June 13, 2025 • 35 mins
In part three of this week's three-part Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how the era of the Business Idiot has led to a dramatic deceleration in innovation - and how the tech media must fight back against their ridiculous narratives to save Silicon Valley.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
What is a podcast a miserable little pile of secrets?
I'm met Zeitron, and welcome to the conclusion of our
three part episode of Better Offline and the phenomena known
(00:25):
as the business Idiot. In the first episode, we met
our first business idiot. The real princes of them sat
in Adela and talked about the origin of the business
idiot and the rotten ideology that drives them. Then we
talked about the enablers of the business idiots, particularly those
in the media. In this episode, I want to tell
you about where all this goes. Nothing I've said in
this three part should suggest that the business idiot is weak.
(00:46):
In fact, business idiots are in full control. We have
too many managers, and our most powerful positions are valorized
for not knowing stuff, for having a general view that
we can take the big picture from, not realizing that
the big picture is usually made up of lots of
little brushstrokes. Business idiots have a cultural cachet. Then we
aspire to be business idiots, and our education pushes people
(01:06):
to careers where the goal is to climb from the
worker class of the oxygen starved apex of business idiot Mountain.
Yet there are eventually consequences for everything being controlled by
business idiots. Our current society, an unfair, unjust one dominated
by half broken tech products that make their owners billions
and that manipulate and mislead by design, is the real
punishment wrought by growth, A brain draining corporate society, one
(01:29):
that leads it to doing illogical things and somehow making
money doing so. It doesn't make any fucking sense that
generative AI got this big. The returns aren't there, the
outcomes aren't there, and any sensible society would have put
a gun to chat GPT's head and aggressively pulled the trigger.
Generative AI is symbolic of the future of capitalism, one
that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars, one that
(01:49):
surrenders every human work the model can consume, and that
accepts the destruction of our planet, all because everybody kind
of agreed that this is what we're all doing now,
with nobody able to give a convincing expert nation of
what that even is or why we're doing it. Generative
AI is revolting, both in how overstated its abilities are
and in how continually it tests how lower standards somebody
(02:10):
will take for a product, both in its outputs and
in the desperate companies trying to integrate it into everything,
and its proliferation throughout society and organizations is already fundamentally harmful.
We're not just drowning in a sea of slop. We're
in a constant state of corporate AI beta test. New
features sprouting out of our products, like new limbs that
sometimes function normally but often attempt to strangle us. You
(02:31):
know what the stand in that episode of JoJo's Stop It.
It's unclear of companies forcing these products on us have
contempt for us, or simply don't know what good looks like,
or perhaps it's both, with the business idiot resenting us
for not scarffing down whatever they serve us, as that's
what's generally worked before. They don't really understand their customers.
They understand what a customer pays for and how a
(02:51):
purchase is made, you know, like the leaders of banks
and asset managers during the subprime mortgage crisis didn't really
think about whether people could pay those mortgages, just that
they needed lot of them to put in a cedo.
The business Idiot's economy is one run and built for
other business idiots. They can only make things that sell
to companies that must always be in flux, which is
the preferred environment of the business idiot, because if they're
(03:12):
not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new innovations,
they'd actually have to interact with the underlying production of
the company and the people actually doing the work. Does
the software work? Sometimes the successful companies exist that sell
like this. Sure, but look at today's software and tell
me with a straight face that things feel good to use.
And something like generative AI was always inevitable. An industry
(03:33):
claiming to change the world that never really does so,
full of businesses that don't function as businesses, full of
flim flamm half truths used to impress people who will
likely never interact with it, or do so only in
a passing way, by chasing out the people that actually
build things in favor of the people that sell them.
Our economy is built on production puppetry. Just like GENERATIVEAI,
and especially like chat, GPT and Claude. These people are
(03:55):
antithetical to what's good in the world, and their power
deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive and honestly,
any true innovation. The business city it thrives on alienation,
on distancing itself from the customer and the thing that
they consume, and in many ways, from society itself. Mark
Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, and he said
that to the Wall Street Channel Samuel and wants us
to have fake colleagues in the form of the agency
(04:16):
makes that don't fucking work and increase and an increasingly
loud group of executives salivated the idea of replacing us
with a fake version of us that will make a
shittier version of what we make for a customer that
said executive doesn't give a fuck about. And yeah, that
is describing a form of slave, especially if it's conscious.
I mean, if it's not conscious, it isn't. But the
moment you make AGI, you've got a real fucking problem
(04:36):
on your hands.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
They're never going to do it.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Also, what if the AGI is just dumb? What if
it doesn't want to work?
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Anyway?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
The business IDI it's a building products for other people
that don't interact with the real world. We're no longer
the real customers and so we're worth even less than before,
which is as is the case in the world dominated
by shareholder supremacy, not all that much to begin with.
They don't exist to make us better. The business IDY
it doesn't really care about the real world or what
you do do, or who you are, or anything other
than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is
(05:04):
why so many squealing little middle managers look up to
the Musks and Altman's of the world, because they see
in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, somebody
who's above work and thinking and knowledge and doing stuff disgusting.
But one of the most remarkable things about the business
IDIA is their near in vulnerability. Modern management is resource control,
shifting blame away from the manager, who should hold responsibility.
(05:26):
After all, if you don't, why do you have a
fucking job onto the laborer, knowing that the organization and
the media will back them up. Or you may think
I'm making a generalization, the twenty twenty one to twenty
twenty three anti remote work push in the media was
grow tesque proof of where the media's true allegiance lies.
The media happily manufactured consent for return to office mandates
from large companies by framing remote workers some sort of
(05:46):
destructive force doing all they can to discuss how modern
management has no fucking idea how the workplace actually works now.
These articles were effectively written as fan fiction for managers
and bosses demanding that we return to the office, ridiculous
statements about how remote work failed young people, which it didn't,
or how employees needed remote work more than their employers
because the chit chat and lunches and happy hours are
(06:07):
so important that they're really not. I'm also going to
link to these and in the notes, I've written a
lot about the remote work push and the people who
were pushing for us to return the office. It's actually
where I got started, and it really was the ultimate
jokification for me. It's what actually set me on the
path the better offline, because it's when you saw both
(06:29):
how little the bosses knew what was going on and
how willing people in the media were to support them.
And these were people people writing these stories were journalists
that were going to be forced back to the office
and ended up being so, and they were like, yeah,
this is actually it's actually good that we go into
the office. And when you ask the journalists, hey, what
do you get to the office, they say well, one
time I ran into someone and we had a good idea,
(06:52):
or it was quicker to walk over to someone's desk.
Does that mean the work was better? No, but the
vibes felt better, I guess. I also't know way more
people who just fucking hated working in the office. But
these articles rarely, if ever, cared about whether remote work
was more productive or the disconnect appeared to be between
(07:12):
managers and workers. Now, had any of those reporters every
spoken to an actual worker, they'd say that they valued
more time with their families rather than the grind of
a daily commute, so often with the promise of an
occasional company pizza party, which usually happens outside of the
typical working hours. Anyway, and these articles and this period,
it was from the very beginning about crushing the life
(07:33):
out of a movement that gave workers more flexibility and
mobility while suppressing managers' ability to hide how little work
they actually did. I do give credit to CNBC in
twenty twenty three for saying the quiet part out loud
that and I quote, the biggest disadvantage of remote work
that employeers cide is how difficult it is to observe
and monitor employees, because when you can't do that, you
have to hear, actually know what they're doing and understand
(07:55):
their work. Jesus Christ. Now I'm with the managers, how discussing.
But yet higher up the chain the invulnerability continues. CEOs
may get fired I mentioned it before, and more getting
fired than ever. It turns out, although sadly not the
ones we want, they always receive a golden parachute at
the end before walking into another role at another organization
(08:16):
doing exactly the same level of nothing. Yet before that happens,
CEO is allowed to pull basically every lever before they
make they face any kind of accountability. They can lay
people off, they can freeze pay, they can move from
people from salary to contracted workers. They can close down sites,
they can offshore, they can cut certain products. They can
even spend more fucking money so they lose less. If
(08:36):
you or I misallocated billions of dollars on stupid ideas,
we'd be fired and we'd have real trouble finding more employment.
We would be well known for our incompetence, and indeed
we would be in real trouble and there would be
real problems finding more work. If we were a big
stupid piece of shit.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
When CEOs do that, they get board placements, they get
other positions. They can run companies head into the ground.
Let me give you an example. Microsoft CEO Sachan Nedella
said and I quote that the ultimate computer is the
mixed reality world, and that Microsoft would be inventing new
computers and new computing in twenty sixteen, pushing his senior
executives to tell reporters that Hololenz was Microsoft's next wave
(09:15):
of computing in twenty seventeen, selling hundreds of millions of
dollars worth of headsets to the military in twenty nineteen,
then debuting HoloLens two at Bill twenty nineteen, only for
the on stage demo to break in real time, calling
for a referendum on capitalism in twenty twenty, then saying
he couldn't overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse in twenty
twenty one. Now let's hear what Nadella had to say
(09:36):
about it, and massive prompts the Preston Growler of Computer
World for writing this piece. AHM. Nadella in that twenty
twenty one keynote made big promises. When we talk about
the metaverse, we're describing both a new platform and a
new application type, similar to how we talked about the
web and websites in the early nineties. In a sense,
the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real
world and to embed the real world into computing. Fucking
(09:56):
what bringing real presence to any digital space. Years we've
talked about creating the digital representation of the world, but
now we actually have the opportunity to go into that
world and participate on it. I just want to be clear,
at this time, Microsoft had nothing of the sort. They
had like websites, They had Microsoft Teams. They tried to
claim Microsoft Teams was a matter of us fucked up,
and as Grella notes, Nedella made big promises beefing up
(10:19):
development in projects such as its Mixed Reality tool Kit MRTK,
the virtual reality workspace project all Space VR, which it
brought back in twenty seventeen, It's HoloLens Virtual Realities headset,
and its Industrial Metaverse unit, among others, before firing all
members of its Industrial Metaverse core team, along with those
behind MRTK, and shutting down it's all Space VR in
(10:40):
twenty twenty three, before discontinuing Hololenz two entirely in twenty
twenty four. Guess that wasn't anything then, Just you know,
it's like like a friend of yours is in a
really chaotic relationship and they just the next stage tag
like it's not happening, or someone tells you they've had
a big moment in their life and they just pretend
it doesn't happen. It was hundreds of millions of dollars
(11:02):
and tons of media coverage where people said, this is
what Microsoft's doing next, this is what happened. It's so
insane that that happened. We really don't talk enough about
how fucking insane. The metaverse thing was just like a
year or so where everyone just played make believe, completely insane.
I of course was right about it at the time,
and it was very fucking clear, and there are a
(11:23):
few people that were negative as well. There were also
some people who claim they were negative who weren't. Their
time will come now. Nadella was transparently copying meta and
Mark Zuckerberg's ridiculous metaverse play, and absolutely nothing happened to
him As a result. The media outlets like The Vergin
Independence like Ben Thompson, happily boosted the Metaverse idea when
it was announced, and conveniently forgot about it the second
(11:45):
that Microsoft and Meta wanted to talk about AI. Not really.
Both the verg and Ben Thompson were ready in waiting
to do literally the same interview, but about a different subject,
no consideration of what was previously said at all. A
true business city it never admits wrongdoing, and the more
powerful the business city is, the more likely there are
power structures that exist to avoid them having to do so.
The media, captured by other business idiots, has become powerfully
(12:07):
poisoned by power, referring to its whims and ideals and
treating CEOs with more respect, dignity, and intelligence than anyone
who ever worked for them. When a big company decides
they want to do artificial intelligence, the media's natural reaction
is to ask how and why and write down the answer,
rather than to think about whether it's possible whether the
company might profit, say by increasing their shareholder price by
having whatever they say printed advobatim. These people aren't challenged
(12:29):
by the media or their employees because their employees are
vulnerable all the time and often are encouraged to buy
into whatever bullshit dju there is, like hostage is held
captive until the media and corporate culture give them Stockholm syndrome.
They're only challenged by shareholders ru agnostic about idiocy because
it's not core to value in any meaningful sense, as
we've seen with crypto, the metaverse, and AI, and shareholders
will tolerate infinite levels of idiocy if it boosts the
(12:51):
value of their holdings. It goes further too. Twenty twenty
one saw the largest amount of venture capital invested in
the last decade, a record breaking six hundred and forty
three billion dollars, with a remarkable three hundred and twenty
(13:14):
nine point five billion dollars of that invested in the
US alone. Some of the biggest deals include Amazon reseller
aggregate e Thrasio, which raised a billion dollars in October
twenty twenty one and file for bankruptcy in February twenty
twenty five. Cloud security company lace Work, which raised five
hundred and twenty five million dollars in January twenty twenty one,
then one point three billion dollars in October twenty twenty one,
(13:34):
and was rumored to be up for sale to Whiz,
only for the deal to collapse and then they ended
up selling for about two hundred million dollars to another company.
And then, of course there was autonomous car company Crews,
which had hundreds of headlines about being the future, raised
about two point seventy five billion dollars in twenty twenty one,
and was killed off in December twenty twenty four. Suddenly,
the people who lose their livelihoods those who took stock
(13:55):
in low of cash compensation, those who end up getting
laid off at the end are always work while people
like Lacework co CEO j Perick, who oversaw reckless spending
and management dysfunction according to the information, can walk into
highly paid positions at companies like Microsoft, as Jay did
in October twenty twenty four, a few months after a
file sale and the one I mentioned before, the two
(14:15):
hundred million dollar one even to a company for fourt
in it. Yeah, this is the behind the actor studio
A bit. I got a little ahead of myself, But
I'm not editing it. Why would I? It doesn't matter
if these people are wrong or if they run their
companies badly, because the business idiot is infallible and judged
too by fellow disconnected business idiots. In a just society,
(14:35):
nobody would ever want to touch any of the C
suite that oversaw a company that handed out Nintendo switches
to literally anyone who booked a meeting, as was the
case with Lacework. Instead, the stank remains on the employees alone.
One point about this, just an aside. Maya's most recent
layoffs were explicitly said to target low performers, needlessly harming
the future job prospects of those handed the pink slip
in an already fucked tech job market. It was cruel
(14:58):
and pointless, and I'm certain of big fat Meta is
spending big on AI and has spent big on the metaverse,
which went nowhere and owns two dying platforms Instagram and Facebook,
and one that's hard to monetize in WhatsApp. It needs
to get costs down and improve margins. Layoffs are one
way to go, and things are getting bad enough to
matter is now, according to the information walking around Silicon Valley,
begging other big tech companies for money to train their
(15:19):
open source Lama LLM as shit is. That is, the
low performance Jive is an unnecessary twist of the knife
demonstrating the metal would gladly throw its workers under the
bus if it serves their interests, because the optics of
firing low performers is different to say, firing a bunch
of people because she keep spunking money on dead end
vanity projects and me too products that nobody wants or
wants to use or can understand. Mark Zuckerberg I add
(15:41):
owns an island on Hawaii. The idea that he even
thinks this much about meta is disgraceful. Go outside, you
fucking freak. Anyway, It's so easy, and perhaps inevitable, to
feel a sense of nihilism about this. Nothing matters, It's
all symbolic. Wild is filled with companies run by people
who don't interact with the business and that raise money
from venture that neither run businesses nor really have any
(16:02):
experience doing so. And despite the fact that these people
exist several extractions from reality, the things that they do
and the decisions they make impact us all, and it's
hard to imagine how to fix it. I don't want
you to live without hope. Understanding how evil these people
are is the first step to things changing, and more
people understanding is genuinely important. But we really do live
(16:24):
in a system of inequity dominated by people that do
not interact with the real world, who have created an
entire system run by their fellow business idios. The rot
economy's growth at all costs manor is a symptom of
the grander problem of shareholders supremacy, and the single minded
economic focus on shareholder value inevitably ends at an economy
run by and for business idios. There is a line,
(16:46):
and it ends here with layoffs, the destruction of our
planet and our economy and our society, and a rising
tide of human misery that nobody really knows where it
comes from, and so we don't know who to blame
and for what. If our economy actually works as a
true mayor autocracy where we didn't have companies run by
people who don't use their products or understand how they're made,
and who hire similarly specious people, these people would collapse
(17:07):
under the pressure of having to know their ass from
their ear hole. Yet none of this would be possible
without their enabling layers, and those layers are teeming with
both business idiots and those unfortunate enough to have learned
from them. The tech media has enabled every single bubble
without exception, accepting every single narrative fed to them by
vcs and startups, with even critical reporters still accepting the
(17:29):
lunacy of companies like open Ai just because everyone else
does too, and because the standard has been set of
if a company raises money, they're real. Let's be honest
when you remove all the money. Our current tech industry
is kind of a disgrace. Our economy is held up
by Nvidia, a company that makes most of its money
selling GPUs to other companies, primarily so that they can
start losing money selling software that might eventually make them money,
(17:54):
just not today, and they're not sure how. In video
is defined by massive peaks and valleys as it jumps
on trends and bandwagons at the right time, despite knowing
that these bandwagons always come to some sort of halt.
The other companies feature Tesla, a meme stock car company
with a deteriorating brand and a chief executive famous for
his divorces from both reality and multiple women, along with
(18:15):
a flagrant racism that may cost the company its life,
a company that we're watching die in real time with
a snagnant lineup, and an actual fucking competition from companies
that are spending on innovation in Europe and elsewhere. Bid
is eating Tesla's lunch, offering better products for half the
price and with far less racism. And this is just
the first big Chinese automotive brand to go global. Others
(18:36):
like Cherry are enjoying rapid growth outside of China because
these cars are actually good and affordable and even when
you factor in the things like tariffs. Hey, remember when
Tesla fired all those people and it's charging network despite
the fact that it's one of the most profitable and
valuable parts of the business, and they meant to then
went and had to hire them back because it turns
out they actually needed them. This is a good example
(18:57):
of managerial alienation decisions made by non workers elon Musk
who don't understand their customers, their businesses, or the work
their employees do. And let's not forget about the cyber
truck and monstrosity, both in how it looks and how
it's sold. It's illegal to drive in the majority of
developed countries because it's a death trap for drivers and
pedestrians alike. Oh and nobody actually wants it. With Tesla
(19:18):
sitting on a quarters worth of inventory they can't sell
elsewhere is Meta a collapsing social network of ninety nine
percent of its revenue based on an advertising model to
an increasingly aged population, and a monopoly so flagrantly abusive
in its contempt for its customers that at times it's
difficult to call Instagram or Facebook a social network. Mark
Zuckerberg had to admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that
(19:40):
people don't use Facebook as a social network anymore. The
reason why is because the platform is so fucking rotten
run by a company alienated from its user base. It's
the crepit product, actively hostile to anybody trying to use it.
And more fundamentally, what's the point of posting on Facebook
if your friends won't see it? Because metas algorithm decided
it wouldn't drive engagement, monument to disconnection. A company that
(20:02):
runs encounter to its own mission to connect people, run
by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who hasn't had a good
idea since he stole it from the Winkle Brothers. I'm
meant to say that Winklevoss Brothers, I'm actually going to
keep him the solution to all that ails him adding
generative AI to every part of Meta, which are shit.
It was meant to do something other than burn seventy
two billion dollars in capital expenditures in twenty twenty five. Right,
(20:24):
it isn't clear what was meant to happen, but the
Wall Street Journals Jeff Horwitz reports that metas ai chatbots
are and I quote empowered to engage in romantic roleplay
that can turn explicit, even with children. In a civil society,
Zuckerberg would be ousted immediately for creating a pedophile chatbot. Instead,
four days after the story ran, everyone cheered they're better
than expected earnings report in Redmond. Microsoft sits atop multiple monopolies,
(20:48):
using tariffs as I mean toduce flailing Xbox revenue, as
it invests billions of dollars into open Ai so that
open Ai can spend billions of dollars on cloud compute,
losing billions of dollars in the process, requiring Microsoft inverst
further money to keep them alive, all because Microsoft wanted
generative Ai'm bing what a fucking waste. And they're also
(21:08):
raising the costs of their office suite too, while which
is only something they've been able to hold on to
because of an underhanded bullshit fest from their antitrustrial from
the nineties. Amazon lumbers listlessly through life. It's giant labor
abusing machines, shipping things overnight at whatever cost is necessary
to crush the life out of any other possible source
of commerce. It's cloud services and storage arm on shore
(21:28):
of who to copy next, dumping billions into anthropic as
a means of creating revenue for their dead end products.
Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Who knows? Who knows
what Amazon is anymore? But one analyst believes it's making
five whole billion dollars in revenue from AI in twenty
twenty five. And you know how much they've put in
capital expenditures this year, one hundred and five billion dollars
(21:49):
in capital expenditures. There are slot machines with better ROI
than this bullshit. Again, Amazon is a company that's totally
exploitive its customers, no longer acting as a platform that
helps people find the shit they need, but directing them
to products that pay the most for prime advertising real estate,
no matter whether they're good or safe. Let's be clear,
(22:09):
Amazon's recklessness will kill someone if it hasn't already. The
products they allow on their are not safe. They do
not give a fucking shit. But then there's the worst
(22:35):
of them, Google, most famous for its namesake, a search
engine that has been reduced as hard as possible and
will continue to be juced before the inevitable anti trust
sentencing that will rob Google of its power, along with
the severance of its advertising monopoly along with them. But
don't worry. Google has a generative AI think for some reason,
and no, you don't have a choice about using it,
(22:58):
because they've now replaced Google Assistant with Google Gemini and
Google Search all but requires you to use their AI.
They burn money for no reason. It sucks, and at
no point do any of these companies seem to be
focused on making our lives better or selling us any
kind of real future. They exist to maintain the status
(23:19):
quo where cloud computing allows them to retain their previous fifdoms.
They're alienated from people, they're alienated from workers, they're alienated
from consumers, and they're alienated from the world. They're deeply antisocial,
they're narcissistic, they're sociopathic, and they're misanthropic, as demonstrated by
zux moronic aisocial network comments, and AI is a symptom
(23:40):
of a reckoning of the stupidity in hubris. They cut,
they cut, they cut, the cut, they cut some more,
and then they stagnated. Their hope is a product that
will be adopted by billions of imaginary customers and companies
and will allow them to cut further without becoming just
a peer box and a domain name. We have to
recognize that what we're seeing right now with generative AI
(24:01):
isn't a fluke or a bug, but a feature of
a system that's rapacious and short, termed by its very
nature and doesn't define value as we do. Because value
gets defined by a faceless shareholder as growth, the system
can only exist with the contribution of the business idiot.
These are the vanguard, the foot soldiers of this system
and a key reason why everything is so terrible all
(24:22):
the time and why nothing seems to be getting better.
Breaking from that status quo would require a level of
bravery that they do not have and perhaps isn't possible
in the current economic system. These people are powerful and
they have big platforms. They're people like Derek Thompson, famed
co author of the Abundance Agenda, who celebrates the idea
of a fictitious version of chat GPT that can entirely
(24:44):
plan and execute a five year old's birthday party, or
his co author Ezra Klein, who, while recording a podcast
where his researchers likely listened, talk proudly about replacing their
work with open ais broken deep research product because anything
that can be outsourced must be and all researches is
looking at stuff. It's relevant if you're a fucking idiot,
and really that's the most grotesque part of the business idiom.
(25:05):
They see every part of our lives as a series
of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books
they've read rather than content, have said books the way
they made them feel, About how many hours they work,
even though they never ever ever work that many, About
how high level they are in a video game they
don't actually play, about the money they've ated than the
scale they've raised it at, and about how expensive and
fancy their kitchen gadgets are, even if they use the
(25:27):
wrong oils. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth, and possession over
any lived experience because their world is one where the
journey does not matter, because their journeys are riddled with
privilege and persecution of others in the pursuit of success.
These people don't want to auter make work, They want
to automate existence. They fantasize about hitting a button and
something happening, because experiencing living is beneath them, or at
(25:50):
least your lives and your once and your joys are.
They don't want to plan their kids birthday parties. They
don't want to research things. They don't value culture or
art or beauty. They want to give to the end.
They want to hit fast forward on anything, because human
struggle is for the poor, the unworthy, and the uneducated.
When you're steeped in privilege and have earned everything basically
(26:10):
through a mixture of stolen labor and office pantomime, the
idea of effort is always a negative. The process of
creation of a fiction of love, of kindness, of using
time not just for an action or output, is disgusting
to the business idiot, because those are the times that
could be focused on themselves or some nebulous, self serving
vision that is, when stripped back to its fundamental truth,
either moronic or malevolent. They don't realize that you hire
(26:33):
a worker not just for the output, but for their
actual labor and their experience in creating that labor and
their understanding of the world around it, which is why
they don't see why it's so insulting to outsource their
interactions with human beings. You'll notice that these people never
bring up actual examples of automating actual work, the mind
numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace,
(26:54):
because they either don't really know what that is, or
they don't really give a shit about what it is.
They are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with
other people, or existing outside of the gilded circles of
socialite fucks and pleurocrats, or just things that are inevitable
facets of working life, like reading an email, your son's
birthday part or a conflict with a friend. Can indeed
(27:15):
be stressful, but these are not problems to be automated.
These are the struggles that make us human, the things
that make us grow, the things that make us who
we are, which isn't a problem for anybody other than
somebody who doesn't believe they need to change in any way.
It's both powerful and powerless at the same time. A
nihilistic way of seeing our lives is a collection of
events we accept or dismissed like a system, prompt the
(27:36):
desperate pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel
a thing until you die. I spent years talking about
these people without giving them a name, because categorizing anything
is difficult. I can't tell you how long it took
me to synthesize the rot economy from the broader trends
I saw in tech and elsewhere. How long it took
me to thread that particular needle to identify the various
threats that unified events that are otherwise separate and distinct.
(27:59):
I am but one person. Everything you've read in my
newsletter or artclesse I've written or heard on my podcast
to this point has been something I've had to learn.
Building an argument and turning it into words, often at
the same time that other people read, doesn't really come
naturally to anyone. It's something you have to work deliberately out.
You might have talent, but you have to work towards them.
It's imperfect. There are fuck ups. I sometimes mispronounced names
(28:21):
and words, including my own name, which Metasowski has always
been kind enough not to laugh at me. About these
podcasts and newsletters, they increase in length and breadth and
have so many links, and I'll never change my process
because part of said process is learning, relearning, processing, messaging
Casey saying Casey, I don't understand this, arguing with Casey
a little bit, coming up with another idea and a
(28:41):
chord is by text. Matt Hughes, I talk with Robert Evans,
I go back and forth with everyone. I get more
pissed off. Then I write, and I really write, and
I speak, and so on and so forth. This process
makes what I do possible, and the idea of someone
automating it discuss me not because I'm special or important,
but because my work is not the result of me
reading a bunch of links or writing a bunch of words.
(29:02):
The script for this piece is not just about thirteen
thousand words long. It's the result of more than a
million words, probably more than that that I wrote before it,
the hundreds of stories I've read in the past, the
hours and hours of conversations with friends and editors, years
of accumulating knowledge, and yes, growing with the work itself.
I as a person have grown with this show thanks
to the wonderful feedback I get from all of you,
(29:24):
from the conversations we have on the Reddit or just
the emails. I get the occasional one of you who
finds myself on which is really quite scary, but not
many of you do, and please don't look. The thing is,
imperfections are what make us human. Imperfections are what make
art so great. The fun things that happen in our
life are never from a moment of perfection or from
(29:46):
crystallizing something that is immacular. Perhaps the timing is perfect,
perhaps we're in the right place at the right time,
but nothing about us is perfect. And through those imperfections
we grow and we thrive. Business idiots don't give a
fuck about that. Sam Mortman doesn't give a fuck about that.
Satchinnidella doesn't give a fuck about that. They think they're
fucking perfect. But true art and true joy and true
(30:10):
solidarity is what's needed to dispatch with these people and
to stop what they're doing. And really, the biggest thing
that we can do early on the real starting block
is anyone within the tech media listen to this. We
need to change. We need to change how we cover
these companies. We need to change that. Honestly, everything needs
(30:30):
to be inverted. Trusting a company based on how much
money it has and how big it is is the
wrong way to go about this business. Business idiots have
learned that, and they have moved their marketing strategies to
create metrics that journalists accept and will print, and then
they will sound good for people that don't know what
they're talking about, because the journalists don't even bother to
(30:51):
pull the metrics apart themselves. And I understand why everyone's
doing what everyone else is doing. But we can change things,
But you, as a listener, how can you change things
You're already doing it. Over the last year, I've seen
a remarkable growth in just regular people being willing to
push back against these narratives, in pushing back in their businesses. Also,
(31:12):
those of you with children can teach them not to
aspire to be a fucking manager or an executive unless
they know their fucking work. It is that simple. And
I know it feels kind of bleak right now with
everything going on in California, with everything going on with
the government, with everything going on with Open AI, with
the amount of stories about how AI is going to
take everything and take everything we have and recreate it
(31:33):
in a shitty way. The fact that they're so desperate
means that they're scared, and they're scared of the fact
that you are willing to talk about this and you
are willing to spit in their face. If you don't
want to use AI, don't use AI. If you are
curious about what it does, don't bother looking or fuck
around with the free version of bit so that you
only lose the money. If these things would automate you,
(31:55):
they'd be automating you already, if they were close to
doing so, they would be previewing the world in which
they do. So they're fucking scared. Well, the era of
the business idiot is happening right now. It could potentially
be coming to an end because as this movement ends,
and I said this in the rock Kom bubble a
year ago, they don't have any more growth markets. This
is the end for them. I'm not saying the end
(32:16):
of the companies. They'll work something out, but they don't
have double digit growth in them past the next year.
The revenues are small, and you the listener who've been
sitting there the whole time saying, why the fuck does
everyone say this thing is amazing whenever they use jet
GPT and not really understanding why you're not the weird one.
They are. They cannot beat us because we actually do things.
(32:41):
If you're a business city yourself listening to this, open
a book, go and learn something, Go and talk to
a customer, Well, start your current in the garage. I
don't really know. I really don't encourage you to do
that necessarily. But the point I'm making is this middle
managers ruin lives, business city. It's ruined lives. I think
everyone listening to this is going to have experienced several
(33:02):
of them. The fact that management as a concept and
that management as a discipline has died is a big
part of this as well. Labor is really fucking hurting
right now. I realize them kind of rambling, but I'll
end on the simpler note. If you are around people
who are scared, be scared with them, Offer them kindness,
(33:23):
Offer them solidarity and a generous ear. Support their work,
Support independent creators. Support people at the Vox Union who
are currently battling against the company that saw for to
give Kara Swish to tens of millions of dollars, that
continually pushes powerful people at the CEO of Airbnb, which
is company which is ruined pretty much rentals everywhere. Don't
(33:44):
know why Neli Pittella to talk to him about his
house and the catskills, because that happened. When you hear
these stories, push back on them, say I don't like this,
Say fuck this. Support the Vox Union. In the event
that the Vox Union does not get their contract, do
not visit a single fucking Vox site. You must walk
away from that. Support workers, support artists, support creators, support
(34:08):
the people who actually do work, and fuck the business idiots.
Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
composer of the Better Offline theme song is Metasowski. You
can check out more of his music and audio projects
at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S
(34:31):
O W s ki dot com.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
You can email me at easy at better offline dot com,
or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast
links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot ad to
visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline
to check out our reddit.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
What is a podcast a miserable little pile of secrets?
I'm met Zeitron, and welcome to the conclusion of our
three part episode of Better Offline and the phenomena known
(00:25):
as the business Idiot. In the first episode, we met
our first business idiot. The real princes of them sat
in Adela and talked about the origin of the business
idiot and the rotten ideology that drives them. Then we
talked about the enablers of the business idiots, particularly those
in the media. In this episode, I want to tell
you about where all this goes. Nothing I've said in
this three part should suggest that the business idiot is weak.
(00:46):
In fact, business idiots are in full control. We have
too many managers, and our most powerful positions are valorized
for not knowing stuff, for having a general view that
we can take the big picture from, not realizing that
the big picture is usually made up of lots of
little brushstrokes. Business idiots have a cultural cachet. Then we
aspire to be business idiots, and our education pushes people
(01:06):
to careers where the goal is to climb from the
worker class of the oxygen starved apex of business idiot Mountain.
Yet there are eventually consequences for everything being controlled by
business idiots. Our current society, an unfair, unjust one dominated
by half broken tech products that make their owners billions
and that manipulate and mislead by design, is the real
punishment wrought by growth, A brain draining corporate society, one
(01:29):
that leads it to doing illogical things and somehow making
money doing so. It doesn't make any fucking sense that
generative AI got this big. The returns aren't there, the
outcomes aren't there, and any sensible society would have put
a gun to chat GPT's head and aggressively pulled the trigger.
Generative AI is symbolic of the future of capitalism, one
that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars, one that
(01:49):
surrenders every human work the model can consume, and that
accepts the destruction of our planet, all because everybody kind
of agreed that this is what we're all doing now,
with nobody able to give a convincing expert nation of
what that even is or why we're doing it. Generative
AI is revolting, both in how overstated its abilities are
and in how continually it tests how lower standards somebody
(02:10):
will take for a product, both in its outputs and
in the desperate companies trying to integrate it into everything,
and its proliferation throughout society and organizations is already fundamentally harmful.
We're not just drowning in a sea of slop. We're
in a constant state of corporate AI beta test. New
features sprouting out of our products, like new limbs that
sometimes function normally but often attempt to strangle us. You
(02:31):
know what the stand in that episode of JoJo's Stop It.
It's unclear of companies forcing these products on us have
contempt for us, or simply don't know what good looks like,
or perhaps it's both, with the business idiot resenting us
for not scarffing down whatever they serve us, as that's
what's generally worked before. They don't really understand their customers.
They understand what a customer pays for and how a
(02:51):
purchase is made, you know, like the leaders of banks
and asset managers during the subprime mortgage crisis didn't really
think about whether people could pay those mortgages, just that
they needed lot of them to put in a cedo.
The business Idiot's economy is one run and built for
other business idiots. They can only make things that sell
to companies that must always be in flux, which is
the preferred environment of the business idiot, because if they're
(03:12):
not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new innovations,
they'd actually have to interact with the underlying production of
the company and the people actually doing the work. Does
the software work? Sometimes the successful companies exist that sell
like this. Sure, but look at today's software and tell
me with a straight face that things feel good to use.
And something like generative AI was always inevitable. An industry
(03:33):
claiming to change the world that never really does so,
full of businesses that don't function as businesses, full of
flim flamm half truths used to impress people who will
likely never interact with it, or do so only in
a passing way, by chasing out the people that actually
build things in favor of the people that sell them.
Our economy is built on production puppetry. Just like GENERATIVEAI,
and especially like chat, GPT and Claude. These people are
(03:55):
antithetical to what's good in the world, and their power
deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive and honestly,
any true innovation. The business city it thrives on alienation,
on distancing itself from the customer and the thing that
they consume, and in many ways, from society itself. Mark
Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, and he said
that to the Wall Street Channel Samuel and wants us
to have fake colleagues in the form of the agency
(04:16):
makes that don't fucking work and increase and an increasingly
loud group of executives salivated the idea of replacing us
with a fake version of us that will make a
shittier version of what we make for a customer that
said executive doesn't give a fuck about. And yeah, that
is describing a form of slave, especially if it's conscious.
I mean, if it's not conscious, it isn't. But the
moment you make AGI, you've got a real fucking problem
(04:36):
on your hands.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
They're never going to do it.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Also, what if the AGI is just dumb? What if
it doesn't want to work?
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Anyway?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
The business IDI it's a building products for other people
that don't interact with the real world. We're no longer
the real customers and so we're worth even less than before,
which is as is the case in the world dominated
by shareholder supremacy, not all that much to begin with.
They don't exist to make us better. The business IDY
it doesn't really care about the real world or what
you do do, or who you are, or anything other
than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is
(05:04):
why so many squealing little middle managers look up to
the Musks and Altman's of the world, because they see
in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, somebody
who's above work and thinking and knowledge and doing stuff disgusting.
But one of the most remarkable things about the business
IDIA is their near in vulnerability. Modern management is resource control,
shifting blame away from the manager, who should hold responsibility.
(05:26):
After all, if you don't, why do you have a
fucking job onto the laborer, knowing that the organization and
the media will back them up. Or you may think
I'm making a generalization, the twenty twenty one to twenty
twenty three anti remote work push in the media was
grow tesque proof of where the media's true allegiance lies.
The media happily manufactured consent for return to office mandates
from large companies by framing remote workers some sort of
(05:46):
destructive force doing all they can to discuss how modern
management has no fucking idea how the workplace actually works now.
These articles were effectively written as fan fiction for managers
and bosses demanding that we return to the office, ridiculous
statements about how remote work failed young people, which it didn't,
or how employees needed remote work more than their employers
because the chit chat and lunches and happy hours are
(06:07):
so important that they're really not. I'm also going to
link to these and in the notes, I've written a
lot about the remote work push and the people who
were pushing for us to return the office. It's actually
where I got started, and it really was the ultimate
jokification for me. It's what actually set me on the
path the better offline, because it's when you saw both
(06:29):
how little the bosses knew what was going on and
how willing people in the media were to support them.
And these were people people writing these stories were journalists
that were going to be forced back to the office
and ended up being so, and they were like, yeah,
this is actually it's actually good that we go into
the office. And when you ask the journalists, hey, what
do you get to the office, they say well, one
time I ran into someone and we had a good idea,
(06:52):
or it was quicker to walk over to someone's desk.
Does that mean the work was better? No, but the
vibes felt better, I guess. I also't know way more
people who just fucking hated working in the office. But
these articles rarely, if ever, cared about whether remote work
was more productive or the disconnect appeared to be between
(07:12):
managers and workers. Now, had any of those reporters every
spoken to an actual worker, they'd say that they valued
more time with their families rather than the grind of
a daily commute, so often with the promise of an
occasional company pizza party, which usually happens outside of the
typical working hours. Anyway, and these articles and this period,
it was from the very beginning about crushing the life
(07:33):
out of a movement that gave workers more flexibility and
mobility while suppressing managers' ability to hide how little work
they actually did. I do give credit to CNBC in
twenty twenty three for saying the quiet part out loud
that and I quote, the biggest disadvantage of remote work
that employeers cide is how difficult it is to observe
and monitor employees, because when you can't do that, you
have to hear, actually know what they're doing and understand
(07:55):
their work. Jesus Christ. Now I'm with the managers, how discussing.
But yet higher up the chain the invulnerability continues. CEOs
may get fired I mentioned it before, and more getting
fired than ever. It turns out, although sadly not the
ones we want, they always receive a golden parachute at
the end before walking into another role at another organization
(08:16):
doing exactly the same level of nothing. Yet before that happens,
CEO is allowed to pull basically every lever before they
make they face any kind of accountability. They can lay
people off, they can freeze pay, they can move from
people from salary to contracted workers. They can close down sites,
they can offshore, they can cut certain products. They can
even spend more fucking money so they lose less. If
(08:36):
you or I misallocated billions of dollars on stupid ideas,
we'd be fired and we'd have real trouble finding more employment.
We would be well known for our incompetence, and indeed
we would be in real trouble and there would be
real problems finding more work. If we were a big
stupid piece of shit.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
When CEOs do that, they get board placements, they get
other positions. They can run companies head into the ground.
Let me give you an example. Microsoft CEO Sachan Nedella
said and I quote that the ultimate computer is the
mixed reality world, and that Microsoft would be inventing new
computers and new computing in twenty sixteen, pushing his senior
executives to tell reporters that Hololenz was Microsoft's next wave
(09:15):
of computing in twenty seventeen, selling hundreds of millions of
dollars worth of headsets to the military in twenty nineteen,
then debuting HoloLens two at Bill twenty nineteen, only for
the on stage demo to break in real time, calling
for a referendum on capitalism in twenty twenty, then saying
he couldn't overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse in twenty
twenty one. Now let's hear what Nadella had to say
(09:36):
about it, and massive prompts the Preston Growler of Computer
World for writing this piece. AHM. Nadella in that twenty
twenty one keynote made big promises. When we talk about
the metaverse, we're describing both a new platform and a
new application type, similar to how we talked about the
web and websites in the early nineties. In a sense,
the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real
world and to embed the real world into computing. Fucking
(09:56):
what bringing real presence to any digital space. Years we've
talked about creating the digital representation of the world, but
now we actually have the opportunity to go into that
world and participate on it. I just want to be clear,
at this time, Microsoft had nothing of the sort. They
had like websites, They had Microsoft Teams. They tried to
claim Microsoft Teams was a matter of us fucked up,
and as Grella notes, Nedella made big promises beefing up
(10:19):
development in projects such as its Mixed Reality tool Kit MRTK,
the virtual reality workspace project all Space VR, which it
brought back in twenty seventeen, It's HoloLens Virtual Realities headset,
and its Industrial Metaverse unit, among others, before firing all
members of its Industrial Metaverse core team, along with those
behind MRTK, and shutting down it's all Space VR in
(10:40):
twenty twenty three, before discontinuing Hololenz two entirely in twenty
twenty four. Guess that wasn't anything then, Just you know,
it's like like a friend of yours is in a
really chaotic relationship and they just the next stage tag
like it's not happening, or someone tells you they've had
a big moment in their life and they just pretend
it doesn't happen. It was hundreds of millions of dollars
(11:02):
and tons of media coverage where people said, this is
what Microsoft's doing next, this is what happened. It's so
insane that that happened. We really don't talk enough about
how fucking insane. The metaverse thing was just like a
year or so where everyone just played make believe, completely insane.
I of course was right about it at the time,
and it was very fucking clear, and there are a
(11:23):
few people that were negative as well. There were also
some people who claim they were negative who weren't. Their
time will come now. Nadella was transparently copying meta and
Mark Zuckerberg's ridiculous metaverse play, and absolutely nothing happened to
him As a result. The media outlets like The Vergin
Independence like Ben Thompson, happily boosted the Metaverse idea when
it was announced, and conveniently forgot about it the second
(11:45):
that Microsoft and Meta wanted to talk about AI. Not really.
Both the verg and Ben Thompson were ready in waiting
to do literally the same interview, but about a different subject,
no consideration of what was previously said at all. A
true business city it never admits wrongdoing, and the more
powerful the business city is, the more likely there are
power structures that exist to avoid them having to do so.
The media, captured by other business idiots, has become powerfully
(12:07):
poisoned by power, referring to its whims and ideals and
treating CEOs with more respect, dignity, and intelligence than anyone
who ever worked for them. When a big company decides
they want to do artificial intelligence, the media's natural reaction
is to ask how and why and write down the answer,
rather than to think about whether it's possible whether the
company might profit, say by increasing their shareholder price by
having whatever they say printed advobatim. These people aren't challenged
(12:29):
by the media or their employees because their employees are
vulnerable all the time and often are encouraged to buy
into whatever bullshit dju there is, like hostage is held
captive until the media and corporate culture give them Stockholm syndrome.
They're only challenged by shareholders ru agnostic about idiocy because
it's not core to value in any meaningful sense, as
we've seen with crypto, the metaverse, and AI, and shareholders
will tolerate infinite levels of idiocy if it boosts the
(12:51):
value of their holdings. It goes further too. Twenty twenty
one saw the largest amount of venture capital invested in
the last decade, a record breaking six hundred and forty
three billion dollars, with a remarkable three hundred and twenty
(13:14):
nine point five billion dollars of that invested in the
US alone. Some of the biggest deals include Amazon reseller
aggregate e Thrasio, which raised a billion dollars in October
twenty twenty one and file for bankruptcy in February twenty
twenty five. Cloud security company lace Work, which raised five
hundred and twenty five million dollars in January twenty twenty one,
then one point three billion dollars in October twenty twenty one,
(13:34):
and was rumored to be up for sale to Whiz,
only for the deal to collapse and then they ended
up selling for about two hundred million dollars to another company.
And then, of course there was autonomous car company Crews,
which had hundreds of headlines about being the future, raised
about two point seventy five billion dollars in twenty twenty one,
and was killed off in December twenty twenty four. Suddenly,
the people who lose their livelihoods those who took stock
(13:55):
in low of cash compensation, those who end up getting
laid off at the end are always work while people
like Lacework co CEO j Perick, who oversaw reckless spending
and management dysfunction according to the information, can walk into
highly paid positions at companies like Microsoft, as Jay did
in October twenty twenty four, a few months after a
file sale and the one I mentioned before, the two
(14:15):
hundred million dollar one even to a company for fourt
in it. Yeah, this is the behind the actor studio
A bit. I got a little ahead of myself, But
I'm not editing it. Why would I? It doesn't matter
if these people are wrong or if they run their
companies badly, because the business idiot is infallible and judged
too by fellow disconnected business idiots. In a just society,
(14:35):
nobody would ever want to touch any of the C
suite that oversaw a company that handed out Nintendo switches
to literally anyone who booked a meeting, as was the
case with Lacework. Instead, the stank remains on the employees alone.
One point about this, just an aside. Maya's most recent
layoffs were explicitly said to target low performers, needlessly harming
the future job prospects of those handed the pink slip
in an already fucked tech job market. It was cruel
(14:58):
and pointless, and I'm certain of big fat Meta is
spending big on AI and has spent big on the metaverse,
which went nowhere and owns two dying platforms Instagram and Facebook,
and one that's hard to monetize in WhatsApp. It needs
to get costs down and improve margins. Layoffs are one
way to go, and things are getting bad enough to
matter is now, according to the information walking around Silicon Valley,
begging other big tech companies for money to train their
(15:19):
open source Lama LLM as shit is. That is, the
low performance Jive is an unnecessary twist of the knife
demonstrating the metal would gladly throw its workers under the
bus if it serves their interests, because the optics of
firing low performers is different to say, firing a bunch
of people because she keep spunking money on dead end
vanity projects and me too products that nobody wants or
wants to use or can understand. Mark Zuckerberg I add
(15:41):
owns an island on Hawaii. The idea that he even
thinks this much about meta is disgraceful. Go outside, you
fucking freak. Anyway, It's so easy, and perhaps inevitable, to
feel a sense of nihilism about this. Nothing matters, It's
all symbolic. Wild is filled with companies run by people
who don't interact with the business and that raise money
from venture that neither run businesses nor really have any
(16:02):
experience doing so. And despite the fact that these people
exist several extractions from reality, the things that they do
and the decisions they make impact us all, and it's
hard to imagine how to fix it. I don't want
you to live without hope. Understanding how evil these people
are is the first step to things changing, and more
people understanding is genuinely important. But we really do live
(16:24):
in a system of inequity dominated by people that do
not interact with the real world, who have created an
entire system run by their fellow business idios. The rot
economy's growth at all costs manor is a symptom of
the grander problem of shareholders supremacy, and the single minded
economic focus on shareholder value inevitably ends at an economy
run by and for business idios. There is a line,
(16:46):
and it ends here with layoffs, the destruction of our
planet and our economy and our society, and a rising
tide of human misery that nobody really knows where it
comes from, and so we don't know who to blame
and for what. If our economy actually works as a
true mayor autocracy where we didn't have companies run by
people who don't use their products or understand how they're made,
and who hire similarly specious people, these people would collapse
(17:07):
under the pressure of having to know their ass from
their ear hole. Yet none of this would be possible
without their enabling layers, and those layers are teeming with
both business idiots and those unfortunate enough to have learned
from them. The tech media has enabled every single bubble
without exception, accepting every single narrative fed to them by
vcs and startups, with even critical reporters still accepting the
(17:29):
lunacy of companies like open Ai just because everyone else
does too, and because the standard has been set of
if a company raises money, they're real. Let's be honest
when you remove all the money. Our current tech industry
is kind of a disgrace. Our economy is held up
by Nvidia, a company that makes most of its money
selling GPUs to other companies, primarily so that they can
start losing money selling software that might eventually make them money,
(17:54):
just not today, and they're not sure how. In video
is defined by massive peaks and valleys as it jumps
on trends and bandwagons at the right time, despite knowing
that these bandwagons always come to some sort of halt.
The other companies feature Tesla, a meme stock car company
with a deteriorating brand and a chief executive famous for
his divorces from both reality and multiple women, along with
(18:15):
a flagrant racism that may cost the company its life,
a company that we're watching die in real time with
a snagnant lineup, and an actual fucking competition from companies
that are spending on innovation in Europe and elsewhere. Bid
is eating Tesla's lunch, offering better products for half the
price and with far less racism. And this is just
the first big Chinese automotive brand to go global. Others
(18:36):
like Cherry are enjoying rapid growth outside of China because
these cars are actually good and affordable and even when
you factor in the things like tariffs. Hey, remember when
Tesla fired all those people and it's charging network despite
the fact that it's one of the most profitable and
valuable parts of the business, and they meant to then
went and had to hire them back because it turns
out they actually needed them. This is a good example
(18:57):
of managerial alienation decisions made by non workers elon Musk
who don't understand their customers, their businesses, or the work
their employees do. And let's not forget about the cyber
truck and monstrosity, both in how it looks and how
it's sold. It's illegal to drive in the majority of
developed countries because it's a death trap for drivers and
pedestrians alike. Oh and nobody actually wants it. With Tesla
(19:18):
sitting on a quarters worth of inventory they can't sell
elsewhere is Meta a collapsing social network of ninety nine
percent of its revenue based on an advertising model to
an increasingly aged population, and a monopoly so flagrantly abusive
in its contempt for its customers that at times it's
difficult to call Instagram or Facebook a social network. Mark
Zuckerberg had to admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that
(19:40):
people don't use Facebook as a social network anymore. The
reason why is because the platform is so fucking rotten
run by a company alienated from its user base. It's
the crepit product, actively hostile to anybody trying to use it.
And more fundamentally, what's the point of posting on Facebook
if your friends won't see it? Because metas algorithm decided
it wouldn't drive engagement, monument to disconnection. A company that
(20:02):
runs encounter to its own mission to connect people, run
by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who hasn't had a good
idea since he stole it from the Winkle Brothers. I'm
meant to say that Winklevoss Brothers, I'm actually going to
keep him the solution to all that ails him adding
generative AI to every part of Meta, which are shit.
It was meant to do something other than burn seventy
two billion dollars in capital expenditures in twenty twenty five. Right,
(20:24):
it isn't clear what was meant to happen, but the
Wall Street Journals Jeff Horwitz reports that metas ai chatbots
are and I quote empowered to engage in romantic roleplay
that can turn explicit, even with children. In a civil society,
Zuckerberg would be ousted immediately for creating a pedophile chatbot. Instead,
four days after the story ran, everyone cheered they're better
than expected earnings report in Redmond. Microsoft sits atop multiple monopolies,
(20:48):
using tariffs as I mean toduce flailing Xbox revenue, as
it invests billions of dollars into open Ai so that
open Ai can spend billions of dollars on cloud compute,
losing billions of dollars in the process, requiring Microsoft inverst
further money to keep them alive, all because Microsoft wanted
generative Ai'm bing what a fucking waste. And they're also
(21:08):
raising the costs of their office suite too, while which
is only something they've been able to hold on to
because of an underhanded bullshit fest from their antitrustrial from
the nineties. Amazon lumbers listlessly through life. It's giant labor
abusing machines, shipping things overnight at whatever cost is necessary
to crush the life out of any other possible source
of commerce. It's cloud services and storage arm on shore
(21:28):
of who to copy next, dumping billions into anthropic as
a means of creating revenue for their dead end products.
Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Who knows? Who knows
what Amazon is anymore? But one analyst believes it's making
five whole billion dollars in revenue from AI in twenty
twenty five. And you know how much they've put in
capital expenditures this year, one hundred and five billion dollars
(21:49):
in capital expenditures. There are slot machines with better ROI
than this bullshit. Again, Amazon is a company that's totally
exploitive its customers, no longer acting as a platform that
helps people find the shit they need, but directing them
to products that pay the most for prime advertising real estate,
no matter whether they're good or safe. Let's be clear,
(22:09):
Amazon's recklessness will kill someone if it hasn't already. The
products they allow on their are not safe. They do
not give a fucking shit. But then there's the worst
(22:35):
of them, Google, most famous for its namesake, a search
engine that has been reduced as hard as possible and
will continue to be juced before the inevitable anti trust
sentencing that will rob Google of its power, along with
the severance of its advertising monopoly along with them. But
don't worry. Google has a generative AI think for some reason,
and no, you don't have a choice about using it,
(22:58):
because they've now replaced Google Assistant with Google Gemini and
Google Search all but requires you to use their AI.
They burn money for no reason. It sucks, and at
no point do any of these companies seem to be
focused on making our lives better or selling us any
kind of real future. They exist to maintain the status
(23:19):
quo where cloud computing allows them to retain their previous fifdoms.
They're alienated from people, they're alienated from workers, they're alienated
from consumers, and they're alienated from the world. They're deeply antisocial,
they're narcissistic, they're sociopathic, and they're misanthropic, as demonstrated by
zux moronic aisocial network comments, and AI is a symptom
(23:40):
of a reckoning of the stupidity in hubris. They cut,
they cut, they cut, the cut, they cut some more,
and then they stagnated. Their hope is a product that
will be adopted by billions of imaginary customers and companies
and will allow them to cut further without becoming just
a peer box and a domain name. We have to
recognize that what we're seeing right now with generative AI
(24:01):
isn't a fluke or a bug, but a feature of
a system that's rapacious and short, termed by its very
nature and doesn't define value as we do. Because value
gets defined by a faceless shareholder as growth, the system
can only exist with the contribution of the business idiot.
These are the vanguard, the foot soldiers of this system
and a key reason why everything is so terrible all
(24:22):
the time and why nothing seems to be getting better.
Breaking from that status quo would require a level of
bravery that they do not have and perhaps isn't possible
in the current economic system. These people are powerful and
they have big platforms. They're people like Derek Thompson, famed
co author of the Abundance Agenda, who celebrates the idea
of a fictitious version of chat GPT that can entirely
(24:44):
plan and execute a five year old's birthday party, or
his co author Ezra Klein, who, while recording a podcast
where his researchers likely listened, talk proudly about replacing their
work with open ais broken deep research product because anything
that can be outsourced must be and all researches is
looking at stuff. It's relevant if you're a fucking idiot,
and really that's the most grotesque part of the business idiom.
(25:05):
They see every part of our lives as a series
of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books
they've read rather than content, have said books the way
they made them feel, About how many hours they work,
even though they never ever ever work that many, About
how high level they are in a video game they
don't actually play, about the money they've ated than the
scale they've raised it at, and about how expensive and
fancy their kitchen gadgets are, even if they use the
(25:27):
wrong oils. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth, and possession over
any lived experience because their world is one where the
journey does not matter, because their journeys are riddled with
privilege and persecution of others in the pursuit of success.
These people don't want to auter make work, They want
to automate existence. They fantasize about hitting a button and
something happening, because experiencing living is beneath them, or at
(25:50):
least your lives and your once and your joys are.
They don't want to plan their kids birthday parties. They
don't want to research things. They don't value culture or
art or beauty. They want to give to the end.
They want to hit fast forward on anything, because human
struggle is for the poor, the unworthy, and the uneducated.
When you're steeped in privilege and have earned everything basically
(26:10):
through a mixture of stolen labor and office pantomime, the
idea of effort is always a negative. The process of
creation of a fiction of love, of kindness, of using
time not just for an action or output, is disgusting
to the business idiot, because those are the times that
could be focused on themselves or some nebulous, self serving
vision that is, when stripped back to its fundamental truth,
either moronic or malevolent. They don't realize that you hire
(26:33):
a worker not just for the output, but for their
actual labor and their experience in creating that labor and
their understanding of the world around it, which is why
they don't see why it's so insulting to outsource their
interactions with human beings. You'll notice that these people never
bring up actual examples of automating actual work, the mind
numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace,
(26:54):
because they either don't really know what that is, or
they don't really give a shit about what it is.
They are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with
other people, or existing outside of the gilded circles of
socialite fucks and pleurocrats, or just things that are inevitable
facets of working life, like reading an email, your son's
birthday part or a conflict with a friend. Can indeed
(27:15):
be stressful, but these are not problems to be automated.
These are the struggles that make us human, the things
that make us grow, the things that make us who
we are, which isn't a problem for anybody other than
somebody who doesn't believe they need to change in any way.
It's both powerful and powerless at the same time. A
nihilistic way of seeing our lives is a collection of
events we accept or dismissed like a system, prompt the
(27:36):
desperate pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel
a thing until you die. I spent years talking about
these people without giving them a name, because categorizing anything
is difficult. I can't tell you how long it took
me to synthesize the rot economy from the broader trends
I saw in tech and elsewhere. How long it took
me to thread that particular needle to identify the various
threats that unified events that are otherwise separate and distinct.
(27:59):
I am but one person. Everything you've read in my
newsletter or artclesse I've written or heard on my podcast
to this point has been something I've had to learn.
Building an argument and turning it into words, often at
the same time that other people read, doesn't really come
naturally to anyone. It's something you have to work deliberately out.
You might have talent, but you have to work towards them.
It's imperfect. There are fuck ups. I sometimes mispronounced names
(28:21):
and words, including my own name, which Metasowski has always
been kind enough not to laugh at me. About these
podcasts and newsletters, they increase in length and breadth and
have so many links, and I'll never change my process
because part of said process is learning, relearning, processing, messaging
Casey saying Casey, I don't understand this, arguing with Casey
a little bit, coming up with another idea and a
(28:41):
chord is by text. Matt Hughes, I talk with Robert Evans,
I go back and forth with everyone. I get more
pissed off. Then I write, and I really write, and
I speak, and so on and so forth. This process
makes what I do possible, and the idea of someone
automating it discuss me not because I'm special or important,
but because my work is not the result of me
reading a bunch of links or writing a bunch of words.
(29:02):
The script for this piece is not just about thirteen
thousand words long. It's the result of more than a
million words, probably more than that that I wrote before it,
the hundreds of stories I've read in the past, the
hours and hours of conversations with friends and editors, years
of accumulating knowledge, and yes, growing with the work itself.
I as a person have grown with this show thanks
to the wonderful feedback I get from all of you,
(29:24):
from the conversations we have on the Reddit or just
the emails. I get the occasional one of you who
finds myself on which is really quite scary, but not
many of you do, and please don't look. The thing is,
imperfections are what make us human. Imperfections are what make
art so great. The fun things that happen in our
life are never from a moment of perfection or from
(29:46):
crystallizing something that is immacular. Perhaps the timing is perfect,
perhaps we're in the right place at the right time,
but nothing about us is perfect. And through those imperfections
we grow and we thrive. Business idiots don't give a
fuck about that. Sam Mortman doesn't give a fuck about that.
Satchinnidella doesn't give a fuck about that. They think they're
fucking perfect. But true art and true joy and true
(30:10):
solidarity is what's needed to dispatch with these people and
to stop what they're doing. And really, the biggest thing
that we can do early on the real starting block
is anyone within the tech media listen to this. We
need to change. We need to change how we cover
these companies. We need to change that. Honestly, everything needs
(30:30):
to be inverted. Trusting a company based on how much
money it has and how big it is is the
wrong way to go about this business. Business idiots have
learned that, and they have moved their marketing strategies to
create metrics that journalists accept and will print, and then
they will sound good for people that don't know what
they're talking about, because the journalists don't even bother to
(30:51):
pull the metrics apart themselves. And I understand why everyone's
doing what everyone else is doing. But we can change things,
But you, as a listener, how can you change things
You're already doing it. Over the last year, I've seen
a remarkable growth in just regular people being willing to
push back against these narratives, in pushing back in their businesses. Also,
(31:12):
those of you with children can teach them not to
aspire to be a fucking manager or an executive unless
they know their fucking work. It is that simple. And
I know it feels kind of bleak right now with
everything going on in California, with everything going on with
the government, with everything going on with Open AI, with
the amount of stories about how AI is going to
take everything and take everything we have and recreate it
(31:33):
in a shitty way. The fact that they're so desperate
means that they're scared, and they're scared of the fact
that you are willing to talk about this and you
are willing to spit in their face. If you don't
want to use AI, don't use AI. If you are
curious about what it does, don't bother looking or fuck
around with the free version of bit so that you
only lose the money. If these things would automate you,
(31:55):
they'd be automating you already, if they were close to
doing so, they would be previewing the world in which
they do. So they're fucking scared. Well, the era of
the business idiot is happening right now. It could potentially
be coming to an end because as this movement ends,
and I said this in the rock Kom bubble a
year ago, they don't have any more growth markets. This
is the end for them. I'm not saying the end
(32:16):
of the companies. They'll work something out, but they don't
have double digit growth in them past the next year.
The revenues are small, and you the listener who've been
sitting there the whole time saying, why the fuck does
everyone say this thing is amazing whenever they use jet
GPT and not really understanding why you're not the weird one.
They are. They cannot beat us because we actually do things.
(32:41):
If you're a business city yourself listening to this, open
a book, go and learn something, Go and talk to
a customer, Well, start your current in the garage. I
don't really know. I really don't encourage you to do
that necessarily. But the point I'm making is this middle
managers ruin lives, business city. It's ruined lives. I think
everyone listening to this is going to have experienced several
(33:02):
of them. The fact that management as a concept and
that management as a discipline has died is a big
part of this as well. Labor is really fucking hurting
right now. I realize them kind of rambling, but I'll
end on the simpler note. If you are around people
who are scared, be scared with them, Offer them kindness,
(33:23):
Offer them solidarity and a generous ear. Support their work,
Support independent creators. Support people at the Vox Union who
are currently battling against the company that saw for to
give Kara Swish to tens of millions of dollars, that
continually pushes powerful people at the CEO of Airbnb, which
is company which is ruined pretty much rentals everywhere. Don't
(33:44):
know why Neli Pittella to talk to him about his
house and the catskills, because that happened. When you hear
these stories, push back on them, say I don't like this,
Say fuck this. Support the Vox Union. In the event
that the Vox Union does not get their contract, do
not visit a single fucking Vox site. You must walk
away from that. Support workers, support artists, support creators, support
(34:08):
the people who actually do work, and fuck the business idiots.
Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
composer of the Better Offline theme song is Metasowski. You
can check out more of his music and audio projects
at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S
(34:31):
O W s ki dot com.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
You can email me at easy at better offline dot com,
or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast
links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot ad to
visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline
to check out our reddit.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Host
Ed Zitron
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