Lately, the internet has broken the White House. Influencers and tech CEOs now have unprecedented access to the Trump administration. How will the “broligarchy” change our world?
Lately, the internet has broken the White House. Influencers and tech CEOs now have unprecedented access to the Trump administration. How will the “broligarchy” change our world?
Our guest, Taylor Lorenz, covers the influence of influencers on User Mag, her tech and online culture Substack. The former Washington Post reporter literally wrote the book on how the internet took over politics: Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.
Lorenz weighs in on the big tech transformation of the U.S. government, why banning TikTok is a bad idea, and what it’s like to party with the content creators who shaped the U.S. election.
Also, Vass and Katrina discuss hostile haberdashery.
Subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where the Globe’s online culture reporter Samantha Edwards unpacks more of the latest in business and technology.
Find the transcript of today’s episode here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Vass Bednar [00:00:00] I'm Vass Bednar and I host this Globe and Mail podcast Lately.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:03] And I'm Katrina Onstad I'm the show's executive producer. Vass I'm still recovering. It's been a couple of weeks since President Trump was inaugurated, but those images are seared into my brain. Number one, of course, Melania's hat
Vass Bednar [00:00:19] That why you're wearing a hat right now?
Katrina Onstad [00:00:21] Aare you liking it? Yeah. Yes. The most hostile hat in history. Amazing. And number two, of course, all of those big tech bros just flanking that guy. Left, right, center behind. There were so many of them.
Vass Bednar [00:00:35] It was something else. Did you notice who else was there, though? Maybe you were a little bit too focused on the hat.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:41] I was really just there for the hat. So, no, tell me.
Vass Bednar [00:00:44] The influencer brothers, Logan and Jake Paul. You know them from Vine and YouTube. I think you once said you subscribe to their channel. Just be honest. Now's the time.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:55] And the Mike Tyson fight. I do recall.
Vass Bednar [00:00:58] Look, it was just announced that they're going to have an official boxing match against each other. No word on what their parents think, but they were there. And why not? It just adds to the surreal nature of this shift. And this whole thing is what our guest today calls the influencer election. American journalist and online culture commentator Taylor Lorenz wrote the book on influencers. Literally, it's called Extremely Online The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet and on her Substack, which is called User Mag, she's covered this massive shift in power, the elevation of the creator economy, their new influence on politics in the United States, and how that's going to affect all of us.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:39] Yes. Well, our eyes have been cast south. I mean, how can we not keep looking up here? We are creeping up to our own federal election. And even without a set date, we're already seeing some echoes of political strategy from the US. We're watching authority being reconfigured on platforms here to write, not, of course, on the same scale as the US, but both Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre have been hitting the podcast circuit.
Vass Bednar [00:02:02] Yes, and I don't know if we have like a Canuck Jake Paul just it's not my area of expertise, but we do have political influencers on Tik Tok Right. A couple of quick examples. Steve Boots, Frank, Domenic, Jennifer L, and others, there's maybe less of a threat that they'll go dark in Canada in the way that they might in the U.S. We already banned Tik Tok just from government devices, but the app's lights are still on, at least at the time of recording.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:30] And Taylor has some very strong feelings about the Tik Tok ban. It was interesting how when you two got into this, she is a very staunch defender of the app and if you're not on it, I think it's possible to think of Tik Tok as kind of frivolous, like funny dances, e commerce. But she really regards it as a fundamental tool of free speech. And, you know, of course, it's worth noting that she herself has a presence on TikTok as an independent creator. So Taylor first made her name as a legacy media reporter. Her stories covering social media at The New York Times were very clicked and forwarded, and she publicly parted ways with The Washington Post last year. So now she is really part of the creator economy that she is covering.
Vass Bednar [00:03:11] And whether you buy Taylor's pro-TikTok argument or have concerns about the theoretical security risks posed by a technology whose parent company, Bytedance, is Chinese, it kind of doesn't matter because these influencers are here and they are cozying up to power. In fact, the White House just announced that podcasters and influencers are going to be allowed to attend press briefings. That is new. So let's talk tech oligarchy and drink a few TikToktinis with Taylor Lorenz. This is lately.
Vass Bednar [00:03:57] Hi, Taylor. Hi. I need to live vicariously through you for a second, if that's okay. You wrote recently in Rolling Stone about attending a pretty interesting party in D.C. on the eve of the inauguration. Could you describe that TikTok inauguration eve party for us? Like, who was there? What was the vibe? What were people drinking?
Taylor Lorenz [00:04:20] Yeah. So the night before the inauguration, a bunch of the basically biggest influencers who won the election for Donald Trump came together and hosted a party that was sponsored by TikTok. It was in this beautiful sort of double storey venue in the heart of Washington, D.C., with giant gold chandelier is red velvet walls. It looked very like old money, I guess, as the Gen-z would say. And it was it was black tie suggested. So everyone was decked out. And it was a lot of content creators, specifically gen-z content creators. So you had Raquel Debono, who has become really popular on the right lately for her Make America Great Again events. She's a tik-tok influencer. You had C.J. Pearson. He co-hosted the event with Raquel, and C.J. is the one who does all the influencer partnerships for the RNC. And then you just had a smattering of sort of the biggest content creators on the Internet. On the right, you had DC Dre, now a famous, you know, right wing meme king. A bunch of people from The Daily Wire. And it was wow, there they were dancing to pop songs. I have to I would describe the playlist as maybe a 2012 bar mitzvah. And they were sipping on a custom Tik tok tinnies. They were sort of like custom drinks that TikTok had created for the crew.
Vass Bednar [00:05:44] Say that three times fast. You wrote that C.J. Pearson called this the influencer election. What does that actually mean? Why does it matter?
Taylor Lorenz [00:05:54] Yeah, I would say this is the first election where influencers were really at the forefront and you really started to see this new media landscape acknowledged by the political establishment. Donald Trump has always leveraged online figures and internet personalities in his campaign, as is part of how he rose to power. But this was the first year that I think that we really saw it all go mainstream. So podcasters playing a huge role. People basically people's information ecosystems have completely shifted away from legacy media.
Vass Bednar [00:06:26] So you and I are chatting exactly one week after the inauguration, and since then there's been an avalanche of announcements and executive orders, Right? We had that head fake with the Ticktalk band. We've had this announcement of a $500 billion A.I. infrastructure project, which has, I think hilariously called Stargate. There's all these pronouncements around tech. Which one do you think is going to have the most profound effect on our lives?
Taylor Lorenz [00:06:54] I think that the Trump administration is sort of trying to signal to Silicon Valley that they are, you know, going to work with them. And, of course, you have every single Silicon Valley leader just doing everything they can to kiss up to Trump because they recognize that this is a potentially very lucrative administration for them. You know, I think there was a lot of backlash towards the tech industry, especially after Trump's first term, where I think a lot of liberals who initially boosted the tech world throughout the Obama years felt sort of betrayed, felt like Facebook helped put Trump in office and give rise to his whole campaign. So you saw this tech lash throughout the second half of the 20 tens. And then even in the beginning of the first half of the 2020s. And now, yeah, I mean, they're just there to kiss the ring. They all think that they can get lucrative government contracts and that they can get a very sort of friendly regulatory environment. And I think that they might be able to do that. I mean, Trump. Trump just kind of governs, faced off vibes. And, you know, if he likes someone like Elon Musk, who's coming around 24 seven, like he's going to let that person in, potentially give that person a desk in the White House even like it's just going to be very favorable to them.
Vass Bednar [00:08:09] Yeah, I kind of feel like his brain is a constant, like in and out list on a notes app on his phone, and it's just people shifting. But speaking of in and out, we had that with TikTok, right? So we watch that here in Canada too. We had the pending TikTok ban and then TikTok returned. You've argued that banning TikTok is a terrible, maybe even dangerous idea. And you wrote in your newsletter User Mag that the TikTok ban isn't just a platform reconfiguration. It will reshape the political leaning of the creator economy and permanently alter whose voices get heard online. How so?
Taylor Lorenz [00:08:43] So, I mean, aside from the fact that, you know, we are supposed to have a free and open information ecosystem in free speech in America, this is one of our most foundational rights. You know, the government is not supposed to control access to information in American speech, much less the speech of 170 million Americans through banning apps. We are not China, right? Like the government is not supposed to have direct control of our app store in these ways. I think the primary reason why TikTok became such a target has nothing to do with data security, which no one in the government actually gives a hack about. It's all about the speech happening on the app and TikTok. As Pew Research found in their great influencer study a couple of months ago, was the one app where news content creators skewed to the left. And this is why we saw TikTok plays such an integral role in the Black Lives Matter movement, in the climate justice movement and the disability justice movement. All of these major sort of grassroots forces that have been able to leverage the platform to speak truth to power. And so I think, you know, the government sought to ban it. The Biden admin really led the charge on this, although Rep Gallagher originally introduced it, it was the Biden White House that shepherded it through and they passed this really terrifying restrictive ban and this law that can ultimately be used not just to silence a generation of progressive content creators, but this law can also be used to silence media companies. And I think that's a very scary precedent to set.
Vass Bednar [00:10:11] We're kind of in between in Canada with tech talk, right? We haven't banned it, but we have said that government officials can't have it on their devices. So it's fascinating to hear you sort of minimize or say that security and geopolitical risks aren't actually what we need to be thinking about.
Taylor Lorenz [00:10:26] Well, let me just be clear. Yeah, banning TikTok won't solve any of those risks. That's the thing, right? And it's very silly. I mean, it's silly for any government to say, you know, we're banning TikTok because we care so much about China getting access to your data. China can buy all the user data it wants from third party data brokers. We have absolutely zero data privacy protections in the United States in any sort of meaningful way. We just banning TikTok doesn't protect our data in any meaningful way. And we know, by the way, that China has been able to get access to a huge amount of, you know, data on Americans through these through these data brokers. So, you know, if they actually cared about this, they'd be passing things like comprehensive data privacy reform. But they'll never do that because it's not about that. They don't actually care to protect Americans data. They care about censoring speech. And that's what I think is extremely concerning.
Vass Bednar [00:11:19] Okay. So you're not seeing a kind of categorical difference with an app that has interests from another government.
Taylor Lorenz [00:11:27] Well, there's no evidence of any data breaches in terms of U.S. user data. There's no evidence that the Chinese government has ever sought to access user data. Again, this has been a multi-year thing that the government has tried so aggressively to find any smoking gun that would give them justification for banning it over speech. And again, they have never been able to find a single proof of any of this, that they've even sought to do it again because they don't need to do it. They can just buy it openly. Tiktok's you know, as we know, their sort of algorithm and the algorithm changes has to go through Oracle, which is a U.S. based company.
Vass Bednar [00:12:02] I think what people bring up is that it could be required to under Chinese law. Right.
Taylor Lorenz [00:12:07] And you could say that about any Chinese app. But we have tons of them. They don't need TikTok to get user data even remotely.
Vass Bednar [00:12:13] So in Canada, through our Foreign Investment Act, we've shut down TikTok. In Canada, we haven't shut down the app, but their physical offices and Canada's kind of in between in terms of the threats of TikTok or what could be coming forward, which is maybe why we're watching what's happening in the U.S. more, because Trump seems to have sort of kicked that can a little bit. Right. He's saying he wants Tik Tok to have at least 50% American ownership. People have put their hand up. Does that solve these risks, whether the risk is speech or geopolitics?
Taylor Lorenz [00:12:47] No, it doesn't solve anything. All it would be is basically delivering a windfall to his friends. And again, this is a. Wild precedent to set. I mean, by the way, the U.S. is not even Tiktok's biggest market at all. Indonesia is when Tik Tok was banned in India, they had twice as many users as the US had. It's just it's such insane arrogance to, you know, sort of strong arm a company which again, Tik Tok is a global platform that is based in America and Singapore. This is not even an app that operates in China. And to randomly pick it basically, again, it just all goes back to speech. Why are they banning TikTok and not Shan and Teemu and these other Chinese apps that we have that collect far more user data and that the ownership structure is far more directly tied to China. Because again, it's not about data. It's about it's about silencing speech. And unfortunately, you're already seeing the effects of this, where you're already seeing TikTok since the ban, you know, since sort of Trump put them in this limbo period, which, by the way, I think ultimately they won't come out of it if TikTok is dead sort of either way. You're already seeing sort of changes to the algorithm. You're seeing conservative influencers that were banned for spreading dangerous action, misinformation being allowed back on the app. You're hearing on sort of widespread reports of certain phrases like free Palestine suddenly being censored on the app when they weren't previously. So I think it's concerning. I mean, TikTok is just another tech company now that is kowtowing to the U.S. government.
Vass Bednar [00:14:13] Tell me about TikTok being dead.
Taylor Lorenz [00:14:16] I mean, the law is structured in a way to ban TikTok. This is a law that every single person who led the charge to get it banned spoke of it as a ban, you know. So, yeah, they might sort of force the app to sell part of the front end, you know, whatever to some American buyer. But it's essentially dead. It would take an act of Congress to reverse the law. And Congress has shown that they don't want to do that even with Trump. You know, I don't think Trump has an appetite to do it either, because he doesn't really care. He just wants to, you know, get his friends paid or whatever it will be, I think banned again or it will be sort of deprecated. Basically, we're we're not going to have the same version of Tik Tok that we had previously.
Vass Bednar [00:15:00] Could you talk a bit about Red Note? I think we all sort of saw whether we downloaded the app or not, that sort of almost jokey shift to another foreign owned app. Are influencers sticking with it? Are we learning anything from that?
Taylor Lorenz [00:15:14] You know, so after, you know, TikTok was banned, users flocked to Red Note, which is a actual Chinese social platform. So you had tons of users of Tik Tok sort of flock over there as basically an F-you to the government. And what they were able to do is connect directly with Chinese citizens and sort of start to knowledge share and I think break some of the propaganda that they've maybe heard about China and sort of actually start to learn about people in the country and learn about how things go. I mean, in some cases, they're ultimately just trading one set of propaganda for another. I did see some stuff that was a little bit concerning, you know, like denialism of certain historical events and stuff. But but overwhelmingly, I think it just shows that we're increasingly living in this like, globalized tech world. And these efforts by these authoritarian regimes, whether it's China or America, to sort of control the Internet and crack down on speech and ensure that, you know, we can't communicate with other people around the world, it's just ultimately these efforts might prove futile.
Vass Bednar [00:16:16] Let's go back to post-party what was happening up on stage at the inauguration or sort of in the room. We saw those images of of Mask, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai and other big tech leaders with a combined net worth of almost $1 trillion. And even the head of TikTok was there not on stage. What did you think when you watched that moment unfolding? What was it that we were all looking at and what does it tell us about power?
Taylor Lorenz [00:16:46] I think we're seeing that the sort of new oligarchy of tech billionaire CEOs are ultimately pulling the strings and controlling the presidency. I mean, I think that these are people that have an enormous amount of sway and power over Donald Trump. We've seen the influence that Elon Musk has been able to exert over the president even before he was in office. We're seeing that these tech CEOs are also willing to manipulate their platforms in ways that they think can shape the political climate to be more in their favor. This is what we saw with Elon Musk do with acts this election cycle where he he was leveraging the platform to promote Trump's win and Republican policies, and he's altered the algorithms to promote that stuff. We're also seeing Mark Zuckerberg. Right. Talk about a more masculine environment on Facebook and with, you know, conservative influencers that I've spoken to have talked about the boost that they've seen since he's talked about that stuff.
Vass Bednar [00:17:39] Let's talk about a couple of other people they might have run into in the line for the washroom. Y were Jake and Logan Paul at the inauguration. Like what's the thinking when you're when someone's making the guest list for that to invite these creators. It's.
Taylor Lorenz [00:17:53] Actually the same reason the tech CEOs are invited. It's all about online influence. So while the tech CEOs sort of directly control the platforms that allow these creators to amass influence and they sort of sway the platforms, ultimately putting their thumb on the scales of who gets popular online and who doesn't. You have some of the most popular creators that have been able to leverage their platforms for Trump. And, you know, again, Trump recognizes that online influence is sort of the most powerful form of modern currency that exists today. And if you're able to amass online influence, you can really do anything because ultimately you control the media environment, you control the access to information, and you're able to get your message out there. And that's something that the Paul brothers, along with all the other influencers that were there, did a lot this cycle is is getting his message out.
Vass Bednar [00:18:41] So would you say that this rise of this tech oligarchy is about more than just lower taxes and deregulation? Is there kind of a more mature ideology at play? I want to say among these guys, because they're all guys, but about sort of unchecked power, impunity, or is it about flexing the power that they do have?
Taylor Lorenz [00:19:01] I think it's about cultural capital and power. Like we've seen, you know, with these billionaires, especially the tech billionaires, they're not just content to be rich people working behind the scenes. I think even Musk has really also sort of pioneered this idea of the CEO influencer, right. Where he has enormous amount of power and wealth. And yes, he can get lower taxes right, by kissing up to Trump. But it's also about building his own personal brand and his own platform to challenge the media, to attack his enemies, to push his political beliefs, whatever. Right. And so I think that that's what you're seeing from these tech CEOs. I mean, you're seeing it with Mark Zuckerberg, too, right? And these other CEOs, Sam Altman, they're seeking to leverage online attention for themselves as well, to push their own narratives.
Vass Bednar [00:19:49] And with attention in mind. Was it a Nazi salute? What did you think about that?
Taylor Lorenz [00:19:55] I think we all saw what we saw. But I think, yeah, it's about how it's interpreted. And the only people that seem to not want to interpret it the way that the Nazis themselves are interpreting it are, you know, these these pundits that I would say generally are holding water for Elon. And Wired wrote a great piece on this. When you have these far right extremists open, Nazis celebrating it as a Nazi salute, whether it was intended to be a Nazi salute or not, it ultimately has that effect.
Vass Bednar [00:20:25] I notice that in some of the coverage of the tech oligarchs are sometimes called bro like arcs. They're sort of presented as being a monolithic oligarchy. Right. But they're not always all that unified. And I'm wondering if you think they might kind of like each other. Like I'm thinking of how Musk and Zuckerberg used to kind of joke online about fighting physically fighting each other. Recently, Zuckerberg took aim at Apple in a Joe Rogan interview. There's kind of some dramatic infighting going on now.
Taylor Lorenz [00:20:55] You had Elon going after Sam Altman.
Vass Bednar [00:20:58] Yes, yes, yes. And the kind of Stargate I'm good for Might 80 billion, which is my new tagline. They're being called an oligarchy. But isn't this also a little bit of like a Real Housewives situation? Like, how do you think this this new politic is going to pan out?
Taylor Lorenz [00:21:13] Who's the Bethenny Frankel? Yeah, I think I mean, I think these are all massive rich egomaniacs with cults of personality. And ultimately, their companies are in competition with each other. I think that's also why you're seeing a lot of them go so hard towards Trump is ultimately because Elon sort of set that precedent and I think got in early. And now you're seeing all of the other ones sort of trying to weasel their way in. They're all so powerful that I think Trump will let them sort of fight while he retains the ultimate control.
Vass Bednar [00:21:54] Let's talk about cute winter boots. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about that and how this all goes. Speke fits into subverting power.
Taylor Lorenz [00:22:05] So recently, in the past week, after Ticktalk came back online, you started to see a lot of left leaning TikTok users talking about cute winter boots. And if you scroll through this is hashtags that are used thousands and thousands of times in videos that have hundreds of thousands of views. And what cute winter Boots has sort of come to signify is essentially resistance to Trump. And people are using that language to plan different resistance actions to talk about how to keep yourself safe from the police at protests. People are sharing information on Ice raids, which is our immigration services. How to keep safe, keep your data safe online, protect yourself from Ice. And they're using that language because TikTok has a very shopping heavy algorithm. TikTok is as much an e-commerce app as it is a social media platform. And so when you talk about products, you receive a boost in the feed. And so creators are talking about cute winter boots as this sort of as you mentioned, like algo speak, which is is actually coded language to talk about resistance in a way that isn't going to get them censored because again, they feel like since Trump took office, TikTok has been cracking down on left wing political speech. So they're using this language to sort of avoid that censorship.
Vass Bednar [00:23:18] Well, you're in L.A., right? Like Cuban or Boots is really good Canadian content as well. We're always looking for those.
Taylor Lorenz [00:23:24] Yeah, I know. We were. I was wondering if any brands we're going to sort of see that phrase trending and try to hop on it.
Vass Bednar [00:23:30] That's how, you know, it's kind of over. But maybe yeah, there is an argument kicking around that Republicans won this election by intentionally pulling the levers of the independent creator economy. Thinking about Joe Rogan, who you mentioned, other influencers, the YouTube creators, and that traditional media just didn't see it coming. Last year you left Legacy Media and started your own online publication user Mac. Watching this election, did you feel just a little bit of I told you so.
Taylor Lorenz [00:24:01] I feel I have to say, like I think as somebody that covers the content creator industry and wrote a whole book on it and I covered Trump's first election. I was in the room at the Hilton that night that he won. I was one of the few reporters back then that said that he was going to win that election as well. I think when you cover online influence and see the growing impact that online influence in the Internet is having on society, you feel like you're screaming at a wall sometimes for years and years and years, and it definitely feels like that. Sometimes it's frustrating. At the same time, I don't think that the Democrats have accepted reality. I have to tell you, as somebody that was at the Democratic National Convention this year, the just absurdity with how they treated these content creators, the entitlement, the I mean, they were they literally revoked Hasan Packer's credentials on stream. Hasan Piker, arguably the most powerful leftist content creator in America with the biggest audience of young men, the key demographic that ended up swinging for Trump. This is who the Democrats were actively booting out of their own convention because he deigned to mention Gaza and question that sort of narratives on that. So I think I think if the Democrats want to win, they need to stop living in in la la land and they need to accept that this that we live in an Internet enabled world and we're not going to go back to the media environment of 1995. This is the Internet and it's here to stay.
Vass Bednar [00:25:34] What do you think it's going to take for them to take it more seriously and not feel like it's 1995?
Taylor Lorenz [00:25:39] You know, I don't know. So in 2020, you had hundreds of Tiktok's biggest content creators come together under the this collective called TikTok. For Biden, these creators collectively turned out hundreds of thousands of votes. Joe Biden actually thanked them and invited these creators to the White House after and said that they played a pivotal role in getting him elected within two years. And I reported on this for The Washington Post. He had banned those creators from the White House because these creators deigned to push back on him and ask for progressive policies. So the Democrats need to it's entitlement. Ultimately, it's entitlement. They refuse to sort of engage with any progressive members of their base. And I think that that those progressive people were willing to sort of hold their noses for one election and give them a win in 2020. But but after that, they've felt very scorned and rightfully so. And I think they're just going to keep losing. I mean, they lost in 2016. They lost this election cycle. And I think they're going to keep losing because they're pursuing an ultimately failed strategy.
Vass Bednar [00:26:48] It seems like last time, protests against the Trump administration came in the form of like, pussy hats and. Marches, right? And now we're seeing digital campaigns like free our feeds. The slogan is Save social Media from billionaire Capture. What do you make of this shift in the type of resistance that we're seeing?
Taylor Lorenz [00:27:08] I actually would say we're not seeing resistance, really. I mean, the free hour feeds thing is sort of not necessarily political. I think it is it is a resistance to capitalist, I guess, like a capitalist vision of the Internet. And I think that that can it is sort of in light of a lot of the Trump control of our social media ecosystem, but it's also sort of outside of it. It's not direct resistance to Trump. I'm actually not seeing any direct resistance to Trump. I mean, I've been talking to a lot of content creators that were formerly apolitical or even liberal, and they say, you know, he won fair and square. This is the vibe I'm going to hop on board. And these are people that four years ago were marching in Black Lives Matter protests. So I think we are just not seeing dissent.
Vass Bednar [00:27:54] Well, maybe with that feed element that free feeds is is trying to get at.
Taylor Lorenz [00:27:59] That's not going to do anything.
Vass Bednar [00:28:01] You don't think is going to change anything.
Taylor Lorenz [00:28:02] Look, I support that movement, but Blue Sky is a private company. They want to, like take control of a private protocol that they didn't build. I mean, I think that there's a noble effort to I'm not trying to sort of pour water on what I ultimately think is well intentioned people, but we're not going to build an entire decentralized Internet ecosystem overnight. I mean, something like that is going to take decades of work and aggressive money and activism. I mean, we don't have any money for that sort of thing. And there's not a public appetite for it. Most people are perfectly happy using these consumer friendly apps. Also, when you look at the decentralized social media landscape, no creators are going to build their platform on something like Blue Sky when you would much rather have 200,000 subscribers on YouTube where you can actually effectively monetize and make a living.
Vass Bednar [00:28:52] Could you just unpack what the vision is of a decentralized Internet from this movement?
Taylor Lorenz [00:28:59] You know, there's these efforts like Free Our Feeds, which wants to seize control of this one protocol. We already have an open, decentralized protocol, which is activity pub, which is what Mastodon is built on. It's what I think it's called Pixel feed. It's the open, decentralized version of Instagram, peer tube, the decentralized version of YouTube. They're not very user friendly platforms. Even Mastodon, right? It's like you have to join. You have to join the right server. It's hard to find your friends. It's all very sort of complicated compared to these consumer facing tech apps that billionaires have invested, you know, billions of billions of dollars in in making very consumer friendly.
Vass Bednar [00:29:38] These tech companies, these platforms are mostly American, but they dominate our lives, too, here in Canada. And President Trump has been trolling us pretty hard, right, with the 51st state meme. He called our prime minister a governor. I believe Elon Musk referred to Prime Minister Trudeau as girl in our lives next door. How else do you think we're going to feel this merging of big tech and the new U.S. administration?
Taylor Lorenz [00:30:06] Good question. And I probably shouldn't even say that they're consumer friendly because ultimately they're mining consumers data and they're exploiting users. But I think that you're going to see a ripple effect around the globe where you're seeing these platforms increasingly cater towards American interests and see them in lockstep with the U.S. government. We've seen these tech platforms willing to enact policies directly, basically at the behest of the U.S. government. We see obviously, they're all, you know, with Trump at Mar a Lago behind him at the inauguration. So I think these US tech companies are becoming a sort of arm of the U.S. government increasingly. And I think that should concern every other country around the world.
Vass Bednar [00:30:51] We have a federal election coming up in Canada. What do you think our politicians need to take away from the shift in the U.S. and this last election being an influencer one? For instance, do they do they need to campaign on podcasts and YouTube? Yes. Who should we pay attention to?
Taylor Lorenz [00:31:10] Well, I think that any politician, no matter where you are in the world, should recognize the new media environment. And I think this is a global phenomenon. This is not just in the U.S., although it's heavily expressed in the U.S. and Asia as the sort of influencer driven media climate. We've seen the decline of legacy media all over, especially in Canada as well. And so you see the rise of independent content creators, podcasters, etc., YouTubers. This is where people are getting their news. This is where people are getting their information. This is who is shaping people's political views. You have to acknowledge that. Again, it's not 1995 where people go to their driveway and pick up a newspaper, and that's how they find out about, you know, the news of the day. They're getting that live stream to them through podcasts, feeds, live streamers, etc..
Vass Bednar [00:31:57] Are you still a techno optimist?
Taylor Lorenz [00:32:00] Yes, I am. I'm always an optimist about technology. I think technology is not the problem. I think it's it's the sort of people that currently control it and this sort of capitalist fever dream that that we're stuck in. But I think that I mean, I am a believer in a decentralized Internet. I do think that if we cared about free speech and civil liberties, we could have a much better tech ecosystem. I'm very scared by, you know, how things are going. But I do believe in a better world through technology.
Vass Bednar [00:32:33] All right. Thank you so much for being our decoder ring.
Taylor Lorenz [00:32:37] Thank you for having me.
Vass Bednar [00:32:51] You've been listening to lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Jay Cockburn, and our sound designer is Cameron McIvor, and I'm your host, Vass Bednar. In our Shownotes. You can subscribe to the Lately newsletter where the Globe's online culture reporter Samantha Edwards unpacks more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.