Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

Blum is a journalist who began investigating the physical internet after a squirrel chewed through his cable connection. The book follows him from that hole in his garden to submarine cable landing stations in Portugal, internet exchange points in Frankfurt, and data centers in Oregon. It is narrative journalism at its best — concrete, sensory, and stubbornly material about an infrastructure most people experience as pure abstraction. Blum shows that the internet has a geography, and that geography reflects economics, history, and power in ways that matter for anyone building products on top of it. The writing makes visible what engineers take for granted and what users never see. For product people accustomed to thinking in APIs and dashboards, it is a necessary correction toward the physical substrate underneath.