Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

Latest Episodes:

Your Landlord Might Be Using Facial Recognition to Spy On You Aug 22, 2025

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All across the country, sweeping surveillance laws are being enacted under the guise of "safety" especially "child safety". Courts are handing over sensitive federal data, housing authorities are deploying broadband surveillance, and tech companies across the board are pushing facial recognition with no oversight.

Amidst of all this, S.T.O.P.—the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project—is fighting back. The organization has released A People’s Handbook of Surveillance to equip the public with information about rampant “smart city” surveillance. They've been calling out facial recognition tech being enacted in public housing. They're pursuing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the NYPD for civil liberties violations and more.

Albert Fox Cahn is the founder of S.T.O.P. and an icon in the fight against surveillance capitalism. He's joining me today to talk about what's going on right now in America, all the sneaky new ways corporations and the government are trying to surveil us, and how we can build people-first tech that challenges power.
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The True Story Behind Four Loko Aug 20, 2025

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Few beverages have left as unforgettable a mark on American culture as Four Loko. With a dizzying mix of alcohol and caffeine, it skyrocketed to success in the 2000s and became an iconic American brand overnight.

Four Loko was one of the first brands to ever go "viral" and the brand understood internet culture before the internet was even mainstream. But that virality came with a cost. The company suffered government crackdowns, a media moral panic, they changed the formula of their drink and somehow emerged from it all more relevant than ever.

When I met Four Loko CEO and cofounder Jaisen Freeman, I knew I had to talk to him for my podcast. We talk about how his scrappy college drink startup went from being nearly banned to one of the top-selling beverages in the country and how the brand has managed to transform online controversy into a business.

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YouTube's AI Age Verification is a Disaster Aug 15, 2025

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This week, YouTube rolled out automatic age verification in the US. It forces users who the company's AI system guesstimates might be under 18 to submit their government IDs or full biometric scans just to watch certain videos. YouTube is the first major tech platform to preemptively normalize invasive identity checks for everyday online activity, and it's a disaster.

This new identity verification system creates a dangerous precedent. It is building a surveillance infrastructure that normalizes the tracking of legal and previously anonymous content consumption, all under the guise of child safety.

For this week's Free Speech Friday I dig into why what YouTube and other tech companies like Instagram and Roblox are doing with preemptive AI age and identity verification is so harmful, and how it might change YouTube forever.

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What killed The Song Of The Summer w/ Anthony Fantano Aug 13, 2025

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We're halfway through August and summer is rapidly coming to a close. But this year, something about the season was different. It's the first year in over 100 years that there hasn't been a definitive song of the summer.

Is the absence of a “2025 song of the summer” just a quirk of this year’s charts or a symptom of a music culture permanently fractured by personalization, speed, and saturation. I called up Anthony Fantano to help me answer this question.

We dive deep into what makes a good song of the summer, how the concept emerged in culture, why we don't have one this year, and what a post song of the summer society might look like.

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Everyone’s Lying About Lil Tay OnlyFans w/ Kat Tenbarge Aug 08, 2025

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A few days ago, 18 year old social media star Lil Tay made over $1 million by launching an OnlyFans shortly after her 18th birthday. The launch generated a massive backlash online, people on the left and the right are calling for OnlyFans to be banned and for the criminalization of porn.

On today's free speech Friday Kat Tenbarge and I break down Lil Tay's rise, what actually went down with her OF launch, and how this viral moment is already being weaponized by both influential Democrat and far right accounts to silence speech, dismantle civil liberties and push dangerous censorship laws that would lead to even more exploitation of women and children.

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Is ChatGPT Changing The Way We Talk? w/ Adam Aleksic Aug 06, 2025

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Since its launch in 2022, ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The tool is embedded in more and more areas of daily life and new research shows that it's also transforming how we write and even speak.

A group of researchers analyzed more than 360,000 YouTube videos and 771,000 podcast episodes from before and after ChatGPT’s release to track the use of ChatGPT-affiliated words like "delve" and "examine."

All of this has major implications. Adam Aleksic is an etymologist who studies the way the internet is reshaping language. His new book Algospeak tackles all of this. He joins me to discuss how ChatGPT and AI is transforming the way we talk, what words we use, and how we communicate.

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The UK's Censorship Catastrophe is Just The Beginning Aug 01, 2025

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The UK's Online Safety Act finally went into effect this week and it has been a massive clusterfuck. Entire forums, websites, communities and essential journalism is being censored. People are being forced to scan their faces to use Spotify and YouTube.

Like all of these terrible censorship bills, the Online Safety Act claims it's about protecting children from the evils of pornographic and “adult” content. But immediately after it went into effect, platforms began classifying nearly all breaking news footage, war coverage, investigative journalism, political protest material and information about reproductive and public health as “explicit” or “harmful" content, thus blocking anyone from under 18 from accessing it.

I break down the fallout from the UK's Online Safety Act and what we could be facing here in the U.S. soon if we don't fight back to protect free speech online.

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The Public Health Internet Is Crumbling Jul 30, 2025

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The internet has become the primary way that people get public health information. Especially since the pandemic began in 2020, millions of people have turned to platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and newsletters to keep up to date on things like food recalls, infectious disease reports, and more.

But now, CDC social media channels have gone dark, and the agency's public health communication across the internet is being cut off and dismantled. Chiara Eisner is an investigative reporter at NPR and she's been covering the fiasco at the CDC. We talk about the crucial role that the internet plays in public health and why what's happening right now under Trump and RFK and why it might set us back decades.

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How Companies Learned Everything About Us Jul 28, 2025

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This is the first video in my new series on data brokers and the dark history of digital surveillance. I dig into how surveillance capitalism evolved, the companies profiting from intimate details about your life, and how it all began long before the internet.

I reveal the industry's origins from early government tracking systems to invisible surveillance networks fueling ultra-targeted ads. How corporations are able to build data profiles so detailed that they can predict when you’re going to get sick, where you're likely to live, and even discover you're pregnant before your own family.

Let me know what you think in the comments! I worked so hard on this one 🙏

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ICE Is Building a Nationwide Tracking System (and Your Data is In It) Jul 25, 2025

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The U.S. government is quietly building the largest surveillance system in modern history. In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I break down how agencies like ICE, DHS are weaponizing your personal data including tax filings, medical records, license plate scans, and more, to hunt innocent people down across the country.

The Department of Homeland Security is also exploring ways to access IRS data on millions of U.S. citizens "associated with criminal activity" or who have shown support for "terrorism." I break down ICE’s growing surveillance empire, the risks of government data abuse, and the terrifying consequences for civil liberties if we don't fight back.

ProPublica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-irs-share-tax-records-ice-dhs-deportations

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