Substrate

If the ‘90s internet was a weird, largely unproductive place where you escaped from reality, today’s internet is where much of reality happens, and meatspace is where you escape from it. It barely even makes sense anymore to refer to “the internet” as an alternate domain. We’re all basically online all the time, passively if not actively.

In 2006, Senator Ted Stevens infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes,” for which he was ridiculed, but his statement has aged well as a metaphor if not a literal description: a visual reminder of the wormholes we’re teleporting through to reach one another, the digital bridges and tunnels — the infrastructure we arrived by.