Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

Matt Bernstein, Kat Tenbarge and I dig into what the 2016 nostalgia is really about. 
Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with 2016? Hyper-saturated Instagram photos are back. The Snapchat puppy filter is everywhere again. Nostalgic edits are flooding TikTok. From the "King Kylie" era to Harambe, it feels like we’re collectively regressing.
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But was 2016 really “the last good year”? I wanted to understand why this particular moment looms so large in our cultural memory, so I called up my friends Matt Bernstein and Kat Tenbarge to discuss.
Kat is an incredible journalist and the author of Spitfire News, and Matt is an iconic podcast host and content creator. We re-examined the defining moments of 2016, talk about the old days of YouTube, why boomers don't get the nostalgia, and why 2016 has become such a powerful focal point. 
We unpack what this fixation on 2016 reveals about today's internet, culture, and politics nearly a decade later.
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In this video, we cover:
The revival of 2016 aesthetics on TikTok.

Why people romanticize the pre-Trump/early-Trump era.

The impact of 2016 internet humor on today's culture.

The rise of the content creator industry. 

Why it's all Gen Z and Millennials who are getting nostalgic while older generations don't seem to care.

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For decades, tech billionaires have sold us a shiny future powered by AI. But what if the future they’re building doesn’t include us? A disturbing ideology has quietly come to dominate Silicon Valley: the belief that we need to dispose of the flawed, biological human race in order to give birth to a superior AI intelligence that will ultimately replace us. Tech billionaires are already investing in the technology and infrastructure to make this happen.
I dove deep into how these ideas, known as TESCREAL, took hold, who’s funding them, who the power players are in this new movement, how they've been quietly prepping the public to accept this fate for years, how TESCREAL, pro-extinction beliefs are already shaping how the most powerful companies on Earth operate, and how real, human workers are paying the price for all these decisions. 
If you're feeling uneasy about AI hype, billionaire bunker “prepper” culture, and getting the sense that AI technology is moving way too fast, you have probably seen evidence of these extreme beliefs manifesting in the world already.
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ICE just bought a massively powerful new surveillance system that can monitor every single phone in your neighborhood, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow you home from work and to other locations.
Joe Cox at 404 Media broke the story of these new ICE systems called Tangles and Webloc. He joined me to break down how this new ICE tech works, what these systems do, why the online advertising market is secretly dangerous, and how we can fight back. 
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Until recently, Ashley St Clair was a star in the conservative influencer world. She built a large and powerful following by leaning into culture-war rhetoric and boosting MAGA policies. She worked for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and gained national attention by publishing an anti trans Children’s book. She was welcomed into the upper echelons of right-wing media and activism, and her proximity to power on the right deepened when she began a relationship with Elon Musk, who she later had a child with.
But lately, Ashley’s public posture has begun to shift. After Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, began to flood the internet with nonconsensual deepfake content undressing Ashley and countless other women (and children), she became increasingly outspoken in her criticisms of Musk and unchecked AI development.
In her posts, Ashley has also suggested that some of her other earlier views on things like trans rights, have changed.
I sat down with Ashley to talk about how she got her start in conservative influencing, Maga 1.0 vs MAGA 2.0, the right wing internet pipeline, Elon Musk, and how her positions on issues like LGBTQ rights, healthcare, and immigration have changed.
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Every week it feels like Congress cooks up a new bad internet law. This week we're diving deep into the SCREEN Act. Framed as a child safety bill, this law is an insidious trojan horse for mass censorship and surveillance. 
It's been getting a lot of traction thanks to its backing from extreme far right groups and the religious right, and Democrats are now signing on board claiming the law will protect kids online. 
In reality, this law could end up forcing you to scan your face to access websites, ban VPNs, and more. To break it all down Michael Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, joined me. Mike has been fighting these censorship laws on the state level and has been in the rooms in state legislatures where a lot of these debates are taking place. 
We get nitty gritty into how the SCREEN Act works, what it does, how it came to fruition, what sets it apart from some of these other child safety laws, and why we need to band together to kill it!
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