The Rot Society

Blame the tech industry for the rise of authoritarianism. Blame a news media handicapped by a deference to power and a fear of bias. Blame the fact that our digital lives are unchecked ecological disasters. In this episode, Ed Zitron draws a direct line from the rot of the digital ecosystem for what happened on November 5. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:07Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:10Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 1:25Ed Zitron?

  Been a hard couple of weeks. It's been pretty hard to focus. I've written a few newsletters, I've gone to Portugal, I've done a bunch of shit. Just trying not to think about everything happening outside, but it's time to do so. Similarly, every single person on earth with a blog, or a podcast, or even a Twitter account, or X the everything app, or whatever it's called now, they've all tried to drill down into what happened on November 5th to find the people to blame, to explain what could have gone differently. Really looking for who to blame, though, and find out why so many actions led to a result that will overwhelmingly harm women, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and lower-income workers.

• 2:06Ed Zitron?

  It's terrifying. It fucking sucks. I'm not gonna mince words, not that I would usually anyway. And I don't feel fully equipped to respond to the moment. I don't have any real answers, at least not political ones. I'm not a political analyst, and I'd feel disingenuous trying to dissect either the Harris or the Trump campaigns. Because I just feel like there's a take Olympics right now. It's the Dunning Kruger Festival out there. Everyone is trying to rationalize and intellectualize these events that ultimately come down to something quite simple. People don't trust authority, and yeah, it's pretty ironic that this often leads them towards authoritarianism. Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm gonna go on my crank mode and somehow

• 2:49Ed Zitron?

  against institutions on their face. I'm not. But at the same time, understanding this moment requires us to acknowledge that institutions have failed us, and failed most people, and how certain institutions' missteps have led us to exactly where we are today. Legacy media, and while oftentimes they're staffed by people who truly love their readers and care about their beats, they're weighed down by this hysterical, nonsensical attachment to the imaginary concept of objectivity and the will of the markets. Case in point. Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase due to inflation, despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by, get this, corporations raising their prices.

• 3:31Ed Zitron?

  Now, that's not to say that external factors like the war in Ukraine or lingering COVID restrictions in China, these things did play a role in it. They did. But the bulk of these price increases were caused by these fucking companies raising the prices. It was in their earnings. It was, it was right there. Pepsi-Cola said it on the news. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their own reporting, and there will be links in the episode notes, I promise, as a means of providing balanced coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is actually good, contorting their little bodies to prove that prices aren't actually higher, even as companies literally boasted about raising

• 4:16Ed Zitron?

  their prices on earnings. In fact, the media spent years debating with itself whether price gouging was actually happening, despite years of proof that it was. Some of them even reported that the price gouging was happening. So like...

• 4:30Ed Zitron?

  Get this, I just don't think people trust authority and they especially don't trust the media, especially the legacy media. It also probably didn't help that the legacy media implored readers and viewers to ignore what they saw at the supermarket or at the pump and the growing hits to their wallets from the daily necessities of life. It was just a national level gaslighting and it was disgusting. And I know some of you might say, you know where to email me, "Oh, it's not just this." No, of course it's not just this, arsehole. But I think this is a big thing. Now, before I go any further, I've used the term "legacy media" here repeatedly, but I don't completely intend for it to come across as a pejorative. Despite my criticisms, and believe me, I've got a few of them, there are people in the

• 5:15Ed Zitron?

  legacy media doing a good job. They're reporting the truth, they're doing the kinds of work that matters and they're actually trying to teach their readers stuff and tell them what's happening and giving them context. I read and pay for several legacy media outlets and I think the world is a better place for them existing, despite their flaws. The problem is, as I'll explain, is this editorial-industrial complex and how these people are writing about the powerful don't seem to be able to, or maybe they don't want to, actually interrogate the powerful. This could be an entire episode on its own, but I don't think the answer to these failings is to simply discard legacy media entirely. But I want to implore them to do better and to strive for the values of truth-hunting and truth-telling and actually explaining what's happening and criticizing the people

• 6:00Ed Zitron?

  that don't have PR firms and lobbying groups and lawyers and the means to protect themselves in the world. The time for fucking around is over and we're currently finding out. Now, anyway. As you know, as a person existing in the real world, the price of everything has kept increasing despite the fact that wages are stagnating. It's forcing many of the poorest people to choose between food and fuel, or, I don't know, eating and having heat. Simultaneously, businesses have spent several years telling workers they're asking for too much and doing too little, telling people a few years ago they were quiet quitting, which is a fucking stupid term that just means going to your job and doing the thing you're paying to do. Anyway, anyway.

• 6:42Ed Zitron?

  And a year later, in 2023, they insisted that the years of remote work were actually bad because profits didn't reach the same profit levels of 2021, which was something to do with remote work. Now, did anyone actually prove this? Did anyone actually go and...? No, they didn't. They just, well, they just listened to Marc Benioff, who's one of the more evil people alive. Now, I also think a lot of these problems come to 2021, a year that we really need to dig into more. We might not do so today, but we will in the future. But one of the big things that punished workers and led to so many layoffs in 2023 was the fact that we couldn't get back to the post-lockdown boom of 2021, when everyone bought everything always as they left the house for the first

• 7:23Ed Zitron?

  time in a while. Now, any corporation would be smart enough to know that that was a phase, that that was not going to be forever, except every single big company seemed to make the same mistake and say, number going up forever, line go up forever, when it didn't. Well, they started punishing workers and they started thinking, well, could it be that we as companies, we set unrealistic expectations for the markets and we, we just thought that we'd keep growing forever? Or maybe it was the people using the computer at home. Yeah, that seems way better. Anyway, while the majority of people don't work remotely, from talking to the people I know outside of tech or business, there's this genuine sense that the media

• 8:05Ed Zitron?

  has allied itself with the bosses. And I imagine it's because of the many articles that literally call workers lazy and have done so for years. Yet, when it comes to the powerful, legacy media doesn't seem to have that much piss and vinegar. They just have much more guarded critiques. The appetite for shaming and finger wagging, it's always directed at middle and working-class workers, and seemingly disappears when a person has a three-character job title like CEO. It's fucking stupid, it's insulting, and yes, it's demoralizing for the average person. Despite the fact that Elon Musk has spent years telegraphing his intent to use his billions of dollars to wield power, equivalent to that of a nation state, as you may remember from my first episode of anything over on It Could Happen Here, too much of the media, both legacy and otherwise, responded slowly,

• 8:50Ed Zitron?

  cautiously, failing to call him a liar, a con artist, an aggressor, a manipulator, a racist, a deadbeat dad, you know, all the things actually happening. No, no, no. They kind of danced around him. They reported stories that might make you think that they maybe noticed it, but there was this desperation to guard objectivity.

• 9:09Ed Zitron?

  And it was just, it lacked any real intent, it lacked any interest in calling account to a man who has pretty much bought an election for Donald Trump. A racist billionaire using his outsized capital to bend society to his will just isn't a fucking problem for the media, or at least not as much of a problem, as a worker who might not work fifty to a hundred hours a week for a boss who makes a hundred and thirty times what they do. The news, at least outside of the right wing, is always separate from opinion, always guarded, always safe, for fear that they might piss somebody off and be declared biased, something that happens anyway. And while there are columnists that are given some space to have their own thoughts, sometimes

• 9:50Ed Zitron?

  in the newspaper, sometimes online, the stories themselves are delivered with the kind of reserved hmm tone that often fails to express any actual consequences or context around the news itself, and just doesn't seem to care about making sure that the reader or listener learns something. My mate Casey has a good point about podcasts, and I deplore it, some of the news too, that there's too much stuff out there that is there to make you feel intelligent rather than make you intelligent. I think this falls into it. Now, this isn't to say that outlets are incapable of doing this correctly. I love the Washington Post, they've done an excellent job in analyzing major tech stories. But a lot of these outlets feel custom-built to be bulldozed the moment an authoritarian turns up.

• 10:33Ed Zitron?

  This force that exists to crush those desperately attached to norms and objectivity. Authoritarians know that they're ideologically charged words. We quoted "ad verbatim" with the occasional "huh, this could mean..." Little dribble, this drizzle, this spunk of context that's lost in the headline that repeats exactly what the fucking authoritarian wants them to. And guess what? Some people don't read the article, they just read the headline. And Musk is the most brutal example of this, by the way. Despite the fact that he's turned Twitter into a website pump full of racism and hatred that literally helped make Donald Trump president, Musk was still able to get mostly positive coverage from the majority of the mainstream media for his fucking robo-taxi nonsense, despite the fact that he's spent the best part of a decade lying about what Tesla will do now.

• 11:19Ed Zitron?

  There are entire websites just based on how much Elon Musk lies, yet they still report this shit. It makes me very upset. And it doesn't matter that some of these outlets, by the way, had a company in coverage that suggested that the markets weren't impressed by Tesla's theoretical robo-taxi plans, or their fake-ass robots run by people. Musk is still able to use the media's desperation for objectivity against them, and he knows that they never dare to combine reporting on stuff with thinking about stuff, for fear that Elon Musk might say they're biased, which he has been doing for years. Do you see my goddamn point yet? And this, by the way, is not always the fault of the writers. There are entire foundations

• 12:02Ed Zitron?

  of editors that have more faith in the markets and the powerful than they do the people writing or the people reading their fucking words. And above them are entire editorial superstructures that exist to make sure that the editorial vision never colors too far outside the lines or informs people a little too much. I'm not even talking about Jeff Bezos, or Lauren Peril Jobs, or any number of billionaires who own any number of publications, but the editors editing business and tech reporters who don't know anything about business and tech, or the senior editors that are terrified of any byline that might dare get the outlet under fire from somebody who could call their boss. It's fucking cowardice.

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• 13:17Speaker 02

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 13:53Ed Zitron?

  There are, however, I should add, also those who simply defer to the powerful, that assume that this much money can't be wrong, even if said money, in the case of Elon Musk, is repeatedly wrong, and there's an entire website about the wrongness and the lies and the bullshit. And I'm talking about Elon Musk still, obviously. These editors are the people that look at the current crop of powerful tech companies that have failed to deliver any truly meaningful innovation in years, and they go, "Ooh, send me more, daddy, show me more of the apps." It's fucking disgraceful. Just look at the coverage of Sam Altman from last year. You know, the guy who spent years lying about what AI can do. And tell me why every single thought he says must be uncritically catalogued. His every goddamn decision applauded. His every claim trumpeted as certain.

• 14:35Ed Zitron?

  His brittle little company that burns $5 billion a year, talked about like it's a fucking living god. Sam Altman is a liar, who's been fired from two companies, including OpenAI, and yet because he's a billionaire with a buzzy company, he's left totally unscathed. The powerful get a completely different set of rules to live by and exist in a totally different media environment. They're geniuses, entrepreneurs, firebrands. Their challenges are framed as missteps, and their victories framed as certainties by the same outlets that told us that we were quiet quitting, and that the economy is actually good, and that we're the problem for high prices. While it's correct to suggest that the right wing is horrendously ideological, and they're terribly biased, it's very hard to look at the rest of the media and claim that they're not.

• 15:16Ed Zitron?

  The problem is that the so-called left media, which usually is just the center, isn't biased towards what we may consider left-wing causes, like universal healthcare, strong unions, expanded social safety nets, you know, the stuff that would actually be helpful. No, they're biased in favor of fellating an ever-growing carousel of sociopathic billionaire assholes, elevating them to the status of American royalty, where they exist above expectations and norms that you and I must live by. This is the definition of elitism. The media has literally created a class of people who can lie and cheat and steal, and rather than condemn them for it, they're celebrated. While it might feel a little tangential to bring technology into this, I truly believe

• 15:58Ed Zitron?

  that everybody is affected by the rot economy, the growth at all costs ecosystem, where the number must always go up, because everybody is using technology all the time, and the technology in question is getting worse. This election cycle saw more than 25 billion text messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was crammed full of random election advertising. Here's the thing about elections: they're not really always about policy, no, they're a referendum on the incumbent party or president, and by proxy, a poll on how people feel. And the reality is that most people are fucking miserable. There's this all-encompassing feeling that things are just harder now. It's harder to pay your bills, it's harder to keep in touch with your friends, it's harder to start a family, it's harder to buy a house, it's harder to fall in love,

• 16:43Ed Zitron?

  it's harder to do everything. And what we're seeing is an enshittification of existence, to use Mr. Doctor O's phrase. Everything just, I don't want to be this much of a curmudgeon, but everything just kind of sucks. It's all terrible, it's miserable, and hardly anyone thinks it's going to get better. And this creates the kind of fertile conditions for a strong man to emerge, one who arises and says that only he can fix things, even if he spent four years proving how he could not. And the problem for Democrats and for institutions more broadly is that the all-encompassing nature of this milieu is kind of hard to solve. It's hard to change the perception that everything's terrible when you're reminded of it, when you're trying to do the most basic of tasks. Our phones are full of notifications trying to growth hack us into doing things that companies want.

• 17:26Ed Zitron?

  Our apps are full of microtransactions, our websites are slower and harder to use with endless demands of our emails and our phone numbers, and the need to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to someone who dared to consume a Washington Post article, and yes, I'm talking about the Post, which I fucking pay for despite the fact it logs me out all the time. Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely show us the things we want them to anymore, with executives dedicated to filling our feeds full of AI-generated slop, because despite being the customer, we're also the revenue mechanism. Our search engines do less as a means of making us use them more, our dating apps have become vehicles of private equity to add a toll to falling in love, our video games are constantly nagging us to give them more money, and despite it costing money and being attached to our account, we don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase.

• 18:10Ed Zitron?

  We're drowning in spam, both in our emails and our phones, and at this point in our lives, we've probably agreed to three million pages of privacy policies allowing companies to use our information as they see fit. We get one value transaction with every company, they get 11, they get 100, we really actually don't know, because there's no legislation to tell us what they're fucking doing. And these are the issues that hit everything we do, all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use our phone, we check our texts, three spam calls, two spam texts, we look at our bank balance, two-factor authentication check, we read the news, a quarter of the page is blocked by an advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to hide the button to get rid of it. And then we log into Slack and feel a pang of anxiety as 15 different notifications

• 18:55Ed Zitron?

  appear in a way that is really not built for us to find what we need, just to let us know something happened.

• 19:03Ed Zitron?

  Modern existence is just engulfed in sludge. The institutions that exist to cut through it seem to bounce between the ignorance of their masters and this misplaced duty to objectivity. Our mechanisms for exploring and enjoying the world are interfered with by powerful forces that are just basically left unchecked. Opening our devices is willfully subjecting us to attack after attack after attack from applications, websites, and devices that are built to make us do things for them rather than operate with dignity and freedom that much of the internet was actually founded upon. These millions of invisible acts of terror are too often left undiscussed, because accepting the truth requires you to accept that most of the tech ecosystem is rotten, and that billions of dollars are made harassing and punishing billions of people

• 19:48Ed Zitron?

  every single day of their lives through the devices that we're required to use in order to exist in a modern world. Most users suffer the consequences, and most of the media fails to account for them, and in turn, people walk around knowing something is wrong but not knowing who to blame until somebody provides a convenient excuse, like immigrants, like the Democrats, like whatever fucking works, because we can't actually call the people out, the corporations crushing our existence. Why wouldn't people crave change? Why wouldn't people be angry? Living in the current world absolutely fucking sucks sometimes. It's miserable, it's bereft of industry, and filthy with manipulation. It's undignified, it's disrespectful!

• 20:30Ed Zitron?

  And it must be crushed if we want to escape this depressing goddamn world we've found ourselves in. Our media institutions are fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems, but it starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating them without fearing accusations of bias that, as I've said repeatedly, happen either way. The truth is that the media is more afraid of accusations of bias than they are of misleading their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope, and it may very well be one, there must be room to inject the writer's voice back into their work, and a willingness to call out bad actors as such, no matter how rich they are, no matter how big their products are, no matter how willing they are to bark and scream that things are unfair as they accumulate more power and money. We need context in our news.

• 21:15Ed Zitron?

  We need it, we need it now. We need opinion, we need voice, we need character, we need life. Because as long as we follow this bullshit objectivity path, we're screwed. And if you're in the tech industry and hearing this and saying, "Oh, the media's too critical of tech", you're flat fucking wrong, kiss my asshole. Everything we're seeing happening right now is a direct result of a society that let technology and the ultra-rich run rampant, free of both the governmental guardrails that might have stopped them and the media ecosystem that might have actually held them in check. Our default position in interrogating the intentions and actions of the tech industry has become that they will work it out, as they continually redefine what "work it out" means and turn it into "make their products worse but more profitable". Covering Meta, Twitter, Google, OpenAI,

• 22:00Ed Zitron?

  and other huge tech companies as if the products they make are remarkable and perfect is disrespectful to the reader's intelligence and a disgusting abdication of responsibility as their products, even when they're functional, are significantly worse, more annoying, more frustrating, and more convoluted than ever. And that's before you get to the ones like Facebook and Instagram that are outright broken. I don't give a shit if these people have raised a lot of money unless you use that as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with the tech industry. Meta making billions of dollars of profit is a sign that something is wrong with society, not proof that it's a good company or anything that should grant Mark Zuckerberg any kind of special treatment. Shove your chains up your ass, Mark.

• 22:40Ed Zitron?

  OpenAI being worth $157 billion for a company that burns $5 billion or more a year to make a product that destroys their environment for a product yet to find any real meaning isn't a sign that it should get more coverage or be taken more seriously. No, it should be a sign that something is broken, that something is wrong with society. Whatever you may feel about ChatGPT, the coverage it received is outsized compared to its actual utility and the things built on top of it. And that's a direct result of a media industry that seems incapable of holding the powerful accountable or actually learning about the subject matter in question. It's time to accept that most people's digital life fucking sucks, as does the way we consume our information, and that there are people directly responsible.

• 23:23Ed Zitron?

  Be as angry as you want at Jeff Bezos, whose wealth and the inherent cruelty of Amazon's labour practices makes him an obvious target, but please don't forget Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sandeep Shai, Tim Cook, and every single other tech executive that has allowed our digital experiences to become fucked up through algorithms that we know nothing about. Similarly, governments have entirely failed to push through any legislation that might stop the rot, both in terms of dominance and opaqueness of algorithmic manipulation and the ways in which tech products exist with few real quality standards. We may have, at least for now, consumer standards for the majority of consumer goods, but software is left effectively untouched, which is why so much of our digital lives are such unfettered dog shit.

• 24:06Ed Zitron?

  And if you're hearing this and saying I'm being a hater or a pessimist, shut the fuck up. I'm tired of you. I'm so fucking tired of being told to calm down about this as we stare down the barrel of four years of authoritarianism built on top of the decay of our lives, both physical and digital, with a media ecosystem that doesn't do a great job explaining what's being done to the people in an ideologically consistent way. There's this extremely common assumption in the tech media, based on what I'm really not sure, that these companies are all doing a good job and that good job means having lots of users and making lots of money, and it drives tons of editorial decision making. If three quarters of the biggest car manufacturers were making record profits by making half of their cars with a brake that sometimes didn't work, that'd be international news.

• 24:48Ed Zitron?

  Government inquiries would happen, people would go to prison, and this isn't even conjecture, it actually happened. After Volkswagen was caught deliberately programming its engines to only meet emission standards during laboratory testing, they were left to spew excessive pollution into the real world. But once lawmakers found out, they responded with civil and criminal action. The executives and engineers responsible were indicted, one received seven years in jail, and their former CEO is currently being tried in Germany and being indicted in the US too. And here we are in the tech industry. Facebook barely works, used to, you know, genocides and bully people and harass teen girls, paedophiles are on rampant on there, there was a Wall Street Journal about, story about it. They're fine.

• 25:30Ed Zitron?

  So much of the tech industry, consumer software like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even ChatGPT, and business software from companies like Microsoft and Slack, it sucks! It sucks, it's bad, you use it every day, you've been listening to me ramble for 50 episodes now, you, you know what I'm talking about? It's everywhere. Yet the media covers it just like, eh, you know, it's just how things are, mate. Now Meta, by the admission of its own internal documents, makes products that are ruinous to the mental health of teenage girls, and it hasn't made any substantial changes as a result, nor has it received any significant pushback for failing to do so. Little bit of a side note here, big shout out to Jeff Horowitz and the rest of the Wall Street Journal people who did the Facebook files, there are our legacy media people doing a good job on this.

• 26:14Ed Zitron?

  Nevertheless, Meta exercises this reckless disregard for public safety, kind of like the auto industry in the 60s, and that was when Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed. And his book, it actually brought about change, it led to the Department of Transportation and the passage of seatbelt laws in 49 states and a bunch of other things that can get overlooked. But the tech industry is somehow inoculated against any kind of public pressure or shame, because it operates in this completely different world with this different rulebook and a different criteria for success, as well as this completely different set of expectations.

• 26:56Speaker 01

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• 27:25Speaker 02

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 28:00Ed Zitron?

  By allowing the market to become disconnected from the value it creates, we enable companies like, I don't know, Nvidia, that reduce the quality of their services as they make more money for their GeForce Now service. Or Facebook, they can just destroy our political discourse so they can facilitate genocide in Myanmar, and then, well, they get headlines about how good a CEO Mark Zuckerberg is and how cool his chains are and how everything's just fine with Facebook and they're making more money. No, no. I actually want to take a step back, though. I want to take a little bit of a step back. I previously mentioned, I said it twice now, oh, Meta enables genocide and destroys our political discourse. I want to be clear. When I say that everything is justified at Meta, I'm actually quoting their Chief Technology

• 28:45Ed Zitron?

  Officer. That's quite literally what Andrew Bosworth said in an internal memo from 2016, where he said that, and I quote, "Ahem, all the work Facebook does in growth is justified." Even if that includes, and I'm quoting him directly, "somebody dying in a terrorist attack coordinated using Facebook's tools."

• 29:07Ed Zitron?

  Now, the mere mention of violent crime is enough to create reams of articles questioning whether society is safe and whether we need more plastic in our Walgreens. Yet our digital lives are this wasteland that people still discuss like a utopia. Seriously, putting aside the social networks, have you visited a website on the phone recently? Have you tried to use a new app? Have you tried to buy something online, starting with a Google search? Within those experiences, has anything gone wrong? You know it, I know it has. You know it has. It's time to wake up.

• 29:40Ed Zitron?

  We, the users of products, we're at war with the products we're using and the people that make them. And right now, we are losing. The media must realign to fight for how things should be. This doesn't mean that they can't cover things positively, or give credit where credit is due, or be willing to accept that something could be something cool. But what has to change is the evaluation of the products themselves, which have been allowed to decay to a level that has become, at best, annoying and, at worst, actively harmful for society. Our networks are rotten. Our information ecosystem is poisoned with its pure parts ideologically and strategically concussed. Our means of speaking to those that we love and making new connections are so constantly interfered with that personal choice and dignity is all but removed. But there is hope.

• 30:24Ed Zitron?

  There really is. Those covering the tech industry right now have one of the most consequential jobs in journalism, if they choose to fucking do it. Those willing to guide people through the wasteland. Those willing to discuss what needs to change, how bad things have gone, and hold the powerful accountable, and say what good might look like, have the opportunity to push for a better future by spitting in the faces of those ruining it. I don't know where I sit, by the way. I don't know what to call myself. Am I legacy media? I got my start writing in print magazines? Am I an independent contractor? Am I an influencer? Am I a content creator? I truly don't know, and I don't know if I care. But all that I know is that I feel like I'm at war too, and that we, if I can be considered part of the media, are at war with people that have changed the terms of innovation

• 31:09Ed Zitron?

  so that it's synonymous with value extraction. Technology is how I became a person, how I met my closest friends and loved ones. And without it, I wouldn't be able to write, I wouldn't be able to read this podcast, I wouldn't have got this podcast. And I feel this poison flowing through my veins as I see what these motherfuckers have done and what they're continuing to do. And I see how inconsistently and tepidly they're interrogated. Now is the time to talk bluntly about what is happening. The declining quality of tech products, the scourge of growth hacking, the cancerous growth at all cost mindset, these are all the things that need to be raised in every single piece. And judgments must be unrelenting.

• 31:51Ed Zitron?

  The companies will squeal, "Ooh, that they're being so unfairly treated by the biased legacy media, oh, oh, save me." Hey, Nilay Patel, interview with Sundar Pichai, this is how you sounded when you handed him your phone, it was pathetic. They should be scared of you, Nilay. The powerful should be scared of the media. They shouldn't be sitting there sending letters to the editor like fucking customer support. No. They should see this podcast, they should see these newsletters, they should see everything published by the tech media and go, "Uh-oh." And there can be good people, there can be good boys and girls and others. There can be plenty of people that make good products and get great press for it.

• 32:31Ed Zitron?

  But do you really think Meta, Google, Apple to an extent frankly, do you think Amazon looks good right now? Do you think it's easy to find stuff? Or do you think it's slop, full of more slop? Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call the other day that he intends there to be an AI-specific slop feed. That should... These are harmful things. This is pouring vats of oil into rivers and then getting told you're the best boy in town. These companies, they're poisoning the digital world and they must be held accountable for the damage they're causing. Readers are already aware. But are, and this is really thanks to members of the media, by the way, they're gaslighting themselves into believing the, "Oh, I just don't catch, I don't keep up with technology,

• 33:16Ed Zitron?

  I, I, it's getting away from me, I'm not technical enough to use this." When the thing that they don't get, that the average person doesn't get, is that the tech industry has built legions of obfuscations, legions of legal tricks, and these horrible little user interface traps specifically made to trick you into doing things, to make the experience kind of subordinate to getting the money off of you. And I think that this is one of the biggest issues in society. And yes, of course, I'm biased. I'm doing a podcast about tech. But for real, though, billions of people use smartphones. Billions of people are on the computer every day. It's how we do everything. And it stinks. It stinks so bad. This is the rot economy. We're in the rot society.

• 33:58Ed Zitron?

  But things can change. And for them to change, it has to start with the information sources. And that starts with journalism. And the work has already begun and will continue. But it must scale up, and it must do so quickly. And you, the user, have the power. Learn to read a privacy policy. And the link there is to The Washington Post. Yes, there are plenty of great reporters there. Fuck Bezos. You can move to Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app that works on just about everything. Get a service like Delete Me. And by the way, I pay for it. I worked for them a lot four years ago. I have no financial relationship with them. But they're great for removing you from data brokers. Molly White, who's a dear friend of mine, and even better, right, you might remember from one of the early episodes about Wikipedia. She's also written this extremely long guide

• 34:41Ed Zitron?

  about what to do next that I'll link to in the notes. And it runs through a ton of great things you can do. Unionization, finding your communities, dropping apps that collect and store sensitive data, and so on. I also heartily recommend Wired's Guide to Protecting Yourself from Government Surveillance, which is linked in the show notes.

• 34:58Ed Zitron?

  Now, before we go, I want to leave you with something that I posted on November 6 on the Better Offline Reddit.

• 35:06Ed Zitron?

  The last 24 hours have felt bleak, and will likely feel more bleak as the months and years go on. It'll be easy to give in to doom, to assume the fight is lost, to assume that the bad guys have permanently won, and there will never be any justice or joy again. Now's the time for solidarity, to crystallize around ideas that matter, even if their position in society is delayed, even as the clouds darken, and the storms brew, and the darkness feels all encompassing and suffocating. Reach out to those you love, and don't just commiserate. Plan. It doesn't have to be political. It doesn't even really have to matter. Put shit on your fucking calendar. Keep yourself active and busy, and if not distracted, at the very least animated. Darkness feeds on idleness. Darkness feasts on a sense of failure and a sense of inability to make change.

• 35:49Ed Zitron?

  You don't know me very well, but know that I'm aware of the darkness and the sadness and the suffocation of when things feel overwhelming. Give yourself some mercy and in the days to come, don't castigate yourself for feeling gutted. Then keep going. I realise it's little solace to think, well, if I keep saying stuff out loud, things will get better, but I promise you doing so has an effect and actually matters. Keep talking about how fucked up things are. Make sure it's written down, make sure it's spoken cleanly and with the rage and fire and piss and vinegar it deserves. Things will change for the better, even if it takes more time than it should. Look, I, I know I'm imperfect, emotional and off-kilter at times. I get emails saying that, too angry.

• 36:32Ed Zitron?

  I'm sorry if it's ever triggered you, I really do mean that. It's, it's not intentional, I just, I feel this in everything I do. I use technology all the time and it is extremely annoying, but also I'm aware that I have privilege. And the more privilege you have within tech, the more you're able to escape the little things. Go and buy a cheap laptop today, try and see what a $200, $300 laptop is, it's slow, it's full of 18 pop-ups trying to sell you access to cloud storage, to shit that you'll never use, tricking grannies and people who can't afford laptops. So people that just don't know. When I see this stuff, it enrages me, not just for me, but because I know that I'm at least lucky enough to know how to get around this shit. Spent most of my life online, spent most of my life playing with tech, I know how it works.

• 37:17Ed Zitron?

  And I know I have my tangents and my biases, uh, but I wear them kind of like my heart on my sleeve. I care about all this stuff in a way that might be a little different to some, and it's because I've, I've watched an industry that really made me as a person, that allowed me to grow as a person, to actually meet people, to not feel as alone. And I imagine some of you feel like this too. And then watching what happens to it every day, watching the people who get so rich off of making it so much worse and then seeing what happened on November 5th, and you can draw a line from it. People are scared, they're lost.

• 37:59Ed Zitron?

  Their lives are spent digitally and your digital lives are just endless terrorism, endless harm. Some of you know your way around tech, so you can escape some of it, but it's impossible to escape all of it. Try meeting people these days, you can't. Everything is online. And everything online, everything on your phone is mitigated and interfered with. It's an assault on your senses, one deprived of dignity.

• 38:26Ed Zitron?

  And I see the people doing this. And it fills me full of fucking rage. And it makes me angry for you and for me. For my son, growing up in what will probably be a worse world. For my friends and loved ones, who are harder to see, harder to speak to. Whose lives too are interfered with. And there are the millions and millions of people who have no fucking idea it's happening. That just exist in this swill and this active digital terrorism. Poked and prodded and nagged and notified constantly.

• 39:00Ed Zitron?

  And I, I don't, I, early on in this, I got a message saying, "Don't tell people to be angry." And I stick by that. But I, I'm not gonna hide that I am. I'm not gonna hide the pain I feel. I'm not gonna hide the pain I feel seeing this shit happen.

• 39:17Ed Zitron?

  And I've watched this thing that I love, technology. Really do love tech, I really do, deeply. I've watched it corrupted and broken and the people breaking it. They don't just make billions of dollars, they get articles and they get interviewed on the news. Mark Zuckerberg, he wears a chain and there's articles about how cool he is. He should be in fucking prison. He should be on a prison on a boat that just circles the world. And he shouldn't have air conditioning or heat depending on how the weather is. And I know that I'm kind of errant and again, tons of tangents, but look. The reason I'm like this is because I really care. And I think caring, I think being angry at the things that actually matter.

• 40:01Ed Zitron?

  And giving context as a result, I think that's deeply valuable. And I realise, I do fly off the handle a lot. But it really is because I care. I care about you, I care about the subject matter. I'm so grateful and so honoured that you spend your time listening to me every week. And I hope you'll continue to do so, because I'm not going anywhere.

• 40:28Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot app to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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