The Slop Society

In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how lax regulation and all-too-chummy media coverage has empowered Mark Zuckerberg and other tech companies to intentionally make every digital experience worse for profit. --- 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.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:19Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:22Ed Zitron?

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

• 1:37Ed Zitron?

  Here to serve, here to podcast. In the last episode, I walked you through the how the so-called sudden magnification of Meta is really just them formalizing the rot economy, the growth-at-all-costs bullshit that drives the entire company, making the products worse to grab more advertising impressions, to make Mark Zuckerberg richer, while also making the life of the average Facebook user that bit worse. And I believe that had Meta and Mark Zuckerberg been ever really held accountable, truly accountable, in the last decade, that things might have gone a little differently. Zuckerberg, like many tech executives, has been allowed to destroy the user experience in broad daylight because the media, despite writing about Facebook as a product all the time for years, doesn't seem capable of writing

• 2:19Ed Zitron?

  the blunt truth about how shit it is, how bad it works, how everything is kind of getting there, but nowhere worse than Facebook, really. The problem, I believe, is there are some people that simply want the tech executives to have power. They want to make friends with the rock stars, they want to be in their orbit, to humour their ideas and celebrate their victories, which is so strange, because said victories are usually just the rich just got even richer. And where that's not the case, there's just a lack of willingness to say that something is bad. And the consequences are that these platforms have been left unchecked. To be clear, there are plenty of reporters who have done great work reporting on specific parts of Matt's problems. Gavin Russo at The Times with CrowdTangle, Jeff Horowitz and the rest of the team who

• 3:02Ed Zitron?

  did the Facebook files at The Wall Street Journal, for example. But there's been this bigger, nastier and more obvious problem that no one's really put down in blunt words. The core product of Facebook has gone incrementally worse, seemingly every month since 2008. And while I understand that it's hard to just write "thing bad" every week, but I fucking do it, journalism is fully capable of doing this in other ways. Think about it, when they write about crime or wars, how is a social network used by billions of people less important than that? Or less important than how many people have allegedly broken into a CVS cabinet? If a tanker overturned on a highway spilling various poisons and acids and such into local water sources and burning people alive in the middle of a fucking freeway, that would

• 3:47Ed Zitron?

  be news, right? But somehow billions of people being actively misled, manipulated and harmed every single day just isn't relevant. Now, one argument might be, "Well, it isn't really clear what the harms of social media are. We have some reporting, but it's just not that obvious." Well, my retort's also fairly obvious, and goes back to something I just said. The media seems fully capable of writing about the rise of retail theft, for example, and that led to a whole thing with pharmacies, like I mentioned, locking entire parts of the store behind plastic. And it wasn't obvious whether this was a real problem, but it didn't stop the media writing hundreds of thousands of words about how dangerous cities had got, how dangerous, "Oh, this retail theft, it's all happening."

• 4:30Ed Zitron?

  And again, it wasn't necessarily based on anything other than editorial vibes and whoever picked up the tab at Balthazar that week. It was craven. But at least could we, could we do like a craven thing with Facebook? Because if streets were littered with needles and corpses and fires and trash and violence, you would expect the news to cover that. Why isn't Facebook treated the same way? Why aren't social networks treated the same way? We can do this paranoid, xenophobic shit. We can do this thing where we say TikTok is manipulating people with their algorithms, as if Meta isn't doing the same thing with theirs.

• 5:09Ed Zitron?

  But let's take an abstraction above that and just look at what we're really dealing with here. Facebook is used by billions of people. It is a platform that probably has more effect on the people that use it than many forms of entertainment, by congressmen even, by local officials. People are more aware of the things they see on social media than they are of civic things. And I really want to be clear, with that level of exposure, with that many people affected by how bad Facebook has got, we should be treating this like a mass casualty event, like a mass poisoning. We should be looking at the quality of these platforms, but none worse than Facebook,

• 5:52Ed Zitron?

  and saying, "What is being done to people?" And it's not just about misinformation, it's not just about harassment, two things which are very, very fucking important, especially the harassment, it's disgraceful. It's disgraceful that trans people are now targeted on there. But on top of that, it's just bad, flat-out bad, flat-out harmful, flat-out obviously horrible, and unsafe, and harmful, full of scams and spams. But we treat it like this cute little thing in the fucking corner. And the basic quality of the Facebook experience really is quite terrible, I need to repeat myself, and it actively deprives the users of dignity and industry to make their own decisions, and their experiences are constantly interfered with, and the majority of the content

• 6:33Ed Zitron?

  that they see is provided by a shadowy algorithm built to promote engagement rather than any kind of utility. This is not a fair exchange of value. If Facebook were a city, every second car would be overturned and on fire, men would solicit you on the sides of the street for, I don't know, drugs or just to steal from you, or maybe they just try and confuse you like a carnival guy. Random people would just bark at you from their windows, I think. People would be just throwing faeces out the fucking window. And the governor would be actively selling pardons on television every day. If that was happening in a city, that would be news. But it happens on Facebook. It happens on Facebook every day. The harms have been here for years and we, as the media, have done jackfucking shit. You can report on the obvious things, on the research, on the harms that Facebook knows.

• 7:17Ed Zitron?

  Fine, actually need to do that. We need that journalism. But on top of it, we need to treat this platform as how harmful it is, but also how harmful it's going to get. And like I said last episode, it's been like this for a while. And it's kind of a comfortable lie, I think, to say that Meta's suddenly done something bad here. Because it gives the media and society kind of a free pass for ignoring this gaping wound in the side of the fucking internet. Two of the world's largest social networks are run and have been run with this blatant contempt for the user, misinforming and harming people at scale, making the things they want to see harder to find, and swamping them in this endless stream of sponsored and recommended

• 7:59Ed Zitron?

  content that either sells them something or gets them to engage further with the platform, with little care as to why they'd be doing so, other than the fact that all things are justified under growth. Worse still, there have been some members of the media that have actively worked to support and celebrate what Meta has done for years. You'll never guess that I'm referring to Casey Newton of Platformer, who's done an admirable job, I will repeat myself, covering Meta in the last few weeks and the horrifying anti-LGBTQ things that Meta has been doing. But it's also really important to note that Casey was cheerfully covering Zuckerberg, and I quote, "his expansive view of the future," as recently as September 25th, 2024. And he happily published how, and I quote again, Zuckerberg was back on the offensive,

• 8:44Ed Zitron?

  somehow not seeing anything worrying about the fact that Mark Zuckerberg's shirt referenced Julius Caesar, the historic dictator that perpetuated a genocide in the Gaelic Wars. Like, this is who he was months ago. Where was the alarm then? Where was the worry then? But don't worry, I'm not remotely done with you, Casey. Yet Casey felt it unnecessary to mention at any time how utterly atrocious Facebook has got. But he'll happily quote Mark Zuckerberg, saying things like, "In every generation of technology, there is a competition of ideas for what the future should look like." Yet the most loathsome thing that Casey Newton published was the following. And I quote, and all of these will be linked to in the notes, don't worry.

• 9:23Ed Zitron?

  But it left unsaid, "it" referring to Meta, what seemed to be the larger point, which is that Zuckerberg intends to crush his rivals, particularly Apple, into a fine pulp. His swagger on stage was most evident when discussing the company's next-generation glasses as the likeliest next-generation computing platform, and highlighted the progress that Meta had made so far in overcoming the crushing technological burdens necessary for that to happen. And Meta also failed to capture just how "personal" all this seems to Mark Zuckerberg, burned by what he has called "the 20-year mistake of the company's reaction to the post-2016 tech backlash." Very weird, that, that's not 20 years. And Zuckerberg, in this case, quoting again, "is long haunted by criticisms that Meta

• 10:08Ed Zitron?

  has been nothing more than the competition-crushing copycat since it released the newsfeed. Zuckerberg has never seemed more intent on claiming for himself the mantle of innovator."

• 10:20Ed Zitron?

  Well done, Casey. Great fucking journalism there, mate. Shit, not a dry seat in the house. Ridiculous, cowardly, paper tiger analysis, stenography for the powerful, masters, deep thoughts. This specific paragraph is exactly where Casey Newton could have said something about how worrying Mark Zuckerberg modeling himself on a Roman dictator was. I don't know, maybe he could have brought up how the company was, despite oinking about how it's building the future, letting its existing products deteriorate as it deliberately turned the screws to juice engagement. Casey Newton has regularly and reliably turned his back on the truth, that Meta's core products are really quite bad, in favour of pumping up various AI products and vague promises from Zuckerberg about a future that just arrived and fucking sucks.

• 11:05Ed Zitron?

  The reason I'm singling him out, by the way, is that it's very, very, very, very important to hold the people that helped Mark Zuckerberg succeed accountable, especially as they attempt to hint that they've always been an aggressive advocate for the truth. Casey Newton is fully capable of real journalism, as proven, by the way, by his recent coverage, but he's chosen again and again to simply print whatever Mark Zuckerberg wants to say. Now, I'm going hard in the paint against Casey for a reason. And it's because he wrote something at the end of last year called "The Phony Comforts of AI Skepticism." It's one of the weirdest things I've read in my life. It's this sloppily stapled-together piece of marketing collateral for AI companies saying that not only is AI the future, but those that are critiquing it were doing so in this kind of cynical, corrupt way for attention.

• 11:50Ed Zitron?

  And he singled out one person, Gary Marcus, who's an independent critic. I've had my issues with Gary, but let me tell you something. If you're singling out a writer, you'll do it again. You'll gladly choose an independent writer and single them out. Now, I should be clear, I'm doing the same thing with Casey right now, but Casey has a bigger audience than I have. He has more connections, he's more powerful ostensibly. But on top of that, when you choose to single out a writer, a writer who is critiquing the powerful, what are you doing? Who do you work for, Casey? I'm not done with you, not remotely. I've got plenty more to say here, but I think the biggest question I ask for Casey Newton is, who are you defending? What are you defending?

• 12:36Ed Zitron?

  What is it you do every day? Who are you writing for? Because if you're going to choose an independent critic, a critic who is critiquing multi-billion dollar companies, to what end are you doing so? What are you defending? But let's keep going though, because there was also another thing that Casey said that I just didn't like. Right at the end, he said, and I quote, that he was "taking detailed notes on all bloggers writing financial analyses suggesting that OpenAI will go bankrupt soon because it's not profitable yet." "Oh, Casey, Casey, Casey, Casey, who could you possibly be talking about there? I'm not going to say who I think it is. I'm just going to say this. I do not like bullies, and I do not like threats."

• 13:21Ed Zitron?

  "Suggesting that one is taking detailed notes on bloggers is an attempt to intimidate people that are seriously evaluating the fact that OpenAI burns $5 billion a year and has no path to profitability." "I don't know if this is actually about me, and I don't really give a shit. But I will tell you something, Casey." Actually, I'll tell you two things. One, don't fucking threaten people. Don't talk about taking detailed notes on people. You have power, you have a platform. You have responsibility to young journalists as well as to yourself. And you seem to have given up on all the rest of it. You seem to have lost your way. But then there's the second thing, which is Casey, I've been taking detailed notes on you for some fucking time.

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• 14:53Speaker 01

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• 15:17Ed Zitron?

  While Newton's Metaverse interview from 2021 was deeply irresponsible in how much it quoted Mark Zuckerberg just saying complete crap, arguably his most disgraceful act was October 26, 2021, when he wrote a piece called "The Facebook Papers Missing Peace", an interview with an anonymous integrity worker that attempted to undermine the Wall Street Journal's reporting on the Facebook files, a massive investigation and expose of how Facebook knew how harmful their platform was. I should be clear. The Facebook file situation involved Frances Horgan coming forward, risking her life, risking her safety. That woman is incredibly brave, as are the reporters that cover this. This is important work. This is necessary work. And Newton's piece is

• 16:02Ed Zitron?

  a disgrace to tech journalism, a disqualifying one, a seeming attempt to discredit by proxy the bravery of a whistleblower that provided documents that led to this meaningful reporting, and it's utterly repulsive, corporate handwashing, and it's important context for any criticism that Casey Newton has anything of anything ever again. And I'm furious. I'm furious because Casey could be better. I believe that Casey could actually do meaningful things, and we need you right now, Casey. We need you to fucking start working again. And indeed, I think the only comfortable thing I hear, or at least feel, is reading how much of the powerful's messaging you like to share. Casey Newton argued that while AI companies

• 16:47Ed Zitron?

  have hit a scaling wall, it's actually okay. Don't worry, I'll have plenty of links in the notes. That NFTs went finally mainstream in 2022. They didn't. He argued that Clubhouse was the future, and that live audio was Zuckerberg's "big bet on creators" in 2021 due to, and I quote again, "the shift in power from institutions to individuals." I should add that Facebook shut down their podcast service a year later. And he also added, and I can't see the full text here because it's paywalled, that Metaverse pessimists were missing something because Meta's grand vision was already well on its way. He wrote this in November 2021, by the way. He also added that Meta's leadership changed its mind about its name because Facebook was not the future of the company. Maybe that was accurate? I don't know. He also wrote about Axie Infinity, which is a crypto Web3

• 17:31Ed Zitron?

  Pokémon clone thing that created a kind of indentured servitude. There's like loan sharks in the Philippines that fuck people up over this. It's insane. And by the way, backed by Andreessen Horowitz. And he was claiming that the game turned gaming on its head. It sucks. It absolutely sucks. I could go on. It shouldn't be this easy, man. It shouldn't be this easy to find a bunch of really weird stuff, because Casey has also at times had real dalliances with criticism. He has criticized Facebook. But it's also hard to take those criticisms seriously when Casey's also written a piece for The Verge about how Google plans to win its antitrust trial, they didn't win by the way, and he printed the legal and marketing opinion of one of the largest companies in the world, their general counsel, knowing full well the Department of Justice could

• 18:16Ed Zitron?

  not respond. How would they respond? The old Microsoft antitrust case ended up getting fucked up because a judge responded to a journalist. Like, that's the thing, Casey, use your power responsibly. Don't talk about taking notes, mate. Don't talk about taking notes, that's them's fighting words. Anyway.

• 18:34Ed Zitron?

  The Google thing I brought up, maybe thinking, why would I bring up anything with with Google? This is about Meta, right? Well, there were emails revealed in the Department of Justice's antitrust against trial against Google Search, which, as you well know, for the man who killed Google Search, I've read a lot of. Well, Google specifically mentioned having briefed Casey Newton with the intention of, and I quote, "looking for ways to drive headlines on Google's own terms." Now, in Newton's defense, this is standard PR language, but it is, within the context of what I'm saying, quite hard to ignore. And again, the reason I'm so fucking furious about Casey Newton, it's these part of a media machine that's helped whitewash Mark Zuckerberg and the people around Mark Zuckerberg, running these glossy puff pieces with scumbags like Nick fucking Clegg, and saying things like, and

• 19:16Ed Zitron?

  I quote, "the transition away from Facebook's old friends and family-dominated feeds to Meta's algorithmic wonderland," Jesus Christ, "seems to be proceeding mostly without incident." By the way, that line I add was published in 2023, two years after the release of the Facebook files, which revealed that the company knew its algorithmic timeline had a propensity to push users into increasingly radical echo chambers. And one year after, Amnesty International published a report accusing Facebook's algorithms of, and I quote, "supercharging the spread of harmful anti-rohingya content in Myanmar amidst the genocide that saw an estimated million displaced and tens of thousands massacred." Casey, Casey, wake up, brother. It's

• 19:56Ed Zitron?

  time to go back to work. It's time for you to do a good job again. Casey has spent years using his platform to subtly defend these companies, these companies that actively make their shit worse. And he occasionally proves he can be a real journalist. There is a whole series of articles he wrote about the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk that was genuinely important, fighting for workers as well as members of the platform, decrying horrible things that Elon Musk was saying and doing. You can do this, Casey. You can actually do this. But then it feels like you slip back into, "Am I being too mean to Meta?"

• 20:32Ed Zitron?

  I'm not gonna single Casey out further, and I really wanna make it clear, my frustration here isn't that I think Casey's stupid or poorly connected. Quite the opposite, I think Casey's quite smart. I think Casey's fully capable of doing this. It's why it's so sickening when you go and look back and see what he's done. And I really need you to know how important it is to have really great independent writers and not have them scared to do things, because a guy who clearly has some allegiance with the powerful wants to scare them. You can't scare Gary Marcus, nothing scares Gary Marcus, it's actually kind of remarkable. Actually, kind of weird, but this isn't about Gary. Now, the media and people like Casey, and this is another frustrating thing as well,

• 21:15Ed Zitron?

  they're super influential over public policy and the overall way that society views and judges tech. As an experienced, knowledgeable journalist, Casey is too regularly chosen to frame fair and balanced as, "Let's make sure the powerful get their say too." As I've said, and I will continue to say, Casey is fully capable of doing some of the literal best journalism in tech. And I always cite his Facebook moderation stuff, it's really good. He fought for people that were victims of a horrifying corporate machine.

• 21:45Ed Zitron?

  Yet he keeps choosing not to do that, and I don't know what it is. I'm not gonna, I actually don't consider Casey and Kara Swisher the same thing. I don't know Casey's intentions. All I know is what he's done. And all I know is that if we are to push back on authoritarianism, that if we're actually going to tell the truth to people and help people understand what's happening to them, we can't keep doing it this way. We can't. And the cost of doing it this way is that the powerful have used people in the media as mouthpieces to whitewash these horrible little fucking product decisions, these terrible things they've done. And I don't know why Casey, I mentioned it, like, I don't know his intentions. I really don't. But what I do know is that as a result of Casey Newton's work, Mark Zuckerberg and

• 22:30Ed Zitron?

  his products have received a continual amount of promotion for ideas and air cover for their failures. And as a result, public policy has been directly influenced.

• 22:41Ed Zitron?

  And it's just frustrating. It can be better. It should be better. And while Newton has acted for years like nothing was wrong with the quality of the platforms themselves, he's been able to write with clarity and purpose about other things. And if he did the same thing, and I would be, I will be completely serious. If he changes his tune, I'd be so happy. We need Casey Newton actually challenging these companies meaningfully. And I don't know what would change that. But I will say, don't threaten fucking writers, Casey. Don't do that. I don't like bullying. I won't tolerate it in this fucking tech media. I'm going to oink and squeak at you all I, all I possibly can. Don't talk about taking detailed notes about people. It's greasy. It's gross.

• 23:24Ed Zitron?

  And I think that the consequences of supporting these companies, of making sure that when something bad happens, they have a newsletter with 150,000 subscribers that they can go to and get a kindly story. That's just worrying. And it can be better. Casey can be better too. But the consequences here are horrifying. And they're all, also just reading these stories again just fills me full of bile, as if I'm usually that calm. Putting aside the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is this horrible career liar and this charlatan, he's deliberately hurting billions of people. He has been doing this for a while. And I believe that by being given air cover for so long,

• 24:07Ed Zitron?

  and now having this mask off moment, where he can just say, I don't give a shit. He's now, I would not be surprised if Zuckerberg turns on the media. Well, maybe they'll help him. I don't know. But I think that where we are right now, with this kind of unvarnished, unrepentant Mark Zuckerberg, I think that all of the changes he's making at Meta, it's going to create this new era of decay. I think he is going to inspire tech executives, unburdened by the kind of flimsy approach to societal norms and customer loyalty. I think he's going to inspire them to make their shit even worse from here. I think Meta has fired the gun of the slop society. And yes, I came up with a new term because this is the beginning of the shittiest shit that ever did shit.

• 24:52Ed Zitron?

  In an interview with the Financial Times from December 2024, Meta's VP of Product for Generative AI, Connor Hayes, said that Meta expects AI to actually over time exist on Meta's platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do, each one having their own bios and profile pictures and the ability to, and I quote, "generate and share content powered by AI on the platform." This came hot off the heels of Mark Zuckerberg saying in a quarterly earnings call that Meta would, and I quote, "add a whole new category of content which is AI-generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way", effectively promising to drop AI slop into feeds already filled with recommended and sponsored slop from real people that gets in the way of you seeing the things you actually log on to their platforms to look at.

• 25:35Ed Zitron?

  Now, this whole thing in the Financial Times, it led to a kind of scandal where users discovered what they believed to be brand new AI profiles. Karen Attier of the Washington Post wrote a long thread on Blue Sky in a piece in the Post itself about her experience talking to a bot she fairly described as "digital blackface", with Meta receiving massive backlash for these bots that would happily admit that they were trained by a bunch of white people. It turns out, by the way, that these bots have been around for over a year in various forms that were so unpopular that nobody really noticed in 2023 until the Financial Times story came up at the end of 2024, leading to Meta deleting the bots, at least for now, though I'm hearing reports you can still get to them if you really need to talk to a ChatGPT version of what someone who thinks a gay black person is.

• 26:19Ed Zitron?

  And I'm really describing the literal bot here, Liv is the name, really disgusting stuff. And I'm 100% sure, by the way, that these chatbots are coming back because it's fairly obvious that Meta intends to fill your feeds with content, whether it's entirely generated or recommended or summarized or whatever it is. And AI-generated slop is already dominating the platform. And as discussed earlier, the quality of the platform itself has already fallen into a kind of ultra disrepair, mostly because Meta's only concern is keeping you on Instagram or Facebook so that they can show you more ads or content that they've been paid to show you, even if the reason you're seeing it is because you can't find the things you actually want to find. And I keep repeating that point for a reason because that's how Meta makes money.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  We believe in starting with your financial goals, not a formula. At Oppenheimer, we put the full strength of our longstanding expertise to work, understanding your life and your ambitions, and designing the precise strategies that build and protect your wealth with confidence, across this generation and the next. Put the power of Oppenheimer Thinking to work for you. Wealth management, capital markets, investment banking.

• 28:18Ed Zitron?

  And all of this is because, well, like everything in this show, all roads lead back to the rot economy, which is the growth-at-all-costs mindset that means that the only thing that matters is the growth of revenue, which comes from showing you as many ads as possible and you being engaged with the platform as much as possible. But I'm gonna be honest, it's almost ridiculous to call us users of Facebook at this point. We don't use Facebook, Facebook uses us. It's trite, but it's true. We're victims. We're all victims of the rot economy. And I said it at the end of last year, but with Facebook, I really think it's at its most grotesque. We're not users, we are the used, we're the punished, the terrorized, the tricked, the scammed, the abused.

• 29:00Ed Zitron?

  We're constantly using this app, trying to get things that we actually want. We're constantly forced to navigate through layers of abstraction between the thing we're allegedly using and the features we'd like to use. It's fucking farcical how little attention has been given to how bad tech products have gotten, and few have decayed as severely as Facebook thanks to this near-monopoly they have over social media. I, personally, would rather not use any of their products, but there are people I know who really only speak to me on there, and I know many people who have the same experience. Don't call me a loser, alright? I've gone to a lot of therapy, I don't call myself that anymore. Anyways.

• 29:36Ed Zitron?

  Zuckerberg and his people are intimately aware, though. People don't really have anywhere else to go. Which, along with a lack of regulation and a fairly compliant media, has given Mark Zuckerberg and Meta permission to do just about anything they want to increase advertising impressions. Which in practice means giving you more reason to stay on the platform. Which means putting more things in the way of what you want to see, rather than creating something you'd want to see in the first place. It's the same thing that happened with Google Search, where the revenue team pushed the search team to make search results worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people search for things on Google. Because you know, a user that finds what they're looking for quickly spends less time looking at ads. And that's just not how it works for Prabhagavand. Haven't said his name in a while.

• 30:18Ed Zitron?

  But this is why the App Store on Apple devices is so chaotic and poorly curated as well. Because they make money on the advertising impressions they get from showing you ads as you search for apps. Also, this is why so many products on the App Store have expensive and exploitative microtransactions too. Apple makes 30% off of all App Store revenue. Even if the app sucks, even if the app tricked you and said, "Oh yeah, we're gonna charge you, uh, weekly." And they hide the weekly. You think, "Oh, $3.99 a month, right?" No, it's weekly. It's in a tiny little, little note at the bottom. Apple eventually gets rid of those people. Eventually. And I believe that Mark Zuckerberg loosening community standards and killing fact checking is just the beginning of tech's real era of decay. You think the rotten economy is bad today?

• 31:04Ed Zitron?

  It's only getting worse. See, it's... Trump really inspires people, horrible people, by bulldozing norms. Doing things that we would all agree we would never do, like being noxious and toxic and racist.

• 31:19Ed Zitron?

  And in the process moves the Overton window, which is the range of acceptable things in a society, further and further and further into the toilet, aggressively flushing it as he goes. But really, we've already seen tech's Overton window shift for years. A lack of media coverage of the actual decay of these products and a lack of accountability for tech executives, both in the media and regulation, has given these companies the permission to quietly fuck up their stuff, to make their services worse, to make more growth happen. And because everybody made things shittier over time, it became accepted practice to punish and trick customers with dark patterns, design choices to intentionally mislead people. To the point that the FTC found last year that the majority of subscription apps and websites use them.

• 32:00Ed Zitron?

  I believe however that Zuckerberg is gonna move the tech overton window a little bit further. Look, he's publicly saying "we are going to fill your feeds with slop", "we're firing 5% of our workers because they're not good", "and we're gonna have AI profiles instead of real people on the site you visit to see the real people you know", "and we don't really give a shit about marginalized people to the point we're formalizing it in policy", "we're ending our DEI initiatives", "and people are too mean to men", "these are the things that Mark Zuckerberg is using to signal the fact that he does not give a rat fuck about you" "or the users of his products", "and he knows that in his position at the CEO is one of the most powerful companies in the world", "let alone tech companies by the way", "people are gonna follow", "not just in tech but really in tech",

• 32:44Ed Zitron?

  "tech's already taken liberties with the digital experience", "and I believe this slop era is gonna be one where experiences will begin to subtly and overtly rot", "with companies proudly boasting that they're making adjustments to user engagement" "that will provide better business-forward outcomes", "which will be code for make things worse so we make more money", "I realize there's also an obvious thing I'm not saying", "that the Trump administration isn't gonna be any kind of regulatory force against big tech", "Trump is perhaps the most transactional human being to ever grace the earth", "big tech knows this", "which is why all of them have been donating random $1 million checks to him", "to his inauguration fund", "it's why Trump has completely reversed his position on TikTok", "which is banned or unbanned depending on what's happening today", "I'm recording this, it's back up, I don't use it, it's weird, I don't like it",

• 33:29Ed Zitron?

  "something's wrong there", "I thought even with the app before, like, something's weird with it now", "you can't post about Meta negatively", "but tech knows, or at least thinks, that by kissing the ring, they can do whatever they want", "now, I should be clear that" "previous governments have not been particularly effective at curbing the worst excesses of big tech though", "I think we can all agree on that", "EU's done some stuff, but even then", "the qualities, there's no quality standards", "outside of the last few years and specifically the work done by the FTC under Lina Khan", "antitrust against big tech has been incredibly weak", "and really has been pretty weak against everyone else as well", "and no meaningful consumer protections exist to keep websites like Facebook or Google functional for consumers", "or limit how exploitative they can be",

• 34:12Ed Zitron?

  "like, they can't just have vats of piss in your drinking water", "why is this any different", "and yes, I consider spam a form of piss", But the media really has failed to hold them accountable at scale, which has in turn allowed the Overton window to shift on quality. And now that Trump and the general MAGA-fied mindset of you can do or say whatever you want if you do so confidently or loudly enough, has risen to power again. And so too will an era of outright selfishness and cruelty within the products that consumers use every day. Except this time, I believe, these tech companies finally have permission to enter their real, dirtiest, sloppiest eras. I also think that Trump gives them the confidence that monopolies like Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft 365, which is Microsoft's enterprise monopoly over business productivity software,

• 34:57Ed Zitron?

  things like Google Search and Google Advertising, which I realise remedies are coming for, but I really think a lot of these are going to remain unchallenged. And even if they're not, I don't think anything exists to make these companies start getting better. But what I'm really describing is an era of industrial contempt for the consumer, a continuation of what I described in The Invisible War and The Invisible War Criminals from last year, where big tech decides that they will do whatever they want to consumers within the boundaries of the law, but with little consideration of good taste, user happiness, or anything other than growth. Now, how this manifests in Facebook and Instagram will be fairly obvious. I believe that the already fucked up state of these platforms will just massively accelerate. Meta's going to push as much AI slop as it wants,

• 35:41Ed Zitron?

  both created by its generative models and their users, and massively ramp up content that riles up users with little regard for the consequences. And I wouldn't be surprised if the generative content is political too. Instagram will become more exploitative and more volatile. Instagram ads have been steadily getting more problematic, and I think Meta will start taking ads from just about anyone. And this will internally to an initial revenue bump. But then, I hypothesize, a steady bleed of users that will take a few quarters to truly emerge. And we're already kind of seeing it with Facebook. Go back to the Rockcom bubble from last year.

• 36:15Ed Zitron?

  Sadly, I think we're already seeing the abuse, these abusive practices come out elsewhere. Both Google and Microsoft are now forcing generative AI features onto customers, with Google grifting business users by increasing the cost of Google Workspace by $2 per user per month, along with adding AI features that they didn't want. And Microsoft has now raised the price of consumer office subscriptions, justifying the move by adding copilot AI features that, again, nobody really wants.

• 36:43Ed Zitron?

  The information John Victor and Aaron Holmes add that it's yet to be seen what Microsoft does with their corporate customers using Microsoft 365's productivity suite, adding code pilot costs, by the way, $30 per use per month. But I also hypothesize that they're going to do exactly the same thing that Google did. They're going to knock up the prices and they're going to go, "But you got free AI." Isn't free, isn't free if I have to pay more, mate. That's not how free works. I should also be clear that the reason they're doing this is because they're desperate. These companies must express growth every single quarterly earnings or see their stock prices crater. And big tech companies have oriented themselves around growth as a result, meaning that they're not really used to having to do things like compete for a customer or make a product

• 37:27Ed Zitron?

  that the customer might like. For over a decade, tech has been rewarded for creating growth opportunities empowered by monopolistic practices. And I'd argue that the cultures that created the products that people remember actually liking, yeah, they're dead. They've been killed. And the people that did them, the people that built those products, well, they've been strangled too. They've been pushed out of the tech industry. The soldiers of the rot economy are manifold, and they're willing to do whatever it takes to make things grow. And you are more than likely already seeing signs that this is happening. The little features on products you use that feel broken, like when you try and crop an image on iOS and it sometimes doesn't actually crop it, and when the copy link button on Google Docs doesn't work, when a Google search gives you a page of forum

• 38:12Ed Zitron?

  links that don't answer your question, I expect things to get worse, possibly in new and incredibly frustrating ways. I'm being a little dramatic with all that stuff, but these are the little niggling problems in your head. These are things poking you in the head as you use these apps every day. Don't pretend like this shit doesn't piss you off. Don't pretend that the little interruptions, the little problems you get from these things don't annoy you. And if they don't, great, I wish I could engage with a little level of calm. I'm very mentally healthy, it may not come across in the podcast, but I find these things just very frustrating because there's no way in hell that the people using these products don't see them. Or they don't use their products. Both of these are utterly reprehensible.

• 38:56Ed Zitron?

  And I deeply worry that we're gonna enter now into the most irresponsible era of tech yet. Not just in the harms that companies allow or perpetuate, but in the full rejection of their stewardship from the products themselves. Our digital lives are already chaotic and poisonous. Different incentives warring for our attention. User interfaces corroded by those who believe everything is justified in pursuit of growth. And I fear that the subtle little problems you see every day will both multiply and expand, and that the core services we use will break down. Because I believe the most powerful people in tech never really gave a shit, and no longer believe that they have to pretend otherwise. Now, like the end of every episode, you may think, "Hey, that's all just very sad." There is a funny thing I'm hypothesizing happens.

• 39:42Ed Zitron?

  I think as crappy as these companies are gonna get, I think users are just gonna stop using stuff. They're all saying, "Oh, well, they don't have anywhere else to go. We got them on Facebook and Instagram, they're fucked." What are they gonna do, not use Instagram or Facebook? Yes. Yes. I actually think that that's what's really coming.

• 40:02Ed Zitron?

  I think that these companies assume that they are unkillable. They assume that because they've never really been held accountable, not by governments, not by the media. Though there are people in the media who have, nevertheless, never consistently accountable, and certainly not for the quality of the services they provide. They're arrogant. They're lazy. There are probably startups that could come for them. There are genuinely ways that these companies can be stopped. And though they may be unrepentant in the dogshit they serve you, they're only doing that because they're desperate, but also because they don't think there's ever gonna be other competition. And history has kind of proven that that never happens, that there is always a bigger fish, to quote Qui Gon Chin in The Phantom Menace.

• 40:47Ed Zitron?

  Classic movie about trade. Anyway, point of making is, nothing is unkillable. Nothing's unstoppable. Every empire, even the worst one, ends.

• 41:01Ed Zitron?

  There is a good chance in the next 10 years that Meta actually collapses. Mark Zuckerberg is doing this meaningless fake masculine bullshit because he realizes he doesn't have much left. He may have all that money, but his platforms suck, his users hate them. He's twisted and hurt people, billions of people at a time. He knows that the party's ending. Online advertising is falling apart. I think things are going to get very interesting in the next years, frankly, in the next months. But I'll leave you with some hope again. None of these companies are unkillable. Every single company in tech history that's thought they were, died. MySpace died, and yeah, it was a different circumstance.

• 41:44Ed Zitron?

  But Meta, while they may seem unstoppable, relies on advertising for 99% of their revenue. Things like ad blockers, things like even subtle changes in the EU about how ads can be served to customers. Like the opt-in feature for ads is deadly for them. If anything happens to online ads, Meta will die. AI is not going to save them. AI will not save Mark Zuckerberg. And if he truly pulls the top off of this and says, you know what? I'm just going to serve them shit at scale. I'm just going to slop them up, slop them up. AI slop in every profile. No one's going to go on Facebook anymore. They're already losing traffic.

• 42:27Ed Zitron?

  And if they do that to Instagram, which is the one meaningful thing they still have, they're completely double fucked. And if you think that Google search can't be competed with, nah, I don't even think that that's the case either. I think the remedies of that trial mean that they have to start sharing their search data. All of these companies can be beaten with or without regulation. But it also starts with not using their shit anymore. I'm really working out how I can start deleting myself from these services. I don't know how I'm going to do it. I'm already going to delete myself from threads after this. I need Instagram, there are people that like I can't talk to elsewhere. I don't know, not super close friends or just people that like talking on there more than elsewhere. Some of you probably feel like that too. Don't give up hope, alright? Don't...

• 43:13Ed Zitron?

  There's the whole thing about not bending the knee and all that, but a big thing authoritarianism really wants from you is to give up in advance. It's not just about controlling you, it's about making it so that you don't stay angry, that you don't stay outraged at these people. I'm trying really not to tell you how to feel here. I'm just saying if you feel the frustration with these companies, all that these people, Zuckerberg especially, have is their names. You think Mark Zuckerberg's going on the Joe Rogan experience and going, "Mmm, men, men are mistreated because he's secure"? No. All of these men, all they have is their names. So talk about the things they've done. Tell people about how bad Facebook is now. Maybe they know. Maybe they've never really looked close enough.

• 43:59Ed Zitron?

  I can't give you the exact skeleton key to life, but I can tell you, things get better through discussions, things get better through everybody agreeing that things should be better. It's a start. I really appreciate all of you listening to this show. Better Offline is going to be so weird this year. The whole talk radio segment was so good in CES and I enjoyed doing them in person at the beautiful iHeartRadio studios in New York. If you've made it this far, you must really like my voice, so thank you for listening. We will be back next week. We'll be back next week with another Talk Radio segment. Thank you.

• 44:40Ed 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 betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 45:12Speaker 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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