There is a decent chance you have driven past one of them and never noticed it. A small black camera box on a pole. Maybe at an intersection. Maybe near a school. Maybe at the edge of town, where the road bends and the streetlights thin out. It does not look dramatic. It does not look like a warning. It looks like municipal clutter, one more little piece of roadside furniture in a world already full of signs, wires, boxes, poles, and things nobody asked about until they were

For years, tech companies sold Americans a comforting illusion called “the cloud.” It sounded soft. Weightless. Almost magical. Our photos, messages, streaming services, and social media posts were supposedly floating somewhere in the digital heavens like electronic fireflies. But the reality is far less poetic. The cloud is physical. It has buildings, cooling towers, power substations, diesel generators, pipelines, tax incentives, and environmental consequences. Increasingly