There is something quietly strange about the internet. We use it constantly, we depend on it for almost everything, and yet most of us have no idea what it actually is — not the physical reality of it, the cables running along ocean floors, the data centers humming in the desert, the radio waves bouncing between towers and satellites and the small rectangles in our pockets. We interact with a surface, a kind of polished interface on top of an enormous, aging, and deeply complicated machine. And that machine is changing in ways that are hard to fully grasp, even for the people building it.
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