The Rip Current

Taylor, a journalist who reports on online culture and tech’s effects on users, joins the conversation. They debate whether alarm about kids and screens is moral panic or public-health concern. Short takes cover research limits, platform features versus content, design accountability, data-driven harms, and privacy reform as a central remedy.

A viral courthouse moment unfolds when papers are dropped at Mark Zuckerberg’s feet as he arrives. The show dissects whether the act was a real legal service or a stunt. It explores how CEOs are shielded by tight security, NDAs, and entourages. The segment touches on surveillance culture, evasions of legal process, and the symbolic meaning of forcing accountability.

A courtroom showdown over Zuckerberg's testimony and how Meta framed safety versus engagement. Internal documents about tweaks for tweens and enforcement lapses come up. Dramatic courtroom tactics and PR coaching are described. The trial is compared to big-tobacco style legal theory. The tension between engagement goals and safety claims is highlighted.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comThis trial is the first time in American legal history that a jury gets to look inside these companies and decide whether the design choices that shape billions of people’s daily lives were made responsibly. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the actual legal question on the table. The LA case is the opening act. Behind it sits a pipeline of more than 1,500 similar personal injury lawsuits, a parallel federal MDL in Oakland with school districts as plaintiffs, actions from more than 40 state attorneys general, and a separate New Mexico case focused specifically on child sexual exploitation. Whatever happens in that LA courtroom over the next six to eight weeks sets the temperature for all of it.

Opening arguments started this morning in two landmark trials that could reshape social media forever. In Los Angeles Superior Court, Meta (Instagram/Facebook) and YouTube face a 19-year-old plaintiff known as “KGM” who claims their platforms’ addictive design features caused her anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts starting at age 10. Simultaneously, New Mexico’s attorney general is suing Meta for failing to protect children from sexual exploitation.These are bellwether trials—their outcomes will influence 1,500+ similar lawsuits, hundreds of school district claims, and cases from 40+ state attorneys general. Meta warned in October that damages could reach “the high tens of billions of dollars.”Here’s what makes this different from every other “social media is bad” moment: these lawsuits sidestep Section 230 entirely. They’re not attacking content on the platforms—they’re attacking the design of the platforms themselves. Infinite scroll. Auto-play videos. Algorithmic recommendations that keep kids scrolling for hours. The lawsuits argue companies “borrowed heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry.”Internal documents will show what these companies knew about the harm their design choices caused—and when they knew it. Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan are all expected to testify during the 6-8 week trial.This is choice architecture meets corporate accountability. Nobody voted for infinite scroll. But we’re all addicted to it. Watch the full breakdown to understand what’s at stake. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

They unpack why agents hide their faces and how facial and iris scanners change public life. They list massive tech purchases like Palantir, Clearview AI, license-plate tracking and stingrays. They compare U.S. surveillance to global 'safe cities' and show how commercial location data and AI let agencies sidestep legal limits.

AI is getting people fired — openly, loudly, and at scale. Amazon just cut 16,000 corporate jobs. Dow announced 4,500 more. And in both cases, executives are gesturing toward AI as the reason, or at least the backdrop.But here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s not because AI is ready to replace these workers.A new study from Harvard Business Review shows that companies are laying people off in anticipation of AI’s future impact — not because today’s systems are actually performing at a human level. Executives are betting early. They’re trimming headcount now and “white-knuckling it,” hoping AI fills the gap later.That’s a brutal moment to live through as a worker. But it also tells us something important about where human value really sits.The World Economic Forum’s latest skills report makes it clear: the future isn’t just about technical ability. It’s about deep domain expertise — knowing enough about your field to catch AI when it’s confidently wrong — and about what used to be derisively described as “soft skills” that are now about to be the hardest kind to find.Leadership. Facilitation. Persuasion. Judgment. Being good to work with.Those skills are learned socially, on the job — especially in early career roles that companies are now cutting. Which means firms may be quietly sabotaging their own future managers while chasing short-term efficiency.In the short term, survival means shifting from “job applicant” to “problem solver.” Build things. Show your work. Sure, demonstrate that you can chain some prompts together and use a no-code environment. But the edge is human connection — both in terms of getting you in the door,and because algorithms can’t replace trust, collaboration, or judgment under uncertainty.AI may be the excuse for these layoffs. But it won’t be the thing that ultimately makes organizations work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

This is a massive week for anyone who’s been watching Big Tech’s impact on kids. Internal documents from Meta, Google, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok are being made public as part of major lawsuits, and what they reveal is damning.Two themes emerge. First: the business value of kids. A 2020 Google presentation literally says “solving kids is a massive opportunity.” An internal Facebook email from 2016 identifies the company’s top priority as “total teen time spent.” These companies clearly saw children as a pipeline of new users to be captured.Thanks for reading The Rip Current by Jacob Ward! This post is public so feel free to share it.Second: they knew about the harm. An Instagram internal study from 2018 documented that “teens weaponize Instagram features to torment each other” and that “most participants regret engaging in conflicts.” TikTok’s own strategy documents admit the platform “is particularly popular with younger users who are particularly sensitive to reinforcement and have minimal ability to self-regulate.” YouTube identified “late night use, heavy habitual use, and problematic content” as root causes of harm.They knew.As I discuss here, I want this moment to establish a new legal framework in America — one that recognizes behavioral harm the same way we recognize physical and financial harm. We’ve done it before with tobacco. We can do it again with social media. And this might be the beginning.The Rip Current by Jacob Ward is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

It’s a dark time. We have an unaccountable federal police force killing Americans in the street. Heather Cox Richardson, the foremost historian of the American political moment, ended her show in tears. The American experiment feels more experimental than ever. As any beat reporter can tell you, when a national event falls outside your coverage area, you find refuge, and sometimes even comfort, in what you know. That’s what I’ve been doing the last couple of days: trying to get perspective, and trying to remind myself what matters. And science is a great way to accomplish both. So here I want to step back and think about something much, much larger than us. Not to minimize our problems, but because understanding how impossibly small we are might help us stop f*****g around and take care of one another.In 1964, a Soviet astronomer named Nikolai Kardashev detected a regular signal from deep space. To his ears, it had to be aliens — some mechanical device creating this extremely repetitive, measurably consistent pulse. It turned out to be a pulsar, a naturally occurring phenomenon. He was disappointed. But the experience obsessed him, and he created what’s now called the Kardashev Scale, a way of measuring the sophistication of civilizations.Level one: a civilization that has harnessed the available power of its own planet. Level two: harnessed the power of its nearest star. Level three: harnessed the power of its galaxy. We’re not even a one. We’re maybe a 0.4. We’re primitive.There’s a comedian on TikTok named Vinny Thomas who does this great bit about humanity being interviewed by some intergalactic HR person for admission into the larger club of civilizations. We’re bombing the interview. “Have you colonized any other worlds?” No. “What about Mars? It’s right down the street.”This gets at something Enrico Fermi famously asked while building nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project. At lunch with colleagues, he’d talk about the math: so much space, so many stars. Where is everybody? The Fermi Paradox has been kicked around for decades, but the solution I find most compelling came from European researchers: It’s not that we’re alone. It’s that even if other civilizations exist across the vastness of the universe, they don’t exist at the same time as us.The universe isn’t just unimaginably large. It’s also unimaginably old. We’re a fraction of an instant in its history — a match flare struck in the darkness. The idea that two matches would happen to be lit at the same moment, such that they’d see each other’s light in all that vastness? Ludicrous.Here’s how alone we are. The Kepler telescope searched for exoplanets — planets with the right ratio of size and distance from their star to potentially support life. The closest one to us is Proxima Centauri b, 4.2 light-years away. That’s right down the block in universal terms. The news coverage at the time was breathless: we might go there someday!I was one of those breathless reporters. It felt like a civilizational shift! But then I began asking about the distances involved, and that’s where the story fell off the front page. At the fastest speed we can get a rocket to travel, it turns out it would take 2,000 human generations to reach Proxima Centauri b. That’s 200,000 years of travel. Modern humans have only been around for 200,000 years. Getting to that planet would mean bottling up the entirety of human history, jamming it into a tube, and sending it off into the unknown.We’re not doing that, whatever Elon Musk tells you. We are on the generation ship right now. This is it. Planet Earth.Astronauts talk about the overview effect — this euphoric epiphany that grips them when they see Earth from space. They come back describing the specialness of life here, how incredibly fragile and precious this delicate little vessel is.And so when I think about how much we’re lying to each other and being angry at one another at the behest of companies that profit from it, killing people for objecting to political decisions, taking people from safety to harm to remain in power — all these sins we’re committing in the face of the vastness of the universe and how fragile we are on our tiny speck.We’re a match flare. We get this brief moment. Let’s make it count. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

Promotional plea: if you have a moment, please head over to my YouTube channel and give it a follow. This week TikTok changed to U.S. owners, and my preparations for that change have involved investing more of my time in YouTube content. The more subscribers I get over there, the better I can insulate myself against whatever happens next on TikTok. Hit subscribe please!I spent this week talking to bank tellers at Wells Fargo for a special report over at Hard Reset, and what they told me should alarm anyone who thinks their job is safe from AI.The bank has cut 65,000 jobs since 2019. CEO Charles Scharf just told investors more cuts are coming — permanently. Meanwhile, profits are soaring. Credit card accounts up 20 percent, auto lending up 19 percent, investment banking fees up 14 percent. Fewer people, more money.The Rip Current by Jacob Ward is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Branch employees describe what’s happening on the ground: three tellers became two, then one. Lines getting longer. Pressure mounting. Work that used to require human judgment now gets handled by an app, with AI guiding and surveilling every interaction. The jobs aren’t disappearing — they’re just getting piled onto fewer bodies, all of them working “at-will” with zero protection.And that’s why, for the first time in American history, bank tellers at a national institution are unionizing. Twenty-eight Wells Fargo branches across 14 states have voted to join the Communications Workers of America. Banking was always the stable, boring job that didn’t need a union. That deal is broken.Here’s what gutted me: the workers getting hit hardest are women without college degrees, especially women from Black and brown communities. Retail banking was a reliable path to middle-class stability for those folks. Now those jobs are being automated away, and as one banker pointed out, the money saved flows straight up to an overwhelmingly white, male executive class.This is the forecast. AI isn’t coming for jobs in some distant future. It’s here. It’s seeping into white-collar work that we assumed to be safe. And the only people who know it are the ones already being forced out the door.Read the full investigation at Hard Reset. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe