Numlock Sunday: Taylor Lorenz on User Magazine
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Taylor Lorenz, journalist and creator of the newsletter User Magazine.
Taylor is a brilliant writer who has spent the past several years covering one of the most compelling beats out there, content creators and influencers, not only how they have managed to amass massive audiences, but also how that success has had major ramifications across culture. After years of writing for some of the most esteemed publications out there, Lorenz made the move to strike out and start her own publication, User Magazine, just last week.
We spoke about the transition from legacy media to content creation, the next wave of AI, and the threat that censorship poses to technology.
Lorenz can now be found at usermag.co and on all the platforms.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Taylor, welcome back.
Thanks for having me.
Congratulations, you are celebrating the launch this week of User Magazine. You have had a really amazing career covering internet culture, and more importantly, I think, the people who make internet culture. Over the course of your run, you've worked at a number of publications — The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic — and you've been able to carve out a fascinating beat. In starting User Magazine, you make an argument that, listen, a lot of places that are traditionally constructed aren't built to understand and succeed in this beat. What are you trying to accomplish with User Magazine?
I want to really do the type of reporting that I cut my teeth on and made a name for myself doing, which has become completely impossible to do in legacy media. Back in the 2010s, when you had the rise of sites like BuzzFeed and Vice and all these digital places that were doing a really great job of covering online culture, places like The New York Times and The Washington Post and others took internet culture a little bit more seriously, basically recognizing that they had to compete with these digital outlets. Once those digital outlets crumbled and went away, you saw them retreat back into their delusional world where the internet doesn't exist.
I think they just completely misunderstand the internet. They don't understand the dynamics of it. I can't tell you how many really big, newsworthy stories I've had that have just sat in the CMS unpublished, never to see the light of day, because some senior editor that's been in print media for 30 years didn't understand it or didn't understand the importance of it. I'm just tired of fighting those battles.
I also started as a blogger and work a lot in interactive media. I don't consider myself just a writer. I like to make videos; I like to do podcasts; I livestream; I used to have a Snapchat show. I've always done a lot of stuff like that and worked in more multimedia journalism. In 2017, when I made the decision to switch from being a social media editor to reporting full-time, that really meant my entire day job became writing. And that was so different.
I think of, for instance, my coverage of Charlottesville back in 2017. I know a lot of people didn't think of it as an internet event, but I would say it was a very internet event in the sense that these were radicalized online communities that manifested in the real world in really dark ways. I wrote an article about that day, and it was pretty well read, but I think what most people knew me from for that day was my livestream. I livestreamed to millions and millions of people. I ended up livestreaming James Fields driving the car through the crowd, Heather Heyer's death, and that footage ended up at the end of the movie BlacKkKlansman. It's the final scene.
I want to do more interactive reporting like that. If the story requires a video, I'd like to tell the story in that way. Or maybe it's a podcast episode, or maybe I will write something but I'll have an audio component in it. I just want to experiment a little bit more, and I think traditional media is not set up that way. The traditional media is not set up for that. If you take a reporting job at one of these places, you are writing 800- to 1400-word articles. That is your job. And then I have to do this whole second job of all the multimedia stuff on the side, and I just I want it all to be combined.
One of the things we've talked about in the past, specifically for an event that we had around our books, was how the idea that media shouldn't evolve is historically naive. We've talked about the history of film as a technology, and that film was a technological event. It used to be plays, and the earliest films were just filmed version of plays, and then they realized, oh shit, we can do a bunch of really interesting things with cameras. No longer were you limited by those constraints.
You and I have talked about the evolution of what we refer to as the media, or the establishment media, and it does seem like it's really chafing for a lot of the same reasons that historically institutions have chafed when new ways of telling stories and new ways of interacting with readers have emerged. It seems like what you're doing is just following through on so many of the concepts that you've been covering.
They're so hostile to change. It's wild. There was a moment, back at the end of 2017 when I made the decision to be a reporter full-time rather than just reporting on top of all my social media jobs, and I felt like there were two paths. I could either go fully into the content creator world or I could go into the traditional journalism world. And at the time, I really wanted people to take my beat seriously. I felt like I had to show people that I could work at the highest level in these top media organizations and show people that this coverage really mattered.
The more that time has gone on, I feel like I ended up on the wrong side of the tracks. Like I'm stuck on this side where it's decaying and crumbling and falling apart, and everyone's getting laid off. Then I watch my friends on the other side of things, in the content creator world, doing such innovative, amazing work and pushing boundaries and doing fun, amazing things — and monetizing successfully, making a living independently, and having complete autonomy over what they get to do. I want to be in that world.
Before I made this decision, I talked to so many people, and I really talked to a lot of older journalists. I asked my former colleagues at The New York Times to put me in touch with some of the oldest journalists that they knew, and these are people that have worked in legacy institutions in pretty senior positions for decades. All of them said that the number one thing they wish they'd done when they were younger was take more risks. They also, even people in senior jobs, were like, it's only a matter of time before I get laid off or the jig is up for my job.
And it just made me think. I'm in my 30s now, but I started to think, okay, what is my future like in legacy media? What does 10 years from now look like? Maybe I get to write some great stories, but 10 years from now, I'm probably laid off somewhere in budget cuts. I don't even know if the place I work for will exist in the same way. Whereas when I started to think about building something independently, I was like, well, I don't know what it'll be like 10 years from now — maybe I'll be broke — but at least I'll have tried to build something, which is something I have the luxury of doing. My only expenses now are rent in a pretty affordable part of town, food and health care, I guess.
Something that's also happening a lot in the field that you cover is this interesting moment in media where you have lots of people who started first online now rather desperate to break into the more official channels. You see MrBeast producing shows with Amazon now, and then at the same time, you see establishment stars attempting to do the other move. Reese Witherspoon is attempting to develop an online fandom and parasocial relationships through Hello Sunshine and her book club and whatnot.
I've always enjoyed your work in no small part because, as you describe it in your launch piece, you've always been in a very liminal space between these worlds. It's really interesting to see you assess the market and decide that's the way to go.
If you were to ask me how I want to be seen, I want to be seen as a content creator. In 2024, being seen solely as a legacy news writer is extremely — I mean, good luck to you. It's just a doomed industry, unfortunately, and I've seen that up front. I've seen that firsthand.
My editor, Mark Seibel, who I would die for, was the most amazing editor I've ever had in my life, but I think he was 71 years old when he retired in June. When he retired, I was just thinking that there's this generation of incredibly amazing, talented journalists that we've lost through this failing business model of media, and it's very sad. It doesn't make me happy. When I say I don't want to be part of legacy media, that doesn't mean I want all of these places to go away. I have friends in them and I love them, and I love a lot of journalists. I'm not saying everyone needs to be a TikToker. I just think for me personally, it's a dead end.
And I don't need the prestige — the prestige doesn't do anything. What's really funny is that I've found it cuts both ways. The traditional media has been so polarized that just as many people won't talk to you because you work at The New York Times as will talk to you. It doesn't even get you more access these days. I went to the DNC as a content creator this year, not as part of The Washington Post, and I got way more access than my colleagues who were there as journalists. Things are changing, and I want to be in a forward-looking job, not a backward-looking job.
So, let's look forward. You had a book come out last year that was really fascinating; we talked to you last year about it here. What has changed over the past year in the direction and trajectory of the influencer economy that's got your attention? What are some of the bigger trends that we should be looking out for in this beat that you've so valiantly defended and vouched for?
Oh god, I want to throw up when I say this, but I do think AI has been the biggest development. I do think we're in a hype cycle around a lot of it, but what a lot of the generative AI tools do is they lower the barrier for content creation even more. I also do think that a lot of content that people will eventually be consuming will be AI-generated. For instance, with the educational YouTuber market and some of these other markets, you're already seeing them being disrupted by generative AI. That's been interesting to watch and something I would put into my book more.
I also think it's exciting. I know that's not a very popular thing to say, but I do think it's exciting in some ways. The more you lower the barrier to creation and creativity, the more people are able to participate. We're seeing a lot of really amazing, creative pieces of work and people that are using AI to create creative work.
Most AI creative work is garbage. It is Facebook spam, slop, whatever, but these tools can do really amazing things. I use a lot of AI for plugins on Adobe and stuff, and it's just saved me so much time. It's made things better. I'm a terrible video editor, but it's just made things that were previously really hard to do more accessible. So I'm excited by all of that stuff.
Definitely. What are the platforms that you think people are neglecting to pay adequate attention to?
Good question. We're in this era of fragmentation — I would say that's another big story. We've got the duopoly of Google and Meta, and they will not allow anybody to even remotely compete with them. And the U.S. government seems to not want to do anything about that.
So we have the big two, and then we have this endless soup of small niche communities. I don't know. I do think TikTok will be banned, and that ban will really, really be a major disruption.
You think the ban is going to go through?
I do. I don't have any faith in the government. One thing I've been writing about is this really aggressive moral panic around kids and technology especially, and it's horrifying what's happening. Things like the Kids Online Safety Act — this terrible, horrible, awful, dangerous, bad piece of legislation that's being passed. There's just a lot of bad pseudoscience out there claiming that social media is doing a lot more harm to children than it is.
The real harm is actually these monopolistic tech companies and their predatory business models and the data harvesting they engage in. We have absolutely no focus on reining any of that in and instead we're passing laws that are essentially censorship bills. That's what the TikTok ban is at the end of the day. It's censoring the speech of 170 million Americans, and I think that's terrifying.
But I do think it'll happen, given both parties' appetite for it. It sucks because you end up sounding like Glenn Greenwald or something, who's so full of shit, but it is really scary what's happening. I'm working on a YouTube series right now about a lot of this, actually.
You've been using YouTube a lot more. How's that been as a journalist?
It's been really fun. I've been building up my YouTube. I put my podcast out there every week. I'm just trying to do a lot more long-form, deep-dive content. It's been fun. This is another thing that really made me want to go independent. For instance, this series that I'm doing on kids and technology was really spurred by covering this horrible piece of legislation, the Kids Online Safety Act, and seeing figures like Jonathan Haidt, who is completely full of shit, emerge and spread pseudoscience nonsense to millions of people. These are things that aren't necessarily a breaking news story that I'd be able to write about, but it's a topic that I want to dive into.
And it's really historical. The first segment, which I've dropped already on this series, is about the history of moral panics around technology and looking at how people talked about things like the landline telephone. I don't know if you know, but when the landline telephone became really popular, people were very concerned about it making people violent. It was said that the telephone had the ability to manipulate people's emotions. Someone assaulted or even tried to murder someone and the media actually called on telephone companies to regulate all of this chaos that was ensuing, all because people were talking to each other on the phone.
You see this time and time again. We saw the criminalization of beepers in the '90s. Seventy students at a high school in Chicago were arrested for carrying beepers because it was thought that beepers were leading kids into a life of crime and affecting their mental health. Beepers affecting kids' mental health. Then we saw, of course, the moral panic around video games, and now we're seeing this moral panic around social media.
These are just things I want to dive deeper into. They're not necessarily news topics, but I want to write about them, make videos about them, do podcast episodes and cover this stuff. And I can't do that with a full-time day job where I have to write news articles all day.
It's a really interesting point that the way we've sought to address some of the issues around technology is not by directly addressing what makes the technology addictive or a negative experience. It's instead been to, as you mentioned, censor it, cut off populations from it, whether it's the TikTok or KOSA, which has one of those names that's designed to elicit a great degree of sympathy. But in many ways, it will end — correct me if I'm wrong, you know more about this than I do — end-to-end encryption on the internet, which is a bit of a reach.
Yeah. It's really scary, and I don't think enough people care. We have both political parties working together to dismantle our civil liberties.
Could you explain what the act is before we get too into the analysis element?
The Kids Online Safety Act is kind of dead right now, though it's being revived in a new form. It thankfully died in the House a little while ago, but they're trying to revive it.
I would say the Kids Online Safety Act is indicative of this larger wave of legislation, primarily in the states. You see things like age restriction laws in Florida and Utah, where they're trying to raise the age to use the internet to 16 or even 18. It's this broad slew of laws, really, aimed at trying to restrict young people's access to technology, the internet and social media under the guise of “safety” and protecting them.
Meanwhile, every single researcher that actually studies this topic has said time and time again that social media is not what's driving or even remotely a meaningful factor in the youth mental health crisis at all. We actually know a lot about what's driving the youth mental health crisis, and none of it has to do with social media. It has to do with a lot of really much bigger issues.
But under this guise of cracking down on big tech, you see Democrats partnering with really far-right, extreme Republicans to basically censor the internet. With things like age verification laws, you might think, oh, fine, whatever. It's fine if all kids have to scan their faces and tie their government ID to social media use. But you can't only scan kids' faces. This means we're moving toward a world where you're going to have to scan your face and tie your social media platforms to your government ID to engage in the internet. Because you can't verify only 16-year-olds' faces without verifying everyone's. You have to scan everyone's face to know who is 16 and who is not 16.
My former colleague Drew Harwell wrote a really good piece and did an episode on my podcast, Power User, about this and the rise of age verification. I have a YouTube video about it as well. But it's really scary. These are things that people should be worried about. There are reasons why we want to protect anonymity on the internet, why we want to protect civil liberties, why we don't want to have to have a government-issued driver's license or identification to have a freaking social media account.
That's dystopian. That's scary. That's authoritarian. But that is what both political parties are pushing under the guise of “protect the children,” and a lot of really dangerous laws have been passed under this guise of protecting children.
I care about these things, and I want to have an opinion on these things. That's the other thing that's been increasingly hard as this stuff has been happening, too, especially in the past year and since my editor left. I don't want to cover these things neutrally. I want to be able to say that this is dangerous legislation. There's a reason the Heritage Foundation is saying they're excited to push things like the Kids Online Safety Act and age verification, because they want to use it to, in the Heritage Foundation's own words, restrict conversation online about reproductive health care.
That should scare anybody that cares about these issues. But instead you have seemingly progressive people, seemingly people that care about civil liberties, talking about how social media is dangerous and bad. And it's like, well, it is dangerous and bad, but not for the reasons that you're saying. It's dangerous and bad because we have these monopolies that are harvesting our data and doing terrible things. We should rein that in, not make sure that some 17-year-old LGBTQ+ kid in Florida can't access health care information. That's bad.
One thing that I was really excited by with the launch of User Magazine — available at usermag.co, subscribe today — is that it's almost a return to form. With the whole view-from-nowhere perspective on media, people forget that that's an anomaly, that that's a recent development and it used to be fairly typical for organizations in the First Amendment business to, you know, fight for the First Amendment, which is really what's at stake in some of these issues. It's really exciting to see that you're putting yourself out there in that direction.
Is there anything you want to do or get in there before we wrap this up and talk about where folks can find you?
I will say I'll be covering a lot of fun, weird, interesting, silly internet ephemera. I love the content creator industry and all the crazy things that happen online. It's not all going to be doom and gloom, tech policy rants, things like that. I cover the way the internet is reshaping our culture, business, political landscape, and every aspect of our world, really. So I'm excited to do that.
I'm open to story ideas, too. Please reach out if there's something you think the traditional media isn't covering. I want to hear those stories.
Now that you're allowed to talk about some of your favorites, who are some content creators that you personally really like?
Oh my god. I love Mina Le. She's just so creative; she does these video essays that are really well researched. I'm just such a fan. She's Gremlita on YouTube. I'm a huge fan of her stuff.
I love commentary channels. I'm really inspired by people like Johnny Harris, who I think does phenomenal journalism on YouTube and is a really incredible visual storyteller. I'm also inspired by a lot of newsletter writers. I love Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day, Kate Lindsay's Embedded, Casey Lewis' After School. 404 Media does the best work in the business.
I wrote about this in my announcement post, but I started to look at who the journalists are today that I'm really inspired by, and it's all independent journalists. There are a lot of critical mainstream journalists out there. That should say something.
That's a really great reading list. I'd definitely check out a few.
Where can folks find User Magazine? Where can they find you?
Usermag.co. Couldn't afford the .com, so we have Usermag.co. I'm on all platforms. Subscribe to my YouTube. Buy a paid subscription to User Magazine. You'll see me in your inbox.
Amazing. And you do have a book out. Where can folks find that?
Yes, please. My paperback is actually coming out in the next couple months. It's called Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. The book is available anywhere you get books. It's Simon and Schuster. You can go to extremelyonlinebook.com and buy it that way.
Good for you! Awesome. Taylor, thanks so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
Edited by Susie Stark.
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