Series of tubes
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Series of tubes is a term coined by United States Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, describing the Internet in a June 28, 2006 [speech] about network neutrality. Stevens was criticizing a proposed amendment to a bill in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation which would have disallowed ISPs from charging fees to give some companies faster Internet access:
Publicity
On June 28th, Public Knowledge Government Affairs Manager Alex Curtis wrote a brief blog entry [link] introducing the Senator's speech and posting an MP3 recording. On June 29th, the Wired Magazine blog 27B Stroke 6 featured a much longer blog post [link] by Ryan Singel, including Singel's transcriptions of some of the most humorous parts of Stevens' speech. Within days, thousands of other blogs and message boards, including BoingBoing [link], Slashdot [link], Fark [link], DailyKOS [link], and Digg [link], posted the story. Most writers and commentators derisively cited several of Senator Stevens' misunderstandings of Internet technology, arguing that the speech showed that Senator Stevens had apparently formed a strong opinion on a topic which he understood poorly. The Internet phenomenon sparked mainstream media attention, including a mention in a New York Times story [link]. The technology podcast This Week in Tech discussed the incident in Episode 60, [A Series of Tubes].Within two weeks, the speech had also become the subject of a T-shirt design [link], at least two musical remixes [link] [link], a myspace fan site [link], and a blogspot spoof blog [link].
Stevens' speech was also ridiculed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart which featured clips of Stevens's speech. [link] Stewart proceeded to compare him to "a crazy old man in an airport bar at 3:00 AM", then going on to state, "you don't seem to know jack shit about computers or the Internet, but that's okay — you're just the guy in charge of regulating it."
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