Ed Zitron (29:36)
The Internet allows us to do so many things and what we see today is both a technological marvel and a disgrace to humanity. We right now have the ability to talk to somebody thousands of miles away to send them a photo of a video of what we're doing to meet people we'd never meet in real life and build meaningful relationships with them as a creator, a writer, whatever the hell you call me. I'm able to shoot the shit with my Buddy Casey in SoCal or my editor Matt Hughes in Liverpool, and I'm able to do so about the same speed and as a result write thousands of words of ideas and perform these long podcasts where I get extremely mad that that. Well, Matt Osawski or Matt Hughes ends up editing all with a few clicks and I can distribute my newsletter to 55,000 people and the podcast to a number larger or smaller that I can't say than that it's kind of cool. I can go on bluesky and shoot the shit with people I know well or who I've just met or never met in my life and have a blast doing so. I can sit in my living room and play a video game while I stream music from my phone to a big speaker in a few taps. And this technology has become more and more accessible as the years have gone on. It's really cool. And we live in a time when technology does really, really cool things that help billions of people. These companies can innovate and they can make our lives better. The problem is that software may have actually eaten the world and growth holds software's leash. The rot economy sits above all things. It's not enough for Apple to make iterations of the iPhone that are better and faster. It must sell more of them every quarter. And the software sitting in those iPhones must continue to generate monthly or quarterly revenue or annual reven revenue in perpetuity. The websites you read that have page wide ads, they're all run by people that don't read anything and must see revenue numbers increase. And they're doing so because they're looking for startup metrics in media which has never ever worked. And that's the same way that the Match group must always find new ways to increase quarterly revenues for their dating apps. Even if the way they do so is to make them cost more money to connect with people and to obfuscate the connections that we log on to find. Mind each of these ideas a miniature little computer that sits in our pocket and gives us access to the world's information or an app for falling in love. They're extremely cool. Yet the reckless incentives of the rot economy and growth have poisoned them. And like I've said, I don't hate this stuff. I love it. I'm a broken hearted romantic. The Internet made me who I am. And it allowed me to thrive both as a person and a professional. And it continues to do so every day, except now I have to fight seemingly every app and service to get them to do what I want. As I've said before, I will never forgive these people for what they've done to the computer, as I love what the computer has done for me and I hate what the computer now does to other people and myself because Apple, Google, and Meta need to increase quarterly revenues. Well, look, it's easy to give into pessimism here, but I'd argue that the better alternative is to be loud and annoying and extremely verbal about the problems you see. Every single website you use has a feedback form, and I really encourage you to use them as I encourage you to complain about these problems on social media and to regularly say the names of the people who caused these problems to everybody. You know, if you're feeling particularly spicy, perhaps write your elected officials that you believe the quality of digital products you're using is getting worse as a means of increasing stock prices. And add that doing so is anti democratic, anti competitive, and un American and very harmful. But really, just say un American. Say to them, like, look, this isn't real business. This isn't what America's for. And I realize why that might not sound so good right now, but maybe listen to this in the future. And there's another idea. I think a lot of these executives have email accounts. Why not let them know how you feel? I'm not saying be horrible or rude like Jeff. Amazon.com I think, like, you don't need to. Don't. Don't be horrible to these people. Really, please don't. But I think you should look them up and let them know how bad things have become and mention how long you've used them and how bad they are and how you're going to keep emailing them every couple weeks. Let them know you don't want to spam them, you don't want to threaten, you don't want to be nasty. You just want to very patiently let them know. Because these people, they're insulated, they're safe. They don't have anything that really scares or upsets them. They read their emails. That's the one thing I know. But another thing you can do is be less useful. If you use Instagram, use it in a way that actively generates less engagement. Click through a few stories, then drop off the app. Don't use the feed, avoid clicking or staying on any ads. Go through them quickly. And as Jeff Fowler at the Washington Post recommends reset your feed regularly. Delete the data that these companies have on you regularly and there'll be links, by the way, to this. And anytime a company asks you for feedback that isn't about a customer service rep, skip it. Close the browser. That data is only useful for them. In general, engage with apps less, both in the amount of time you spend on them and the amount of time you interact with their features and obsessively read every single privacy policy. These companies make billions of dollars off idle muscle memory based use of their software, so get used to their tricks and work against them. And if you really don't use the service, stop using it. By the way, I'm not going to judge you for staying on any of them. I'm still on Instagram because it's where a lot of my friends are and I like seeing what they're up to. Again, I'm not against these products in principle, I just hate what they've become. But more importantly, I want you to find solidarity with others against the rot economy. Every single person you meet is a victim. Every single person you meet faces similar problems to you. And every single person you know is likely pissed off at email, spam, the collapse of social networks and Google, or the abominable state of modern business software. We all have this. This is a thing that all of us deal with. It's bipartisan, it's cross culture, it's cross class. Though I would argue it hurts people the lower their income is, much like most of America. And this is something we all face. And I know that it sounds kind of schmaltzy to be like oh you're a fellow man, but really it is. I don't know how else you connect with people, but I guarantee their software pisses them off. But the reason that these companies have been able to penetrate and poison so many things using software is a combination of lax regulation and hostile societal approach to technology. They want. No, no, no. They need you to feel hopeless. They need you to think that they're too big, that they can grow forever or do whatever they want to you, and that there'll never be enough negative sentiment to change their ways. The reality is these people are extremely vulnerable, extremely unprepared, and they don't know how to deal with pushback. Tech executives are poorly media trained, thin skinned, and have never faced any meaningful negative consumer sentiment largely because they've never faced any meaningful competition. They simply do not believe you will act in a way that doesn't benefit them because they've done literally everything they can to make it difficult to avoid or leave their systems. They need you to think that things will always be this bad or that they'll get worse, and for you to just sit there and take it, rather than screaming in their fucking faces about what they're doing and saying it's unacceptable. They want you to give up. Don't let them destabilize you. Do not let them pump you full of cynicism, of pessimism, of the belief that there's nothing good and thus that there can be nothing that will ever change that. We're in this unchanging hell. We are not going forward. One of my missions with this podcast is to give you the language to describe what is being done to you and the names of those responsible for doing it to you. I fundamentally believe that anyone can understand the stuff I'm talking about and that the tech behind it is not magic, and that the terrible things being done to you are being done in the name of the rot economy and perpetual growth, and that none of these things are mystical or require some insane background. You can do this. I talk to so many of you over email and it's awesome because you're teachers, robbers, you're people that drive into banks and with a big car. No, no no. No more criminal stuff. Please keep that off the Reddit. But generally most of the people that contact me are non tech people. You all seem to fucking get it. I don't know what the problem is and I want you to understand this stuff so you can make better decisions and also understand that you are the victim of a con where you've been convinced that you were behind the times when the tech industry just actually gave up on serving you. Our economy and the majority of public companies are run by people who do not face any real problems or do any real work. And the tech industry, run by similar people, has oriented itself around building products and services to sell them. These people do not use their own products, or if they do, they do so in such a distant way it doesn't really matter if they suck. It's time to speak about these companies and this software in plain terms. We are in an era of rot, our markets dominated by a growth obsessed death cult so powerful that it's just accepted that the only good stocks are those that grow every single quarter. A good company is no longer one that provides a good service or that will be around in 10 years. No, it's one that provides a service in such a way that they can jack up the prices or upsell customers while also somehow getting more customers. If anything, the rot economy is kind of like a global Ponzi scheme where the only companies that succeed are the ones that can continually get more customers and come up with new ways to get more customers that don't exist yet, even if the service or the goods provided are back bad. It doesn't matter to these companies that the only thing that grows forever is cancer and the perpetual growth could very well falter and then crash everything. It's short term thinking all the time. And I want you to start seeing everything through the lens of growth and I believe everything will start making more sense as a result. And these companies don't even have to do it this way. Success and being a decent, in the moral sense of the word, sparingly in the case of capitalism, you can do this as a company. These things are not mutually exclusive. These companies could have modest 2 to 5% growth each quarter. They could make good software that people like. They could do all of these things, but they choose not to. They'd rather hurt us because growth is more important to them than whether our lives fucking suck. They'd rather refuse to maintain or rigorously test their products, especially their software, because investing in customers doesn't grow your customer base as fast as focusing on finding new ones. And these things have been happening for over a decade. And being able to explain them for you, I mean, it's important. You need to be able to do this in plain English. Having conversations about this is important too. Talk to your friends and your family and your co workers about this stuff. They're all dealing with it too. I don't care if my work's involved, just tell them what's fucking happening. Look, you can't change the world on your own. And you may very well go through the world without changing much at all. But in your own small way, you can at the very least contribute to a greater hope and positivity in the bubble around you. You, the ideas you have of a fairer, better, more inclusive world, one where people are not vilified for being who they are, are shared by most people. We outnumber them and we outnumber them by an overwhelming margin. The demands you make of the world do not necessarily need to be realistic, but they can be fair. It's not unfair to demand a tech industry that is worth, I don't know, a few hundred billion dollars while providing a service that largely benefits the world around us. At the very least, we can ask for shit that works. Discussing ideas what a better world might look like. It's eternal. It's the root of humanity. It's what gives us light in the darkest times and what the darkest people in the world wish to rob of us. Not simply hope, but the ingredients of hope, the stuff that builds the foundation, that allows us to truly believe. This isn't to say any of this will be an easy process, nor one without deep, dark moments, but at the very least, we can have standards and beliefs in ourselves of what better looks like. I know it kind of feels a little silly to hold up better software and technology as such a serious concept, but I think the world as it stands is suffering due to the tolerance we've had for the horrifying conditions of modern software, which has now been deeply penetrated into every part of our lives, in some cases leaving trash lying around that we find ourselves tripping over all the time. Software has, to some extent, truly improved humanity, allowing levels of connection that are truly special, both with those we know and those we barely know. It has, however, grown without restraint, without true accountability for those who write it and deploy it, and, let's be honest, barely maintain it, or actively and consciously striving to undermine it. I cannot promise you that we'll ever have solutions to any of these problems. But I can, as you can, say what a better world looks like. And a better world is one where software works for, not against, the people that use it. There's no harm in liking or even loving technologies. Liking it allows you to more articulately explain why you fucking hate what they've made of it. Expressing what good looks like, what you love allows you to cut deeper with your hatred for those who have caused you so much harm. This starts, by the way, with naming those responsible for poisoning the world with software. Sundar Pishai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Tim Cook and Phil Schiller, who runs the App Store of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and the other invisible war criminals responsible for the destruction of our digital lives. They have nothing but their name. The tech industry is so woefully unprepared to deal with regular people having the language and understanding of their horrible acts. Crisis PR for tech does not know how to deal with real people saying, why did you fuck up my website? In the thousands or millions, these people have never, ever dealt with real accountability or even a real conversation about what they're doing and why they're doing it. We deserve better, so we should fucking ask for. 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@matasowski.com m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezeteroffline.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 Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Coolzone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever.
