Last week, amid the Robinhood market drama in which the trading app’s users produced wild swings in several stocks, I stumbled on one of my favourite small books, Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure.
At first glance, that title might seem distinctly dull — and not obviously connected to the current Wall Street fireworks. The book was penned almost five years ago by Ingrid Burrington, a Brooklyn-based artist turned social commentator, because she was frustrated by so few people truly understanding how the internet works.
Most notably, while we are all addicted to cyberspace, the majority of us are ignorant about the physical connections that enable the internet to work. Networks of New York explains how to decode the urban features of the internet around us: it suggests that, say, we follow the squiggly symbols that are painted on our streets to track the path of underground internet cables (just as a hunter in a jungle might track animal droppings to find a herd). It also describes data centres sitting inside anonymous, unmarked buildings on Broadway and Avenue of the Americas.