Transcript
Osvaloshin (0:00)
Do you want to see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human? On tech stuff we travel from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars, from conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok to ask burning questions about technology, from high tech to low culture, and everywhere in between. Join Us Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Alec Baldwin (0:30)
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policy makers, and so many other fascinating people like writer and actor Dan Aykroyd.
Dan Aykroyd (0:45)
I love writing more than anything. You're left alone, you know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon. Go pick up a kid from school and write at night and after nine hours you come out with seven pages and then you're moving on.
Alec Baldwin (0:58)
Listen to here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you.
Tisha Allen (1:04)
Get your podcasts, you are cordially invited to the hottest party in professional sports. 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, tips to help improve your swing, and and the craziest stories to come out of your friendly neighborhood country club. Welcome to the Party with Tisha Allen is an iHeart woman'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 podcasts.
Unknown (1:48)
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Ed Zitron (2:22)
Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. Of course, I'm your host, Ed Zitron. Better Offline Here to serve, Here to podcast. In the last episode I walked you through the how the so called sudden magification of meta is really just them formalizing the rot economy, the growth at all cost bullshit that drives the entire company making the products worse to grab more advertising impressions, 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 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 rockstars. They want to be in their orbit, to humor 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 Meta's problems. Kevin Rusol at the Times with Crowdtangle, Jeff Horwitz, and the rest of the team who 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 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. All this retail theft. It's all happening. 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. But let's take it 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, like, 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 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 users of dignity and industry to make their own decisions. And their experiences are constantly interfered with. And the majority of the content that they see is provided by a shadowy algorithm. 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. They think people be just throwing feces 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 jack fucking shit. You can report on the obvious things, on the research, on the harms that Facebook knows. 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 content that either 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 25, 2024, and he happily published how, and I quote again, Zuckerberg was back on the offensive, 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 Gallic 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. Ahem. 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 post2016 tech backlash. Very weird that that's not 20 years. And Zuckerberg, in this case quoting again, is long haunted by criticisms that Meta has been nothing more than the competition crushing copycat since it released the news feed, Zuckerberg has never seemed more intent on claiming for himself the mantle of innovator. 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 master's 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 turn 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 favor of pumping up various AI products and vague promises from Zuckerberg about a future that just arrived and fucking sucks. 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. 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 will 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? 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. 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.