Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

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What happens when startups straight up stop hiring human creators and start leveraging industrial-scale bot farms powered by AI? In this bonus episode of Power User, I sit down with New York Magazine's Rebecca Jennings to discuss her investigation into Doublespeed, a massively viral new venture-backed startup founded by 21-year-old entrepreneur Zuhair Lakhani that aims to replace human influencers with an army of AI-generated personas. They've already raised over $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz. 
From sneaker botting and manufactured restaurant waitlists to operating thousands of cold Android phones from a desktop computer, Rebecca and I unpack the dark mechanics and patterns behind these bot armies running on phone farms in LA. We also discuss the total atrophy of the internet as we know it.  
We break down how AI bot farms work, why brands are turning to AI instead of human influencers, and how Silicon Valley is turning manufactured virality into a business. We also discuss the explosion of AI slop, the future of the influencer industry, the death of online authenticity, AI advertising, political manipulation, human verification and what happens when bots become indistinguishable from real people.

Inside the Case That Could Change Protesting Forever
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This week on Free Speech Friday, I sat down with independent investigative journalist Andrew Fedorov, whose bombshell Mother Jones piece reveals the horrors of the Prairieland case, which was one of the harshest protest sentencing outcomes in modern U.S. history. 
Activists who gathered outside a Texas ICE detention center on July 4th are now facing sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years, with combined sentencing for the group reaching over 580 years.
 Andrew sat in the courtroom for the entire trial, interviewed the defendants' friends and families, and pieced together a detailed timeline of what actually happened that night. We break down the real story of how these activists were persecuted and how the government built its case using Signal chats and iCloud backups.
 
We break down:
Who the Prairieland activists actually are and how they got involved

What really happened outside the ICE facility on July 4th

How the government used signal chats, iCloud data, and TikTok activity as evidence

Why one man is facing 30 years and deportation for moving a box of zines

What these sentences mean for the future of protest and free speech in America

Why big tech companies are complying with government subpoenas targeting anti-ICE accounts

This is a case everyone should understand because prosecutors are already calling it a successful blueprint, and similar cases are emerging in Minnesota, Washington, and beyond.
Read Andrew Fedorov's full investigation, "How Anti-ICE Protesters Became Prisoners in Trump's War on Antifa," linked below.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/prairieland-texas-antifa-trial-ice-protesters-terrorism-conspiracy/

The Wild Rise and Fall of Leopold Aschenbrenner
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Until a week ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner was hailed as the "Nostradamus of AI". A 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher whose 165-page manifesto, Situational Awareness, convinced Silicon Valley and Wall Street that superintelligence was coming faster than anyone expected, his hedge fund ballooned to over $20 billion. Then, it came crashing down. 
In this episode of Power User, WSJ reporter Berber Jin joins me to break down the meteoric rise and fall of Leopold Aschenbrenner, from his early days in the effective altruism movement and FTX's Future Fund, to his controversial exit from OpenAI, to the margin calls, Citadel bailout, and chaos that unfolded the very same week he got married
 We discuss what Aschenbrenner's spectacular blowup tells us about Silicon Valley, AI hype, and the rush to bet billions on AI.
Follow Berber Jin (Wall Street Journal): https://twitter.com/berber_jin 
Read Berber's story: https://www.wsj.com/finance/leopold-aschenbrenner-situational-awareness-ai-fund-597633d3

Everyone got this viral lawsuit totally wrong.
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This week, a viral story claimed Elon Musk's xAI is suing Minnesota so that he can create AI-generated CS*M. That false claim exploded across social media, but it leaves out the most important part.   
 
In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with First Amendment scholar Jeff Kosseff to break down Minnesota's new AI law, why xAI is challenging it, why major civil liberties orgs like the ACLU are also against the law, and why free speech advocates across the country say the law raises serious concerns.
This convo is NOT defending Elon Musk. It is about understanding how AI regulation can produce unintended consequences and why even laws that claim to do good can do immense harm to us all. 
 
We discuss:
The $500,000-per-image penalties facing AI companies

How the law could affect image generators, creative software, and indie developers

Why First Amendment scholars are sounding the alarm

The risks of strict liability for AI platforms

The chilling effect on online speech and creative expression

Whether AI-generated content deserves First Amendment protection

How this compares to Section 230, FOSTA-SESTA, and the Take It Down Act

Why regulating platforms instead of bad actors may have unintended consequences

Is AI destroying human literature? 
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You might have seen the viral videos of a "book guillotine" slicing the spines off thousands of books in a massive warehouse. Last week, the internet exploded after videos surfaced showing Anthropic cutting the spines off thousands of books to train AI models. Social media quickly filled with claims that AI companies were destroying rare books, erasing human knowledge, and building a future where artificial intelligence replaces libraries.
 But is that actually what happened?
In this episode of Power User, I sit down with tech policy expert Derek Slater, who worked on the original Google Books project, to explain why Anthropic is actually scanning books and destroying physical copies afterward, how decades of copyright law (not just AI) created this bizarre situation, and how we can actually save the books!!
 
We discuss:
Why Anthropic buys books by the pallet

Whether rare books are actually being destroyed

How Google Books handled digitization

Why copyright law incentivizes destroying books

The Internet Archive lawsuits

Fair use and AI training

The future of libraries in the AI era

Why the viral outrage missed the bigger story