Do Tech Billionaires Want Us Dead? (w/ Taylor Lorenz)

Is the online safety legislation moving through Congress actually a Trojan horse for mass surveillance? And do the tech billionaires building our future actually care if the rest of us survive it?

Rushkoff sits down with Taylor Lorenz, the internet’s premier culture reporter and founder of User Mag, to discuss her departure from legacy media (The New York Times, The Washington Post) and the dangerous reality of the new tech authoritarianism.

From the misogyny of the 2013 "Selfie" panic to the rise of "maximalist" human aesthetics, Lorenz and Rushkoff break down how to reclaim the internet from the billionaires who view humanity as a problem to be solved (or eliminated).

Key topics:

• Why She Left: The institutional failure of The Washington Post to protect its reporters.

• The "Safety" Trap: How laws like KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) are being used to kill anonymity and harvest biometric data.

• Billionaire Prepping: Why elites are building bunkers instead of fixing the planet.

• Maximalism: Why the "Apple Store" aesthetic is dead and messy, human clutter is coming back.

Check out User Mag: https://usermag.co
Follow Taylor Lorenz: @TaylorLorenz

• Team Human is proudly sponsored by Everyone's Earth.
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Credits

Hosted by Douglas Rushkoff
Produced by Josh Chapdelaine

Music by:
Fugazi (On this Episode you heard “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro – thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records.)
The Team Human Band - Growth Trap

Special thanks to Stephen Bartolomei.
Team Human is a Production of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at Queens College.