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PODCAST

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

Taylor Lorenz explores how technology and the internet are upending our lives and the world around us. Each week, she explores everything from online fame to emerging platforms, viral phenomena, the creator economy, and much more. Tune in every Wednesday for regular episodes and every Friday for "Free Speech Friday," her series on tech policy and the fight for civil liberties online.

technology

All Episodes

00:21:28

The Real Reason Your Insurance Just Went Up

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/08/29

Go to https://joindeleteme.com/TAYLOR20 and use my code TAYLOR20 at checkout for 20% off! SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co Data brokers vacuum up information about us, what we buy, where we drive, what we watch, when we sleep, where we worship, and, increasingly, information about our faces and bodies and how we move through the world. They stitch

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00:27:54

The MrBeast of OnlyFans on Skibidi Toilet Porn and...

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/08/27

If you’ve spent enough time online, you have undeniably encountered the work of John Kilo. John is a 28 year old OnlyFans creator in Portland, and he has become a fixture on meme accounts and viral subreddits. He's part porn star, part performance artist, part cultural critic and shitposter. He has created Skibidi Toilet porn, cosplayed a Trump supporter while having sex with a fleshlight mounted to an AR-15, made corn parodies of Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk, had s*x with every item on the Taco

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00:35:48

Your Landlord Might Be Using Facial Recognition to...

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/08/22

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co 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

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00:33:43

The True Story Behind Four Loko

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/08/20

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co 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

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00:12:57

YouTube's AI Age Verification is a Disaster

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/08/15

SUPPORT MY PODCAST ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co 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

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00:28:43

What killed The Song Of The Summer w/ Anthony Fantano

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/08/13

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co 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,

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00:49:25

Everyone’s Lying About Lil Tay OnlyFans w/ Kat Tenbarge

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/08/08

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co 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

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00:25:21

Is ChatGPT Changing The Way We Talk? w/ Adam Aleksic

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/08/06

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co 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

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00:07:52

The UK's Censorship Catastrophe is Just The Beginning

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/08/01

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co 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

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00:29:19

The Public Health Internet Is Crumbling

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/30

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co 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

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00:35:41

How Companies Learned Everything About Us

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/28

I'm proud to partner with DeleteMe. Get 20% off their plans: joindeleteme.com/taylor20This 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

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00:13:20

ICE Is Building a Nationwide Tracking System (and...

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/25

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co 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

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00:40:44

Why we can’t stop doxxing people for fun

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/23

Last week, a couple featured on the Jumbotron during a Coldplay concert in Boston went viral for being caught cheating. Within minutes of the video spreading on TikTok and X, users rallied together to identify the couple in the video using AI and facial recognition tools. Crowdsourced social media investigations are becoming more and more common, and the people conducting them are leveraging increasingly dystopian surveillance tech that police and the feds are using against undocumented immigrants

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00:24:03

AI Deepfake Panic is Killing Free Speech

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/18

There's a bill right now in congress called the NO FAKES act that claims it will protect you from deepfakes. "In this new era of AI, we need real laws to protect real people," Rep. Maria Salazar said when announcing the bill. "The NO FAKES Act is simple and sacred: you own your identity, not Big Tech, not scammers, not algorithms." As usual, none of this is what the law actually does!!!!! The NO FAKES act is actually an incredibly sloppy and dangerous piece of legislation

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00:54:21

Diddy And The Death of #MeToo: How Diddy’s Trial Was...

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/16

Earlier this month, Sean “Diddy” Combs was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering after a high-profile federal trial. The acquittals show how high profile men accused of sexual abuse and wrongdoing still often escape justice. Already the outcome is being co-opted by the far right and manosphere spaces who are spinning it as proof that movements like #MeToo are overreaching. Today we're talking about why the Diddy case was a pivotal moment online and why celebrity trials like this do

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00:36:38

Is a YouTuber Using Copyright Law to Silence Speech?

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/11

[FREE SPEECH FRIDAY] For decades, content creators have fought against oppressive copyright law. Copyright claims have been wielded by powerful corporations to take down videos, suppress criticism, and stifle parody through rigid enforcement of online speech. But now, a troubling shift is unfolding: legal attacks that were once used almost exclusively by powerful media companies, are being weaponized by a big content creator against smaller content creators. Meredith Rose is a senior policy counsel

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00:30:39

MAGA's Epstein Crashout And What's Next w/ Will Sommer

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/09

After years of hype and promises to destroy the deep state, the Department of Justice and FBI publicly declared there is no “client list” linking Jeffrey Epstein to prominent figures, this week. They also confirmed Epstein died by suicide and said told all of MAGA basically to drop the issue. Now, MAGA influencers are accusing Trump of a cover up, the right wing internet is in disarray, and it remains unclear what will happen next. The Epstein cover up has been the defining conspiracy on the right

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00:16:15

Silicon Valley Wants Endless War

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/07

[VIDEO ESSAY] --- Anti-Muslim hate is becoming extremely profitable in Silicon Valley as the tech industry pivots towards defense tech and embedding itself with the U.S. war machine. From funding Israeli defense startups to spreading racist conspiracy theories about Zohran Mamdani, VCs like Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire are pushing a new breed of tech militarism. Defense tech, AI surveillance, and far-right pro-Trump ideologies are merging in the tech world as Silicon Valley’s obsession with

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00:19:37

Are kindness influencers bad?

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/07/02

Because it's a holiday week I'm re-running one of my favorite episodes from last year. I spoke to content creator Brad Podray‬ about the problem with “Kindness Influencers” and whether charity for content is ethical. We talk MrBeast, viral giveaways, and the difference between actual kindness vs kindness for the camera. ***** Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co ***** Subscribe to my newsletter:

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00:11:43

Deported Over a JD Vance Meme

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/06/27

Can a meme really get you deported? This week’s Free Speech Friday, is on Mads Mikkelsen, a Norwegian tourist allegedly kicked out of the country over a viral JD Vance meme saved to his phone. His story comes as tensions over speech rights at our borders are under greater threat. I break down what's going on and dig into the U.S. government's growing use of border screenings to police political speech. From increased surveillance to ideological questioning at customs, journalists, activists,

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149 results

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