When Ingrid Burrington walks the streets of New York City, she notices things others might overlook. Like a manhole cover on a Brooklyn side street, tantalizingly labeled “TELEPORT.”

“ It’s such a weird little treat,” says Burrington, a writer and artist based in Brooklyn. “Like, if I stand on this, I’m gonna get taken to another place.”Unfortunately, you’re not, unless you count the Wikipedia page for “History of AT&T.”Teleport is short for Teleport Communications Group, a holding company for a digital communications facility built in Staten Island in the 1980s, which was acquired by AT&T in the ’90s. The manhole cover that bears its name isn’t a portal to a fantasy dimension but to the netherworld of utilities humming beneath our feet.

Burrington is an avid chronicler of the wires, cables, boxes, hubs, meters, sensors and nodes that connect the vast amorphous internet to the very real phones and computers in our homes, and by extension, to our brains. Her field guide to the internet infrastructure of New York City, was published in 2016, a time when AI doomsday scenarios still felt like science fiction and data centers lived in obscurity. A decade later, Burrington has revisited and revised the book for a transformed technological age, asking people to notice the internet anew — while acknowledging the irony that, in 2026, “the internet makes itself all too legible in the city’s public spaces now, in some of its worst forms.”

To Burrington, it’s worth it to stop and consider the artifacts of digital communication — from fiber distribution boxes bolted to telephone poles to cell tower antennas on rooftops — because their presence “reminds me that while the internet has been made a certain way over time, it was in fact and could have been made differently,” she writes. “Maybe it still can be made differently.”To help promote the book, Burrington has been holding “Internet Walks” around New York; she’s holding another one on Nov. 8, at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

I’m wondering if you could start by taking me back to 2016, when you first published this book. What question were you trying to answer? Did it feel like people needed to be alerted to the ways that the internet was shaping their physical reality in a different way?

A lot of this work really started for me around 2013. A lot of the Edward Snowden NSA stories were dropping, and there was a lot of hubbub around government surveillance, and all of the imagery associated with those stories were these inscrutable PowerPoint graphics and stock photos of, like, a guy in a hoodie typing. The cyber criminal.

Very spooky, Matrix, spin-art-type thing. And I had this strong sense of: I don’t quite know what the internet looks like, but I don’t think it looks like this.

I initially was more interested in that interplay of defense contracting and internet infrastructure. Because the Northern Virginia corridor is where it is for a reason. I was really fascinated by these banal office parks that were like, data center on one side, Northrop Grumman on the other.

A lot of aspects of living with the internet seem to have been decided without anyone’s input. It’s like, “Oh, this is complicated technology and you don’t understand, and this is kind of distant and happens somewhere else.”And either you don’t need to worry about it or you can’t wrap your head around it. It’s too big.

The book is a way of personalizing it. Yeah, bringing it to a human scale. Being able to identify a cable running down this street doesn’t mean that you’re going to change the trajectory of the cable. But I think the recognition of it as one part of the urban fabric — and also acknowledging that so much of this stuff isn’t possible without the availability of access to public space and public right of way.

The internet is this massive privately owned public space. That connects to some of the questions we’re now seeing about whether companies should be allowed to build huge data centers in the suburbs. Ten years later, you acknowledge that it’s a weird time to be highlighting these collisions between technology and public space in New York City, where, as you write, “online vibes are not only omnipresent in the city, but also rancid.”

So why bring our attention back here? Some of it, to be quite candid, was simply the book went out of print. Over the years, I’d kind of been like, it’d be nice to come back to this, make it the way I wanted it to be from very early on. But another reason that it seemed like a good time to revisit was, as data center discourse got a lot more heated, I had people asking, “Would you like to talk with us about ‘materiality of internet’?”It’s very weird to be like, “I thought data centers were bad before everyone else.”There’s no win in being early on this.

But you noticed them perhaps before everyone else. Certainly.

There’s something about almost, like, a moral economy of computing that’s underway right now of — what are we using all of the compute power for, and is that part of the social contract? Especially when crypto had a big bubble moment in the later 2010s, I think the public understanding that compute was being used for stuff that did not really serve a public interest, and its use was in fact taxing other resources, was starting to become a bit more legible. Crypto was a much easier target for people to be mad at, because you’re just literally making funny money out of gasoline. But the current engagement with this stuff I think has been similar. It’s very visceral. And it can get more fraught, because there is some sense that perhaps this one will be different.

That AI may have slightly more utility. Data centers are a very glaring physical manifestation of the internet. They are huge, they’re disruptive, people can see them and touch them.

Does that make them a better villain or a useful symbol for opponents of AI to organize around? Well, first of all, you actually can’t really touch them. The security around these things can be a pain.

They are a thing people can see, they are a thing people can be galvanized around, but most people can’t get inside. One of the other reasons I think data center resistance is happening more at the town planning meeting level or in online organizing or in these other environments is, the optics of trying to do a demonstration around a data center are terrible.

Even if you’ve got a reasonably good critical mass, 100 people in front of that building is still gonna be dwarfed. I do think that they’re one of the more material manifestations, and a thing that people to some extent feel like they can still have some intervention in. Like, you can’t get your boss to change his mind on whether you all have to learn how to use AI even though there’s no clear efficiency gain from it. Or, I don’t have a lot of say about how many more AI ads I have to see on the subway. I don’t have a lot of say over what’s happening on Wall Street and what weird new special-purpose vehicles are being created to move money around in this.

But I can go to a planning meeting. I mean, not me personally, because I live in New York City, where data center development is generally going to be happening in repurposed existing buildings, because where are you gonna put a hyperscaler? Staten Island?

Queens, maybe? The other physical manifestation of technology that has become a site of protest is Flock cameras and automated license plate readers. You write about the long sweep of ALPRs being used by police in New York City. [In addition to using ALPR cameras on vehicles, the NYPD has contracted with a company called Vigilant Solutions to access its license plate database.] Around the country, people are vandalizing Flock cameras. How do you think about this current moment of ALPR backlash given all that you know about the decades of surveillance that have come before it? I often feel like a bit of a pedant telling people like, “Well, actually Flock’s not in New York City because we’ve been doing it longer.”

And there is a qualitative difference to Flock that I think is worth being upfront about. Mainly that they’re doing much more than ALPR at this point, and two, because they are this networked cloud platform that allows cross-sharing of stuff across jurisdictions, their reach as a product is very different. I wonder, to some extent, if there’s also a generational component to it.

So much of what exists in the NYPD’s surveillance apparatus in New York City was a post-9/11 thing. Now that there is a generation of adults who have very little recollection of that time period, and in some cases were not even alive for it, there is a little bit more room to look at what was built in the name of national security and acknowledge that it hasn’t really done what it was supposed to do, and that its costs are very great. A lot of your book is spent documenting the kinds of surveillance happening in New York City, both by law enforcement and by ad tech companies.

Do you move through space differently knowing what you know about how this operates? To a degree.

There’s only so much monitoring of that stuff that I can personally devote my head space to. If I’m looking for every Ring camera in Brownstone Brooklyn, I’m not gonna move very fast. One of the things I find especially pernicious are the consumer grade — and especially landlord-grade — surveillance.

I included the ButterflyMX kiosks in the guide. There is just something so unnerving to me about — why does a management company need to know when I’m coming in and out of my own house? Why do they need to know that I have guests? Why do they need to have a photo of that person? The other piece of this is so much of it is theater.

It’s hard to tell if a surveillance camera is actually just a decoy or something that a business owner has left up so that they will theoretically deter crime. And in that way, the physical presence of it is the whole thing.

It’s not even the technology itself. Yeah. Monsieur Foucault, you were right all along. My other favorite part of the book was the way you drew attention to the more analog evidence of the internet in public space.

Like, the spray paint on the streets indicating which underground cables are buried where, or the manhole covers with telecoms company logos. The buried utility markings are such a treat.

And that is also the entry point through which I realized, this book is great for people with children in New York City. They’re low to the ground. Curious about stuff.

I find being able to decode those symbols is really satisfying in that often it’s quite immediate. You’ll see, OK, there’s a manhole cover and there’s spray paint coming out of it, and it’s going directly into this light post, and you can see the cell tower on the top of it. There’s something very satisfying about a complete circuit in that sense.

You end the book by talking about some community-led internet projects in New York, like the Red Hook Wi-Fi Community Mesh Network, which stayed online when other providers were down during Hurricane Sandy; and NYC Mesh, a community-owned internet project run by volunteers. Why are these kinds of projects so important, and what kind of future do they have?

Red Hook Wi-Fi has kind of gone by the wayside. NYC Mesh is the most active and successful, and is arguably less community-driven in the sense that it’s not neighborhood scale. They’ll go anywhere they can put an antenna.

Community Tech New York has this nascent project — they’re working with The Point in Hunts Point in the South Bronx. Their community network is still running, and they’ve been trying to use the community land trust model to think about locally governed internet infrastructure, because one of the things that’s really hard about these projects is making sure they last. You can do all this stuff in a very ad-hoc, DIY mode, and then maybe the person who was the most excited about it moves to a different neighborhood, or the grant that got you started runs out.

One way I’ve been thinking about infrastructure, or rethinking how I think about infrastructure, is that it’s a big word that’s sometimes used to just mean “means of production.”How are we circulating information? How are we producing knowledge? How are we moving goods and services? How are we powering industry? And who controls the ability to do that? And networks that have a localized governance or that aren’t operated from this higher-level financialized model, there’s a resiliency to that.

I’ve been also thinking a lot about how sad it is that so many young adults have no recollection of the internet as being anything other than a dozen huge companies that control everything. One thing that these much more localized bottom-up networks can do is revive that possibility that in fact these are open protocols and systems that can be done with off-the-shelf components, and that’s actually incredibly cool.