Doomscroll: Taylor Lorenz

I recently streamed with veteran soldier of the culture war, Ben Mora, on his new video series: Interior Motives.

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Welcome to Doomscroll. This week, my guest is Taylor Lorenz, a journalist, author and content creator.

I first met Taylor in 2018 while she was writing at The Atlantic. At that time, I had just recently published Politigram & the Post-Left and there were few other voices in the media that were seriously looking at these topics.

In particular, Taylor’s work caught my eye when she wrote about the memetic activity of Gen Z teens — first, in a story about “flop accounts” and later when she wrote about the flourishing of far right material on Instagram. In 2018, most adults didn’t even know what a flop account was. Taylor is deeply familiar with the terrain of internet culture. There is no viral trend or cultural phenomena that she doesn’t already know about. Her work in this space is unparalleled by any other reporter today.

~2019 Politigram style flop account

After a few failed attempts to schedule this episode (one of which was my fault, sorry), I finally got to sit down with Taylor and reflect on the chaotic events of our extremely online era. We discuss:

• Dark money & Democrat influencers. Where and when does funding shape editorial content?

• The breakdown of law and liberal norms; Charlie Kirk and Luigi Mangione. Can we return to the rules-based order?

• Masking and government misinformation. Taylor describes her personal story.

• How to preserve free speech during authoritarian times.

Taylor went on to work at The New York Times and later moved to The Washington Post. Today, she publishes independently on Substack and on YouTube. She is the author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.

Over the past few years, we have seen tech journalism slowly drift into politics, culture and many other verticals. Writers who might have specialized in consumer technology or social media are now likely to cover breaking stories about radical political groups and OSINT. On Doomscroll, we want to explore this overlap of tech, culture and politics. These topics may now be entangled in a that is impossible to reverse:

Taylor Lorenz: Memes, Masks and Dark Money | Doomscroll

On this week’s bonus episode, we explore these issues deeper and discuss Taylor’s background, how she became politicized and her vision for a free and open internet. I also get us hugely sidetracked while I troll about StateBook:

Doomscroll: Taylor Lorenz II

Explore these related episodes:

Doomscroll: Hasan Piker II

Doomscroll: Andrew Callaghan II

Doomscroll: Ezra Klein II