TUBESA Journey to the Center of the InternetBy Andrew Blum294 pages. Ecco. $26.99.The title of Andrew Blum's first book, "Tubes," is a tacit and playful acknowledgment of something the world's digerati have long known: Ted Stevens was right.You remember Ted Stevens. He's the former Alaska senator who, in 2006, described the Internet as "a series of tubes." For this he was roundly satirized, especially on late-night television. He was an easy target. He seemed cranky and out of touch. He looked like the kind of guy who didn't know the difference between the ROTC and ROTFL.The phrase "a series of tubes" felt - and feels - like an insult to this ethereal network, which has come to resemble both the air we breathe and an intimate extension of our nervous systems. Mr. Stevens's comment was the equivalent of reducing sex to our wobbly bits, or religion to votive candles.Mr. Blum is a correspondent for Wired magazine, which happily is not called Tubes magazine. His quixotic and winning book is an attempt to comprehend the physical realities of the Internet, to describe how this seemingly intangible thing is actually constructed. Early on, he lays down this bedrock assertion, which is worth quoting at modest length:"I have confirmed with my own eyes that the Internet is many things, in many places. But one thing it most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of tubes. There are tubes beneath the ocean that connect London and New York. Tubes that connect Google and Facebook. There are buildings filled with tubes, and hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and railroad tracks, beside which lie buried tubes. Everything you do online travels through a tube."Reading this, you wish Mr. Stevens, who died in an airplane crash in 2010, were here to savor it. "Inside those tubes (by and large) are glass fibers," the author continues. "Inside those fibers is light. Encoded in that light is, increasingly, us."In "Tubes," Mr. Blum travels the globe, visiting vast data warehouses, which tend to be in the boonies, and giant Internet exchanges where multiple networks meet, the largest of which are in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and London. He witnesses the laying of undersea cables, and he spooks around in what he calls "signal-haunted buildings where glass fibers fill copper tubes built for the telegraph." He learns that the Internet in many places has a smell, one he describes as "an odd but distinctive mix of industrial strength air-conditioners and the ozone released by capacitors." This scent he breathes deeply, as alert to its nuances as Robert M. Parker is when inhaling from a glass of 1787 Chateau Yquem.Mr. Blum is an unobtrusive writer, yet one with a knack for bundling packets of data into memorable observations. Dense layers of cables suggest to him a "data center mille-feuille." In an Internet cafe near Palo Alto, Calif., ground zero for America's digital faithful, the patrons "reminded me of priests in Rome, fingering smartphones rather than rosary beads, but similarly sticking close, for reasons both practical and spiritual, to the center of power."Watching a technician fuse together fibers in undersea cables that have been pulled to the surface, he writes: "The work became increasingly delicate: He worked first like a butcher, then a fisherman, then a sous-chef, now finally a jeweler, as he held each fiber between his pursed lips."Mr. Blum's book flickers with the remnants of his own reading. He's as familiar with Thoreau and Emerson as he is with Walter Benjamin, the author of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and the dystopian science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard.What truly animates Mr. Blum, however, and what makes "Tubes" more than an unusual sort of travel book, is his sense of moral curiosity that tips over into moral outrage. "I'd feel better about outsourcing my life to machines if I could at least know where they were, who controls them, and who put them there," he declares. He adds: "The great global scourges of modern life are always made worse by not knowing."In one of this book's best scenes Mr. Blum visits an important Google data center in central Oregon, a popular locale because of its cold and dry weather, limiting the need for air-conditioning to keep the machines cool. Google gives him the runaround, refusing to show him little more than the lunchroom.The Orwell in him emerges. The company's "primary colors and childlike playfulness no longer seemed friendly," he says. "They made me feel like a schoolkid. This was the company that arguably knows the most about us, but it was being the most secretive about itself."What Mr. Blum calls "the condescending purr of 'we'll take care of that for you' " puts him in mind of slaughterhouses. "If we're entrusting so much of who we are to large companies, they should entrust us with a sense of where they're keeping it all, and what it looks like."The reporting in "Tubes" didn't lead the author to many grand vistas or scenic sites. "I had tried to prepare myself for this - for the possibility of banality, of an apparently unremarkable black box," he writes about visiting the nerve center of the Internet exchange in Frankfurt. "This was like visiting Gettysburg: It's just a bunch of fields."Yet he does consider many contentious issues, including security and terrorism. When Mr. Blum visits an important Internet service provider in Milwaukee, an engineer says to him, "All this talk about Homeland Security, but look what someone could do in here with a chain saw." That's a bit of local paranoia; some of the situations discussed here are global in their dark import. In 2007, he notes, Scotland Yard broke up a Qaeda plot to destroy the London Internet Exchange from the inside.This valuable book leaves you with its share of unsettling visions, but there are comic ones too. At the London exchange, Mr. Blum is forced to step into a small, cylindrical, high-tech glass space that verifies the identities of employees and visitors and checks for theft. Inside it the author lets out "a burst of uncontrolled laughter, a loud snorting guffaw."He adds: "I couldn't help it: I was inside a tube!"
