Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure

The web isn’t what it used to be. When the editors of Nature compared mycorrhizal fungi to a computer network, the web was still predominantly peer-to-peer, its users sharing their thoughts on personal home pages and homespun message-boards. Online advertising was in its infancy. But as the web has centralized, it has strayed further and further fr... See more

I’ve recently begun to visit the internet. There, I’ve found cement, metal gates, water tanks, miles of solar farms, buzzing wires, fiber optic trenches, and towers. Data centers, often hidden from the everyday ‘user,’ house rows of blinking servers containing the vast contents of our digital lives. Inside these electronics lie conductive materials... See more

Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, g... See more