Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

The government is using powerful AI tools to build massive digital dossiers on everyday citizens, and it’s happening with zero oversight.
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In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sat with Matthew Guariglia, Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), to expose how generative AI has democratized mass surveillance. 
From the FBI’s massive physical paper filing hangars of the 20th century to modern AI models that scrape your social media, track your geolocation, and predict your political affiliation in seconds—the barrier to entry for government surveillance has officially collapsed.
We dive deep into Guariglia's recent congressional testimony on the AI security landscape, revealing how the Pentagon is blacklisting tech companies like Anthropic for trying to restrict AI from being used in autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.
 In this video, we cover:
How AI is automating mass surveillance at an unprecedented scale.

The secret government contracts and the battle for unrestricted AI use.

Why your social media history, geolocation, and purchases create a permanent record.

The historical lessons from Ferguson and the Japanese-American internment that prove data is vulnerability.

What you can do to protect your digital rights (hint: it starts with turning off your geolocation).

We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. 
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The idea of living on Mars has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest promises. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech billionaires claim humanity's future depends on becoming a multi-planetary species. But what if nearly everything you've been told about colonizing Mars is quite literally scientifically impossible?
In this week's episode of Power User, I sat down with physicist and science journalist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, a fantastic book that I absolutely loved, to break down the biggest myths about Mars colonization, SpaceX, AI, and Silicon Valley's vision of the future. 
 
We discuss why Mars is far more hostile than most people realize, the scientific barriers that make permanent settlement nearly impossible, and why billionaires continue selling this vision despite knowing it will never become reality. 
We cover:
Why humans will literally NEVER live on Mars

The biggest scientific problems SpaceX can't solve

The truth about Elon Musk's Mars colony plans

Why Silicon Valley keeps selling science fiction as reality

How AI and space colonization became part of the same billionaire narrative

Why investing in Earth may matter far more than escaping it

Is social media actually destroying a generation, or are we in the middle of a massive political moral panic?
For this week's Free Speech Friday I sat down with one of the world's leading researchers studying young people, technology, and mental health to answer one question: Did social media really create a generation-wide mental health crisis?
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For years we've been told that smartphones and social media are fueling anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide among teenagers. Politicians, bestselling authors, and news outlets have treated that idea as settled science.
But what does the actual research say?
Developmental psychologist Candice Odgers has spent decades studying how young people use technology. In this interview, we break down what the evidence actually shows, why many experts disagree with the popular narrative, and how the social media panic is influencing online safety laws, censorship, surveillance, age verification, and internet policy around the world.
 
We discuss:
The real relationship between social media and teen mental health

Why correlation is often mistaken for causation

What studies actually find about screen time

The debate around The Anxious Generation

Why many scientists reject claims that phones are driving a mental health epidemic

Online safety laws and age verification

Privacy, surveillance, and internet censorship

What parents should actually focus on

The future of social media regulation

Are we living through the dawn of a permanent Surveillance Summer?
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Kylie Jenner is the new face of Meta's AI smart glasses and suddenly, mass surveillance is a fashion trend. Influencers are declaring a "hot surveillance summer," West Village fashion girlies are posting AI glasses selfies, and for thousands of people (not me! lol), cameras on your face have officially gone from creepy to chic. How did we get here?
  
In this episode, I sit down with iconic fashion journalist Amy Odell, author of the Back Row newsletter covering fashion, culture, and power, to unpack how Big Tech used the fashion industry to normalize wearable surveillance. We trace the full history of smart glasses, from the Google Glass disaster and Snapchat Spectacles vending machines to Ray-Ban Stories, Oakley Meta glasses, and the rhinestone-studded AI glasses taking over your feed.
 
We discuss why the Kylie AI glasses are a turning point for wearable tech, and how this could be the moment personalized AI surveillance becomes permanently woven into public life. 
Subscribe to Amy's newsletter here: https://www.backrow.net/ 
 
We get into: ▸ Why Meta chose Kylie Jenner as the face of its AI glasses campaign ▸ How Mark Zuckerberg rehabbed his image through influencer interviews ▸ The "hot surveillance summer" discourse and why some women are embracing being recorded ▸ How fashion makes surveillance tech palatable — from GoPro to AI hair clips ▸ Meta's facial recognition plans, data harvesting, and what it means for privacy ▸ The Meta Gala, OpenAI's fashion world infiltration, and Snap's $2,000 AR flop ▸ How anti-phone and anti-screen sentiment is fueling the rise of ambient computing, AI pendants, pins, and camera-equipped AirPods
 ▸ Who actually owns the data Meta's AI glasses collect

Most people hand their ID to a bouncer without thinking twice. But what if your local bar was monitoring way more than your age?
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 Cydney Hayes is a tech and business reporter at the Gazetteer SF.and she joins me for this week's Free Speech Friday to discuss her investigation into Patronscan, a creepy biometric surveillance system being integrated into bars and restaurants across the country. 
We examine how these systems collect personal information, photograph and surveil patrons as they move from bar to bar, build databases, and raise serious questions about privacy, biometric tracking, facial recognition, and data collection.
We discuss:
How PatronScan works

Why bars are adopting these systems

What information is collected

Privacy concerns surrounding biometric data

Facial recognition and surveillance technology

How customer databases are created

The legal controversies surrounding PatronScan

Why surveillance is expanding into everyday spaces

What this means for the future of privacy

As surveillance technology spreads from airports and retail stores into restaurants, bars, and nightlife, it's becoming increasingly important to understand how these systems operate and what tradeoffs they create.