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... See more

I believe the common prevailing metaphor—the internet as cloud—is problematic. The internet is not one all-encompassing, mysterious, and untouchable thing. (In early patent drawings depicting the internet, it appears as related shapes: a blob, brain, or explosion.) These metaphors obfuscate the reality that the internet is made up of individual... See more

In the networking days of the 1990s, computer manufacturers sought to maximize the processing power of individual machines. The power of the digital network was something of a market externality, the happy byproduct of linking many powerful nodes. Now, however, the rise of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency are driving a new demand for the... See more