-
![]()
Justin Sullivan / Getty Who Gets to Live in Silicon Valley?
Google and San Jose hope to make the city more affordable for working- and middle-class families, but they make matters worse.
-
![]()
Nigel Young / Foster and Partners New Mexico’s Sad Bet on Space Exploration
Spaceport America was supposed to bring a thriving space industry to the southern New Mexico desert—but for now it’s a futurist tourist attraction, not an operational harbor to the cosmos.
-
![]()
Ralph Orlowski / Reuters Could Facebook Be Tried for Human-Rights Abuses?
The legal path is murky.
-
![]()
Courtesy of Ingrid Burrington A Surreal Trip to a Domain-Names Conference
… where misspelled URLs are auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars.
-
![]()
Ingrid Burrington Why Amazon's Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country
The company powers much of the Internet, but its cloud facilities are difficult to find.
-
![]()
Shannon Stapleton / Reuters How Mobile Carriers Skirt Net-Neutrality Rules
“There’s something stomach-twisting about a company offering free video streaming but charging for the data used when filling out an online job application.”
-
![]()
Yves Herman / Reuters The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge
The data centers that support the Internet use a huge amount of energy.
-
![]()
Ingrid Burrington The Secrets of an Abandoned Microwave Tower in Kansas
A mysterious AT&T relic reveals connections between telecommunications infrastructure and the Cold War.
-
![]()
Ingrid Burrington A Network of Fragments
There’s a poetry in the bits and pieces of Internet infrastructure that hide in plain sight all around us.
-
![]()
Sam Kronick A Journey Into the Heart of Facebook
How the “sharing” company’s data centers reveal its values
-
![]()
Jim Young / Reuters Why Are There So Many Data Centers in Iowa?
“Networks, land, power, and taxes.”
-
![]()
Ingrid Burrington Finding Dark Fiber in a Desert Ghost Town
In the American West, there are ruins everywhere.
-
![]()
British Library / Wikimedia How Railroad History Shaped Internet History
It’s no accident that Iowa, where the first transcontinental railroad began, is now home to a huge data-center industry.
-
![]()
Wikimedia A Visit to the NSA's Data Center in Utah
Why would the intelligence agency put its largest surveillance storehouse in the middle of a desert?
-
![]()
Bob Riha Jr / Reuters The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud
How cold weather, taxes, and sovereignty dictate the placement of data centers overseas.
-
![]()
Jan Butchofsky / Corbis Where the Cloud Rises From the Sea
The cable that connects the U.S. to the global Internet runs right next to a small coastal town in California. Why do so few of its residents have broadband?
-
![]()
Mike Segar / Reuters What's Important About Underwater Internet Cables
Hint: It has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin or terrorism.
-
![]()
KFOR-TV / AP What People Mean When They Talk About ‘The Cloud’
When your data-center road trip is waylaid by rain, why not use the time to define your terms?
-
![]()
Sam Kronick The Room Where the Internet Was Born
An epic American road trip—to see “The Cloud” in all its strange manifestations—begins in an old lab at UCLA.
-
![]()
Ingrid Burrington How to See Invisible Infrastructure
I spent a weekend at the International Utility Locate Rodeo, where people compete to find hidden cables, water mains, and gas lines.
