How The Tech Media Can Beat The Rot Economy

Summary

Podcast Summary: Better Offline – "How The Tech Media Can Beat The Rot Economy"

Episode Overview

In the February 19, 2025 episode of Better Offline, host Ed Zitron delves deep into the pervasive "rot economy" within the tech industry and examines how the tech media plays a pivotal role in perpetuating this cycle. The episode critiques the relentless pursuit of growth by tech giants, highlighting the detrimental effects on product quality, user experience, and societal well-being. Zitron calls for a transformative approach within the tech media to counteract these negative trends and advocate for more user-centric advancements.

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1. Introduction to the Rot Economy

Ed Zitron opens the episode by painting a grim picture of the current tech landscape:

“Sometimes recording this show kind of feels like narrating the end of the world and watching as the growth at all costs economy kind of poisons every corner of our digital lives...”
— Ed Zitron [02:20]

Zitron criticizes major tech companies for prioritizing revenue and engagement metrics over product functionality and user satisfaction. He cites impressive profit figures juxtaposed against declining product quality:

• Meta: $20.8 billion profit from products deemed nearly non-functional.
• Microsoft: $24.11 billion profit despite deteriorating productivity tools.
• Google: $26.5 billion profit with a declining search experience.

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2. Misalignment of Incentives

Zitron argues that tech companies have shifted their focus from creating value to extracting it, leading to products that complicate rather than simplify users' digital interactions. This misalignment results in:

• User Frustration: Products like Facebook's newsfeed prioritize engagement over meaningful connections, inundating users with irrelevant content.
• Degraded Search Experiences: Google’s search algorithms no longer serve user intent effectively, turning simple queries into convoluted data scrambles.
• Aggressive Monetization Tactics: Services like Dropbox push annual subscriptions aggressively, locking users into long-term commitments without clear benefits.

“The business of making our shit worse to increase revenue growth year over year. It's absolutely booming.”
— Ed Zitron [02:45]

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3. The Decline of Product Quality

Highlighting specific examples, Zitron underscores how product decisions are driven by profit motives rather than user needs:

• Facebook: Prioritizes AI-generated content over authentic user interactions, leading to a cluttered and irrelevant newsfeed.
• Google Drive: Criticized for poor user interface design and functionality, making file management unnecessarily frustrating.

“Look, we don't use the computer, we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do.”
— Ed Zitron [04:15]

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4. The Role of Tech Media

Zitron turns his focus to the tech media, asserting that it contributes significantly to the rot economy by:

• Promoting Corporate Narratives: Instead of critiquing, tech media often magnifies corporate successes without addressing underlying issues.
• Lack of User-Centric Reporting: Coverage tends to focus on market trends and executive actions rather than how technology impacts everyday users.
• Hype Over Substance: Technologies like ChatGPT are lauded as revolutions without substantial discussion on their actual utility or drawbacks.

“The tech media has been poisoned by a mixture of ignorance and cynical optimism...”
— Ed Zitron [20:30]

Zitron calls for the tech media to adopt a more critical and user-focused approach, emphasizing the real-world implications of technological advancements.

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5. Love for Technology Amidst Criticism

Despite his criticisms, Zitron expresses a deep appreciation for what technology can achieve:

“I do not believe that the majority of people actually hate technology. They hate what the technology industry has become in search of growth.”
— Ed Zitron [07:50]

He acknowledges the positive aspects, such as instant connectivity, global collaboration, and the ability to manage businesses online. However, he laments that these benefits are overshadowed by the industry's current trajectory.

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6. Call to Action for Change

Towards the episode's conclusion, Zitron outlines a path forward:

• Reform in Tech Media: Shift focus from corporate narratives to genuine user experiences and the societal impact of technology.
• Accountability for Tech Giants: Highlight and challenge companies that prioritize profit over product quality and user satisfaction.
• Empower Users: Encourage listeners to demand better from their technology and support media outlets that advocate for meaningful change.

“The media decided that they would be the ones that would prove it for them... I'm not re-recording that.”
— Ed Zitron [18:15]

He emphasizes the importance of collective effort in combating the rot economy, fostering a tech environment that truly serves its users.

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7. Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode

Ed Zitron wraps up the episode by teasing the next discussion, which will focus on identifying the individuals responsible for the current state of the tech industry and strategies to counteract the pervasive issues.

“In the next episode, we're going to talk about the people responsible for this mess and the kind of morass of filth that our digital lives have become...”
— Ed Zitron [28:45]

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Better Offline serves as a compelling critique of the tech industry's current practices and the media's role in sustaining them. Zitron's passionate discourse sheds light on the urgent need for a paradigm shift towards more ethical, user-centered technology development and reporting. Listeners are encouraged to reflect on their interactions with technology and advocate for a digital landscape that prioritizes genuine value over superficial growth metrics.

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Notable Quotes

• “We're not logging on to whatever social networks we're on because we're ready to be pissed off or we want to have our lives interrupted by weird slop.”
  — Ed Zitron [05:10]

• “The tech media has been poisoned by a mixture of ignorance and cynical optimism where the narratives are driven not by any particular interest or domain expertise...”
  — Ed Zitron [20:45]

• “Regular people are also furious at the state of software and fully aware that they're being conned.”
  — Ed Zitron [19:30]

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Stay Connected

For more insights and discussions on the intersection of technology and society, subscribe to Better Offline on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred podcast platform. Visit betteroffline.com for additional resources, including the newsletter and community forums.

Transcript

[Ed Zitron]

Hey, man, what are you into? I have the hookup.

[Damian]

The hookup? The hookup for what? I'm solving a mystery through sex and haven't made a private dick joke until now. Poppers. Why are there so many poppers? All roads lead to the hookup.

[Ed Zitron]

You think it's causing people to turn aggro? I'm gonna rip your arms off and use them to.

[Damian]

Yeah, that's a word for it. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Jay Shetty]

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. My latest episode is with financial expert Scott Galloway.

[Scott Galloway]

If you are doing a lot of side hustles, it's very, very difficult to be great at your main hustle. The only way you're going to build real wealth and economic security is to go all in on one thing. That is greatness. Focus. Scott is a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business.

[Ed Zitron]

Scott Galloway.

[Jay Shetty]

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alec Baldwin]

Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast here's the Thing, I speak with musician, photographer, and philanthropist Julian Lennon.

[Julian Lennon]

One of the really important things that happened to me with photography was I would have people write to me, people that couldn't financially afford to travel the world. And what they had all said to me is that you bring these stories to us, you bring the truth, you bring cultures that we would never necessarily know anything about.

[Alec Baldwin]

Listen to the new season of here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jon Stewart]

Jon Stewart is back at the Daily show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondence and contributors, and with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Zitron]

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitro. And you know, sometimes recording this show kind of feels like narrating the end of the world and watching as the growth at all costs. Right Economy kind of poisons every corner of our digital lives, changing everything in search of growth, growth of revenue, growth of engagement metrics, growth of anything and My core frustration isn't just how shitty things have got, but how said shittiness has become insanely profitable for so many companies. Meta made $20.8 billion of profit in its last reported quarterly earnings off the back of products that are bordering on non functional. Microsoft made $24.11 billion in profit with an increasingly deteriorating series of productivity products and cloud based solutions that its customers absolutely fucking hate. And Google made $26.5 billion in profit from multiple monopolies and making its core search product worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people search for stuff. You see the business of making our shit worse to increase revenue growth year over year. It's absolutely booming. The products you use every day are more confusing and more frustrating to use because everything must grow. Which means in practice that product decisions now driven in many cases by companies trying to make you do something rather than do something for you, which in turn means that basic quality control, things like, I don't know, usability or functionality, they're more secondary considerations to the good grander rot economy thing. It's why your Facebook newsfeed doesn't show your posts from friends and family, but happily bombards you with AI generated slop of weirdly shiny faced old people celebrating their birthday alone with a weird heartstring tugging caption that doesn't really make any sense. It's why whenever you search for something not just on Google, but anywhere, the keywords you use aren't treated as an explicit instruction of something you want to do or see, but a kind of interpretive dance of information where maybe something you want comes out at the end. Look, we don't use the computer, we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do. Because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user. Too often when you open up an app, you start bargaining with the company behind it. Like Dropbox is a great example. You log in and it says, hey look, you could save money switching to an annual plan this big pop up, and if you agree to that, they've just secured your annual recurring revenue and they've done something that they hope you'll forget, which is switch you from a monthly to a yearly subscription. You forget that, well, you're stuck with them for a year. Tech companies have the perseverance and desperate hunger for your money of a timeshare salesman, and they're even more craven. And by the way, all of these things I'm talking about with negotiating with the computer, this is assuming Whatever you're doing actually loads. We're all familiar with the tense moment when you open up Microsoft Teams and just hope it doesn't crash. Or that maybe, I don't know, your camera or your video works or your audio works, whether anything actually works. We live in this weird state of constant digital microaggressions. And as I said last year, it's everywhere banking apps that now have helpful assistance that get in the way of flipping banking pop ups during online shopping, that promise discounts in exchange for our emails and phone numbers so they can spam us notifications from apps that are built to push us to interact further rather than like. And by the way, a great example here is Instagram. Someone just posted a comment on someone else's post notifications. Not sure if you got those. Or like the emails we get from Amazon about an order shipping that don't include any of the actual information. These are things that are happening not because the company is like, oh well this better for the customer, but because they need you to do something or they need to stop someone doing something else. In the case of your Amazon emails, by the way, if you're wondering why you don't get, you don't actually get to see what's in an Amazon package when it ships now. Well, the reason is because Google was scraping your Gmail and finding out stuff about what people were buying on Amazon. So Amazon just stopped doing that. They stopped providing any of that information when your stuff shipped. Now Amazon absolutely makes money off of this themselves. This is Amazon's business, not Google. No, no, no, no. You can't rot our customers. They're ours to rot. Yet my and I, I'm going to imagine your frustration with tech isn't born with any kind of hatred of technology or a dislike of the Internet or a lack of appreciation of what it can or could or used to do. But the sense that all of this was once better and that these companies have turned impeding our use of the computer into a kind of weird charlatan filled bacchanalia of capital. And so much of the pushback I get on my work and the pushback I've seen toward other critics as well is that I hate technology. But I'd like to argue that my profound disgust and anger is born of a great love of technology and a deep awareness of the positive effects it's had on my life. I don't turn on the computer every day wanting to be pissed off. And I don't imagine any of you do either. We're not logging on to whatever social networks we're on because we're ready to be pissed off or we want to have our lives interrupted by weird slop. If anything, we'd love to be delighted by the people we chose to connect with and the content we could consume and want to simply go about our business without just these microaggressions created by this growth desperation from companies that are just running out of Runway. They're running out of things to sell us and well, they don't know how to build things we'd like anyway. Technology has in many ways stopped being about using technology to help people do things, or at the very least, help the user do something that they want to do. Software has, as Marc Andreessen said It would in 2011, eaten the world, and has done so in the nakedly cynical and usurious way that Marc Andreessen really wanted it to. Prioritizing the invasion of our life through prioritizing growth and the collection of as much data as possible in the user over any particular utility or purpose or value in a stock. Andreessen his ilk saw and I believe they still see software not as a thing that provides value, but as a means for the tech industry to penetrate and disrupt as many industries as possible, pushing legacy providers to, and I quote, transform themselves into software companies rather than using software to do things or make products better. Andreessen describes Pixar, the studio that made movies like Toy Story and Inside out, and they were acquired by Disney in 2006 by the way. He describes them as a software company rather than a company that uses software to make movies. And that distinction is really important. I realize it sounds like semantics, but let me put it another way. Software has, for the tech industry, become far more about extracting economic value than it has in providing it. When the tech industry becomes focused on penetrating markets, to quote Andreessen, software companies taking over large swaths of the economy, there's little consideration of whether said software is prioritizing the solution to a problem. And nowhere is this more obvious than the software we use in our professional lives. Microsoft Teams is one of the single worst products I've ever used, because Microsoft's goal isn't to make it easy to have digital meetings, but to make a product good enough and cheap enough to make it easy for your boss to buy the entire Microsoft 365 suite, even if most of the suite sucks and people hate it and it doesn't work sometimes or a lot of the time. And here's another great example. Google Drive. Google Drive is one of the worst products of all time. The people responsible for designing Google Drive's user interface should be made to explain themselves before a judge. Why can't you sort files by side? Why does it only show an image and video thumbnails when viewing a folder in a grid layout? Why when you attempt to move a file to a folder, other suggested folders, literally the first window you say always wrong without fail. I know these things sound like I'm just complaining, and goddamn am I, but this is what it is today. This is Google. A company with like $3 trillion market cap and they can't fucking make their cloud storage product work. Jesus Christ. Look, the proliferation of software throughout society has been led by the stewards of the rot economy. As software, along with its associated managed services, can effectively proliferate infinitely and can take advantage of how many corporations are run by management consult, of course, filled with middle managers. And they are the enemy as well. And these people don't do any real work or have any true connections to the problems they're solving. When your goal is winning the market or dominating the market, you're not necessarily optimizing for having a great product or even really happy customers. Selling software to a big company doesn't require you to speak to everybody who might use it. You're selling hundreds or thousands of seats, users who might access the product. That's what that means, by the way, to management in kind of the gestalt. Just this idea of we're selling to a blob of people. And what would the person at the top who wouldn't necessarily touch this, what would make them feel horny? What would make them feel happy? What's going to make them feel warm and fuzzy inside? Because let's be honest, your manager or their manager isn't really using any of this shit. They just want to see what it looks like and it feels good to buy and it fits within the budget. And they get taken out to a nice dinner. Or perhaps the person mentions they watch the same baseball team, some bullshit like that.

[Damian]

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? Ow. Go slower. I met Santi at a luau party in October.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm Santi.

[Damian]

Damian. Oh, it was bizarre. The guy just disappeared one day. Santi has been missing ever since the hookup. What is that? I'm solving a mystery through sex and haven't made a private dick joke until now. Like no matter how hard I try, all roads lead to the hookup.

[Jay Shetty]

You think it's causing people to turn aggro.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm gonna rip your arms off and use them to.

[Damian]

Yeah, that's a word for it. This is such terrible representation. I'm so sorry. Poppers.

[Ed Zitron]

These aren't just any poppers.

[Damian]

Mama always used to say God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. No, my psychiatrist didn't laugh at that one either. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Alec Baldwin]

Everyone's forgotten who runs this valley. Time to remind them.

[Jay Shetty]

Yellowstone fans, step into the Yellowstone universe.

[Ed Zitron]

Dark family legacy Is this ranch My.

[Alec Baldwin]

Protector of my Life.

[Jay Shetty]

Hosted by Bobby Bones, the official Yellowstone Podcast takes you deeper into the franchise that's captivated millions worldwide. Action Explore untold behind the scenes stories, exclusive cast interviews and in depth discussions about the themes and legacy of Yellowstone.

[Alec Baldwin]

You know, the first stuns to settle valley fighting was all they knew.

[Jay Shetty]

Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the ranch, welcome to the Yellowstone. Bobby Bones has everything you need to stay connected to the Yellowstone phenomenon.

[Ed Zitron]

I look forward to it.

[Jay Shetty]

Listen to the official Yellowstone Podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alec Baldwin]

Let's go to work.

[Tisha Allen]

The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear?

[Angel Yin]

I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success.

[Tisha Allen]

Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well being@soundedout together.org that's sounditout together.org brought to you by the ad council and pivotal I'm Tisha.

[Allen]

Allen, former golf professional and the host of welcome to the Party. Your newest obsession about the wonderful world that is women's golf. Featuring interviews with top players on tour like LPGA superstar Angel Yin.

[Angel Yin]

I really just sat myself down at the end of 2022 and I was like, look, either we make it or we quit.

[Allen]

Expert tips to help improve your swing and the craziest stories to come out of your friendly neighborhood country club. The drinks were flowing, twerking all over the place, vaping.

[Tisha Allen]

They're shotgunning.

[Allen]

Women's golf is a wild ride full of big personalities, remarkable athleticism, fierce competition, and a generation of women hell bent on shanking that glass ceiling. Welcome to the Party with Tisha Allen is an I Heart Women's fourth production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to welcome to the party that's P A R T E e on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast presented by Elf.

[Ed Zitron]

Beauty, founding partner of I Heart Women's Sports. You see the people leading the charge in the tech industry and Andreessen Horowitz, by the way. They've been one of the biggest and most influential players in Silicon Valley history. And now Andreessen has something to do with the Trump administration. I'm just trying not to think about it. They've never really seen their primary purpose as the creation of value for anybody other than the people selling software. And this manifests in the rest of your daily lives in far simpler ways. Pop ups from shopping apps you downloaded to make just one purchase, or misleading notifications from Instagram shouting about how you have new views that don't actually lead anywhere, or autoplaying adverts that proliferate on every single news and reviews website. It's having to re log into websites and news websites in particular every day because everyone must pay and nothing could possibly get through. They could not possibly have. You read a New York Times article or a Forbes article for free anymore. And it's emails from online retailers you swore you unsubscribed from, and perhaps you did, but you have no way of tracking for sure, and there's not really a government body that gives a shit about that anymore. Maybe in the future. And it's all the times you've had to create new passwords because of another data breach that happened and the company didn't even bother to meet the basic security standards because again, who would stop them? All of these annoying little examples are inherently hostile towards you, the user, and they're a direct result of a tech industry oriented around growth, driven by the pernicious and aggressive poison of growth focused software. The rot economy has changed the incentives of everything you see and do on the computer. The websites you read that inexplicably recommend laptops that are actively painful to use because of the affiliate revenue they drive to the website's owners with the intent being driven by the way, not by the writers by but by manager who don't really look at the product or care about the laptop, they just care about number going up. It's a It's when Instagram swaps the location of your notification and message buttons, discounts on stores that require both your email and your phone number, social networks that put things in the way of you trying to find the people and the things you actually logged on to See all ways in which software can be used to extract from you, trick you, and mislead you, and control you. And when I say control, I don't mean that these companies have the ability to subconsciously manipulate you and your desires. It's more that they have spent decades finding new ways to gaslight you and bully you into doing things they'd like you to. Everybody knows that Instagram sucks. And it sucks because there's things that you actually want to do on Instagram that matter is hidden behind hundreds of little user interface quirks optimize to increase your time on the app and thus the amount of money you make them by being on there. Also, as an aside, have you ever tried to search for something on Instagram? You can't just type in words and see what you want to see. It allows you to search for certain phrases and it's not really clear what makes a phrase acceptable or not or work. You can have two queries, each with the same words, but arranged in a slightly different order, and Instagram will let you search for one and not the other. It's just so weird. And the post you'll see will contain only some of the keywords, which. Which in the end makes search irrelevant. The other day, I searched for the name of an event with the word live in it, hoping to see whether someone had live streamed it. Instead, I got hundreds of posts that just had the word live. I love the future. I love living in the future. I love that Facebook and Meta, they just make like $20 billion a quarter and their product just fucking sucks. And even if you get semi relevant results, they won't even be organized in any particular coherent fashion. You'll see content from recent weeks mixed in with stuff from over a decade ago. You can't even search recent posts using a hashtag. Instagram removed that feature a couple of years ago, and no amount of caterwauling from users has persuaded them to put it back because they don't really give a shit. And it's not like Instagram's alone in doing this. Everybody knows that Google search sucks because it's optimized to provide results that make the company more money by showing you more ads. But we use it because, well, the Internet's a very big place. And search, while broken, provides enough of a service that it's useful to the point that we'll push through the bullshit to get to the things we kind of want. And now, to quote the comedian Conor O'Malley, fucking computer's bullshit. It's fucking sick. It's not cool anymore. It's not fun. It's not fun to be on the fucking computer.

[Alec Baldwin]

They changed everything about it.

[Ed Zitron]

It used to be so cool. Google search was at one point extremely cool. Something that used to give users a sense of peace and control over an Internet that had grown so vast it was kind of hard to grasp and even once felt like a place you'd go to find, like a crazy idea. With Google a quality search result. Facebook was instrumental in me building my life here in America when I moved in 2008, both in connecting with the people I went to college with at Penn State and operating as a kind of digital address book where people, and this is an insane concept I know, used to post updates about their lives and pictures of things that they were doing on Facebook. I know that this is a strange concept to some of you, but there was a time when people did that on Facebook. In a way, someone might describe it as like social networking. Crazy, right? Anyway, once upon a time, Apple's App Store had actual quality standards, both in the apps themselves and the services they sold, which made downloading a new app feel kind of exciting because your first pop up wasn't for some sort of monthly subscription. Product sold, sold in a weird way where it's like, oh, it's actually a weekly one and with the X to get away from it, hidden on a white background with a white X. Hi. I know I'm romanticizing things a little bit. Capitalism is capitalism. These companies were still worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and evil incentives still exists. And I realised that Microsoft and its monopoly over operating systems is a really good example of how wrong this might be. But nevertheless, the experience of using hardware and software felt like it was fucking you less, it was less exploitative. The stuff we used felt like it worked. And for the absolute avoidance of doubt, none of this is to say that these companies were ever perfect or even good, or even had good intentions. Nor is any of this an attempt to cheerlead for them. This is not a shift to me becoming more fair either, which is usually, by the way, a euphemism for waving away the actual wrongs of a company. I don't get free shit. And even if I did, I'd tell you. I would tell you, if someone wants to send me a free laptop, brilliant. It won't change my mind about shit. Anyway, as much as I may like any given product, these companies are providing a service as a means of making money. I am, as you are, a customer. And the fact that so many of these companies are making so much more money as they make these products so much worse. It fills me full of fucking poison. It makes me very angry. And the reason I'm so onerously explaining this is that I do not believe that the majority of people actually hate technology. They hate what the technology industry has become in search of growth. In fact, I'd argue that deep down many people love technology. We love that we can instantly connect to friends using little computers in our pockets, or that we can share photos or videos with effectively anyone, anyone with an Internet connection. And I quote someone talking about me here. By the way, as one of big tech's angriest critics, I must confess that I absolutely love what I can do with the computer. As deep down I'm kind of a broken hearted romantic that can see beneath all the slop and the shit and the growth and the bullshit, there are many different things I truly, deeply love. I love that I can write a script or a newsletter and I can share it with my editor thousands of miles away, that we can work on an idea or a sentence in real time, despite being an entire landmass in an ocean a apart. I love that I can be in New York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas and make a podcast that gets beamed around the world through fiber optic cables and satellite connections. I love that I can run a business online from anywhere with a stable Internet connection. And I love that during work I can also quickly and easily catch up with my friends wherever they are. I can be there for people and people have been there for me. And it's wonderful. Beneath the bullshit of Google search lies the ability to research decades of journalism and academia. And my fury and disgust comes from seeing such a great product get mangled by fucking Prabhagar Raghavan and and Sundarpish ice so they can make more fucking money. And the problem is that we as a society still act like technology is some distinct thing separate from our real lives. And that in turn, technology is some sort of hobbyist pursuit. Mainstream media outlets have a technology section with technology reporters that are hired to cover and I quote, the tech industry optimizing not for any understanding or experience in using technology, but some 30,000 foot view of what the computer people are doing this week. This may have made more sense 20 years ago, though I'd add that back in 2008 you had multiple national newspapers with multiple tech columnists and computers were already an integral part of our work and personal lives. But in the year 2025, it's fundamentally fucking stupid. And a failure of modern media. Every single person you meet in every single part of your life likely interfaces with technology as much as, if not more than, they do with other people in the real world. And the tech coverage they read in the newspaper online does not represent that experience. It's why a relatively modest software update for Android or Windows earns vastly more column inches than the fact that Google, a product that we all use, does not work anymore. And you could argue, well, a software update for Android that hits a lot of people. Wow. Cool, right? Frankly, it's not like they cover that much anymore either. Used to be that new Android launch would actually have some stuff and people would talk about it. It was fun. But it isn't fun anymore.

[Damian]

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? Ow. Go slower. I met Santi at a luau party in October.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm Santi Damian.

[Damian]

Oh, it was bizarre. The guy just disappeared one day. Santi has been missing ever since. Since the hookup. What is that? I'm solving a mystery through sex and haven't made a private dick joke until now. Like, no matter how hard I try, all roads lead to the hookup.

[Jay Shetty]

You think it's causing people to turn aggro?

[Ed Zitron]

I'm gonna rip your arms off and use them to.

[Damian]

Yeah, that's a word for it. This is such terrible representation. I'm so sorry, poppers.

[Ed Zitron]

These aren't just in the.

[Damian]

Mama always used to say God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. No, not my psychiatrist didn't laugh at that one either. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Alec Baldwin]

Everyone's forgotten who runs this valley. Time to remind them.

[Jay Shetty]

Yellowstone fans, step into the Yellowstone universe.

[Ed Zitron]

Dark family legacy is this ranch and.

[Alec Baldwin]

I, Protector of my life.

[Jay Shetty]

Hosted by Bobby Bones, the official Yellowstone Podcast takes you deeper into the franchise that's captivated millions worldwide. Action, explore untold behind the scenes stories, exclusive cast interviews and in depth discussions about the themes and legacy of Yellowstone.

[Alec Baldwin]

You know, the first stuns, the second valley fighting was all they knew.

[Jay Shetty]

Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the ranch, welcome to the Yellowstone. Bobby Bones has everything you need to stay connected to the Yellowstone phenomenon.

[Ed Zitron]

I look forward to it.

[Jay Shetty]

Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast Now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alec Baldwin]

Let's go to work.

[Allen]

I'm Tisha Allen, former golf professional and the host of welcome to the Party. Your newest obsession about the wonderful world that is women's golf, featuring interviews with top players on tour, like LPGA superstar Angel Yin.

[Angel Yin]

I really just sat myself down at the end of 2022 and I was like, look, either we make it or we quit.

[Allen]

Expert tips to help improve your swing and the craziest stories to come out of your friendly neighborhood country club. The drinks were flowing, twerking all over the place, vaping.

[Tisha Allen]

They're shotgunning.

[Allen]

Women's golf is a wild ride full of big personalities, remarkable athleticism, fierce competition, and a generation of women hell bent on shanking that glass ceiling. Welcome to the Party with Tisha Allen is an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to welcome to the Party that's P A R T E e on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tisha Allen]

Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of.

[Ed Zitron]

I Heart Women's Sports.

[Tisha Allen]

The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear?

[Angel Yin]

I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success.

[Tisha Allen]

Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well being@sounditout together.org that's sounditouttogether.org brought to you by the Ad Council and pivotal.

[Ed Zitron]

As a result, it's worth considering that billions of people actually really like what tech does for them, and in turn, they're extremely pissed off and frustrated with what technology does to them. The problem is that modern tech media has become oriented around companies and trends rather than the actual experience of a real person person living in reality. Generative AI would never have been any kind of movement or industry if the media had approached it from the perspective of a customer and said, okay, right, what does this do exactly? And by the way, the same goes for Metaverse and Crypto. No real products there. But fuck it, right? It's what the market's like. And rather than fold their arms and demand the tech overlords actually prove themselves, the media decided that they would be the ones that would prove it for them. Describing ChatGPT as a revolution without ever really expressing why. Parroting now driven by massive corporations or associated interests, of course, and tutting at those who would disagree. Thank you, Casey. There were multiple other companies doing exactly what GPT3 did months before Chat GPT launched. It only caught fire because the media insisted it did. So to this day, I still can't find a single journalist who has a cogent explanation as to why ChatGPT is big, other than the fact that lots of people use it and a lot of rich people want it to be big. The problem, I believe, is that the tech media has been poisoned by a mixture of ignorance and cynical optimism where the narratives are driven not by any particular interest or domain expertise, but by whatever they believe the market or the powerful people they admire would like it to be. And if you hear this and you're getting offended in the media, I shouldn't be talking about you. If you think I'm talking about you, that's your fucking problem. You need to wipe your own ass. Don't come shit at me anyway. I know for the fact that senior editorial staff are the problem too, because they are handling technology at multiple major mainstream publications and don't really care about it or understand it or have any real interest in tech other than the vague attachment to the idea that maybe it's important somehow. As a result, mainstream tech coverage is focused on market effects like AI or whatever the other thing everybody wants to read about. And by everybody, I mean rich people and editors that don't fucking read. And it's never really directing that coverage towards what is happening to real people as a result of or from being affected by technology or using technology. And I also think that the tech media has been infiltrated and controlled by people that want to be famous or associate with famous people. I think they want them to win. They want a benevolent dictator. They want their products to do so well so they can get the interview with the big name founder or CEO on stage at a conference and have Sam Altman say some bullshit that gets quoted everywhere. They want access for big interviews and they want to make sure that they get the first look at the next product Release, even if 11 other people are doing so too. While one might argue that people want to hear about AI, what people want to hear about is largely driven by the media narratives that the media creates and agrees upon. You realize that if you just all talked about turnips, it would be the fucking turnip news, right? You could cover whatever you want, but the people parroting these narratives, much like the executives they admire, do not find any joy in tech at all. Nor do they experience or care care about the problems that tech might solve or create for a real person. Well, I don't care whether a regular person has enthusiasm or domain expertise in tech. I believe that anyone working in the tech Media should have genuine interest in the tech itself, actual real domain expertise. Actually, I want you to actually fucking use the products you're working on. If you want to talk about agents to me, I want you to come out and fucking use one. I want you to talk about it because you'll know it's bullshit. And I want you in the tech media, if you're listening to this and you're not already someone that's talked to me and agrees with me or whatever, I want you to have the ability to say, okay, for a regular person, does any of this shit actually fucking matter? And I don't want you to extrapolate from there and say, well, in the future, maybe if it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you turned over a theoretical draft, would your editor fucking run it? No. The tech media continually acts without context or conscience with any kind of appreciation of how much worse things have gotten. While I understand that it's hard to break editorial direction at a major newspaper, any and all coverage of Facebook should, by rights cover the fact that Facebook is fucking broken and has been for years and has never made more money than it does today. Because that in and of itself is completely horrifying. Any discussion of ChatGPT should add that it lacks any real killer app and that the company that runs it, OpenAI, burns billions of dollars a year. And I, I don't know, discuss how this thing doesn't really have any real fucking use cases and never did. And how do we hype? Why did we hype this? What's going on? What are we doing here? What are we doing? Really, if you're in the tech media, what are we fucking doing? Why do you cover AI? Why are you covering generative AI? What does this do? Why do you care? Often it's big. Why do you care? Why do you care? Why do you care? Email me at my web zone, easyteroffline.com. you had my phone number? More than likely. I don't know. Contact me, tell me. And I swear to God, if you say to me it's because there's a lot of money. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I feel crazy. I don't care. I feel like I'm going insane when I have these conversations because the actual AI products, they just fucking. They fucking suck. They fucking suck. There are some use cases, sure. The AI Companions, whatever. The AI journals, fine. Is that a trillion dollar industry? Not my ass. Fucking. By the way, those what's going on. Why is this important questions. These are the things I get from my readers and my listeners every single day. And I love hearing from all of you, by the way. Keep getting in touch. Regular people, people that work outside of the tech industry, teachers, writers, artists, authors, academics, criminals and so on have been asking what the fuck any of this was since the beginning. And the fact they're still asking is a damning indictment of the tech media. Really large were still regular people. Regular people are also furious at the state of software and fully aware that they're being conned. Yet the tech media continually frames the growing distrust of the tech industry as some result of political or social change or accumulation of scandals, rather than the big unspoken scandal called how the tech industry made things worse in the pursuit of growth and the greater scandal of exactly how much contempt tech regularly treats their customers with. And more importantly, regular people feel like they're being gaslit by the tech media. I'm regularly told by the people that listen and read me that they're glad to have someone say simple things like, hey, the apps we use that. Do you ever feel like they're fucking with you? Or like, hey, yeah, that ain't. That's true. That's not you being crazy. That actually happens. And here's how. And doing that regularly helps people. If you're in the tech media listening to this, this is where you actually need to be doing things. I don't give a rat fuck about generative AI anymore. It's really frustrating, and I know I'm going on and on and on, but the feedback I regularly receive is that there are too many articles about technology that seem fundamentally disconnected from reality, or at least disconnected from the people at the receiving end of the product. You talk about how much money OpenAI has, you talk about the 300 million weekly users, and that number is kind of bollocks, by the way. Going to get into that in a later pod. Why don't you talk about what happens next? Why don't you talk about how regular people actually use it? Shout out to Shira Vida at the Washington Post. She's been on this with ChatGPT since 2023. There are good members of the tech media. It's just all of this is just very frustrating. But at the risk of sounding like a cliche, that's all the time we have today. But we're not done. There's another episode coming up. Next episode, we're going to talk about the people responsible for this mess and the kind of morass of filth that our digital lives has become. And I want to talk about their motivations behind it. And I want to talk to you about how we can fight back. Because this is a fight and it's one we need to win. And it's one I believe we can win. I'll hear you in the next episode. Well, I guess you'll hear me, but I'm not re recording that. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osalski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at easyetteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat where's your Ed app to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. 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 podcast Podcasts. Hey man, what are you into? I have the hookup.

[Damian]

The hookup? The hookup for what? I'm solving a mystery through sex and haven't made a private dick joke until now. Poppers. Why are there so many poppers? All roads lead to the hookup.

[Ed Zitron]

You think it's causing people to turn aggro? I'm gonna rip your arms off and use them to.

[Damian]

Yeah, that's a word for it. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Jay Shetty]

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. My latest episode is with financial expert Scott Galloway.

[Scott Galloway]

If you are doing a lot of side hustles, it's very, very difficult to be great at your main hustle. The only way you're going to build real wealth and economic security is to go all in on one thing. That is greatness Focus. Scott is a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business.

[Jay Shetty]

Scott Galloway, Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alec Baldwin]

Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast here's the Thing, I speak with musician, photographer, and philanthropist Julian Lennon.

[Julian Lennon]

One of the really important things that happened to me with photography was I would have people write to me. People that couldn't financially afford to travel the world. And what they had all said to me is that you bring these stories to us, you bring the truth, you bring cultures that we would never necessarily know anything about.

[Alec Baldwin]

Listen to the new season of here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jon Stewart]

Catch Jon Stewart back in action on the Daily show and in your ears with the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now. Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners, like in Earth depth interviews, and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.