Keynote: The Internet, Really. Behind the Scenes of Our Everyday Lives

DEEP CABLES: Uncovering the Wiring of the World. The 8th event of the Disruption Network Lab. Keynote: The Internet, Really. Behind the Scenes of Our Everyday Lives with Andrew Blum (writer & journalist, USA). Respondent: Bernd Fix (computer security expert, Wau Holland Stiftung, DE). In the book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (German title: Kabelsalat), journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet’s physical infrastructure, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. What is the Internet physically? And where is it really? The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Connecting a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, from the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan as new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers, Andrew Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet’s development, explains how it all works, and takes the first ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments. Is the Internet in fact “a series of tubes” as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet’s possibilities if we don’t know its parts? www.andrewblum.net (http://andrewblum.net/) www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables (http://www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables) Photo: Maria Silvano Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com