Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

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.

The internet has entered a terrifying new era where reality itself has become a marketplace. Adam Aleksic (Etymology Nerd) & Aidan Walker join me to break it all down.
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Pump Fun GO is a new service that lets anyone pay anyone to do anything, and the results are terrifying. From paying people in poor countries $13 to get forehead tattoos to offering $95 for degrading acts, the platform has become a marketplace for human exploitation disguised as "meme coin marketing."
From meme coins and viral stunts to political influence campaigns, prediction markets, and user-generated marketing, this episode explores how financial incentives are reshaping online culture and even the offline world.
Joining me are Adam Aleksic (Etymology Nerd) and meme researcher Aidan Walker to unpack why platforms like Pump Fun, Polymarket, and the rise of the "bounty economy" could fundamentally change how the internet works.
Topics covered:
How Pump Fun Go is literally recreating Black Mirror episodes in real life

The terrifying rise of the "bounty economy" and what it means for society

Why people in developing countries are being targeted for these stunts

The connection between prediction markets, UGC marketing, and political manipulation

What happens when EVERYTHING becomes a marketing stunt (and why that's breaking trust online)

The psychology behind why people participate in these challenges

How this platform is warping our physical reality and making us question everything

Pump Fun Go explained

Meme coin marketing

Black Mirror becoming reality

The new attention economy

Polymarket and prediction markets

User-generated advertising

Political influence online

Why everything feels fake

The future of social media

The internet's next evolution

The Kids Act Could End Internet Freedom As We Know It. 
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A massive new package of legislation, dubbed the "Kids Act," is moving through Congress with unprecedented speed. The package is a broad-based censorship and surveillance scheme that will affect every single American.
In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), to break down the terrifying reality of what’s happening in Washington D.C. right now. Adam, who has been fighting for internet freedom since the 1990s, explains how these laws demand mass age verification (which applies to adults too), regulate design features like infinite scroll, and even target messaging apps and VPNs.
 
We also dive into the 1,800 AI bills popping up across states, Bernie Sanders' misguided plans for AI, and why the government is moving to create an identity layer for the entire internet. We also discuss the toxic brew of "moral panic," fake anti-big tech sentiment, and censorship that is driving this legislation forward.
Topics covered:
What the Kids Act is and how it passed committee

Mass age verification and the internet ID layer

The end of online anonymity

Why messaging apps and video games are targets

State laws controlling the national internet

State AI preemption and Bernie Sanders' AI plans

The history of internet censorship from 1996 to today

#AI #Tech #TechNews #InternetFreedom #KidsAct #Censorship #TechPolicy #OnlinePrivacy #AILaws #VPNBan #FreeSpeech #MassSurveillance #FirstAmendment #BigTech #BernieSanders #KOSA #DataPrivacy