By Caelan Bailey, Report for America corps member
Council members in Oconee County, South Carolina interrogated Sheriff Mike Crenshaw at a wooden podium this past July.
The sheriff had just given a presentation on an American startup company that began with the help of homeowners associations. Now, the company was crawling into rural areas of the county.
For places like this Appalachian county of about 84,000, technology was wedging its way in via small black boxes mounted on posts, on businesses, on curves in mountain roads, held up through agreements with local governments. Rigged with a camera lens, these installments send a constant feed of license plates to a national artificial intelligence network and database: Flock Safety, a company becoming part of small towns’ eyes on the street.
“I had a phone call when I was driving to this meeting today, and it’s not just one political side,” City Council member Thomas James said. “I’ve heard from people who disagree with me on just about everything, but they’re not for the Flock stuff.”
Unidentified vigilantes had smashed Flock cameras from their perches in neighboring counties in the weeks leading up to the meeting. All over South Carolina, counties are waiting to see how the state Supreme Court will rule in a case where someone detained on the basis of evidence from a Flock camera sued the their county police department for “unreasonable search and seizure.”
In September, the Oconee County Council passed an ordinance defunding “mass surveillance” devices like Flock’s cameras — and, as grassroots sentiment swells, other counties across both Appalachia and the country are considering doing the same.
Flock cameras, along with other brands of automated license plate readers, are now a flashpoint for the fact that the United States lives in an interconnected state. Resistance to these cameras, visible markers of AI-powered technology amid waves of data center development, is making national headlines. Communities are starting to see technology as a physical presence — and economic force — in their day-to-day lives. And Appalachia, the same region that fueled the United States’ industrialization, is building out its own unique relationship to the infrastructure of the globalizing 21st century. 100 Days in Appalachia is designing “The New Rural Landscape” beat to cover that relationship.
South Carolina is my home state, with seven counties in 100 Days in Appalachia’s definition of the Appalachian mountain region. I have freelanced across the South, writing place-based long-form articles, the kind that come from newer outlets like 100 Days. Before, I was the state politics reporter for West Virginia Public Broadcasting — walking the marble halls of the Capitol then connecting those conversations to voices outside that building. Through all of this work, I have been telling stories that reckon with how we are forming our communities today.
“The New Rural Landscape” is a new beat for 100 Days, and I will be reporting it as a Report for America corps member. 100 Days’ last corps member was religion reporter Laura Harbert Allen; her award-winning story about early data center opposition in Tucker County, West Virginia began this project of covering how technology has become a frontier of extraction in Appalachia.
Now, I’ll be continuing that coverage with the whole 100 Days team contributing, honing how we think about “rurality” and technology in Appalachia — who can afford to stay, who can make decisions about the land, and who can shape an economic future.
“The New Rural Landscape” means continuing to ask how hyper-scale data centers do or do not change Appalachian mountains and how Appalachians are using AI. The beat means asking what the environmental impacts are of powering new technological infrastructure in Appalachia and what viable job-creation alternatives are beginning to form in small towns and hollers. It means understanding surveillance technology’s unique relationship to place-based identity and asking how diverse Appalachian communities are preserving their own collective data and cultural maps.
In my conversations about The New Rural Landscape — with people advocating for, against, and around technology in Appalachia — often people ask how the newsroom draws Appalachia’s borders. It’s a boundary we draw from Alabama to the Southern Tier of New York. Twelve of the 13 states in 100 Days’ coverage area are only partially Appalachian: along those state borders, communities might share a mountain, but operate under different state and county laws. At the same time, some in Appalachia’s furthest reaches might not see themselves as Appalachian in name, but face similar relationships to infrastructure, land and extractive cycles. 100 Days wants to create a fuller picture of both economic exploitation and potential by honing our regional lens, understanding what might be unique to Appalachia.
So, what can you expect from me next?
We want to understand the ways new and old laws highlight or reverse differences along Appalachian commonalities, including how regulation of quickly-expanding technology use will set long-term courses and impacts. And as local coalitions become uniquely active, weighing in across Appalachia, we are especially interested when Appalachians go beyond concerns about their own backyard — and are questioning how their communities, and futures, are and will be governed.
These technologies extend into how we share internet space and access the internet, as well as the role tangible signs of technology like massive data center buildings or cameras on perches play in helping us understand the influence of an intangible interconnected world. And true to 100 Days’ origin as an outlet covering the first 100 days of the first Trump administration with nuance and local investment, we will talk to people from within Appalachia about how the second Trump administration is affecting their lives.
We want to know how communities are shaped by and are actively shaping their own sense of place and self-determination. That will include using our journalism to help communities make sense of complicated and fast-changing technologies, and we’ll seek your participation in our coverage.
If you have thoughts on “The New Rural Landscape,” from bigger ideas to events happening in your community to feedback on our coverage, you can email me at [email protected].
Caelan Bailey is a Report for America corps member.
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Previously Published on 100daysinappalachia with Creative Commons License
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Photo credit: A video still of construction at the Monarch Compute Campus, the future site of an AI data center complex, north of Point Pleasant in Mason County, W.Va., on May 26, 2026. The project is adjacent to homes in Meadowlands Estates and is being developed by Nscale, NVIDIA and Caterpillar. P. Nick Curran/100 Days in Appalachia
