A Field Guide to the Internet Infrastructure That Hides in Plain Sight

The internet is everywhere. In another, more concrete way, it’s inside massive, anonymous buildings and beneath city streets, marked by special manhole covers and cryptic, colorful symbols.

Ingrid Burrington introduces us to this latter face in Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide. The artist/writer/map-maker’s book and accompanying website (or, website and accompanying book) document the many physical manifestations of modern telecommunications in the Big Apple. As infrastructure, it’s massive, messy, and constantly under construction. But as Burrington points out, “the city’s tendency toward flux is a strange blessing for the infrastructure sightseer: markings and remnants of the network are almost everywhere, once you know how to look for them.”