5 Tech Podcasts Demystifying Digital Life & Power Dynamics 🤖

Who is tech really serving? These podcasts explore the complexities of our changing digital landscape.

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Let’s meet Bridget Todd, this week’s curator⬇️

I’m excited to be hosting the new season of the IRL podcast from Mozilla and PRX. It centers the voices asking tough questions: Who built these systems? Who benefits? And how do we make tech more human?

These are the other podcasts I trust to help me make sense of how tech is shaping our lives, from how we date and work to how power flows online.

Bridget Todd, EarBuds curator July 2025

Podcast picks, curated by Bridget Todd

IRL: Online Life is Real Life podcast cover art

IRL: Online Life is Real Life

I’m biased because I host it, but this episode explores how AI is already reshaping dating and romance, and not always in good ways.

Instead of sensationalizing people who form romantic relationships with AI, we ask a deeper question: are these companies exploiting our loneliness (and our data) with shady privacy practices?

Better Offline podcast cover art

Better Offline

No one drags tech grifters like Ed Zitron. Better Offline is blisteringly smart, wildly opinionated, and never afraid to say what others won’t.

It’s less “thought leadership” and more “burn it all down” (with receipts). Ed is at his best when spotlighting corners of the internet that are actually good, like this episode about why Wikipedia remains one of the trusted pockets of the web.

kill switch podcast cover art

kill switch

While most tech podcasts are obsessed with the future, kill switch asks: what’s already changing right now? It’s urgent, grounded, and refuses to look away from tech’s real world consequences, not just its shiny promises.

This episode spotlights how AI has already changed the true crime landscape and whether that’s a good thing.

Power User podcast cover art

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

The 2000s were a formative decade for tech.

From the dot com bubble to the rise of social media, to the chaotic days of early blogging, the iMac, and emergence of the PayPal Mafia, the 00s shaped our online world in ways we’re still reckoning with.

Levittown podcast cover art

Levittown

This entire series is a tough but critical listen.

It unpacks a horrifying case in Levittown, New York, where AI was used to non-consensually create deepfake images of young women and reveals how rapidly advancing AI tools are being used in deeply unethical ways, while laws and institutions struggle to keep up.

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👩‍🍼Momcozy Village – Together We Grow is launching a new mini-series tied to World Breastfeeding Week. It's aimed at having supportive conversations about the realities of early motherhood, with a focus on breastfeeding, maternal wellbeing, and the emotional complexity of new parenthood.

🎙️The Early Podcast tells the inside story of unicorn startups through the voices of the early employees who built them.

💖In Podcast The Newsletter, Lauren Passell recommends Unruly. She writes: “They returned for an interview with someone I know and love, Elise Hu, about girlhood, a topic that takes up a lot of real estate in my brain...”

Podcast news from Podnews

  • Pocket Casts have a free partner newsletter for podcasters, which lets you know about upcoming curation opportunities for your show, information about advertising, or helpful insights into how the largest independent podcast app works. It’s free to sign up.

  • U.K. audio awards the APAs from AudioUK has announced its Pay What You Can scheme, which offers free or discounted entry to the awards and to the ceremony for those who otherwise would not be able to do so due to financial constraints. The scheme supporters are Amazon Music and Wondery.

  • New from Novel and iHeartPodcasts is The Girlfriends: Jailhouse Lawyer, the third season for the chart-topping show, produced by the U.K.-based Novel Audio. Anna Sinfield is the host — and the story features a woman who said her abusive boyfriend murdered a man right in front of her. She was terrified that she would be killed next. So how did she end up in prison for over a decade on a murder charge?

Spotlight

New Friends with Jordana Bryant podcast cover art

This is New Friends, the podcast that captures life unfiltered… basically Jordana’s real-life group chat.

Join Jordana and friends to chat about the things that don’t always make it into a highlight reel — everything from messy friendships, dating, and working in music, to the harder-to-share moments like struggling with confidence, stress, and anxiety. It’s vulnerable, it’s chaotic, it’s honest — and full of the kind of conversations that help you feel a little less alone. And yeah, sometimes what they say becomes a lyric.

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