You may never have been inside a server farm (aka: “data center” or “colo” for co-location facility). If you don’t have responsibility for maintaining a website or work as an industrial electrician, cable stringer, HVAC professional or NSA stenographer, you don’t have much reason to ever step inside one of these cavernous worlds of computers, cables and cages.

Imagine an enormous, extremely well-kept zoo, with chain link walls draped from floor to ceiling creating lines of large fenced boxes vanishing somewhere in the far, dark reaches of the Matrix. Inside each cage is a mammoth case (or several mammoth cases) constructed of stylish black metal and glass, crouched on a raised white tile floor into which cables dive and resurface like dolphins. Sometimes glowing green and red lights flicker as disks whir and whistle. Often the machines operate silently as frigid air pours out of exposed ceiling vents and splashes against shiny surfaces and around hard edges.

The overwhelming impression, as Dr. Jim led us past cage after cage of cooled processing power, was of fetishistic efficiency. Clean, pristine and smoothly sculpted, these were more than machines, they were totems of the Internet economy. Here was eBay. Here Yahoo. Here Inktomi. Welcome to Stonehenge for the Information Age. The common design element seemed to be a machine monolith centered in each cage, surrounded by ample space to set up a desk and a few chairs, with enough room left over for a small party of proto-humans to dance about beating their chests and throwing their slide rules into the air.