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I was doing some reading, the other day, on alternating current. I've done a little bit of electronics, and all of it was done using direct current. But prior to Friday or so, I hadn't really understood how alternating current worked, despite the very clear fact that it sees much more use than the direct current model. The difficulty, I think, was I couldn't understand -- or didn't understand -- that alternating current doesn't really have the same mechanics of "flow" that a direct current circuit does. In alternating current, the flow reverses periodically. The documents I was reading suggested that 60 Hz was about typical for the domestic power supply, which means about 120 reversals of direction every second. Instead of electrons continually flowing toward a positive polarity, the electrons slosh back and forth like clothes in a washing machine.

And I thought about that: at the perimeter of my home, electrons spastically in and out like some hyperkinetic teenage boy, thrilled to finally be doing it. The power company is fucking my home at 60 cycles per second.

At first, I went to back away from this image; after all, the current rapidly cycles directions. Only a few electrons are going to be sloshing back and forth across that threshold, right? Then realization struck: electrons move at the speed of light. That means an electron can travel 186,000 miles per second. If we're assuming 60 cycles a second, that means current flows one direction for 1/120th of a second. In that fraction of a second (approx .0083 sec), the electron that starts just outside my apartment's imaginary border, will travel 1550 miles before it reverses direction and returns to its spot just outside my apartment. Fifteen hundred miles. I'm pretty sure I don't have that much wire in my house, even when you start unraveling the solid state circuitry in my electronics.

This brings to mind a different analogy; the eager schoolboy gets a bye. Instead, I turn to yoga. Just after undergrad, when I was working at Barnes and Noble, a friend showed me one of the more unusual books on yoga we carried. This book outlined some of the more extreme practices; one of these was a technique I remember calling a "body floss," where the yogi swallowed a long strip of gauze, and worked it through his digestive tract. I am certain that this technique differs dramatically from the flossing of one's teeth, where insertion of the floss is prelude to a brisk back-and-forth designed to clean the flossed area. I am certain that the gauze simply passed through the yogi; this seems like it would be spectacle enough. But as I think of this alternating current churning through the wires of my home, this is what I think of, a brisk back and forth, sweeping the body clean.

The magic works because we're all tied in to one enormous circuit. The floor lamp sitting in the corner of my room, plugged into the wall, is connected through miles of bare metal, to a generator. The generator moves the electrons in the metal immediately adjacent, and the electrons in all the wire between there and here slosh in sympathy. My lamp is clamped to the end, a tiny reef of resistance in the big churning sea of electrons.

I think sophisticated electronics tend to convert the AC power supply into DC. A directed flow is fairly important to most of the logical circuits I've studied. In the directed flow, electrons move from the negative polarity to the positive polarity, and using the properties of various conductors, we can build systems of logic based on whether the amount of power in a circuit is sufficient to surpass established thresholds. Push enough power through a semiconductor, and it behaves as if it were a conductor. But if you reduce the power, it closes up, and begins to behave like an insulator. This is the foundation of all computing, the basis on which we make electricity express logic.

Server farms are a curious outgrowth of our increasingly wired culture. Like an enormous industrial-chic locker room, rows and rows of cabinets clatter and hum with the cacophany of chattering hard drives and the whir of anxious fans, pushing the heat of entropy out into the air conditioned room. The climate here is controlled with an authoritarian's precision: temperature and humidity are managed with enormous air ducts. Thick cables rope along overhead, vine-like, sprouting tendrils that plug into the cabinets. The noise is astonishing, both in its volume, and in the way it is so perfectly white, so perfectly mechanical and meaningless, cut through only by the odd beeping.

In the server farm, this throbbing pulse of electricity is drunk down greedily by complex assemblages of metal. It gets repurposed into direct current; it gets routed through millions of circuits and subcircuits, gets pushed into one logic gate after another. Heat streams away as it forces order on the dancing electrons. And here it flings those organized electrons out, pushing them down another wire, framed in a perfectly organized packet. More machines split the packet it up, interlace it with other packets, shunt it between circuits, re-assemble it. So many manipulations, between the frenetic beating heart of the AC power supply, and the perfectly realized low-resolution version of a 1980's television commercial playing on YouTube.

Standing there, in the server farm, with thousands of machines throbbing and chattering and humming away as they each shove thousands of messages down the wires, millions of messages to computers, to people, points of literal light in millions of homes and offices and remote locations all around the globe: again, we are connected. The power grid throbs, sixty cycles a second the heart rate of this electronic entity. The power grid throbs, and the network sings nervous messages out to its extremities. I stand in the brain of this entity, this sub-section of culture, this collection of people and wires and machines, connected by nothing beyond a fiscal relationship with the server farm.