2020.01.25

The Internet's "anarchy" may seem strange or even unnatural, but it makes a certain deep and basic sense. It's rather like the "anarchy" of the English language. Nobody rents English, and nobody owns English. As an English-speaking person, it's up to you to learn how to speak English properly and make whatever use you please of it. Otherwise, everybody just sort of pitches in, and somehow the thing evolves on its own, and somehow turns out workable. And interesting. Fascinating, even. Though a lot of people earn their living from using and exploiting and teaching English, "English" as an institution is public property, a public good. Much the same goes for the Internet.

Bruce Sterling (1993)

wtf is the Internet?

The Internet is often described as a "cloud", an amorphous entity that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. This sort of magical thinking does us a disservice as artists. If we hope to make meaningful work with the Internet that also speaks to living in a world mediated by the Internet, it would help if we knew what it really was.

The Internet is actually a very real, very physical thing. You can touch it, you can smell it, it has a "delicious old odor" as Leonard Kleinrock put it. The Internet exists in time and space, and came into existence at specific time[s] and place[s]. Maybe it started in "deep military secrecy" within a "Cold War think-tank" as science fiction writer Bruce Sterling writes in his "Short History of the Internet". Or maybe "ground zero" for the "birth place of the Internet" was actually a dingy university classroom in California, as filmmaker Werner Herzog narrates in his existential documentary "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World." Or maybe it didn't happen in the United States at all? Maybe it started in a British Laboratory? Or maybe a French Laboratory?

Where did the Internet come from? When was it created? Who created it? And, perhaps most importantly, Why? To answer these questions...

• Watch the first 10mins of Werner Herzog's documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
• Read the History Channel's very brief article The Invention of the Internet as well as Bruce Sterling's A Short History of the Internet (written in 1993 just before the explosion of the World Wide Web)
• Watch my (18mins) video The Internet: invented for nuclear war?
• For those looking to deep dive, check out this documentary from 1972 (just as the Internet was being invented) called Computer Networks - The Heralds Of Resource Sharing, and for an even deeper dive into primary sources check out J.C.R. Licklider's Man-Computer Symbiosis as well as Bob Taylor's and Paul Bran's oral histories.

What is the Internet, literally, physically. Where is the Internet? What's it made of, how does it work? To answer these questions...

• To get a sense of the Internet at the "global" level watch this (7.5min) video A Journey To The Bottom Of The Internet by Nat & Lo
• If you'd like to dive deeper into this part of the Internet check out this interactive map of Internet undersea cables.
• Take a look at this (14min) doc on artist, Trevor Paglen's Internet infrustructure projects.
• To see where these sea cables go when they reach land watch this (8min) Motherboad video.
• ... then at "national" level watch the short (10mins) doc Communication: Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors by Ben Mendelsohn
• If you'd like to explore other buildings like the one featured in that doc check out this interactive map of Internet exchange buildings.
• ... then at a "local" level watch this (12min) doc on Diana Nucera and the Detroit Community Technology Project's Equitable Internet Initiative
• For a bit more on broadband access issues in the United States watch this (7min) Vox feature on Why 23 million Americans don't have fast internet

Internet Travelogue

Every time we enter a URL into our Web browser an HTTP request is made. What this means is that our browsers generates a tiny file, or Internet packet, addressed to the server hosting the website we've requested. the packet physically travels from your computer across the Internet until it reaches it's destination, at which point a copy of the site's homepage is made (the HTML page) and sent back across the Internet to your computer and rendered in your browser. All this happens in a fraction of a second.

Choose a website and create an Internet Travelogue which charts your HTTP request packet's journey across the Internet. Here's one example of what your Internet Travelogue could look like, and here's another example. In order to chart your packet's journey you'll need to use a few tools.

First, you'll need to know your IP address, the number which locates you (or your WiFi router to be more precise) on the Internet. Do a websearch for "What's my IP address" and you'll find it. This is your starting point, the packet's "from" address. Next you'll need to find the packet's "to" address, or the IP address of the website you're requesting. If you're using a Mac or Linux computer, open your Terminal application (or the Command Prompt on Windows) and run nslookup example.com replacing "example.com" with your website.

Once you know your destination IP address, you'll need to map that to a physical address. Do a web search for "IP address to location" or "IP to geo" and you'll come across various different services that can translate an IP address into GPS coordinates. I prefer to use https://ip-api.com/ because it not only gives me the GPS coordinates, but also tells me the name of the organization who owns that IP address (a helpful piece of information when creating your travelogue). Use an online mapping service to navigate to those GPS coordinates and try to find where exactly the site is hosted. The GPS coordinates aren't always precise, it'll get you to the general area, but you'll likely need to search the map for "data centers" in the area to try and find the building where your identified organization (hosting the website) is a tenant at. Large data centers often (though not always) have many different companies renting space in the data center for their servers. This means the building your looking for might not have the same name as the organization for which the IP address belongs.

Next we'll need to chart the journey from our IP address to the IP address of the computer hosting the requested website. On a Mac or Linux computer, open your Terminal again (or the Command Prompt on Windows) and run traceroute -I 255.255.255.255 (or tracert 255.255.255.255 on Windows), replacing "255.255.255.255" with your destination's IP address.

The traceroute application will start to list the IP addresses of each "hop" (or router) your packet takes on it's journey. Once you have your list of hops, look up each IP address like you did before to find the GPS coordinates of each and find them on the map. The IP addresses along the way are likely going to be Internet exchange points or "colocation centers", or "carrier hotels". These are all names for large data centers where different networks meet and connect with each other to exchange Internet traffic. Use those terms (in addition to "data center") to try and find the buildings (near the GPS coordinates) where the hops might have taken place. If there's ever a hop between two different continents, then it's likely your packet took a journey through an under sea cable, use this map of submarine cables to try and identify which one.

It's important to note that the traceroute application isn't perfect. It doesn't actually trace a direct route so much as send "pings" (a tiny packet to a router that echos back) to and from each router along the path. Because your packet doesn't necessarily take the same exact journey each time (every new Web request finds the quickest path across the Internet to it's destination at that moment) the list of IP address returned by the traceroute in a way reflects a combination of alternative routes the packet may have taken. So, what you'll need to do is run the traceroute a few times (maybe 4 or 5) keeping track of the list of IP addresses and their corresponding GPS coordinates. Compare the different results, disregard any anomolies (IP addresses that only ever showed up once) and make your best guess as to what a likely journey may have been.

The point is not to figure out the most accurate path, but rather it's to make the Internet visible and to make interesting observations along the way. As you come across different companies or unexpected locations, take notes and share anecdotes about the journey your packet has taken. Email me your Internet Travelogue before our next class (Jan 25th).