Aleks Krotoski looks into the digital world. In this episode, we explore why people are rejecting a traditional relationship with tech, jobs and societal pressures. In addition to the post-pandemic 'Great Resignation', where millions of people quit their jobs to either take early-retirement, or to tackle something less stressful and demanding, we're seeing a broader international pushback to the traditional 'cult of work'. In China, the 'lying flat' movement offered another version of 'quiet quitting'. Essentially, both trends saw people place greater value on their lives than their career. 'Bai Lan' is an extension of that, and means 'let it rot', or 'bed rotting' as it's also known. This means rejecting gruelling competiton for a low-desire life, and being happy with that decision. Elsewhere, others are opting out of tech. Whether this means ditching a smartphone for a 'simple phone' or disconnecting from the web altogether, there's a definite movement towards re-writing the rules of engagement in terms of contemporary life and work.

Our tech future will supposedly be defined by megaprojects. The most attention grabbing ideas include physical Megacities like ‘The Line’ in Saudi Arabia, or Telosa in the United States, and on the digital side of things, we have the Metaverse. These are both supposed to be the new places we will work, play, love and create - sweeping aside past cities and online communities to become a utopian place for everyone to gather, and live a better way. But even as the foundations are laid… we seem to have moved on. The Metaverse has been roundly mocked and dismissed, with people deriding VR zoom meetings and legless avatars. While the very feasibility, and morality, of megacity projects has been questioned from their inception - comparisons to all manner of sci-fi dystopias abound. Aleks explores if promised tech utopias will inevitably become crumbling follies, why we get swept up in the narrative of a single tech genius who carves out the future for us all, and if the cycle of hype we have all been swept up in is disrupting our ability to indulge in slower iterations, which could actually lead us to a brighter tech future for us all.

We’ve all seen those TV programmes (and perhaps shed a tear) when long lost family members are reunited. Who doesn’t love a fairytale ending? Making those connections nowadays is simpler and faster than ever, thanks to a combination of DNA testing, digital records and the ease of gathering information and communicating online. But do these huge leaps forward we’ve experienced in science and technology mean that, sometimes, things can move a bit too quickly for us to process. Reunions don’t always involve a happy ending and can be complicated emotionally. So just because we can track someone down, does that always mean that we should? Aleks Krotoski meets five adoptees navigating aspects of reunion. Producer: Lynsey Moyes Researcher: Anna Miles

They were ubiquitous - taped onto magazines covers, bursting out of overstuffed office cabinet drawers, used to hold everything from secret family recipes, to photo albums, to legal documents, operating systems; anything you could cram on 1.4mb of storage was contained on floppy disks. After a 40 year career as the go to storage method of, even gateway to, the digital world, they were declared effectively obsolete. But are they? Aleks discovers some of the last people to be trading in, and experimenting with, floppy disks. She finds out which industries still depend on them, how artists are repurposing them, and how they birthed a new niche genre of music - despite never having been a means for storing or creating music in their heyday. Why is it only when a technology falls into obscurity that we test its boundaries, and how can floppy disks guide us in our relationship with technology in a future world of unbridled, unlimited, data.

Now the fanfare of billionaires space adventures has died down we're left with the question of are we witnessing a new democratisation of space not unlike the revolution that brought us the modern digital world? Aleks Krotoski asks if the legions of amateurs and innovators working out of bedrooms and garages are about to fundamentally change our relationship with space. And will that be a continuation of the idealism of early pioneers or a repeat of the unregulated, disruptive free-for-all that the internet has largely become. From the NASA retirees who reactivated a space probe from an abandoned MacDonalds to the kids building operational satellites in their after school clubs the face of space is about to change forever. Producer: Peter McManus Researcher: Anna Miles Sound Engineer: Gav Murchie