences. and then to fix it you have to send a ship out after a grappling hook over the side, find the end of the cable, pick it up, find the other end of the

cable, future features strand of fiber together and thrown over the side, and in that instance it was on. there were multiple breaks on may the multiple cables but it took weeks and months to fix it in terms of precautions, it's interesting. because the biggest risk by far is from dragging anchors, this group called the international cable protection committee whose job it is to essentially announce where the cables are, rather than hiding them to try to broadcast with the cables are so anchors don't break them. and there's a disconnect between the sense of security and sort of risk of the cables, people operate the cables have versus sort of some higher ups. 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 head of security for one of these big backbone companies, and he said were 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 the company and a town that it is in, a big red flag lands on google maps on his desk that and so, not only that but the fcc license, the landing license for all these cables is a matter of public record. is not, the secrecy isn't the key to it at all. >> what kind of vulnerabilities then are there for terrorist attacks on these stations or cutting cables? >> well, i mean, the points of biggest concern often to places where the networks meet, these major buildings. again, because there's a kind of

public as to the connection between networks, these countries that own the buildings are eager to announce where they are so every knows that if anyone can connect these networks to so it's just not a very, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense in that they are quite big buildings. that are difficult, destroying any wholesale way. and more than that it's not as if hitting some piece of them at a major impact on the internet. so you are perceived as trying to bring down the global economy and perhaps you slow down a few networks for the morning. certainly these are secure places but it's as much because a single route might have $75,000 worth of equipment rather than for terrorist reason. it was interesting for me that the kind of sort of higher up the food chain i got of the internet, people operate the internet exchange points, the less concerned they were about sort of talking about where they were. because they recognize-is not

the way to do it. with the data centers, it's interesting. i mean, google had until very recently not had, had satellite image on maps had been scrubbed. not just, it was scrubbed. i i could knit a recently changed changed because it seems so imperfect that the google maps scrub something out. and there's no sign on the door previously assigned this is baltimore industry, not google. facebook does have a big sign. so the security issue, i mean, that become one of the most major cuts real successful attacks on the internet that i've had a big effect was in silicon valley when somebody had clipped a sense of all the right

cables any man who, and it was determined to be out of a union dispute, somebody knew exactly which cables to cut. so the terrorist threat, certainly for cyber terrorism, or a tax through the network was a lot greater concern than the physical infrastructure. >> could you talk a little bit about the economics? we're all interested in the cable i see, the 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 cable last, et cetera? >> so, so the internet is never free. somebody is always paying somewhere. we serve lose sight of that because we pay at home in a lump sum and we assume get the rest of the internet. and maybe that is capped or maybe it isn't.

but embedded in that are all of these other payments for the connections between networks. and ideally networks will connect in a way that they call peering. so they will exchange traffic on equal terms until sort of each be giving to the other what it needs back. the transatlantic cable, the transpacific cables, those are owned by a few different types, there are a couple big consortia, verizon, deutsche telekom, a decade ago built these cables together and put them in the water which is usually somewhere 200, 300, $400 million. and vendor a couple of boutique firms that only own cables, and then there's a couple of backbone companies like level three or tata that also own their own cables. and they are often the basic you know, they are renting or leasing a certain number of 10 gigabit per second wavelength of

light, as google. google or facebook both run a global networks of their own, and at a big enough level whether also leasing 10-k per second or 40 or 50 of them across the atlantic. and then they will all either have agreements or all by capacity on each other's cables. so if one cable is cut, but already have space reserved on another cable as backup. and the problem, the englishman who run the cables like to say that the capacity is cheap as chips. it's always getting cheaper because if at the moment the dominant unit is a 10 gigabit per second wave, you switch out what are called the line cards, these things that look like a pack of wrigley's gum and are incredibly dense and cost about as much as a laptop. so you can pop out the 10 gigabit per second in putting the brand-new 40 gigabit per second once and then spend a

lifetime tuning the wavelength so they fit together like a cord. and then suddenly your cable has four times more capacity. so the new cable that is being built next year isn't because the other cables are filled, but is actually a shorter route, fewer miles, which is meant to appeal to the wall street trading firms that essentially arbitrage based on the price differences between new york and london. so being two or three milliseconds closer to the other city is worth the new $300 million cable. any questions? >> could you speak to the beginning of the internet, where it began, how it was sort of connected? was at the same system we have today? >> yeah, sure. i began at the beginning. i begin with the first physical

piece of the internet it does sort of intellectual history before packets distributed networks and this idea that it was a direct connection but smaller bits between places. but my sort of relentless focus was on the physical places, and in that light there is, it turned out that the first piece of the internet, 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 that interface message processor was until recently under a bunch of copy -- coffee cups and a comforter across on his office and he while he -- turned into a reading room or something like that which i haven't had a chance to see.

but that is the kind of place where the internet, he likes to say took it's first breath with a connection from their to the stanford research institute in menlo park, which was the first two notes of the arpanet which is the sort of predecessor network, the internet, or rather the first networks that then became the internet when other networks were attached to it, at this moment when the was established between all these different frank -- emerged. new year's 83 or new years 84 when tcpip said this is what we are, this is the way networks will communicate and you still see that when you're in it breaks at home, and with that it was a of networks. but the arpanet connected to the physicist network connected to the emerging bank networks and it became the internet. then there was al gore. [laughter] >> no, no. who sponsored the key piece of

legislation that essentially anyway privatize the internet and loud all the privately owned autonomous networks to bloom in sort of 94, 95, 96 period. >> you mentioned buildings where these networks, where they come together. are their real estate companies like weeks -- like real estate investment trust that invests in building them and went against the? yes, a couple of lucky of them. i was in portland yesterday important has this great internet building, and was talking to the guy who managed it, i haven't been to the internet and about a year, i don't think i mention that in as specific smell, sort of her toes kind of smell and it was great to walk back into a building and i 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 that this building became the key interconnection point in portland, essentially the dominant spot in oregon where the networks and the internet meet. which is incredibly valuable. you are charging rent for both the cage but also charging rent for what's called the crossconnect, the connection between one cage and the other. and so, and his building is owned by, i don't know if it is a reits precisive but it is an investment company. and aqua next essentially in the real indivisibility, they own the land and i wasn't surprised to see that in ashburn they paid off their under line groundlings, this is not a campus that can they can't move it across the street. it's like a coral reef. that piece of dirt is incredibly

important. and then, of course, the land around us but it's become and credibly valuable for that. in your book you quoted churchill about how we create our buildings and our buildings create us. in terms of architecture not on the architecture of the specific building but this massive, independent architecture that's been created these tubes, what are they doing to us? >> my starting point was certainly a concern that it was losing touch with the physical world and 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 vote democratic in a state and spent the day with these people come at that engagement was very satisfying.

that sort of one way of thinking about it. i mean, my sense of where the internet is going, well, if we're talking about it is that as a philosophical idea of a network of networks, it seems sort of impossible to disappear. if it disappears in it current forms into more networks connect and that's a new internet and somewhere. there's a great story in "the new yorker" a few ago, he imagined was another internet that split and the only 100 people on it at any time. if one person left invite one more but then he was tired of it so you starting an internet within the internet. it's always the sort of linguistic, displays of metaphor, like what is this big thing we spend all our day on? go ahead. >> the things i was concerned

about principally is acceleration interdependence and interconnectedness and how this is changing us as human beings individually and collectively? >> i don't know. i mean, i don't -- it's a hard thing and think one thing i was really struck by was, and to talk about the churchill quote, about we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us, is, i mean, all of this infrastructure is on 10 or 15 years old. it's all relatively incredibly new. and some of the newest buildings are the ones that are most monumental, that seem to say, do seem to want to express in these places the ideals of the things that hold them, both facebook davidson and also a great building in london called tollhouse that looks like it

should look. it's sort of meant to celebrate what is going on inside, and is the kind of key building in london. but the thing that is somewhat heartening, and this is confidence i don't want to sort go too far with the, but i'm very struck by facebook's humanness. i'm very struck by the idea that the building seems to represent an idea, this ideal that it's about people, that it's about us, that that should be reflected in the halls and everything there, there should be a rigor of the. and the contrast a little bit easy but i'm stuck in in the opposite direction by googles in humanness, by the since this is entirely a machine. this is entirely algorithm driven, that this isn't about any sort of compassion, but is instead about this sort of search for some and possible perfect information, perfect. that's a big idea. i'm not sure that is all picked.

-- >> we are just about out of time. we will have this be our last question. >> i'm one of these people who doesn't really understand a lot of the physics of this. >> me, too spent i sort had the idea that there were spots where the signal was transmitted through the air and not through a fiber optic fiber, but now what i'm hearing it is that all the way, the picture on the screen to the picture on my cousin in australia's screen, there's a fiber-optic wire connecting, is that to? >> certainly spent okay, utah be something. >> good, thank you. i think we should stop there. [laughter] [applause] >> for more information visit

the author's website, andrewblum.net. >> booktv has over 150,000 twitter followers. all the booktv on twitter to get publishing news, scheduled updates. author information and talk directly with authors doing our live programming. twitter.com/booktv. >> the official seal of the city of louisville, kentucky, reflects its history and heritage. it represents french aid given to the revolutionary war and the 13 stars signify the original colony. booktv brings you john david -- john david dyche up next. this book "republican leader" takes a look at the political career of senator mitch mcconnell who served as senator of kentucky since 1985. >> the senior senator for kentucky. is the longest-serving senator

from kentucky. he is the republican leader in the united states senate, and some would contend he is the foremost a bug in kentucky political history. he was born in alabama, came to kentucky as a young person, got involved in republican politics, serve as a county judge executive here in jefferson county, which is where legal, the largest city in kentucky, is located. ran for the u.s. senate in 1984, ousted the democratic incumbent, and has been reelected four times since then. it been a steady upward climb in the ranks of republican leadership in the u.s. senate. he came in with really no connections and no national reputation i'm a kind of built his reputation on issues like campaign finance reform, resisting a lot of measures campaign finance reforms.

got into the leadership at now is the leader and would aspire to become the senate majority leader after the elections this fall. his primary legislative area of expertise is probably campaign finance reform. he is still active in filing briefs in litigation in the supreme court opposing reform he thinks would infringe upon the first amendment. but he's also done several other things. he is renowned as the foremost advocate for burma, and the united states senate, and long before the issue of burmese reform became widely known, he's been toiling in that venue for many years. and the fact he recently went to burma to meet with on song, the nobel laureate in burma. he had a measure to protect a democratic institutions in hong kong. during the bush administration

involved in a lot of legislation that had to do with national security, national security wiretaps, et cetera. he's a very soft spoken person. he's a big university of louisville sports fan. he reads a lot of history. he does his own grocery shopping here in louisville, and is often telling stories of people he meets while shopping for the groceries, and i think that's one of the ways he tries to keep in touch and avoid becoming a politician who is washington rather than louisville. he does try to come home and stay in touch with constituents, both at ballgames and doing things like is grocery shopping. but he's pleasant. he doesn't manifest much of a temper, but that doesn't mean sometimes that he doesn't get upset with folks. i think his reputation is that of being a very canny, a very clever political operator.

he is thought to be a master parliamentarian. in fact, he built his reputation largely on coming up with legislative strategy using parliamentary tactics. and he's thought to be a hardball political player, but i think senators would also say that his word is his bond. he's someone you can make a deal with, and once you have made a deal it will stick. i think the democrats here in kentucky describe in with a be grudging respect. they obviously disagree with him a lot, and they think he is ruthless probably in some respects, but they also admire what he has done to build a republican organization in this state. it was and still is a predominantly democratic state, but mcconnell, while making his way upwards in republican

senate leadership, has also helped build a much stronger, more effective republican party here in the state. you can't describe them as a beloved figure by any means, but it think you can describe him as a widely respected figure. he's been elected five times. he's done it with bipartisan support in this democratic state. the people of kentucky appreciate someone in leadersh leadership. it's been a long time since i kentucky and had been in prominent u.s. senate leadership. they like that. he brought back a lot of things to kentucky, and i think every local community can point to something and say mitch mcconnell had a role in helping us do that, and he's also been flexible. mcconnell has not been just an ideologue who won't move or change with the times. basically mirrored where the republican party has been.

george will described as thoroughly marinated in the institution of the senate. he really is a creature of the senate, and the only other position that i thought he might be well suited for a secretary of state, at some point. but unlike a lot of senators he's never really wanted to be president. and i think that's been very much of a factor in his success in the republican senate leadership. he's always been a creature of that chamber and has never really thought he was a president when he looked in the mirror in the morning. i worked on the book for about five years. interviewed countless people that know senator mcconnell. out a lot of interviews within. i have met him before but we weren't by any close acquaintances, and i probably would not have done the book if he had been unwilling to

cooperate. the book is not an official biography, but the senator did go operate with it. sometimes i would share with him something i was thinking of writing, and he would offer his opinion as to where he thought that might be wrong, but i thought she was great credit he would always say, you know, it's your book and i'm not trying to tell you what to write, but here's my take on it. sometimes i thought he had a good point and i would modify what i had, but there are parts that remain in the book that he doesn't agree with i would have to say. >> like what? >> well, for example, whether president reagan had coattails that helped senator mcconnell when his 1984 election. senator mcconnell disputes that, but i happen to think that there's something to it. there are also some criticisms in the book, some stands he took

on various pieces of legislation that i'm sure he would dispute. the medicare prescription drug benefit that was passed during the bush administration is an example of where our perspectives are somewhat different. as i said in the book, for the most part i'm in agreement with the mcconnell political philosophy. i'm a republican, but there are instances in which we part company. also, i was just very impressed with how this person who came from another state, was not a contact he needed, and kentucky can be a very provincial state. it's not easy sometimes for outsiders to make their way here, had done all this. and his discipline, his focus and his tactical thinking all intrigue me. >> you've been watching booktv, 48 hours of programming beginning saturday morning at 8 a.m. eastern through monday morning at eight eastern.