Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Silicon Valley is Breaking Everything

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Is Silicon Valley actually making progress, or are they just breaking the world for profit? Support my independent journalism: 🙏 Patreon: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz     ⁠ ��️ Buy a paid subscription to my Substack: ⁠https://www.usermag.co     ⁠ In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I’m joined by legal scholar and surveillance expert Albert Fox Cahn to dismantle the "Move Fast and Break Things" ethos that has dominated tech for a decade. From the multibillion-dollar failure of the Metaverse to the "innovation theater" of the Apple Vision Pro, we explore why the most hyped technologies are often the most disastrous.We dive deep into the dark side of home security, revealing how Ring cameras have turned from safety tools into a massive surveillance network for law enforcement, sometimes even recording your most private moments without a warrant. We also tackle the "AI bubble," the myth of police body cameras, and why the "boring" analog solutions are often the safest bet for our future. Albert is the founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) and the author of the new book, Move Slow and Upgrade: The Power of Incremental Innovation.

We've seen the court cases where people are saying, hey, I told the cops I didn't want to turn over the footage on my neighbor. So they came back with a warrant for that footage and the footage of my own home, the footage of the inside of my home, the footage possibly even from people's bedroom. For years, Silicon Valley has peddled the idea of disruptive innovation, moving fast and breaking things, going max. They promised the public quick and easy fixes to their biggest problems. But somehow, those solutions almost never come to fruition. Albert Foxconn is a legal scholar and founder of the surveillance technology oversight project. He's also the author of the new book, Move Slow and Upgrade, The Power of Incremental Innovation. Today, he's joining me to talk about some of Silicon Valley's most disastrous innovations

and how the move fast break things ethos of tech is hurling us all into a hellscape. Hi, Albert, welcome. Thank you for having me back. Okay, so to start off, I feel like we're all familiar. familiar by now with this idea of like moving fast and breaking things. I remember seeing posters about this at Mehta's old headquarters in the Facebook offices. I was actually at the Facebook F8 when he I think made that original declaration was a lot of like a decade ago. Why is this such a dangerous philosophy for tech? I mean, obviously the concept of breaking

things does not sound good when it's technology that we rely on. But why is this sort of idea of like moving quickly and innovating even just dangerous. Tech companies have been telling us for years that we need to move fast and break things, and they moved fast and they broke a lot of things. They broke essential public infrastructure. They broke trust. They broke a lot of the ways our democracy works.

And in this book, we're talking about how we're often told that our only choices are either invest in this radical concept of innovation on the one hand or accept the status quo on the other. But what we do is we look at all these ways, that over the years, innovation hasn't been this like eureka moment. It's actually been the slow, incremental, boring work of refining existing systems, investing in proven solutions and incrementally upgrading the status quo. And so we're just challenging that innovation narrative and all the ways that Silicon Valley has

just broken things over the years. That doesn't sound as profitable. Is that like the main issue here is that they just want to like, maximize profits. Well, this is the thing. It's more profitable on average, right? It's the difference between investing a dollar in a savings account and putting it in a lottery ticket, right? Venture capitalists keep telling us, well, we need to invest in these groundbreaking changes because one of them will revolutionize the world. And yes, so many of these companies will fail. Yes, so many of them will go by the wayside. But this is how things advance. But what we detail is that

actually oftentimes for public policy makers, for corporate leaders, for just people facing these sort of tech choices in our daily lives, the best options are oftentimes the boring analog ones. And part of what we're trying to show is that rather than thinking that the boring option is somehow outmoded or that you're losing out on the chance or change, the boring option is often going to be the safest long-term bet, but there isn't as much of an investment upside in the extreme cases. And this sort of hype cycle relies on us constantly chasing those extremes. Yeah, I know. I feel like it's just this like mentality of like beating the markets and like getting that next quarter's number better than the previous quarter's number, never mind if that like

screws over long-term growth. I mean, honestly, I feel like the metaverse reminds me of this where like they forced it was supposed to be this thing. It was like used to kind of bolster corporate profits. And then it's like whatever even happened to that like it just kind of fell apart. It was messy. I don't know if it was like harmful necessarily, but it just seemed like just a waste of everyone's time. A hundred percent. And so we have a chapter on the metaverse where we detail the ways that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg renamed his whole company. You saw multi-billion dollar acquisitions. You saw Microsoft doing this huge gaming play claiming that this was their entree into the metaverse. And at the end of it, billions of dollars wasted on this vision of the future that was laughable. And it's not just a matter of armchair quarterbacking the decisions after they go off the rails.

We're showing the ways that people knew at the time these metaverse pivots were happening that it was never going to work out. And it's not just a really great way to have a bit of Schrodenfreude about the misadventures of, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and these other tech giants, but to kind of learn from that experience and not get hoodwinked again when we see the next play for the future. So, you know, we look at, you know, Apple Vision Pro and how, you know, here you have Apple, iconic company.

It is associated with revolutionizing so many forms of technology. And the Vision Pro came out and it's like, what is the use case for this? It's not that there isn't a killer app. There isn't a fundamental utility. You know, you see this idea that you're going to create an augmented reality world around your home. And yes, you can instantly see how that could be cool in a science fiction novel.

But when you're putting on the tech and seeing that you get a nauseating flicker every time you walk, it's dead on arrival. And we see that sort of mistake with the Metaverse in so many of these corporate acquisitions and so many of these product launches. I mean, it reminds me kind of also of like Corey Doctoros, which I think, you also has a book out about like infidification and just kind of like the disparity between like the hype of these products and how they actually end up being used. Yeah. So in shittification as kind of it is the the sucking force that that takes a life force out of many of the promising

platforms that for a beautiful glimmering moment, we actually have hope will change the world. I mean, I remember the early euphoria of TikTok when people thought this was genuinely going to be this egalitarian platform that would give a mass, you know, audience to people simply based off of some sort meritocratic algorithm. And then we saw it cannibalizing itself. We saw the need to just make money and to, you know, yield to political power. And that sort of optimism quickly faded. And I think that with a lot of the, you know, metaverse examples, and not just metaverse, with our cryptocurrency example, Let's take a moment to actually ask, is your product in any way addressing the problem you're claiming to solve? Or, as is often the case, did you invent a solution, then try to reverse engineer what problem you're going to take on?

Because when we see that in the case of a lot of these technologies, that's a huge red flag that this is not an actual improvement. This is just innovation theater. Oh, innovation theater is such a good way to put it. I love that. Yeah, there's so much disillusionment. I mean, I feel like actually by now, it's funny people felt that way about TikTok. I think that's because also just musically was like, I don't know, musically was never egalitarian, but it was like there was this like energy to it. And this was still in like the 2010s when people had optimism.

Now I think everyone is pretty like black pill. But I see that kind of energy and that skepticism being as I talk about all the time, as you know on this channel, you've been on here before. Like people are kind of diverting that resentment that people have towards the tech industry towards surveillance laws and saying, oh, like, look at how badly the Metaverse went. Look at how badly crypto, you know, AI, everything is going. This is why we need like mass surveillance laws for some reason. But I feel like that's been like this bad path.

It drives me crazy, right? Because I've been fighting these companies for years. I've been fighting the harms they've been doing for years. I've been suing them. I've been ranting about them. And then I see all these people coming in and using that energy to push forward the same mindset. But now instead of it being a sort of venture capital innovation narrative, it's surveillance innovation narrative.

And suddenly you're being told, well, if we just monitor the age and identity of every person using these apps, somehow we're going to solve this array of problems that some people think they're linked to other people question. I mean, I personally, I've tried to get as radically offline as I can. I moved to Cambridge, UK, I'm in a castle. I'm in as an analogous space as you can be. And so I know I am really privileged and lucky that I get to live this like offline Harry Potter life. But at the same time, even if you think that social media is really harmful, the idea that

you're going to be able to solve this intractable issue about figuring out who is whom online and do it without creating all of the like Orwellian threats of a central surveillance state, it's just nonsense. And yet we see a lot of these, you know, identity verification companies working with lawmakers who sell us that same narrative. And they're selling it to a lot of scared parents that, hey, if we have this mandate, if we have this law, we will fix all of this. And the truth is that these are really hard problems to fix where we have evidence-based alternatives to the, you know, surveillance solutionism. But they simply aren't as appealing to lawmakers because they cost money, they take effort, and they actually take time.

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a difference. I think like Candace Odgers and Alice Marwick and other researchers that actually studied this stuff for a living have done such a great job kind of dispelling these narratives. And there was that great report back in 2024 now that it was like Alice and a bunch of other researchers put out just literally calling this a moral panic and it was an indictment of this stuff. But I think it's so hard. I mean, something that I constantly hear from people on my channel every time I try and explain this to them is like, how can you say this is a moral panic if these companies are doing so much harm. I think they're thinking that like acknowledging the moral panic aspect and acknowledging

that actually there is no evidence of any sort of widespread mental health, you know, crisis among children due to social media specifically means that like we're somehow discounting the enormous harm that they do through, I would argue like surveillance capitalism, you know, all of the other stuff they do. I think it's hard for people to understand. There's a lot of nuance here. Yeah. So one of the starting points I have with this is the brain doesn't magically change any

So the idea that somehow the design features that are, you know, potentially detrimental as a teenager are going to be innocuous as an adult. Anyone with a cognitive science background will tell you that makes no sense. Obviously, younger users are going to have different risk profiles on average, but there's going to be a spectrum. And we know that there are going to be some particularly vulnerable users who are particularly at risk or in others who are particularly resilient. Personally, I tend to have a slightly more like downcast view of the overall social impact of social media. But it's not that I want to keep kids off of it. I just want to stop the exploitative practices at the core of it. And you can do that through generally applicable privacy protections.

You can do this through protections against surveillance capitalism. And you can do it for all users because the surveillance capitalism, the algorithmic patterns, is that all the dark pattern prods to use the apps more and more. None of that is somehow perfectly okay for adults if we think that it's, you know, deeply detrimental for kids. And so I think the moral panic part of it is this idea that we need the state to come in and to be, you know, create this massive layer of tracking of that online activity in the supposed interest of the users at surveillance.

because the history of people being surveilled for their own good, quote unquote, only for that information to be used against them is long and heartbreaking. And that's where I think the solution being put forward, the innovation being put forward is just not fit for purpose. I mean, I think it's also just so important to note that, like, as we know, there are a lot of well-documented issues in society that are affecting children and are affecting adults, are affecting people's mental health. there is absolutely no effort to address any of those, which are significantly more impactful than like,

even the studies that like Jonathan Heights sites, like are not like, it's like 0.05 percentage points or something. It's like essentially negligible, you know, so much of this. And there are things that have real harm to people that could do a lot more that we're not addressing. And so that just to me shows that this is not a real good faith effort to improve youth mental health, you know. I really do think this like knee jerk surveillance innovation, response cycle that we have to so many different problems, it keeps failing us, right? So take, for example, the way that Ring surveillance, you know, was supposed to be this breakthrough in home safety, that if you just put all of these internet-enabled cameras, that it would be this

magical force field, this deflector dish against, you know, anyone who was seeking to come into your property. And when we actually have seen people ask Ring for anything to substantiate that their technology worked, their case falls apart, you know. And when we've looked at independent research on this, it's actually, there are some cases where ring installation correlates with increases in crime, increases in theft. But why did we get sold this in the first place? It's because, well, Amazon was delivering all of these packages that was putting in unsecured locations that was leading to an increase in your package thefts, which then justified the surveillance response. So Amazon owns the solution to the problem they're creating, but it doesn't

actually protect anyone in the process. And what we've seen is, you know, we're in an era where not only do those cameras fail to somehow magically ward off anyone who wants to do ill, but they become a potential tool against the homeowner when they're just one court order away from being used against them by law enforcement, by ICE. We know, We see this vast, you know, set of collaborations between law enforcement agencies and ring to help provide access to that video footage. So now that suddenly the camera that you're installing in your living room in the hopes that somehow it will prevent a break in is breaking into your most intimate moments whenever, you know, the government wants to peer in, which sounds obviously conspiratorial. you know, very much like some bad black mirror episode, but we've seen the court cases where people are saying,

hey, I told the cops I didn't want to turn over the footage on my neighbor. So they came back with a warrant for that footage and the footage of my own home, the footage of the inside of my home, the footage possibly even from people's bedrooms. It's really just another way that the technology is a better story than it is a solution. Yeah, well, I think of, I mean, when you think of that like move fast, break things, ethos too, I feel like we're seeing it with all surveillance technology, including like you mentioned ICE. I mean, like, now ICE is getting body cameras, like, and they've got all these new apps and things where they scan your face and put you on a watch list and stuff. And like it just seems like all of that is being rolled out so sloppily. And ICE is contracted with all these like evil Silicon Valley tech companies now who don't have a good track record.

And it seems like that's extending even towards the government. Yeah. And I think body cameras are another classic example of this sort of innovation mindset, right? You had heartbreaking police violence. You saw people being killed by officers. And the solution from the Obama era Justice Department was, let's give officers lots of money for cameras. And, you know, this is something I've been like very clear for years. I wrote about it in the New York Times back in 2019 that this was a failed experiment.

And we keep being told over and over again by lawmakers on both sides. that somehow having this surveillance is going to keep us safe. But what have we seen? The most important videos of police accountability if the last 20 years have never come from body cams, they've always come from bystanders. The person who controls the camera controls the narrative. And when officers do release footage,

so often it's selectively edited. It's withheld if it looks bad for officers. It's given over quickly, when it tells a story they want the world to see. And so rather than creating a police accountability tool, all we did was give them yet another propaganda tool when police departments already have so much power to control the public narrative

and are already given so much deference by our legal system when it comes to their asserted version of the truth. And I don't know if even bystander videos are powerful enough to stand up to the misinformation of a president who's, going to look at, you know, federal officials killing someone, engaging in activity that would be called murder by, in almost any other circumstance, and to tell us that somehow it's not criminal, that somehow the victim was, you know, attacking the officer's bullets. I mean, it is the level of

Orwellian doublespeak that where clearly the images are not enough on their own, but still, The body cams just are a distraction, a wasteful distraction, and another failed high-tech band-aid that just covers up the problem without addressing it. Yeah. I mean, I think of even just the existence of Doge and what they did to the American government, too, is this idea of like, move, fast, break things, go into USAID, gut it, you know, like, do all this stuff. And ultimately, we found out I saw recently, that reported that it cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars, actually. The entire program was actually like a huge burden on taxpayers because it furloughed so many

workers and because of all the like chaos that it basically caused. No, I, I wrote the book with my co-author, Evan Selleinger, before Doge even existed. We finished writing it just before Trump was sworn into office. And so to then see all of our worst fears brought to life by Elon Musk and see. the power of, you know, this man to like, seize so much data blatantly disregarding so many federal privacy laws and creating this massive threat to American civil rights. It feels like a canon loaded and primed to fire aimed at the heart of our democracy and all put forward with this justification that somehow the Silicon Valley ethos would quickly fix.

all of these elements of American government. And not only did it break so many ages, we will spend years trying to figure out how many people Doge killed, how many people have died because the loss of USAID funding, the loss of other vital frontline programs, the reduction in PEPFAR, you know, AIDS funding. I mean, we have seen some of the most impactful programs

promoting global health, stabilizing countries around the world, actually bringing improved quality of life to people just gutted. And I sue the government for a living. I'm not someone who has some rosy picture of how the U.S. government operates. I do not think it is a saintly institution. But we allowed ideologues to cannibalize and devastate some of the most noble and most valuable elements of our government. And I think it's really, it is a scandal.

I don't know if there's words, strong enough to capture just how much of a betrayal it was of any sense of morality. Yeah, I know. It's, it's so bleak. And of course, Elon Musk will never be held accountable, which is so depressing. I mean, I also see the rollout of AI as kind of related to the stuff that you're talking about. I feel like right now we're witnessing this, right? Like idea of like, just roll it out.

Like the Washington Post, where I used to work just did mass layoffs where they, you know, are pivoting towards AI and like losing some of the most. talented journalists, including, like, I think their entire Middle East Bureau, like, it seems so bleak. Yeah. I mean, I will say the AI bubble, I believe, is starting to pop, and people are realizing that they were sold a bill of goods, because we had this rush to integrate AI into every area of life. And what did we get? We got massive amounts of AI slop. We saw degradation and the quality of the information we're consuming online. We saw all of these industries trying to trying to integrate AI as a substitute for human beings,

and oftentimes then quietly backfilling the roles that they gutted because they realized that AI wasn't up to the task. Look, I am a giant nerd. I love machine learning. I love linear algebra, but it is not a crystal ball. And one of the things that, you know, just to go back to these warning signs, you know, there are a lot of times when you can see the differences between a credible claim about the role that AI can

play and sort of the smoke and mirrors. Like when someone is telling you that AI can predict the future, that should be a massive, massive road flare that they are just completely full of smoke. Because, yeah, it is a way to analyze the past, not, you know, somehow gaze in through the midst of time. And yet we see in policing, in logistics, in almost every area of life, people are selling these algorithms where they're claiming to be able to do what is mathematically impossible. I feel that way too. Like I love technology so much. Obviously, that's why I'm a tech journalist. And like, I love things that make my life easier. Like, I'm not anti, the concept of AI. Like, there are things that, I guess, you know, are technically AI that I think do make our life

better. I think like what you said, though, is that there's been this also just misrepresentation of what AI is. Like when you mentioned machine learning, like that's a lot. doesn't sound as good. And so I think people say, like, they've rebranded machine learning as AI. And then they've also rebranded, like, a ton of other stuff that's not even that as, like, AI. And it sort of has become this, like, tech buzzword that is, they're slapping on everything. And it just means basically, like, we've automated this in some way, usually a worse way. And to me, that's what's so frustrating about it is like, yeah, I would love for like AI or whatever you want to call AI to, to, like, cure cancer. Sure, if that research is happening, that's great. And

but I think what it's being used for now is to like deny people health care and that's bad. Like we don't want that. A hundred percent. Like we have so many buzzwordy companies that went from big data to machine learning product. Big data. I forgot about that one. Yeah. You know, cloud base.

There's so many discarded promotional terms. But like when you look at some of the most impressive uses of AI, it's really smart data scientists spending a long time actually working with people who deeply understand the thing they're trying to. solve and custom creating these models that are really, you know, impressive undertakings. You know, the idea that chatbots, that LLMs, that, you know, something to me that often is the least impressive technical aspect of machine learning, that that somehow is the solution. That, to me, misses the point. And I think that, you know, in fact, what we see is inserting LLMs into everything is just

a great way to increase the computational cost and the energy impact. of anything. And, you know, with a lot of these products, I do think we're going to see a market correction where people start to realize, oh, this isn't just something that's like a quick innovation fix where you can just plug in to everything and somehow your life is better. No, it's like you can use some of these techniques, you can use some of these systems, you can use some of this just unbelievable investment in AI hardware to solve some really hard. and do some cool stuff, but it's going to be an incremental refinement of the way you were doing data analytics before. It's going to be an incremental improvement. It's not going to be this sort of breakthrough innovation.

It feels so hopeless because I feel like the entire, like our entire economy and tech system and government now is so optimized to move fast and break things and like optimized for immediate growth. I mean, so much of American culture already is based on instant gratification. Like that concept is very American, I think, already. So what can we even do? Like, is this just going to keep getting worse, basically? But I think part of the issue is that there are people doing these sorts of incremental upgrades every day, tinkering in the background, refining these systems, doing the hard, boring work. But that has a terrible storyline.

So it often gets overshadowed. Like, we spend some time looking at cybersecurity and the way that so much of our cybersecurity infrastructure is built on this really, really wrote, you know, patching and upgrading, incrementally analyzing how you can, you know, refine one level of protection or another trial and error, and it is terribly boring. And whenever you hear about cybersecurity, it's the rare sort of cybersecurity failure. But when you think about how much better cybersecurity has gotten, that we're willing to do so many essential transactions online, that we're willing to store so much of our most sensitive data in electronic forms. Like, It speaks to the way that we really have transformed what was once considered like peripheral data storage into the dominant way that we keep records, the dominant way that we live our lives.

But that's the sort of thing that it's much harder to focus on when, you know, people are trying to get, you know, multi-billion dollar valuations selling lem fluff and, you know, nude image generators. And so I do think there is real cause for hope. And I think there's a real path for how we can sort of actually have our tech and have, like, you know, progress too. But it means having this realistic set of expectations where we're saying, oh, I'm going to stop, you know, investing in the company, buying the product, supporting the solution at work where it's the most razzle-dazzle high-tech. you know, move fast option. My default position is going to be what's the thing that sounds like, oh, this is a slight improvement. This is a way to make life a little bit better. Because when you start looking for, there are so many tech products out there. There's so many, you know, systems for fine months. There's so many home upgrades you can do if you're worried about security

that, yeah, it doesn't have the multi-million dollar marketing campaign of ring surveillance, but having a better lock, having sometimes bars, having lights, having some of these really basic systems, the difference is they actually work. And those sorts of upgrades are actually, they're in almost every part of our lives. And they can just make our daily experience a lot better. Well, Albert, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm always such a huge fan of everything you're doing. And yeah, glad we could spend some time looking at how yes, things are bad, but yes, there's still cause for hope. All right, that's it for this week's episode.

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with a brand new episode. See you then.