Big Tech’s data centers are changing the landscape of small-town America, bringing new kinds of jobs and economic opportunity. This week, we hear from Shannon Wait, a data technician in South Carolina whose experience led to a rare labor settlement — offering a window into what life inside these facilities is really like.

When Big Tech brought plans for a giant data center to St. Charles, Missouri, one college student decided to fight back. And it raises a question small towns all over the US are asking: what happens when the cloud touches ground?

As the Trump administration pressures Apple and Google to remove apps that track ICE activity from their stores, locals are going old-school. Francisco Chavo Romero, an LA-based activist, explains how it works.

Polish developer Kuba Gretzky wanted to prove that multi-factor authentication wasn’t foolproof. He succeeded—maybe too well. What happens when a cybersecurity warning becomes the threat itself?

You’ve likely received a scam call or text at some point. Some of these messages come from elaborate compounds found mostly in Southeast Asia. These compounds look like call centers but operate more like prisons. In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we return to an episode and hear from listeners — on how these centers cropped up and what’s being done to stop them.

We usually think of getting online as something that requires cables—strung under oceans or buried beneath our feet. Mahesh Krishnaswamy of Taara thinks the future may lie in beams of light pointed at the sky.

What does it take to get everyone online? A maze of cables, satellites — and politics. We meet one farmer in Mississippi chasing a signal, and discover that what’s really at stake isn’t just access to the internet — it’s access to the future itself.

In Tuesday’s episode, novelist Bruce Holsinger imagined the moral fallout of an autonomous car crash in his new book Culpability. Today, we leave fiction behind and ask a more urgent question: Can we really trust driverless cars on the road? Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and AI ethicist at NYU, cuts through the hype.