Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

Are you on a government watchlist just for criticizing AI? 
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A shocking new investigation from The Intercept reveals that police are tracking seemingly anyone who expresses skepticism or anger about the tech industry online. 
In this episode of Free Speech Friday, journalist Sam Biddle joins me to dive deep into a terrifying new report from The Intercept exposing how Philadelphia police officers admitted to monitoring legitimate First Amendment activity. Law enforcement documents show that specialized "Fusion Centers" are scanning social media, message boards, and Facebook to flag users posting anti-AI and anti-data center sentiments. 
Sam and I discuss the post-9/11 surveillance apparatus, how local police use tools like Data Miner to monitor online discussions, and why the Trump administration is aligning with tech billionaires and crypto lobbyists to turn AI into a national security priority. 
Is your private Signal group chat safe from police infiltration? Why are corporate platforms like Meta incentivized to censor anti-tech activism? We break down the chilling effect of mass surveillance and the elite effort to frame community civics and political advocacy as domestic extremism.
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#Surveillance #BigTech #ArtificialIntelligence #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Privacy #DataCenter #TheIntercept #TechNews #CivilLiberties
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Are AI data centers destroying the environment, driving up power bills, and consuming massive amounts of water, or is the backlash overblown?
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In this episode of Power User, I sit down with Wired senior climate and energy reporter Molly Taft to unpack the AI data center boom. We discuss how AI infrastructure actually works, why companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and xAI are racing to build more data centers, and what the environmental consequences could be.
We dive into the controversy around electricity demand, fossil fuel expansion, water use, local community opposition, AI infrastructure, data center moratoriums, and whether these facilities are genuinely necessary for the future of artificial intelligence.
Topics covered:
What AI data centers actually do

Why ChatGPT and AI require so much compute

The environmental impact of AI

Energy consumption and power grids

Natural gas, nuclear, and renewable energy

Elon Musk's xAI Colossus project

Water usage and cooling systems

Community backlash against data centers

Climate concerns and AI development

The future of AI infrastructure

If you've been seeing headlines about AI data centers, energy crises, environmental impacts, or the race between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and China, this conversation breaks down what's really happening.
#AI #DataCenters #ChatGPT #OpenAI #ArtificialIntelligence #ClimateChange #Technology #TechNews #Energy #Environment

What if you woke up tomorrow and completely lost access to your bank account, credit cards, PayPal, and Venmo, all because of something you posted online? 
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In this episode of Free Speech Friday, Rainey Reitman, advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and author of the new book "Transaction Denied" joins me to dive deep into the terrifying reality of financial censorship and how major banks and payment processors are quietly becoming the ultimate gatekeepers of internet speech. 
Reitman reveals how a handful of massive financial institutions are bypassing the First Amendment to act as privatized censors, deciding what journalism you can support, what political nonprofits you can donate to, and what ideas are considered "misinformation." From the early financial blockade of WikiLeaks to recent debanking scandals involving independent journalists and nonpartisan advocacy groups, this hidden digital infrastructure controls your life more than you realize. 
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This channel has ZERO sponsors, and speaking out on financial censorship isn't advertiser-friendly. If you get value from this show, support my work so I can keep making these videos!
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👉 Pick up a copy of Rainey Reitman's "Transaction Denied" here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804543/transaction-denied-by-rainey-reitman/ 
*(Note: Half of all book proceeds go directly to the Freedom of the Press Foundation)*
We discuss: 
The Nightmare of Financial Censorship
How Payment Processors Got So Much Power
The Rise of E-Commerce & Speech Dependency
PayPal, WikiLeaks, and Chelsea Manning
Censorship by Proxy: How the Government Pressures Banks
The Visa Lawsuit That Could Ruin the Internet

Have you noticed your social media feeds suddenly flooding with terrifying content about AI existential risk?
From TikTok clips warning about "AI psychosis" to viral YouTube shorts claiming chatbots are pushing people to the brink, the anti-AI movement has taken over the internet... But what if these "anti-AI" influencers aren't actually what they seem?
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In this week's episode of Power User, Washington Post journalist Natasha Tiku join me to pull back the curtain on the massive, billionaire-funded "anti-AI" astroturf campaign.
We track the money and expose how the exact same millionaires and billionaires building the world's largest AI companies (like OpenAI and Anthropic) are quietly paying influencers thousands of dollars to promote AI doomsday scenarios.
We dive deep into the 25-year history of the AI safety movement, from Eliezer Yudkowski’s rationalist blogs and Harry Potter fan fiction to Effective Altruism and the "paperclip maximizer" theory. We talk about how Silicon Valley elites are co-opting VERY genuine public anxieties about jobs and real-world harms related to AI technology in order to push their own pro-AI, anti-regulatory agendas.
We also talk about how to spot the hidden corporate pipelines, dark money nonprofits, and staged research papers designed to control the narrative around AI. If you're seeing AI doomer videos all over your feed, please watch this one!
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Nitasha's WaPo story on all this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/18/ai-doom-influencers-safety/

Elon Musk has evolved far beyond a billionaire CEO. 
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According to political theorists Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Musk has created an entirely new ideology called “Muskism” — a system where technology companies merge with state power, AI shapes politics, and billionaires become more powerful than governments.
In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with Quinn Slobodian, co-author of the new book Muskism, to break down how Elon Musk’s worldview went from Silicon Valley optimism to tech authoritarianism. We discuss Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, AI censorship, OpenAI, Grok, surveillance, DOGE, data centers, Silicon Valley’s shift toward defense tech, and why Musk’s influence now reaches into every part of society.
We also unpack:
Elon Musk’s political transformation

The rise of Muskism

AI paranoia and “woke AI”

Why Silicon Valley is embracing militarization

Musk’s obsession with reproduction and population decline

How SpaceX and Starlink could reshape global power

The future of AI and surveillance capitalism

Why tech billionaires are becoming impossible to escape