The Invisible War

In this year's two-part finale, Ed Zitron enumerates the damage being done to billions of people by the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy - and why you need to have solidarity with your fellow user. --- 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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• 0:49Speaker 01

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• 1:14Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:16Ed Zitron?

  You are the victim of a con. You have more than likely said to yourself sometime in the last few years, even 10 years, that you just didn't get tech, or you're getting too old, or that tech's gotten away from you because you found a service or an app you're computer annoying. You or someone you love have convinced themselves that their inability to use something is a sign that they are deficient, that they've failed to keep up with the times, as if the things we use every day should be in a constant state of flux. You're listening to Better Offline, and I'm Ed Zitron.

• 1:58Ed Zitron?

  And this is the two-part episode that ends this season of Better Offline, and it's about the true scale of the rot economy, and how the tech industry is waging an endless invisible war against the user. And we're losing, by the way. We're losing really badly. They're slowly taking everything away, adding tolls and growth hacks around basically every part of our lives, and they can't even give us the dignity of making sure the things that make them billions keep functioning. No, no, no, no. They have to twist them at every goddamn corner to make them more profitable, because they know in many cases that we have nowhere else to go. Think about it. The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same, right? Buttons on our cars might have moved around a bit, and I'm not talking about Tesla, by the way.

• 2:43Ed Zitron?

  We generally have a brake and an accelerator and a wheel and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has mostly worked the same way since I started flying. Our trains, our buses, restaurants, toilets, houses, they all have the same mechanisms, and we're not expected to update them or adapt to new circumstances. We don't walk into our apartments and the door opens a different way for some reason. The toilet still flushes, I believe, just used it, just checked. Now, what I'm getting into in this episode, there are some exceptions. Some people really just don't try and learn how to use the computer or a smartphone, and they just kind of reject technology, or they refuse to pick it up because it's not for them. These people exist, they are real, we all know them, and I don't think anybody hearing this falls into that camp.

• 3:27Ed Zitron?

  Basic technological literacy is a requirement to live in society, and there is some responsibility on the user. But even saying that, even if we assume that these people are very common, and this is the case, should companies really take advantage of them? And the answer is no, of course. Now, our apps and platforms, the things we use every day, operate with a totally different moral and intellectual compass to other things in our lives. Well, the idea of an update is fairly notable, that something you've bought can be maintained and improved over time. That's a good thing. Many tech platforms see it as a means to further extract and exploit, to push users into doing things that either keep them on the app longer or take more profitable actions. We as a society need to reckon with this, and we need to reckon with how this twists us up.

• 4:12Ed Zitron?

  It makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary. Because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer, we suffer in these manifold ways. There's no digital world and physical world, by the way. They are and have been for some time quite the same thing. And reporting on tech as if this isn't the case is a failure of the user, a failure of reality, and honestly, a failure of curiosity. If you're still doing this as a writer, you're full of shit. And I want to be clear that I'm not just talking about one single product or company. I'm talking about most digital experiences. I'm talking about the digital interference we're constantly having to dodge, the litany of buttons on every app that are all there to distract us, to obfuscate the path of the things we actually want to do. I'll choose an example for you.

• 4:56Ed Zitron?

  Now, my British, Canadian listeners are not going to love this, but as an app called Sleeper, which I used to play fantasy football, NFL, there are so many buttons to try and make me do different kinds of sports gambling. All I want to do is check my lineup. But no, no, no, no, Sleeper must have a way to further monetize me. The way that apps present information in ways that are designed to be illogical and unhelpful is just disgusting. And they artificially force us to engage for longer with the apps in question. It's not about providing a service. And I sound kind of panicky and emotional, but I need you to understand how common this is in your lives. Every different digital experience is a small version of the little pieces that make up an annoying day at work,

• 5:38Ed Zitron?

  except we're either paying for them or being actively monetized for the pleasure. Let me give you an example. Back in 2023, Spotify redesigned its app too, and I quote The Verge, "be part TikTok, part Instagram, and part YouTube", which in practice meant replacing a relatively clean and straightforward user interface with one made up of full-screen cards like TikTok and auto-playing video podcasts, also like TikTok. And CEO Daniel Ek claimed that this would, and I'm quoting Sky News here, "make the platform come alive with different content on a platform that was built and sold as a place to listen to music." And the tech media, by the way, waved off this redesign without really thinking about it. They didn't consider its significance.

• 6:20Ed Zitron?

  At the drop of a hat, hundreds of millions of people's existence, their experience of listening to music would change at the whim of a multi-billionaire with the express purpose of forcing them to engage with completely different content than they sign up for as a means of increasing engagement, metrics, and revenue for a public company. By all means, try and pretend that this is just an app. It's just music, right? No. People's relationships with music and entertainment are intrinsically linked to their moods and their motivations. And no matter how you feel, it's clear that Spotify, a company best known for fucking and exploiting its artists, treats its customers, both paying and otherwise, with a similar level of contempt. And they're far from alone. Earlier in the year, smart speaker company Sonos released a redesign of their app that

• 7:03Ed Zitron?

  removed their accessibility features, the ability to edit song cues or play music from your phone, and this was an attempt, in their words, to "modernize" the interface, with Wired suggesting that these changes could potentially open the door to adding a subscription service of some sort to help Sonos's, you never guess, ailing growth. Meta, great example as well, continually redesigns Facebook and Instagram, the latest of which happened in October, to focus Facebook on Gen Z users, and they're probably the most egregious example of the constant chaos of our digital lives. While we might complain about these things, we're stuck with them because the conditions of our investment in tech are that we need accounts. We have the features that are customized for us. The more time we put into it, the more it becomes ours, but really, the more we become owned by the companies.

• 7:48Ed Zitron?

  We have ways we've set things up that mirror us further to an ecosystem, and that's fine for a time. It's kind of like having to buy specific outfits for specific occasions, except they might stop fitting at random, and I don't mean based on your weight, they just expand and contract at random. We load websites expecting something to go wrong, because it probably will, with mobile websites that cover entire screens with pop-up ads that can break the entire experience. My favorite example, by the way, is IGN.com, which is a site that receives over 118 million unique monthly visitors that will regularly crash your mobile browser. No, really. Go and look up the God of War Ragnarok guide right now and try scrolling on your phone. If it doesn't crash your browser, I'd be very bloody surprised.

• 8:32Ed Zitron?

  Seemingly every experience online demands our email address, and giving them our email address adds another email to inboxes already stuffed with two types of spam: the actual "get the biggest laser spam" that immediately hits your junk folder, and then the "growth hack" emails we receive from clothing brands we wanted to discount from, or newspapers we pay that still feel it's necessary to email us three to five times a day. Every app we use is intentionally built to "growth hack", a term that means moving things around in such a way that the user does the things we want them to do as a company. Dating apps gauge your best matches behind $1.99 or more microtransactions. Uber puts suggestions and massive banners throughout their apps to try and convince you to use one of their other apps, or maybe you accidentally hit them, which gives Uber a better chance to get you to try them.

• 9:17Ed Zitron?

  Outlook, one of the most popular email platforms in the world, puts advertisements in your email inbox that are near and distinguishable from new emails, and they're actually at the top of your inbox too. And Meta, my favourite, they have these video carousels, previously just on Facebook but they just added them to Instagram, that intentionally only play the first seconds of a clip as a means of making you click, giving them more clicks, more engagement, and more things to trick the street with.

• 9:43Ed Zitron?

  What I'm getting at, and I think you kind of experienced yourself, is that our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile. Our apps are ever-changing, they're adapting not to us, not to our conditions or our needs, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics. Things that don't really tell them anything other than how to knock us around to make us do more. It isn't that you don't get tech, I must insist you understand this, it's that the tech you use every day is completely and utterly insane. Every app has a different design, almost every design is growth hacked to optimise your activity on said app, with each app trying to make you do different things, with

• 10:26Ed Zitron?

  some apps having entire growth hacking teams that continually evaluate what you do and what your friends are doing, and perhaps find new ways to mash them together so they can make more money come out. It doesn't matter if the experience sucks, that's not what they're there for, they're not there to make things better. I want you to realize that this is in almost every application you use. I know I'm repeating myself, but it's important. And I'm not saying this to complain, but it's because I believe, as I've hinted at previously, that we're in the midst of the largest-scale ecological disaster of our time. Because almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively adversarial to the user. These issues hit everything we do, all the time, constantly. We're constantly interrupted, and I believe it's so much bigger than social media and

• 11:11Ed Zitron?

  algorithms. Though I must be clear, they're absolutely a big part of it.

• 11:23Speaker 04

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• 11:54Speaker 05

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• 12:27Ed Zitron?

  The average person's experience with technology is one so aggressive and so violent that I believe it leaves large parts of our society with a low-level trauma. I know it sounds dramatic. Some of you hearing this may scoff at the idea even, after all, you're smart, right? You know about disinformation. You know about what these companies are doing, and thus, most people do, right? Wrong. Most people don't think about the things they're doing at all, and they're just trying to get by in a society that increasingly demands we make more money to buy the same things, with our lives both interfered with and judged by social networks, with aggressive algorithms that feed us more things based on what we'll engage with, which might mean things that piss us off or actively radicalize us.

• 13:09Ed Zitron?

  People are nagged constantly by these goddamn notifications, an average of forty-six a day, some useful, some advertisements, like, say, Apple telling us that there's a nail-bite, a college football game, regardless of whether we've interacted with any football contact ever, or a Slack message saying that you haven't joined a group you were invited to a week ago, or Etsy letting you know that you can buy things for an upcoming holiday. It's all the time, it's everywhere, it's constant. It's relentless, and the more time you invest in using a device, the more of these notifications you get, making you less likely or capable of turning them off. After all, how well are you doing keeping your inbox clean? How's that going? What's that? What, what, what was that? You get twenty-five emails a day, many of them from a different company owned by Williams Sonoma? Damn, that's crazy.

• 13:52Ed Zitron?

  But the indignities don't end there, because these people also have to be constantly aware of scams and outright misinformation, both on social networks that don't really care to stop it, and on the chum box advertisements below most major news publications. And if you don't know what that is, those are those weird little stories at the bottom promising miracle cures or trying to sell you weed, or, well, fake weed from Xi Jinping. Plenty of people who read and write about technology have this insipid amount of privilege. They assume that it's natural that you'd know that there are entities out there trying to scam or trick you, and I'd argue that most people don't. Most people are just trying to get by, and to most people, a video from rumble.com may as well be the same thing as a video from cnn.com, and most people would believe that

• 14:34Ed Zitron?

  every advertisement is somehow verified for its accuracy versus the truth, which is it's sold at scale all the time to whoever will pay money. I want to give you a really good example, and this one turns my fucking stomach. This one really pisses me off, and I want to just say, what I'm about to say, cnn.com, it's on NBCnews.com, and it's also on The Verge, Nilay Patel, you need to fix this shit, it's disgusting. But let's talk about cnn.com, a website that had five-hundred-and-ninety-four million visitors in October twenty-twenty-four. At the bottom of CNN, when you scroll down, it's something that says "paid partner content", including things from publications like Finance Buzz that tell you about the, and I quote, "nine dumbest things smart people waste money on." Finance Buzz immediately, when you click through, asks you to turn your notifications

• 15:19Ed Zitron?

  on, you know, so that they can ping you when they have new articles. And each bullet on the story leads to one of a different kind of affiliate marketing arm of the company trying to sell you car insurance and credit cards where they get a little smidgen of commission every time someone buys something. And you're offered the chance to share your email address to receive, and I quote, "vetted side hustles and proven ways to earn extra cash sent to your inbox", which I assume includes things like the advertorial I was led to, where they were telling me that, yes, you could make money playing online bingo in games such as Bingo Cash against other people. And I saw that and I said, "That doesn't sound true at all", so I went and looked him up. Papaya Games, developer of Bingo Cash, was sued in March by rival gaming company Skills

• 16:01Ed Zitron?

  for using bots in allegedly skill-based games that are supposed to be between humans. And the Michigan Gaming Control Board issued a cease and desist order against the company for violating multiple gaming laws, including the lawful Internet Gaming Act. To quote the lawsuit, "Papaya's games are not skill-based and users are often not playing against live actual opponents, but against Papaya's own bots that direct and rig the game so that Papaya itself wins its users' money, while leading them to believe that they lost to a live human opponent." This is a website and its associated content that had prime placement on the front page of a major news outlet. As a normal person, it's reasonable to believe that CNN would not willfully allow advertisements for websites that are, in and of themselves, further advertisements masquerading as trustworthy third-party entities.

• 16:46Ed Zitron?

  It's reasonable that you, as a normal person, would believe that Finance Buzz was a reputable website and that their intentions were to share great deals and secret tricks with you. If you think you're not this stupid, you're privileged and need to have more solidarity with your fellow human beings. It's disgraceful. If you hear this and you're like, "Haha, stupid idiots", god damn you! People are being screwed! People are being screwed right now, in this way that you might scoff at, that you might look down your nose at, but this is serious! And this is horrible! And companies like Outbrain and Taboola, who make these chum-box advertisements, they make millions and millions of dollars doing this! And really, putting aside any privilege you might have, or maybe you don't, maybe you

• 17:29Ed Zitron?

  get what I'm talking about here, why wouldn't you think that the content on one of the most notable media outlets in the entire world is trustworthy?

• 17:39Ed Zitron?

  Now, nothing I'm saying is meant to be polemic, or pessimistic, or describing anything other than the shit that's happening in front of my eyes and your eyes and the eyes of billions of people. Dismissing these things as just how it is, as we have for years, allows powerful people with no real plan and no real goals other than growth to thrive, and staring at people dumb enough to get tricked by an internet and tech industry built specifically to trick them suggests that you have no idea how you are being scammed, because you're smug and arrogant. And I realise I'm possibly making up a person to be angry at, but I've had a few conversations recently with people who had this reaction, and it sucks. We all learn things for the first time, and it's

• 18:19Ed Zitron?

  like, if you never learned, how would you learn? And I'm trying to, I guess, make up this person, but if anyone listening had that attitude, it's important. I need you to stop trying to explain away how fucking offensive using the internet and technology has become. I need you to stop making excuses for the powerful, and consider the sheer scale of the societal rat fucking happening on almost every single device in the world, and consider the ramifications of the difficulty that the human being using the internet has, trying to live an honest, dignified, and reasonable life. And maybe you're in the middle ground, maybe you didn't judge them, maybe it just wasn't you. Either way, it's, I think it's important to put this down. To exist in modern society requires you to use these devices, or otherwise sacrifice

• 19:02Ed Zitron?

  large parts of how you'd interact with other people. You need a laptop or smartphone for work, probably both, for school, or for anything, really. You need messaging apps, otherwise you kind of don't exist. And as a result, there's this societal monopoly of sorts, or maybe it's more of a cartel, in the sense that for the most part, every tech company has accepted these aggressive, anti-user positions, all in pursuit of growth. The stakes are so much higher than I think anyone realises, especially in the tech media, and I don't know why they're not more willing to discuss the scale. They can pick the issues, they can say, "This is bad, and this is bad", and then they can run glossy coverage for Zuckerberg or Musk.

• 19:43Ed Zitron?

  But it's bad. It's worse. It it's worse than a lot of things and just it's undiscussed and I feel almost like I'm saying something obvious, but I've looked. This isn't being put down like this. No one's just pointing at the everything, the bad, the and look, the extent of the damage, the pain, the frustration, the terror. It's so constant and we're all in some level, just kind of numb to it. Because discussing it requires accepting that a vast majority of people live poisoned lives, thanks to their phones and their laptops. And this isn't even an anti-technology position. I want it to be better. And as you'll hear soon, I do love the computer. But we really need to get into this and we need to realize we all live in the ruins created by the rot economy.

• 20:28Ed Zitron?

  Where the only thing that matters is growth. Growth of revenue, growth of business, growth of metrics related to said business, growth of engagement, of clicks, of time on the app, of purchases of microtransactions, of impressions of ads, of things done that make executives feel happy and make the growth team see the number go up. It's goddamn sickening. However, if you want to feel better, I'm pretty sure that after I stop speaking here, there's going to be an ad and I am 100% confident that this ad follows, it will align with everything I've been saying. It won't be for something that has a kind of an ironic context, considering my work. You're going to chuckle and trample because of how right I am here, not because the thing that follows is completely discarded.

• 21:22Speaker 04

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• 22:26Ed Zitron?

  And we're back. So, as you know as a listener, I'm a dickhead. And if you haven't been listening, you probably worked that out by now. You're 20 minutes or so in and you've heard me get pissed off. But I was trying to work out as I wrote this script, how would I frame this? How would I really show you the scale? So I went on amazon.com, the everything store, and I bought the best-selling laptop, a $238 Acer Aspire One with a four-year-old Seleron N4500 processor, which I'd consider fairly representative of how millions of people interact with the internet. I also believe it's a powerful illustration of the damage caused by the rot economy and this abusive, poisonous, and exploitative way in which the tech industry treats people

• 23:11Ed Zitron?

  in a very practical sense. So I opened this piece of shit up and it really, you're gonna hear as I discuss this, the anger that I experienced. So I hit on on it and it took one minute and 50 seconds from touching that power button for the laptop to get to a setup screen. It then took another minute and a half to connect and begin downloading updates, which then took several more minutes. After that, I was faced with a licensing agreement where I agreed to binding arbitration to use Windows, another 24-second pause, and then I got shown a screen of different, and I quote, "ways I could unlock my Microsoft experience with animations that shuddered and jerked violently." It really didn't feel good. It was just, immediately you could tell this thing was cheap. Now, throughout using this thing, this cheap trackpad on this laptop, it would just miss

• 23:55Ed Zitron?

  the occasional click. And at this point, I was forced to create a Microsoft account and hand over my cellphone or another email address to receive a code, or I'd not be able to use the laptop at all. Each menu screen takes three to five seconds to load, and I'm asked to customize my experience with things like personalized ads, tips, and recommendations, with every option turned on by default, by the way. And then I had to sign up for another account, this time with Acer. At one point, I'm simply shown an ad for Microsoft OneDrive and their cloud storage product with a QR code to download it on my phone. And then I'm told that Windows has to download a few updates, which I assume are different to the updates I did before. Now, I'm not just complaining. I just, I'm trying to explain how much stuff happens when a regular person who cannot

• 24:40Ed Zitron?

  afford a MacBook, who cannot afford a nice Dell laptop, just buys the first one off of Amazon, as we all do with different products. So, by the way, at this point, around 20 minutes have passed just to get to this screen. It then took another 33 minutes for the updates to finish, and then another minute and 57 seconds to log in, at which point a screen popped up telling me to set up a browser and discover the best of Windows, including finding the apps I love from the Microsoft Store, and the option to create an AI-generated theme of my browser, or for my browser even. The laptop, by the way, between each screen felt like it was just shaking visually, like the animations juddered viciously. You just get this constant sense that this thing sucks from the moment you use it.

• 25:25Ed Zitron?

  And so I finally, at this point, got to my new laptop, my beautiful new Acer laptop that stunk. And then I opened the start bar, which is ostensibly a place where you'd have apps, right? Apps that you'd use on the computer. And I saw some of the things like Outlook, an email client that's not actually installed and requires you to download it. You click it and it then downloads again. And an option for a travel website called Booking.com, just an ad, along with a link to LinkedIn, another ad for a Microsoft property. One app, ClipChamp, was installed but immediately needed to be updated, which did not work when I hit update, which then forced me to go find the updates page, which then showed me at least 40 different apps called things like Sweet Labs Inc. I do not know what any of this stuff was.

• 26:09Ed Zitron?

  It's just so strange. I typed Sweet Labs into the search bar, and it took a little shaky juddery, like the animations hitched a bit. And then it opened this giant menu with half of it dedicated to Mark Twain's birthday, and which had two different Mark Twain-related links, a quiz of the day and four different games available to download. At this point, by the way, I've been able to do nothing on this computer. I could have loaded Edge, but I'll get to that in a minute. I also should be clear that the computer was pausing slightly every time I typed a letter. Every animation felt so clunky and jittery. Even moving the Windows around didn't feel smooth. It was just slow, it felt cheap, and the operating system, previously something I'd considered to be the thing that operates the computer, it's actively rotten.

• 26:54Ed Zitron?

  It's full of ads, sponsored content, suggested ads, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user. Now, at this point, it's important to add what operating system it is. I'll get to that shortly. And the reason I'm explaining all of this in such agonizing detail is that this is the experience that I believe is more indicative of the average person's use of the computer than anybody else's. It's this. It's Windows, the crappiest, shittiest Windows. And though it's tough to gauge how many of these things, these crappy laptops, are sold to make it a bestseller on Amazon, laptops in this price point, which use a specific version of Windows called 11 Home in S Mode, dominate Amazon's bestseller list, along

• 27:36Ed Zitron?

  with Apple's significantly more expensive MacBook Air and Pro series. It's reasonable to believe that a large amount of laptops sold in America match this price point and spec. There are two similar ones on Best Buy's bestsellers, or at least there were at the time I wrote this script, and as of writing this sentence down, which would have been very beginning of December, multiple different laptops of this very specific specification are on the front of Target's laptop page. And if I haven't made it completely clear, this means that millions of people are likely using a laptop that's burdensomely slow, full of targeted advertising and content baked into an operating system in a way that's either impossible or difficult to remove. For millions of people, and it really could be tens of millions of people, considering

• 28:17Ed Zitron?

  the ubiquity of these laptops, the experience of using the computer is both actively exploitative and incredibly, incredibly slow. Even loading up MSN.com, the very first page you see when you open a web browser in Windows Home S, immediately hits you with ads for eBay, QVC, and QuickBooks, with icons that sometimes don't load.

• 28:38Ed Zitron?

  By the way, about Windows 11 Home in S Mode. That, you might not have heard of this. It's a special version of Windows where you can only use apps from the Windows Store. And on top of that, it's supposedly more efficient. I've used quite a few of these laptops now, and they're the slowest, wonkiest pieces of shit ever. But they're cheap.

• 29:00Ed Zitron?

  And it's not just the crappy hardware either. It's every part of the operating system, which feels like it's built to hound you to use some sort of Microsoft product or some sort of product that Microsoft or the laptop manufacturer has been paid to make you see. While one can hope that people buying these laptops have an awareness of anything, the reality is they're being dumped into a kind of TJ Maxx version of computing. Except TJ Maxx clothes don't sometimes scream at you to download TJ Maxx Plus or stop functioning because you use them too fast. Now, I say this, I haven't shopped there in a while, but I assume this is still the case. Again, this is how most people are experiencing modern computing, and it isn't because this is a big business. It's because laptop sales have begun to fall, and they've been falling for over a decade.

• 29:42Ed Zitron?

  And manufacturers and Microsoft need as many ways to grow revenue as possible, even if the choices they make are actively harmful to the consumer. Also, I swear to God, if your answer here is get a MacBook Air, they're only $600, I beg you, I plead with you to speak with people outside of your income bracket at a time when an entire election was decided in part because everything's more expensive. At this point, said person using this laptop can now log on to the internet, by the way, and begin using websites like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, all of which that have algorithms we don't really understand, but they have been regularly proven to be actively and deliberately manipulative and harmful. And I know I'm angry, I mean, whatever. You listen to this show, and this is the finale of this year. You know how pissed off I am.

• 30:27Ed Zitron?

  But the picture I'm trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person's experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy sludge-like frame, and the wider internet opens up to said user, which has already been battered by horrible user experience, by the way. They're immediately thrown into this heavily algorithmic feed of some sort. Each different feed... Built to con them in a unique way, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in there as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like The Verge and NBC News feature stories from companies like WorldTrending.com with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it's an ad.

• 31:08Ed Zitron?

  As their clunky, shuddering shitty laptop hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com when the laptop slows to a crawl. "Everything slows to a crawl. Why? Why goddammit is everything so fucking slow?" these people say. "I'll just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesn't crash half the time or trick me." Sadly not. The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn't the algorithm, but the convenience. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they're specifically engineered to manipulate you. Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta.

• 31:51Ed Zitron?

  And now that every website is so desperate for our email to show us ads and to push stuff on us, it's either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online. So of course they're going to go to the big box websites. They feel comparatively safe, even if they're not. When every single website needs to make as much money as possible because their private equity or hedge fund or massive corporate owners need to make more money every year without fail, the incentives of building the internet veer away from providing a service or information and towards putting you, the listener, in silent service of a corporation. If you're technologically savvy in reading this, by the way, sit down and think. Think for a second about the amount of effort you've put into mitigating the problems with the internet and modern computing.

• 32:35Ed Zitron?

  Fresh installs of Windows on new machines, avoiding certain websites because you've learned what the bad ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know that's what a spam bot looks like, and so on and so forth. Think about it. I know a lot of you are very technologically savvy, but you're instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you. You're batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications, knowing that they all want something from you, and I need you to realise that most people are not like you, and you too are actively victimised by the tech ecosystem. As a result, and like I said a few weeks ago, I believe that most people are actively concussed by their daily lives, because most people's daily lives are on the computer or their smartphones,

• 33:18Ed Zitron?

  and those lives have been stripped of dignity. And when they look at the media, the best they'll get is a degree of, "Hmm, algorithm bad? Is bad, is, is computer, is Facebook not good?" Actually, I take it back. You don't, you don't really get that either. You don't really get, you know how bad Facebook and Instagram are. You don't even get the media really covering it. It drives me insane. Yet it's so much more than just the algorithm. It's almost the entirety of the digital ecosystem, from websites to apps to the devices we use every day. The fact that so many people likely use a laptop that's equal parts unfit for the task and stuffed full of growth hacked poison is utterly goddamn disgraceful, because it means that the only way to escape

• 34:01Ed Zitron?

  the poison is to simply have more money. Those who can't afford a $300 at least phone or a $600 laptop are left to use this offensively bad technology, and we have at societal scale simply accepted that this is how things go. The result is that everything's a chaotic mess. And by everything, I mean almost every digital experience, like I've been saying. And if you still believe the digital world has no bearing on the physical world, you're a dumb arse. Everything you do, for the most part, goes through apps and websites. It's impossible to avoid, and it gets harder to wade through if you aren't wealthy enough or lucky enough to have someone teach you, or own a powerful enough device, which is not something that really happens in school in any

• 34:43Ed Zitron?

  case. They're not really loading you up with the most powerful stuff, nor do I believe that schools are sitting there and telling people not just how to use the computer, but to make sure the computer doesn't use you.

• 34:55Ed Zitron?

  Yet even on the expensive devices, you're still a victim of algorithmic and growth hack manipulation, even if you're aware of it. Knowing allows you to fight back, even if it's just to stop yourself being overwhelmed by the mess and means that you can read things that can tell you what new horrors we can avoid next. But you're still the target, and you're still receiving hundreds of marketing emails a week. You still receive spam calls, and you're still unable to use Facebook or Instagram without being bombarded by ads and algorithmically charged content. And I realize in this episode, I've kind of brought the hammer down. I've called imaginary or real people dumbasses. Attack people that are listening. I'm not really angry at you. I'm not. I know it might sound like that, and it

• 35:37Ed Zitron?

  really isn't. The conditions of society have adjusted so that we've just accepted how bad things are, that we've just said, "It sucks, but you know, it's everywhere, so what you gonna do about it?" And I'm angry about it because I feel like my peers in the tech media don't take it seriously either. They've just become numb to it, like we all have. And it sucks. We shouldn't become numb to this. If we just had toxic dump in the streets, and who knows with the upcoming EPA, whether we will, we'd say something, right? If we were getting burned by random things, we would be upset. We'd be like, "Ouch!" But because these little attacks, these little indignities, are so subtle and so common, they're everywhere,

• 36:22Ed Zitron?

  it's kind of hard to talk about. It's kind of hard to have language about. And in the next episode, I'm going to talk about why that language is so important, about how fighting back is discussing and raising these problems. And I don't mean with your congressman. I don't mean with elected officials, though that might work, that might help. It's about having a continual societal conversation. It's about the next time that you or your friend says, "I just don't get how the computer works," stopping your someone saying, "No." Probably not. It's that they keep changing how the computer works to make it work against us. It's why I've been so annoyed the last year. And in this two-part finale, I want

• 37:06Ed Zitron?

  you to remember that you're the victim. You're the victim of a con. And I can't wait for you to hear the next episode, coming in a few days.

• 37:22Ed 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 at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  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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