Podbit · This Week in Tech (Audio)
Ring announced facial recognition for its cameras. Flock Safety's nationwide license plate database was allegedly accessed by ICE through local police partnerships. The Super Bowl ad showing radar-like rings emanating from neighborhood cameras triggered mass backlash — because it told the truth about what these systems can do.
Where this was said
At 1:57:00 · chapter starts 1:54:00
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy tells the story of Level Lock — founded by former Apple engineers, it created a genuinely elegant solution to the ugly-smart-lock problem by hiding all the electronics inside the deadbolt mechanism itself, making it look completely normal from both sides of the door. After being acquired by Assa Abloy — the Swedish multinational that also owns Yale and August — the company was developing ultra-wideband hands-free unlocking technology before the entire 80-person team, including the founders, was laid off. Assa Abloy said the company is staying in business, but the engineering team is gone. Jennifer draws a direct line to the broader smart home survivability problem: cloud-dependent devices become useless when the company behind them disappears or pivots. The Level Lock's recent Matter upgrade means its basic functions would survive a server shutdown, which is exactly why Matter matters. She also notes that August Smart Lock, another Assa Abloy acquisition, has not seen a new product in six or seven years and likely never will.
Matter 1.6's Joint Fabric feature means you'll have one smart home network that multiple ecosystems can access but none can own. It sounds like a small change but it required Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung to genuinely relinquish control — something that has never happened before in the smart home industry.
Level Lock built a revolutionary smart lock that hid all its electronics inside the deadbolt mechanism, making it look like a normal lock. Then Assa Abloy bought it, laid off all 80 employees including the founders, and said don't worry. The startup that was about to launch ultra-wideband hands-free unlocking may never ship it.
Social media feeds men and women the absolute worst caricatures of each other while stripping away the everyday, imperfect relationships that would calibrate their expectations. Combine that with smaller families and fewer cross-sex friendships, and you get a generation that talks about the opposite sex constantly but almost never to them.
The 'would you rather be alone with a man or a bear' debate went viral not because men are objectively more dangerous than ever, but because an entire fear industrial complex of influencers and safety products had already primed women to feel that way. Once the algorithm identifies you as worried about personal safety, the content and the scrunchie drink-covers never stop.
Women feel less safe not because danger has increased, but because trust in institutions — police, churches, schools — that used to enforce safety norms has collapsed. Young women are far less likely than older women to believe those institutions will handle sexual assault responsibly, leaving them with only individual self-protection as a fallback.
Even self-identified feminist women consistently told Daniel Cox in interviews and surveys that they want men to open doors, pay for dates, and show demonstrable care. The internet noise around 'benevolent sexism' drowns out this widespread, quietly held preference.
In focus groups in Philadelphia and Raleigh, every single hand went up when participants were asked if parents discussed financial stability and education. Zero hands went up for marriage or parenthood. Parents are shaping their children's ambitions with total silence on the experiences that matter most.
American families are smaller than ever, with roughly 1 in 5 children now growing up as only children. Without the daily friction of siblings — shared bedrooms, shared bathrooms, resolving disagreements — young people enter adult relationships without the negotiation muscles relationships require.
Online dating optimises for your existing preferences rather than expanding your horizons. People who meet online give bad first dates almost no second chances; people who meet through mutual friends are far more forgiving. The disembodied, checklist-driven nature of apps removes all the social cues that actually reveal character.
A split-sample survey found that men judge male and female cheating identically harshly, and women judge male cheating the same way men do. The outlier: young women are dramatically less likely to call female infidelity morally wrong, suggesting shared-fate thinking and personal experience of being cheated on are reshaping the moral calculus.
The monk mode trend encourages men to withdraw from social life to work on themselves — but this is precisely backwards. The research is clear: close friendships are the single most powerful predictor of whether a man dates, commits, and becomes his best self. Self-improvement without social reintegration is just sophisticated avoidance.
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