Benn Jordan trades gear reviews for surveillance fears

Benn Jordan’s channel has moved from music gear to hard-edged cybersecurity investigations—exposing flaws in camera systems, demonstrating easy hacks, and probing claims about robot dogs. In a wide-ranging questionnaire, he shares what he installs, what he wis

A few years ago. Benn Jordan was known for music gear—Flashbulb. synths and effects pedals. the kind of YouTube reviews that help people buy smarter and sound better. Then, slowly, the channel changed shape. The music videos didn’t disappear. But the center of gravity shifted toward science, technology investigations, and eventually the surveillance state itself.

Jordan even turned the whole enterprise into a nonprofit. and as the years went on. the work became less about gear and more about what gear can reveal. In his recent run of investigations. he’s uncovered glaring security flaws in Flock’s camera systems. demonstrated how easy it is to hack a Ring camera. and seemingly confirmed a conspiracy theory involving Unitree’s robot dogs sending data back to servers in China.

That arc—from “best music gear YouTubers” to “best cybersecurity YouTubers. ” as one description puts it—comes with a personal edge. Jordan says he took some time away from proving all of our worst fears about government and corporate surveillance true. and he used the break to answer a weekly questionnaire. The answers don’t just read like a tech checklist. They read like a demand for control.

On a new Windows PC. his first install is Ninite. a free tool that quickly installs a customizable list of things you’d otherwise spend hours picking one by one. He frames it like a wish machine—“basically like you giving me one wish and me wishing for more wishes”—and the point is practical: less friction. more control.

If he could change one thing about his phone, it would be simple and unforgiving: “That it was easily unlockable and rootable.” In his world, locking down a device isn’t a convenience. It’s a barrier.

His online “happy place” is Strudel.cc, described as a 100 percent free, powerful, and wonderfully documented musical programming language that runs completely in-browser. It’s also, he admits, a way to procrastinate while still accidentally learning to code.

The gadget that made the most sense to him—“the only three things I desire from a watch”—was the original Pebble Watch. It told him the time and date, told him when he had a new message, and lasted a week on a single charge. No harvesting. No tracking. Just the basics.

The contrast is immediate when he talks about his most disappointing purchase: the Amazon Echo Show (3rd gen). He bought it for pentesting. but he describes it as laggy and awkward-looking. and says it exists to spy on you. show you ads. and ask you to pay for features it was advertised to already have.

For everything he’s chasing, he’s also still dealing with the kind of curiosity that can burn into obsession. His current obsession is spectrometry and interferometry, particularly using extremely subtle changes in invisible light waves to pick up and demodulate sounds.

He’s also trying to live by one rule that tech tends to break: going without his phone. “I actually try to do this every day!” he says.

When it comes to spending money, his splurge recommendation is a tripod. He calls out a huge price gap between a midrange tripod on Amazon and something like a Sachtler. then argues the difference is justifiable because. over a decade. it could end up being more affordable than repeatedly replacing or incrementally upgrading midrange options.

If his biopic had a tagline, he goes with a joke that lands like a self-portrait: “If Jon Hamm were for sale on Temu.”

And then there’s his proudest creation—one that started as a scam and turned into something much heavier. In 2022. a scammer pretending to be Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene reached out to him on Instagram. saying the scammer wanted to write a piece about his music. Jordan decided to follow the scam as deep as he could and then tell Andy Greene the story.

He expected a video where he’d scam a scammer. Instead. the project became a video about West African oppression. Sakawa culture. and at one point. he says he was literally drinking his own blood on a WhatsApp call with a Ghanaian witch doctor while sitting at Chili’s with his partner’s family. The video didn’t get many views, he says, but it defined the structure of the channel he runs now.

The shape of his online life keeps circling back to the same tension: what tech is supposed to do versus what it actually does when no one is watching. Even his last GIF or meme choice—he’s not sure it counts as a meme—repeats that preference for clean diagrams and controlled options: he always uses the triangle diagram with an option for each corner. but you can only have two simultaneously.

Jordan’s channel may have started in music gear and synth-friendly corners. But today it’s built around something more urgent—security flaws. surveillance systems. and the thin line between convenience and extraction. In his world, the question isn’t whether technology can be fascinating. It’s whether it can be trusted to stay out of your life.

Benn Jordan Flashbulb cybersecurity surveillance state Flock camera systems Ring camera hack Unitree robot dogs nonprofit Ninite Strudel.cc Pebble Watch Amazon Echo Show 3rd gen pentesting Instagram scam