Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON. Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 Hasan Piker has never abused his dog, but you'd never know that from the video clips spreading all over the internet. The backlash that Piker is facing shows the consequences of a world where everyone is constantly being recorded and our internet is built to reward outrage and controversy. In this episode, I dive into the recent viral conspiracy and false claims about Piker and Kaya, unpacking how a single, out-of-context clip spiraled into a full-blown harassment campaign, fueled by bad actors and politically motivated smear tactics. I unpack how the Hasan Piker dog collar incident is a warning sign of a dystopian future where 24/7 video surveillance merges with online outrage farming. As AI and algorithmic amplification make it easier to manipulate and weaponize video, the problems influencers face today will soon affect us all. If you like this video, please support me on Patreon!! https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz   https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0  https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

So everyone right now is up in arms thinking that Hassan shocked his dog. You could see him. Reach over. Hits the thing. The dog fucking yelps. Initially, even Hassan's community was starting to question, did he just shock Kaya? Did he just use a shock caller on stream? He zaps the poor little dog for getting up.

And then he says, why did you make me do that? So what did he just do to that dog? Hi, welcome back to Power User. Today, I want to talk about something that's been all over my feed lately and has been driving me absolutely crazy. For the past week, the internet has been dominated by the conspiracy theory that Twitch streamer Hassan Piker abused his dog using a shock collar during a Twitch live stream. There is, to be clear, zero evidence that his dog, Kaya was even wearing a shock collar during that live stream. Kaya is pictured wearing a canvas collar with a little air tag holder in it in the

original clip, where she yelped once after seemingly catching her nail on the dog bed. This led to a bunch of internet-pilled psychos crawling through hours and hours and hours of footage, claiming that Piker secretly abuses his dog. Their evidence of this is not even the footage where Kaya yelps. It's that in totally different clips, where she doesn't even appear to be in distress at all, she's wearing a collar with a small green light on it. Piker showed this collar on stream. It's an electronic vibration collar with zero shock capabilities. Attempting to debunk this conspiracy that Hassan abuses his dog, however, has become largely impossible. First of all, you can't prove a negative, which everyone pushing this crazy conspiracy theory, by the way, actually knows.

It would be like asking me to prove that I've never punched someone. Again, you can't prove a negative. After Hassan revealed the vibration collar on stream, bad actors attempted to leverage the fact that he put a small piece of tape on the back to conceal his phone number, which is like written in Sharpie on the back of the little vibration box, as evidence that he somehow secretly modified and soldered down shock collar prongs, something that would basically be like impossible to do, like impossible. I'll pause here to say that I've met Kaya IRL.

I have never seen her in a shock collar. I've spoken to people who have walked Kaya, babysit Kaya, probably spent hundreds of hours with this dog. And according to everyone I spoke to, in zero instances, has she ever been abused? Not a single guest on Piker's Twitch stream in the years and years and years that he's had Kaya has said that they've ever seen Piker mistreated Kaya.

It's not a shock collar. I've seen that collar. I've used that collar before. I have babysat that dog. And the only reason more influencers aren't speaking out publicly is because the people perpetuating this vicious harassment campaign are threatening them into silence. Big time influencers are having their brand deals jeopardized and facing serious business consequences for even suggesting that they might publicly come out in support of Hassan.

It's actually happening on a scale that I have never seen before. Multiple journalists in group chats, by the way, I've been talking to people of like wanted to report out this story. but other influencers are so scared of the harassment and abuse that they might get that they don't even want to speak on the record with their name. And yes, I know also, by the way, that making this video will definitely just put a target on my back, but I don't care because the people perpetuating these conspiracy theories already hate me. Everyone who spends any modicum of time with Hassan knows how much he loves that dog.

Kaya is one of the most pampered and spoiled dogs in Los Angeles. Who knows why Kaya yelps that, like, one day, but she is literally a dog. I grew up with dogs, multiple dogs, that was. worked as therapy dogs actually in hospitals. And sometimes if a dog steps on their foot or catches their nail wrong or something or just gets startled, they'll yelp. Kaya's also literally only yelped like that once. Like in all of Asan's years of streaming, it's not like this is some regular thing. And also what's crazy to me too is shock callers, which are commonly used in dog training. They're not like tasers. They usually give like a crawling sensation on a dog's skin. But the idea that Piker is

somehow secretly abusing his dog and shocking Kaya until she's in pain repeatedly is just completely made up in people's heads. This is a dog that lives a life, I guarantee you, is significantly better than anyone watching this video. The idea that dozens of high profile guests on Piker's stream and every single person who's ever spent any meaningful time with Kaya would all be involved in some secret years long elaborate cover-up is insane. Like literally, if you believe this, you have lost touch with reality. The entire thing is the most idiotic and deranged conspiracy theory that I think I've ever covered. Like, this is literally like it's cute. on flat earth level shit. Nevertheless, the story has been weaponized by the far right to launch

a multi-platform smear campaign against Piker. Laura Lumer has posted relentlessly about it. Tech founder, Palmer Lucky, is offering $100,000 to anyone who can tear apart Hassan's vibration collar, which I just want to say again, Kaya's like not even wearing in that original clip. She was just wearing her regular canvas collar with the air tag holder. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists are weighing in. Posts pushing the conspiracy theory are among the most viewed posts of all time on subreddits like live stream fail. Israeli news sites have been mainstreaming the conspiracy along with a slew of low-quality SEO-driven outlets. Democratic influencers who are part of chorus and the 1630 funds dark money

influence campaign like Suzanne Lambert, a failed comedian who calls herself a Regina George liberal, have also been pumping out this conspiracy. Even PETA has weighed in. Though to be fair, Pita was like, um, Hassan said he doesn't use a shock collar. Like, what are we supposed to say? Piker has been subject to politically driven smear campaigns for years. But this latest manufactured controversy reveals a toxic new dynamic that I think will define the next era of the internet. Outrage-driven Gamergate-style social media hate campaigns combined with the 24-7 video surveillance machine. Twitch streamers like Piker are the first to experience this destructive combination, but as more and more footage of everyone becomes available online, anyone who angers the wrong group could suffer a similar fate.

And of course, all of this will be exacerbated by AI. For years, we've been told that constant surveillance is a good thing, that it's vindicating. Silicon Valley executives claim that widespread video recording will prevent abuse, harassment, crimes, etc. This has led to the mass adoption of things like police body cameras, 24-7 video capture on our streets, and a sprawling crowdsource surveillance machine on social media. Social media platforms are actively incentivizing this surveillance, prioritizing video footage and hours-long live streams over every other type of content format. Just last month, billionaire, soon-to-be TikTok owner, Larry Ellison,

said that a vast AI-fueled video surveillance system would ensure, quote, citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. This comment is a perfect encapsulation of the delusional fantasy pushed by so many in Silicon Valley. that the surveillance state will be used for good. The narrative is seductive. If we could just see everything in 4K, disputes over what really happened would collapse, the thinking goes. If everything in life is videotaped and archived,

then the real truth of these messy situations would be indisputable. But Hassan Piker's dog color incident shows that this theory is catastrophically wrong. Almost no one is more surveilled than a Twitch streamer like Piker. He broadcasts almost every wake-a-upyker. hour of his life. There are tens of thousands of hours of archived footage of him and his dog. When he leaves the house or goes out in public, fans videotape his every move. He documents his own life on social media too, posting videos across Instagram and TikTok. In theory, this should

make it harder for bad actors to manufacture controversies. Such total visibility should make false accusations impossible. If everything is on record, then surely it would be easy for anyone to see the truth of the situation. But the opposite is true. Instead, of video being used as a tool to debunk conspiracies, it's increasingly used as a tool to validate them. In Piker's case, this has meant that an endless stream of years-old clips is being repackaged and miscontextualized in order to further a politically driven hate campaign. The dozens of out-of-context video clips spreading on social media, racking up millions of views in some cases, have become a digital Roarshark test. Albert Foxcon, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight

project said, quote, we are always given the same lie that somehow video is objective. But the truth is that there's so much power in how it's interpreted and edited. Even the most trivial form of tracking, even someone's own Twitch stream can turn into this weapon against them. Every camera is now a panopticon in the making. Josh Sidorella, an artist and researcher who studies online communities and radicalization, put it this way. Quote, conspiracy theories and disinformation are flourishing because endless video archives are available. So long as the video archive exists, people can cherry pick and make these new narratives. If the videos didn't exist or were closed, then the narratives wouldn't seem credible. The possibility of people finding disingenuous

clips to piece together a false story in an even marginally convincing way wouldn't be possible. Because each new clip has the potential to go viral and every major social platform right now is incentivizing video, users across the internet are incentivized to participate in these crowdsourced forensic investigations. The hate campaign against Piker has already spawned a cottage industry of video analysts and Reddit internet detectives who have been pouring over thousands of hours of live streaming footage analyzing every video frame and constructing elaborate conspiracy theories about what really happened. The cycle is not entirely new. The tactics being used against Piker are ripped directly from the Gamergate playbook. The goal is to isolate a target, manufacture

controversy, weaponize social platforms and traditional media to spread lies and orchestrate sustained network harassment with the eventual goal of making someone so controversial that they essentially end up bankrupt and de-platformed. But most Gamergate style campaigns have traditionally relied on more text-based media or vague accusations about the business dealings or journalistic practices. Bad actors might use a few screenshots here and there or some out-of- context comments, but the doctored evidence presented in these campaigns hasn't traditionally been video in nature. That has all changed with the rise of clip culture.

The proliferation of this new medium and the sheer scale of this anti-Hassan-Piker hate campaign shows that we're entering a new era of the weaponization of the internet driven by attacks where video has undeniably replaced text as the raw material for conspiracy theories. Albert Foxcon, again of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, which is all by the way, said, quote, with more footage being taken from more places and shared more widely at a time where journalism institutions are breaking, rather than being a way to bring us back down to the ground, video ends up just fueling these conspiracy theories. Influencers willingly monetize their own surveillance in order to turn their lives into content for profit. But if we continue down this path, the experiences of Twitch streamers will become more common in everyday life.

The weaponized internet will merge with the surveillance infrastructure that we've built, and ordinary people will live under the same microscope as influencers do today. As the couple at the Coldplay concert this past summer, or the security guard at Charlie Kirk's final turning point event likely realized, there is no way to opt out of this new system. AI will inevitably make all of this worse. Deep fake video generation tools are being rolled out en masse, while media literacy plummets.

bad actors who are already comfortable manipulating real footage will begin fabricating videos of their targets or subtly altering them using AI. AI will also make it easier to search, catalog, and weaponize every video ever recorded. Finding all available clips of someone making the wrong hand gesture or wearing a specific color or moving their body in a certain way could be as easy as clicking a few buttons. If an influencer broadcasting tens of thousands of hours of his life for years can be successfully smeared by a single misleading clip. What chance does a regular person have when a few seconds of their life goes viral?

What recourse do they have when they're unjustly smeared by thousands online? Institutional fact-based reporting outlets have been all but dismantled. And even when a journalist does debunk misinformation, like I'm trying to do right now, hello, audiences are primed to fall for narratives driven solely by whoever can post the loudest and clip the fastest. This type of video clip-driven harassment can be incredibly profitable. Platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram reward video views with cash payouts. Bad faith actors can rake in thousands of dollars by posting a flood of context-free,

shareable clips or dissecting video footage on a live stream. Any clip, no matter how benign, can be reframed in service of a particular narrative. For example, on Monday, thousands of X users falsely claimed that a sound made by Twitch streamer Austin Show, snapping his gum, was actually Hassan Piker pressing some sort of secret shock button. I'm telling you, this stuff is just. deranged. In other videos, bad actors simply take any small movement by Kaya readjusting her position on her little dog bed as evidence of her being shocked into submission. Again, there's zero evidence of any of these delusional claims. People have also falsely claimed that Kaya is forced to

sit behind Piker throughout his entire broadcast like a prop, which is just an insanely false claim that can be debunked by watching any of his streams where Kaya frequently moves about or goes to grab water or leaves the room. The Piker controversy might be a lot. read as mindless internet drama, but we desperately need people to start caring about these things and recognizing these types of incidents as the internet bellwetheres that they are. We also need to be extremely vocal in calling out bad actors pushing these extremely politically driven lies about Piker and others. The fact that so many Democrat influencers, including Instagram accounts that even claim to be

anti-disinformation, are pushing these grossly false, unsubstantiated claims as part of an effort to smear one of the most vocal, leftists online is deeply disturbing. But that's what these centrist liberal influencers do, and that's why they're so dangerous. Just as with the original Gamergate over a decade ago, liberals who happily align with fascists to attack leftists will blatantly repost and promote false far-right smears about leftists

in order to launder them to a mainstream audience. It's pitiful. This cycle is pitiful. Meanwhile, we are all sleepwalking into a future defined by universal surveillance coupled with algorithmically incentivized online outreach. Our internet is devoid of any meaningful privacy protections and video content specifically is being rewarded. Profit-driven tech platforms have ensured that bad actors and extremists reign and we've

allowed tech oligarchs to dismantle all vestiges of a shared reality. And I think we're really only beginning to see the consequences of this new system. As Albert Fox Khan said, quote, the lesson of history is clear. This is only going to become a more prevalent problem for more people as the technology continues to get cheaper and more ubiquitous. What might seem like the absurd price of fame today may soon become the inescapable price of participating in modern life. We need to start treating this problem like the existential threat to democracy and truth that it is. And that means demanding real accountability from platforms that profit off outrage. We need to fight the expansion of the surveillance state tooth and nail by killing.

surveillance and censorship laws like the Kids Online Safety Act. We need to fight against Section 230 reform and push for comprehensive privacy regulation. The profit-driven tech landscape that rewards engagement at any cost needs to be dismantled and broken up. We need legal frameworks that make intentional harassment committed with actual malice punishable. We need algorithmic transparency laws that force companies like MetaX and TikTok to disclose how their recommendation systems prioritize inflammatory or misleading content. AI developers and hosting platforms should be required to watermark synthetically generated video and audio content, and we should develop easily accessible tools to track when and how footage has been altered.

And I know this is self-serving as a journalist, but actual journalism and civic institutions desperately need investment. We need an independent fact-checking infrastructure that moves at the same speed as these viral clips. We need public education systems that teach basic media literacy alongside skills like reading and writing. For instance, members of the public, in my opinion, should all know how to like, verify video footage, analyze metadata, understand concepts like algorithmic bias, and most importantly, understand and recognize how these manufactured outrage campaigns work. Of course, doing that would require for-profit mainstream corporate media organizations to stop feeding these outrage smear campaigns

and laundering them simply because they're aligned with the far-right actors perpetuating them, but that's a topic for another day. More broadly, we need a cultural shift away from surveillance culture as entertainment. I've talked about this before in my videos, but if there's one thing you take away from this, please stop filming strangers for content. Do everything you can to fight against the surveillance machine. And most importantly, actually, stop sharing these contextless clips that fuel these manufactured outrage cycles, even if you don't like Hassan Piker, like even if you think he's a

worst person in the world, don't feed into this Q&on conspiracy crap. Call out people who you see online who are feeding into these hate campaigns too, because until we make it socially and economically costly for influencers who participate in these Gamergate-style coordinated attacks on leftists, this cycle will only get worse. As many of you who follow me know, I'm also frequently subject to these bad faith smear campaigns. Thankfully, there's not tens of thousands of hours of footage on me yet, at least, but the exact same actors lying about Hassan Piker's dog collar regularly lie about me. These are not people with any sort of commitment to the truth. They've targeted my advertisers and I literally have zero brand deals right now in large part because I've been deemed too controversial for brands to partner with. So if you like this video, please support my work via the Patreon link below or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter, UserMag at UserMag.com, where I publish biweekly internet culture news roundups.

On my Patreon, I publish bonus content and host chats with my followers and do monthly Q&A live streams. I actually just did one on Monday. Every ounce of your support makes such a huge difference, and it really means so much to me. I can't thank you enough for whatever support you can give. Let's all work together to build a better, safer, less profit-driven internet and fight against surveillance capitalism. Thank you so much for watching.