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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

00:38:18

Private Equity Is Destroying America

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/06/25

Private equity has quietly been gutting major sectors of the American economy, from healthcare, to housing, retail, our news media, and more. The industry is a multi trillion-dollar powerhouse that ultimately shapes all of our lives. Journalist Megan Greenwell has been covering the rise of Private Equity, and her new book reveals how private equity takeovers have disrupted industries, eroded job security, and undermined essential services across our country. Megan joined me to dig into the rise of

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00:42:58

ChatGPT Is Becoming A Religion: The Rise of People...

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/06/23

Announcement!! I'm going to start uploading my video essays to this feed so people can watch them on Spotify or listen to them via podcasting apps. I will try to upload one video essay a month, always on a Monday. Hope you enjoy them! A new form of techno-spirituality is spreading like wildfire across the internet. Thousands of people are claiming that ChatGPT is sentient and that the AI is a type of all knowing God, or that it has been sent from the future or an alien civilization to save us

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00:18:00

How The Government Tracks Your Life

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/06/20

VISIT https://joindeleteme.com/taylor20 AND PROTECT YOURSELF TODAY!! Use my code Taylor20 at checkout Every single moment that you're online, you're feeding the data harvesting industry. Corporations then sell that data to the government, allowing them to target you for online speech, protesting, and more.Now, the government wants to build a single centralized platform where U.S. spy agencies and the government can easily buy highly private information about millions of people. Documents obtained by

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00:55:02

The Death of Rainbow Capitalism w/ Matt Bernstein

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/06/18

DONATE TO POINT OF PRIDE: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/point-of-pride/taylor-lorenz-s-pride-2025-fundraiser-for-point-of-prideFor years, Pride Month meant rainbows on everything, in storefronts, on sneakers, burger wrappers, and an endless array of t-shirts and merch. But this June, After a decade of cashing in on queer identity, corporations are pulling back. From the aisles of Target and the Instagram feeds of big brands, the rainbow logos are gone, the merch shelves are empty. Matt

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00:11:58

The Truth About Burning Waymos

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/06/13

Over the past week tech people, right wing figures and the media have been freaking out about Waymos being set on fire in downtown Los Angeles. The Waymos were burned during last weekend’s protests against ICE. A lot of people online seem deeply confused about the burnings of the cars. So, I'm going to break down why there's so much anti-Waymo sentiment, the rise of surveillance technology at protests, and how it all affects free speech. ***** Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture

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00:44:09

Elon vs Trump Explained w/ Brace Belden

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/06/11

Visit https://joindeleteme.com/taylor20 and protect yourself today! Use my code TAYLOR20 at checkout.Last week we witnessed the public blowout between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. After pouring hundreds of millions into Trump’s campaign and serving as a special adviser on the “Department of Government Efficiency" Musk is now on the outs with Trump and his future within the MAGA movement is uncertain. Brace Belden is the co-host of the podcast TrueAnon and has been covering Elon and the right

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01:03:42

Is this the end of the open web?

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/06/06

Welcome back to Free Speech Friday! All across the internet, parents and lawmakers are calling for tech companies to verify users' ages online. They frame these efforts as a smart, reasonable, and harmless way to keep kids safe. But that's not what age verification does!!!Age verification efforts are a major threat to privacy, freedom, and the very idea of an open web. No one knows this better than Eric Goldman. He is the associate dean for research at Santa Clara University School of Law

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00:20:40

How Elon Musk's Ego Took Over

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/06/04

As Elon Musk's influence has grown, so too has a darker, more troubling side of his persona: his rampant egomania.Faiz Siddiqui is a former colleague of mine at The Washington Post and he's the author of the new book Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk. In this episode of Power User we break down exactly how Musk's narcissism has evolved throughout his career, and the key moments that reveal just how deeply Elon's self-obsession has shaped his life and the future he claims to

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00:30:13

The Government Is Lying About Online Safety

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/05/30

Welcome back to my new series Free Speech Friday! :) Right now, lawmakers in congress are trying to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a dangerous censorship bill that would give the government unprecedented control over the internet and force platforms to spy on youth.KOSA claims to make kids "safer" online, but don't let the name fool you. This law would give the government unprecedented power to censor speech across the entire internet in the name of "protecting

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00:41:56

The case against logging off

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/05/29

Every week, there’s a new warning: TikTok is poisoning the youth, Facebook is radicalizing your uncle, and the only way to save ourselves is to log off.But what if that’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing? What if this push to disconnect isn’t about protecting us, but instead about disempowering us?Aidan Walker is a meme researcher and author of the Substack newsletter How to Do Things With Memes. Today, he joins me to talk about why we shouldn't log off and how the internet, for

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00:24:21

The Take It Down Act Is a Free Speech Killer

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/05/23

WATCH ALL FREE SPEECH FRIDAY EPISODES ON MY YOUTUBE CHANNELThe stated goal of the Take it Down Act is to combat non consensual intimate images (NCII), colloquially known as revenge p**n. This includes things like AI generated nude deep fakes and other explicit imagery shared without a person's consent. Cracking down on this seems great right? Sadly that's not what this law does. What the Take It Down Act *actually* does is make it so that anyone, at any time, can get content posted about

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00:40:32

Why Students Can't Stop Using ChatGPT

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/05/22

Students are using ChatGPT for everything. Parents are freaking out and the media is calling it the end of education as we know it. But are students really outsourcing their minds to machines? Are we witnessing the collapse of critical thinking, or are we just afraid of what change actually looks like?In this episode, I’m joined by journalist Kat Tenbarge to break down the rise of ChatGPT in schools. We talk about whether school still serves the purpose it claims to and what does academic integrity

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00:27:25

They're trying to ban posting about abortion online

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/05/15

Imagine messaging a friend on Snapchat about how to get abortion pills, or tweeting about reproductive rights and getting fined hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's only part of what a proposed law in Texas that seeks to criminalize discussing abortion online aims to do. It's called HB5510, and it would essentially criminalize speech about abortion in emails, on websites, in social media posts, and even private messages.Jennifer Pinsof senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier

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00:39:10

How the Media Tricks You Into Loving the Police

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/05/08

If you’ve ever wondered why news media obsesses over shoplifting but ignores wage theft, or why media outlets report a "shortage" of prison guards without questioning why we imprison so many people, you've probably encountered copaganda. In this episode, award-winning civil rights lawyer and author Alec Karakatsanis joins me to discuss his phenomenal new book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, and to break down all the ways that our news ecosystem is polluted

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00:33:00

Undercover AI ‘College Protester’ Bots for Cops

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/05/01

American police departments are using secretive AI technology to create lifelike AI personas designed to interact with real people online —like protesters and activists— for intelligence gathering. This tech is becoming more popular amid crackdowns on student protests against the war in Gaza. Leaked presentations reveal AI personas posing as various individuals, from divorced activists to teenage boys, in attempts to infiltrate online communities.404 Media's Jason Koebler joins me to break down how

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00:35:40

Tween Podcasters Are Taking Over the Internet

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/04/24

From middle schoolers riffing on school lunch to kids interviewing political figures, podcasting is no longer just for adults. With high-end mics, massive TikTok followings, and brand deals from major companies, tween podcast hosts are building real media platforms from their bedrooms and local studios.New York Magazine's EJ Dickson joins me to break down who the major players are in this growing space, including the MD Foodie Boyz, SaltyBoys, GSD Nation, the LOL Pod, and more. These tween stars

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00:42:26

Fake Newspapers Are Flooding America

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/04/17

From Ohio to North Dakota, thousands of people have suddenly gotten brand new newspapers delivered to their doorsteps out of the blue. These newspapers are fake news outlets created by the oil and gas industry to influence public opinion in key districts, and they're having a major impact.Top investigative journalist Miranda Green has been uncovering these schemes. She joins me to talk about how these shady publications are mimicking legitimate local newspapers to spread propaganda and influence

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00:37:59

The White House's social media is deranged

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/04/10

Since Trump took office, the official White House social media accounts have been posting a bit… differently. Drew Harwell, my former colleague at The Washington Post, has been covering the Trump White House's digital strategy.Today, he joins me to unpack the White House's hyper-online social media cruelty, the inner workings of its digital team, how the Trump administration has transformed its traditional press shop into a rapid-response influencer operation, and how the Democratic Party is

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00:53:21

The Dark Truth Behind Ashton Hall’s Morning Routine...

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/04/03

Ever since Ashton Hall's morning routine went viral last week, I've been dying to chat about it with my friend Matt Bernstein of the podcast A Bit Fruity to about it all. We joined up to break down the history and evolution of modern masculinity, the allure and absurdity of the modern "alpha male" archetype, the rise of isolationist masculinity and exactly how things ended up this way, and what videos like Ashton Hall's can tell us about the future of masculinity.SUBSCRIBE TO USER MAG, my tech and

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00:25:33

Musk’s DOGE Antics Could Be the Downfall of Tesla

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User ·

2025/03/27

Over the past few weeks, Tesla has been crumbling. The company's stock, which was once considered invincible, has now plunged to around $250 a share, down from nearly double that in December. Sales are plummeting, dealerships are overrun with protests, and Teslas on the street are being subject to petty vandalism. All of this is happening because of Elon Musk. Since Trump took office and appointed Musk as the head of the very poorly named Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has facilitated the

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149 results

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