As news of the failure of the internet percolated around the interwebs today, a dropped anchor off Alexandria causing this disruption, I was reminded of a remarkable story 11 years ago in Wired, called Mother Earth Mother Board, in which Neil Stephenson tracked the “meat space,” or physical nature of the internet. As the fates would have it, one of the world’s major intersections of the web is in Alexandria, on the same space as the fabled library of Alexandria.

Interesting to note that, for millennia, that same singular location has been dedicated to the sharing of knowledge, and that with a seemingly small act–a spark, a dropped anchor–both could so easily be taken away.

And, just how much the net has changed since this article was written, in that now we can just zoom right over to it. Google is the new library of Alexandria then, I suppose