Tubes by Andrew Blum

Author:Andrew Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins

The next day I visited Witteman at the AMS-IX offices. On the wall behind his desk was a homemade mash-up of the movie poster from 300, based on the bloody comic book epic about the battle of Thermopylae. The original poster had read “Tonight we dine in hell,” and showed an enraged, bare-chested Spartan baring his teeth. Witteman’s version kept the soldier but Photoshopped the blood-dripping text to read, “We are the biggest!” I had a hunch who in this fantasy represented the Persians. While Frankfurt’s exchange projected a polished character, AMS-IX seemed to strive for a thoughtful informality, a philosophy that extended to its offices in a matched pair of historic town houses near the center of the old city. The young, international staff ate lunch together every day, cooked by a housekeeper and served family style at a table overlooking the back garden. There was a homeyness to AMS-IX that I hadn’t yet encountered in the Internet. Rather than the network being the realm of conspiracy theories and hidden infrastructure, the exchange embodied a spirit of transparency and individual responsibility. And as it turned out, that feeling extended to its physical infrastructure.

Before lunch, Witteman and I collected Hank Steenman, AMS-IX’s technology guru, from his office across the hall. The three of us climbed into the AMS-IX jalopy, a beat-up little minivan filled with old coffee cups, and headed toward the core switch, located in one of the data centers Brown and I had walked by. There was a bike rack outside and a welcoming, light-filled lobby, with framed network maps on the walls. We walked down a wide hallway lined with doorways painted bright yellow and past a room used by KPN, filled with racks painted their patented green color. AMS-IX had its own large cage in the back. The yellow fiber-optic cables were perfectly coiled and bound. The machine they plugged into looked familiar. Very familiar. It was a Brocade MLX-32—the same as used in Frankfurt. Alas, the Internet’s sense of place did not extend to the machinery. “So here’s the Internet!” Witteman teased. “Boxes like this. Yellow cable. Lots of blinking lights.”

That evening, when I got back to the Rembrandtplein, a busker was singing like Bob Dylan, and tourists and revelers gathered around. Couples sat smoking on benches. A stag party stormed by, kicking up a commotion. Amsterdam was so many things. But all I could think about was what would happen if you sliced a section through the streets and buildings: the broken walls would glow with the prickly sparkle of all those serrated fiber-optic cables, another kind of red light: the rawest material of the Internet—and, even more than that, of the information age.

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