January 24, 2025 • 42 mins
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how lax regulation and all-too-chummy media coverage has empowered Mark Zuckerberg and other tech companies to intentionally make every digital experience worse for profit.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
As media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. Of course, I'm your
host ed zitron, Here to Serve, Here to podcast. In
the last episode, I walked you through the how the
so called sudden magnification of Meta is really just them
(00:27):
formalizing the rot economy, the growth of all costs bullshit
that drives the entire company, making the products worse to
grab more advertising impressions, to make Mark Zuckerberg richer, while
also making the life of the average Facebook user that
bit worse. And I believe that had Meta and Mark
Zuckerberg been ever really held accountable, truly accountable in the
(00:47):
last decade, that things might have gone a little differently. Zuckerberg,
like many tech executives, has been allowed to destroy the
user experience in broad daylight because the media, despite writing
about Facebook as a product all the time for years,
doesn't seem capable of writing the blunt truth about how
shit it is, how bad it works, how everything is
kind of getting there but nowhere worse than Facebook. Really,
(01:09):
the problem, I believe is there are some people that
simply want the tech executives to have power. They want
to make friends with the rock stars, they want to
be in their orbit to humor their ideas and celebrate
their victories, which is so strange because said victories are
usually just the rich just got even richer, and where
that's not the case, there's just a lack of willingness
to say that something is bad, and the consequences are
(01:33):
that these platforms have been left unchecked. To be clear,
there are plenty of reporters who have done great work
reporting on specific parts of Matt's problems, Kevin Russel at
The Times with crowd tang, or Jeff Horwitz and the
rest of the team who did the Facebook files at
the Wall Street Journal, for example. But there's been this
bigger and nastier and more obvious problem that no one's
really put down. In blunt words, the core product of
(01:56):
Facebook has gone incrementally worse, seemingly every month since two
thousand and eight. And while I understand that it's hard
to just write thing bad every week, but I fucking
do it. Journalism is fully capable of doing this in
other ways. Think about it when they write about crime
or wars. How is a social network used by billions
of people less important than that, or less important than
(02:17):
how many people have allegedly broken into a CVS cabinet.
If a tanker overturned on a highway, spilling various poisons
and acids and such into local water sources and burning
people alive in the middle of a fucking freeway, that
would be news, right, But somehow billions of people being
actively misled, manipulated and harmed every single day just isn't relevant. Now,
(02:39):
one argument might be, well, it isn't really clear what
the harms of social media are. We have some reporting,
but it's just not that obvious. Well, my retort's also
fairly obvious and goes back to something I just said.
The media seems fully capable of writing about the rise
of retail theft, for example, and that led to a
whole thing with pharmacies like I mentioned, locking in entire
parts of the store behind plastic, And it wasn't obvious
(03:01):
whether this was a real problem, but it didn't stop
the media writing hundreds of thousands of words about how
dangerous cities had gone, how dangerous, Oh, this retail theft,
it's all happening. And again it wasn't necessarily based on
anything other than editorial vibes. And whoever picked up the
tab at Balthazar that week it was craven, But at
(03:22):
least could we do like a craven thing with Facebook?
Because if streets were littered with needles and corpses and
fires and trash and violence, you would expect then used
to cover that. Why isn't Facebook treated the same way?
Why aren't social networks treat it the same way? We
can do this paranoid, sinophobic shit. We can do this
(03:45):
thing where we say TikTok is manipulating people with their algorithms,
as if Meta isn't doing the same thing with theirs.
But let's take it an abstraction above that and just
look at what we're really dealing with here. Facebook is
used by billy of people. It is a platform that
probably has more effect on the people that use it
(04:05):
than many forms of entertainment by congressmen, even by local officials.
People are more aware of the things they see on
social media than they are of like civic things, And
I really want to be clear, with that level of exposure,
with that many people affected by how bad Facebook has got,
we should be treating this like a mass casualty event,
(04:28):
like a mass poisoning. We should be looking at the
quality of these platforms. But none worse than Facebook and
saying what is being done to people? And it's not
just about misinformation, it's not just about harassment, two things
which are very, very fucking important, especially the harassment. It's disgraceful.
It's disgraceful that trans people are now targeted on there.
(04:50):
But on top of that, it's just bad, flat out bad,
flat out harmful, flat out obviously horrible and unsafe and harmful,
full of scams and spams. But we treat it like
this cute little thing in the fucking corner. And the
basic quality of the Facebook experience really is quite terrible,
I need to repeat myself. And it actively deprives the
users of dignity in industry to make their own decisions,
(05:12):
and their experiences are constantly interfered with, and the majority
of the content that they see is provided by a
shadowy algorithm built to promote engagement rather than any kind
of utility. This is not a fair exchange of value.
If Facebook were a city, every second car would be
overturned and on fire. Men would solicit you on the
sides of the street for I don't know, drugs, or
just to steal from you, or maybe they just try
(05:34):
and confuse you like a carnival guy. Random people would
just bark at you from their windows. I think people
would just throwing faces out the fucking window, and the
governor would be actively selling pardons on television every day.
If that was happening in a city, that would be news.
But it happens on Facebook. It happens on Facebook every day.
The harms have been here for years, and we as
the media, have done jack fucking shit. You can report
(05:56):
on the obvious things, on the research on the harms
that Facebook know, fine, actually need to do that. We
need that journalism, But on top of it, we need
to treat this platform as how harmful it is, but
also how harmful it's going to get. And like I
said last episode, it's been like this for a while,
and it's kind of a comfortable lie I think to
(06:17):
say that Meta's suddenly done something bad here, because it
gives the media and society kind of a free pass
for ignoring this gaping wound in the side of the
fucking Internet. Two of the world's largest social networks are
run and have been run with this blatant contempt for
the user, misinforming and harming people at scale, making the
things they want to see harder, defiant and swamping them
(06:39):
in this endless stream of sponsored and recommended content that
either sells them something or gets them to engage further
with the platform, with little care as to why they
be doing so other than the fact that all things
are justified under growth. Worse still, there have been some
members of the media that have actively worked to support
and celebrate what Meta has done for years. You'll never
(07:00):
guess that I'm referring to Casey Newton of Platformer, who's
done an admirable job. I will repeat myself covering Meta
in the last few weeks and the horrifying anti LGBTQ
things that Matter has been doing. But it's also really
important to note that Casey was cheerfully covering Zuckerberg and
I quote his expansive view of the future as recently
as September twenty fifth, twenty twenty four, and he happily
(07:23):
published how and I quote again, Zuckerberg was back on
the offensive somehow, not seeing anything worrying about the fact
that Mark Zuckerberg's shirt referenced Julius Caesar, the historic dictator
that perpetuated the genocide in the Gaelic wars like this
is who he was months ago. Where was the alarm then?
Where was the worry then? But don't worry, I'm not
remotely done with you, Casey. Yeah, Casey felt it unnecessary
(07:46):
to mention at any time how utterly atrocious Facebook has got,
but he will happily quote Mark Zuckerberg saying things like
in every generation of technology, there is a competition of
ideas for what the future should look like. Yet the
most loathsome thing that Casey Newton published was the following
and I quote and all of these will be linked
to in the notes don't worry ahem, but it left
(08:07):
unsaid it referring to Meta what seemed to be the
larger point, which is that Zuckerberg intends to crush his rivals,
particularly Apple, into a fine pulp. His swagger on stage
was most evident when discussing the company's next generation glasses
as the likeliest next generation computing platform, and highlighted the
progress that Meta had made so far in overcoming the
(08:28):
crushing technological burdens necessary for that to happen. And Meta
also failed to capture just how personal all this seems
to Mark Zuckerberg. Burned by what he has called the
twenty year mistake of the company's reaction to the post
twenty sixteen tech backlash very weird. That that's not twenty years,
and Zuckerberg, in this case quoting again, is long haunted
(08:50):
by criticisms that Meta has been nothing more than the
competition crushing copycat since it released the news feed, Zuckerberg
has never seemed more intent on claiming for himself the
mantle of inn Well Don Casey great fucking journalism there
mate share, not a dry seat in the house, ridiculous,
cowardly paper tiger analysis, stenography for the powerful masters, deep thoughts.
(09:14):
This specific paragraph is exactly where Casey Newton could have
said something about how worrying Mark Zuckerberg modeling himself on
a Roman dictator was. I don't know. Maybe he could
have brought up how all the company was, despite winking
about how it's building the future, letting its existing products
deteriorate as it deliberately turned the screws to duce engagement.
Casey Newton has regularly and reliably turned his back on
(09:36):
the truth that Metascore products are really quite bad in
favor of pumping up various AI products and vague promises
from Zuckerberg about a future that just arrived in fucking sucks.
The reason I'm singling him out, by the way, is
that it's very very very very important to hold the
people that helped Mark Zuckerberg succeed accountable, especially as the
attempt to hint that they've always been an aggressive advocate
(09:58):
for the truth. J Newton is fully capable of real journalism,
as proven by the way by his recent coverage, but
he's chosen again and again to simply print whatever Mark
Zuckerberg wants to say. Now, I'm going harden the paint
against Casey for a reason, and it's because he wrote
something at the end of last year called The Phony
Comforts of AI Skepticism. It's one of the weirdest things
(10:19):
I've read in my life. It's this sloppily stapled together
piece of marketing collater or for AI companies, saying that
not only is AI the future, but those that are
critiquing it were doing so in this kind of cynical,
corrupt way for attention. And he singled out one person,
Gary Marcus, who's an independent critic. I've had my issues
with Gary, but let me tell you something. If you're
(10:40):
singling out a writer, You'll do it again. You'll gladly
choose an independent writer and single them out. Now I
should be clear, I'm doing the same thing with Casey
right now. But Casey has a bigger audience than I have.
He has more connections, he's more powerful ostensibly. But on
top of that, when you choose to single out a writer,
a writer who is critiquing the powerful, what are you doing?
(11:05):
Who do you work for? Casey? I'm not done with you,
not remotely. I've got plenty more to say here. But
I think the biggest question I ask for Casey Newton
is who are you defending? What are you defending? What
is it you do every day? Who are you writing for?
Because if you're going to choose an independent critic, a
critic who is critiquing multi billion dollar companies, to what
(11:30):
end are you doing? So what are you defending? But
let's keep going, though, because there was also another thing
that Casey said that I just didn't like. Right at
the end, he said, and I quote that he was
taking detailed notes on all bloggers writing financial analyzes, suggesting
that Open Eye will go bankrupts soon because it's not
profitable yet. Oh Casey, Casey, Casey, Casey, who could you
(11:52):
possibly be talking about there. I'm not going to say
I think it is. I'm just going to say this.
I do not like bullies, and I do not like threats.
Suggesting that one is taking detailed notes on bloggers is
an attempt to intimidate people that are seriously evaluating the
fact that open ai burns five billion dollars a year
(12:13):
and has no part of the profitability. I don't know
if this is actually about me, and I don't really
give a shit, but I will tell you something, Casey. Actually,
I'll tell you two things. One, don't fucking threaten people.
Don't talk about taking detailed notes on people. You have power,
you have a platform, You have responsibility to young journalists
(12:34):
as well as to yourself, and you seem to have
given up on all the rest of it. You seem
to have lost your weight. But then there's the second thing,
which is, Casey, I've been taking detailed notes on you
for some fucking time. Well. Newton's metaverse into View from
(13:00):
twenty twenty one was deeply irresponsible in how much it
quoted Mark Zuckerberg just saying complete crap, Arguably his most
disgraceful act was October twenty six, twenty twenty one, when
he wrote a piece called the Facebook Paper's Missing Piece,
an interview with an anonymous integrity worker that attempted to
undermine the Wall Street Journals reporting on the Facebook files,
(13:21):
a massive investigation and expose of how Facebook knew how
harmful their platform was. I should be clear the Facebook
file situation involved Francis Horgan coming forward, risking her life,
risking her safety. That woman is incredibly brave, as are
the reporters that covered this. This is important work. This
is necessary work. And Newton's pieces a disgrace to tech journalism,
(13:45):
a disqualifying one, a seeming attempt to discredit by proxy,
the bravery of a whistleblower that provided documents that led
to this meaningful reporting. And it's utterly repulsive corporate hand washing,
and its important context for any criticism that casing you
has anything of anything ever again. And I'm furious. I'm
furious because Casey could be better. I believe that Casey
(14:08):
could actually do meaningful things. And we need you right now, Casey,
we need you to fucking start working again. And indeed,
I think the only comfortable thing I hear, or at
least feel, is reading. How much of the powerful's messaging
you like to share? Casey Newton argued that while AI
(14:28):
companies have hit a scaling wall, it's actually okay. And
don't worry, I'll have plenty of links in the notes
that NFTs went finally mainstream in twenty twenty two. They didn't.
He argued that Clubhouse was the future and that live
audio was Zuckerbugs and I quote big bet on creators
in twenty twenty one due to and I quote again
the shift in power from institutions to individuals. I should
add that Facebook shut down their podcast service a year later.
(14:50):
And he also added, and I can't see the full
text here because it's payward, that metaverse pessimists were missing
something because Meta's grand vision was already well on its way.
He wrote this in November twenty twenty one. By the way,
he also wanted that Meta's leadership changed its mind about
its name because Facebook was not the future of the company.
Maybe that was accurate, I don't know. He also wrote
about Acxieinfinity, which is a cryptoweb three Pokemon clone thing
(15:13):
that created a kind of indentured servitude. There's like loan
sharks in the Philippines. That fuck, people have heard this.
It's insane. And by the way, back by Andres and Horowitz,
and he was claiming that the game turned gaming on
its head. It sucks absolutely. I could go on, it
shouldn't be this easy, man, It shouldn't be this easy
to find a bunch of really weird stuff. Because Casey
(15:34):
has also at times had real dalliancies with criticism. He
has criticized Facebook, but it's also hard to take those
criticisms seriously when Casey's also written a piece for The
Verge about how Google plans to win its antitrust trial.
They didn't win, by the way, and he printed the
legal and marketing opinion of one of the largest companies
in the world their general counsel, knowing full well the
(15:55):
Department of Justice could not respond. How would they respond?
The old Microsoft anti trust case ended up getting sucked
up because a judge responded to a journalist like, that's
the thing, Casey, use your power responsibly. Don't talk about
taking notes, mate, don't talk about taking notes. There's fighting words. Anyway,
the Google thing I brought up, maybe thinking why would
(16:17):
I bring up anythim with with Google. This is about
meta right, Well, there were emails revealed in the Department
of Justice is anti trust against trial against Google Search, which,
as you well know, for the man who cup Google Search,
I've read a lot of Well, Google specifically mentioned having
briefed Casey Newton with the intention of and I quote
looking for ways to drive headlines on Google's own terms. Now,
in Newton's defense, this is standard pr language, but it
(16:39):
is within the context of what I'm saying, quite hard
to ignore. And again, the reason I'm so fucking furious
about Casey Newton, it's these part of a media machine
that's helped whitewash Mark Zuckerberg and the people around Mark
Zuckerberg running these glossy puff pieces with scumbags like Nick
fucking Clegg and saying things like and I quote. The
transition away from Facebook's old friends and family dominated feeds
(17:01):
to metas algorithmic wonderland Jesus Christ seems to be proceeding
mostly without incident. By the way that line I AD
was published in twenty twenty three, two years after the
release of the Facebook files, which revealed that the company
knew its algorithmic timeline had a propensity to push users
into increasingly radical echo chambers, and one year after amidst,
the International published a report accusing Facebook's algorithms of and
(17:24):
I quote, supercharging the spread of harmful anti Rohinga content
in Nyamar amidst the genocide that saw an estimated million
displaced and tens of thousands massacred. KC. Case wake up, brother,
it's time to go back to work. It's time for
you to do a good job again. Case Is spent
years using his platform to subtly defend these companies, these
(17:46):
companies that actively make their shit worse, and he occasionally
proves he can be a real journalist. There is a
whole series of articles he wrote about the acquisition of
Twitter by Elon Musk that was genuinely important, fighting for
workers as well as members of the platform's trying horrible
things that Elon Musk was saying and doing. You can
do this, Casey, you can actually do this. But then
(18:07):
it feels like you slip back into am I being
too mean to meta? I'm not gonna single Casey out further,
and I really want to make it clear my frustration
here isn't that I think Casey's stupid or poorly connected.
Quite the opposite. I think Casey's quite smart. I think
Casey's fully capable of doing this. It's why it's so
(18:27):
sickening when you go and look back and see what
he's done. And I really need you to know how
important it is to have really great independent writers and
not have them scared to do things because a guy
who clearly has some allegiance with the powerful wants to
scare them. You can't scare Gary Markus. Nothing scares Gary
Marcus is actually kind of remarkable, actually kind of weird.
(18:50):
But this isn't about Gary. Now. The media and people
like Casey, and this is another frustrating thing as well.
They're super influential of a public policy and the overall
way that's I've used and judges tech as an experienced,
knowledgeable journalist, Casey is too regularly chosen to frame fear
and balanced as let's make sure the powerful get their
say too. As I've said and I will continue to say,
(19:11):
Casey is fully capable of doing some of the literal
best journalism in tech. And I always cite his Facebook
moderation stuff. It's really good. He fought for people that
were victims of a horrifying corporate machine. Yeah, he keeps
choosing not to do that, And I don't know what
it is. I'm not gonna I actually don't consider Casey
and Karaswish are the same thing. I don't know Casey's intentions.
(19:35):
All I know is what he's done. And all I
know is that if we are to push back on authoritarianism,
that if we're actually going to tell the truth to
people and help people understand what's happening to them, we
can't keep doing it this way. We can't. And the
cost of doing it this way is that the powerful
of used people in the media as mouthpieces to whitewash.
(19:55):
There's horrible, little fucking product decisions, these terrible things they've done.
And I don't know why Casey I mentioned it. I
don't know his intentions. I really don't. But what I
do know is that as a result of Casey Newton's work,
Mark Zuckerberg and his products have received a continual amount
of promotion for ideas and air cover for their failures,
(20:16):
and as a result, public policy has been directly influenced.
And it's just frustrating. It can be better, it should
be better. And while Newton has acted for years like
nothing was wrong with the quality of the platforms themselves.
He's been able to write with clarity and purpose about
other things. And if he did the same thing, and
I would be I will be completely serious. If he
(20:37):
changes his tune, I'd be so happy. We need Casey
Newton actually challenging these companies meaningfully. And I don't know
what would change that, but I will say, don't threaten
fucking writer as Casey, don't do that. I don't like bullying.
I won't tolerate in this fucking tech media. I know
oint can squeak at you all I possibly can. Don't
(20:59):
talk about taking detailed notes about people. It's greasy, it's gross.
And I think that the consequences of supporting these companies,
of making sure that when something bad happens they have
a newsletter with one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers that
they can go to and get a kindly story. That's
just worrying and it can be better in case he
(21:20):
can be better too, But the consequences here are horrifying
and they're all also just reading these stories again just
feels me full of bile, as if I'm usually that
calm putting aside the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is this
horrible career liar and this charlatan. He's deliberately hurting billions
of people. He has been doing this for a while,
(21:44):
and I believe that by being given air cover for
so long and now having this mask off moment where
he can just say, oh, give it's now, I would
not be surprised if Zuckerberg turns on the media. Well
maybe they'll help him. I don't know, but I think
that where we are right now, with this kind of unvarnished,
unrepentant Mark Zuckerberg, I think that all of the changes
(22:08):
he's making at Meta, it's going to create this new
era of decay. I think he is going to inspire
tech executives unburdened by the kind of flimsy approach to
societal norms and customer loyalty. I think he's going to
inspire them to make their shit even worse. From here,
I think Meta has fired the gun of the slop society.
And yes, I came up with a new term, because
(22:28):
this is the beginning of the shittiest shit that ever
did shit. In an interview with The Financial Times from
December twenty twenty four metas VP of Product for Generative AI,
Connor Hayes said that Meta expects AI to actually overtime
exist on metas platforms, kind of in the same way
that accounts to each one having their own bios and
profile pictures and the ability to and I quote generate
(22:50):
and share content powered by AI on the platform. This
came hot off the heels of Mark Zuckerberg saying in
a quarterly earning school that Meta would and I quote
add a whole new category of content, which is AI
generated or AI summarized content, or kind of existing content
pulled together by AI in some way, effectively promising to
drop AI slop into feeds already filled with recommended and
sponsored slop from real people that gets in the way
(23:12):
of you seeing the things you actually log onto their
platforms to look at. Now, this whole thing in the
Financial Times it led to a kind of scandal where
users discovered what they believed to be brand new AI profiles.
Karenattiir of The Washington Post were a long thread and
blue Sky, and a piece in the post itself about
her experience talking to a bot she fairly described as
digital blackface, with Meta receiving massive backlash for these bots
(23:34):
that would happily admit that they were trained by a
bunch of white people. It turns out, by the way,
that these bots had been around for over a year
in various forms that were so unpopular that nobody really
noticed in twenty twenty three until the financial time story
came up at the end of twenty twenty four, leading
to better deleting the bots, at least for now, though
I'm hearing reports you can still get to them if
you really need to talk to a chat GBT version
(23:55):
of what someone who thinks her a gay black person is.
And I'm really describing the literal bot here live is
the name? Really disgusting stuff. And I'm one hundred percent sure,
by the way, that these chatbots are coming back, because
it's fairly obvious that Meta intends to fill your feeds
with content, whether it's entirely generated or recommended or summarized
(24:16):
or whatever it is. And AI generated slop's already dominating
the platform, and has discussed earlier the quality of the
platform itself has already fallen into a kind of ultra disrepair,
mostly because Meta's only concern is keeping you on Instagram
or Facebook so that they can show you more ads
or content that they've been paid to show you, even
if the reason you're seeing it is because you can't
(24:37):
find the things you actually want to find. And I
keep repeating that point for a reason, because that's how
meta makes money. And all of this is because well,
(24:59):
like everything in this show, all roads lead back to
the rot economy, which the growth at all cost mindset.
That means that the only thing that matters is the
growth of revenue, which comes from showing you as many
ads as possible and you being engaged with the platform
as much as possible. But I'm gonna be honest, it's
almost ridiculous to call us users of Facebook at this point.
We don't use Facebook. Facebook uses us. It's tripe, but
(25:22):
it's true. We're victims. We're all victims of the rot economy.
And I said it at the end of last year,
But with Facebook, I really think it's at its most grotesque.
We're not users. We are the used. We're the punished,
the terrorized, the trick the scammed, the abused. We're constantly
using this app trying to get things that we actually want.
(25:43):
We're constantly forced to navigate through layers of abstraction between
the thing we're allegedly using and the features we'd like
to use. It's fucking farcical how little attention has been
given to how bad tech products have gone, and few
have decayed as severely as Facebook thanks to this near
monopoly they have over social media. I would rather not
use any of their products, but there are people I
(26:03):
know who really only speak to me on there, and
I know many people who have the same experience. Don't
call me a loser, all right, I've gone to a
lot of therapy. I don't call myself that anymore anyways.
Is Zuckerberg and his people are intimately aware though people
don't really have any whe else to go, which, along
with a lack of regulation and a fairly compliant media,
(26:24):
has given Mark Zuckerberg and Meta permission to do just
about anything they want to increase advertising impressions, which in
practice means giving you more reason to stay on the platform,
which means putting more things in the way of what
you want to see, rather than creating something you'd want
to see in the first place. It's the same thing
that happened with Google Search, where the revenue team pushed
the search team to make search results worse as a
(26:45):
means of increasing the amount of times that people search
for things on Google, because you know, a user that
finds what they're looking for quickly spends less time looking
at ads. And that's just not how it works with
Probagar Ragavan and said his name in a while. But
this is why the app store on Apple devices is
so chaotic and poorly curated as well, because they make
money on the advertising impressions they get from showing you
(27:06):
ads as you search for apps. Also, this is why
so many products on the App Store have expensive and
exploited in micro transactions too. Apple makes thirty percent off
of all apps store revenue, even if the app sucks,
even if the app tricked you and said, oh yeah,
we're going to charge you weekly, they hide the weekly.
You think, oh three ninety nine a month, right now,
it's weekly. It's in a tiny, little little note at
(27:28):
the bottom. Apple eventually gets rid of those people eventually.
And I believe that Mark Zuckerberg loosening community standards and
killing fact checking is just the beginning of texts real
era of decay. You think the rot economy is bad,
that they it's only getting worse. See it's Trump really
inspires people horrible people by bulldozing norms, doing things that
(27:52):
we would all agree we would never do, like being
noxious and toxic and racist, and in the process moves
the over window, which is the range of acceptable things
in the society, further and further and further into the toilet,
aggressively flushing it as he goes. But really, we've already
seen tech's Overton window shift for years. A lack of
(28:13):
media coverage of the actual decay of these products, and
a lack of accountability for tech executives, both in the
media and regulation. It's given these companies the permission to
quietly fuck up their stuff, to make the services worse,
to make more growth happen, and because everybody made things shittier.
Over time, it became accepted practice to punish and trick
customers with dark patterns, designed choices to intentionally mislead people,
(28:33):
to the point that the FTC found last year that
the majority of subscription apps and websites use them. I believe, however,
that Zuckerberg is going to move the tech Overton window
a little bit further. Look, he's publicly saying we are
going to fill your feeds with slop, we're firing five
percent of our workers because they're not good, and we're
going to have AI profiles instead of real people on
(28:53):
the site. You visit to see the real people you know.
And we don't really give a shit about marginalized people
to the point of formalizing it in policy, rendering our
DEI initiatives, and people are too mean to men. These
are the things that Mark Zuckerberg is using to signal
the fact that he does not give a rap fuck
about you or the users of his products, and he
knows that, in his position of the CEO, is one
(29:14):
of the most powerful companies in the world, let alone
tech companies. By the way, people are going to follow,
not just in tech, but are really in tech. Tech's
already taken liberties with the digital experience, and I believe
this SLOP era is going to be one where experiences
will begin to subtly and overtly rot, with companies proudly
boasting that they're making adjustments the user engagement that will
(29:35):
provide better business forward outcomes, which will be code for
make things worse so we make more money. I realize
this also an obvious thing. I'm not saying that the
Trump administration isn't going to be any kind of regulatory
force against big tech. Trump is perhaps the most transactional
human being to ever grace the earth. Big tech knows this,
which is why all of them have been donating random
one million dollar checks to him to his inorganization fund.
(29:58):
It's why Trump is completely revert this position on TikTok,
which is banned or unbanned depending on what's happening today.
I'm recording this. It's back up. I don't use it. It's weird.
I don't like it. Something's wrong there. I don't even
mean with the app before it like, something's weird with it.
Now you can't post about meta negatively. But tech knows,
or at least thinks, that by kissing the ring, they
can do whatever they want. Now. I should be clear
(30:22):
that previous governments have not been particularly effective at curbing
the worst excesses of big tech, though. I think we
can all agree on that he has done some stuff.
But even then, the qualities, there's no quality standards. Outside
of the last few years, and specifically the work done
by the FTC under Lena Khan Anti Trust against big
tech has been incredibly weak and really has been pretty
(30:42):
weak against everyone else as well, and no meaningful consumer
protections exist to keep websites like Facebook or Google functional
for consumers or limit how exploitative they can be. Like
they can't just have vats of piss in your drinking water.
Why is this any different? And yes, I consider spam
a form of piss. But the media really has failed
to hold them accountable at scale, which has in turn
(31:03):
allowed the Overton window to shift on quality. And now
that Trump and the general magnified mindset of you can
do or say whatever you want if you do so
confidently or loudly enough, has risen to power again, and
so too will an era of outright selfishness and cruelty
within the products that consumers use every day. Except this time,
I believe these tech companies finally have permission to enter
(31:23):
their real, dirtiest, sloppiest eras. I also think that Trump
gives them the confidence that monopolies like Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft
three sixty five, which is Microsoft's enterprise monopoly over business
productivity software, things like Google Search and Google Advertising, which
I realize remedies are coming for, but I really think
a lot of these are going to remain unchallenged, and
(31:44):
even if they're not, I don't think anything exists to
make these companies start getting better. But what I'm really
describing is an era of industrial contempt for the consumer,
a continuation of what I described in the Invisible War
and the Invisible War criminals from last year take decides
that they will do whatever they want to consume us
within the boundaries of the law, but with little consideration
(32:05):
of good taste, user happiness, or anything other than growth.
Now how this manifests in Facebook and Instagram will be
fairly obvious. I believe that the already fucked up state
of these platforms will just massively accelerate. Meta is going
to push as much aislop as it wants, both created
by its generative models and their users, and massively up
content that riles up users with little regard for the consequences.
(32:27):
And I wouldn't be surprised if the generative content is
political too. Instagram will become more exploitative and more volatile.
Instagram ads have been steadily getting more problematic, and I
think Meta will start taking ads from just about anyone,
and this will internal lead to an initial revenue bump.
But then I hypothesize a steady bleed of users that
will take a few quarters to truly emerge, and we're
(32:49):
already kind of seeing it with Facebook. Go back to
the rock combubble from last year. Sadly, I think we're
already seeing the abuse. These abusive practices come out elsewhere.
Both Google and Microsoft are now forcing generative AI features
onto customers, with Google drifting business users by increasing the
cost of Google Workspace by two dollars per user per
month along with adding AI features that they didn't want,
(33:12):
and Microsoft has now raised the price of consumer office subscriptions,
justifying the move by adding Copilot AI features that again
nobody really wants. The informations. John Victor and Aaron Holmes
add that's yet to be seen what Microsoft does with
their corporate customers using Microsoft three sixty five Productivity Suite.
Adding Copilot costs, by the way, thirty dollars per use
(33:34):
per month. But I also hypothesize that they're going to
do exactly the same thing that Google did. They're going
to knock up the prices and they're going to go
but you've got free AI isn't free? Isn't free? If
I have to pay more? Mate, that's not how free works.
I should also be clear that the reason they're doing
this is because they're desperate. These companies must express growth
every single quarterly earnings or see their stock prices. Creator
(33:57):
and big tech companies have oriented themselves around growth as
a result, meaning that they're not really used to having
to do things like compete for a customer or make
a product that the customer might like. For over a decade,
tech has been rewarded for creating growth opportunities empowered by
monopolistic practices. And I'd argue that the cultures that created
the products that people remember actually liking, Yeah, they're dead.
(34:20):
They've been killed. And the people that did them, the
people that built those products, well, they've been strangled to
they've been pushed out of the tech industry. The soldiers
of the rot economy are manifold, and they're willing to
do whatever it takes to make things grow. And you
are more than likely already seeing signs that this is happening.
(34:40):
The little features on products you use that feel broken,
like when you try and crop an image and iOS
and it sometimes doesn't actually crop it, and when the
copy link button on Google Docs doesn't work, when a
Google search gives you a page of forum links that
don't answer your question. I expect things to get worse,
possibly a new and incredibly frustrating ways, and being a
little dramatic with all that stuff. But these are the
(35:01):
little niggling problems in your head. These are things poking
you in the head as you use these apps every day.
Don't pretend like this shit doesn't piss you off. Don't
pretend that the little interruptions, the little problems you get
from these things don't annoy you. And if they don't, great,
I wish I could engage you the level of calm.
I'm very mentally healthy. It may not come across in
(35:22):
the podcast, but I find these things just very frustrating
because there's no way in hell that the people using
these products don't see them, or they don't use their products.
Both of these are utterly reprehensible, and I deeply worry
that we're going to enter now into the most irresponsible
era of tech, yet not just in the harms that
companies allow or perpetuate, but in the full rejection of
(35:44):
their stewardship from the products themselves. Our digital lives are
already chaotic and poisonous, different incentives warring for our attention,
user interfaces corroded by those who believe everything is justified
in pursuit of growth. And I fear that the subtle
little problems you see every day will both multiple and expand,
and that the core services we use will break down
(36:04):
because I believe the most powerful people in tech never
really gave a shit and no longer believe that they
have to pretend otherwise. Now, like the end of every episode,
you may think, head, that's all just very sad. There
is a funny thing I'm hypothesizing happens. I think as
crappy as these companies are going to get, I think
(36:24):
users are just gonna stop using stuff. They're all saying, oh, well,
they don't have anywhere else to go. We've got more
Facebook and Instagram. They're fucked. What they're gonna do not
use Instagram or Facebook. Yes, yes, I actually think that
that's what's really coming. I think that these companies assume
that they are unkillable. They assume that because they've never
(36:48):
really been held accountable, not by governments, not by the media,
though there are people in the media who have nevertheless
never consistently accountable and certainly not for the quality of
the services they provide. They're arrogant, they're lazy. There are
probably startups that could come for them. There are genuinely
ways that these companies can be stopped. And though they
(37:08):
may be unrepentant in the dogshit they serve you, they're
only doing that because they're desperate, but also because they
don't think there's ever gonna be other competition, and history
has kind of proven that that never happens, that there
is always a bigger fish. To quote Qui gon Jin
in The Phantom Menace, classic movie about trade. Anyway, the
(37:30):
port are making is nothing's nothing is unkillable, nothing's unstoppable.
Every empire, even the worst one, ends. There is a
good chance in the next ten years that Meta actually collapses.
Mark Zuckerberg is doing this meaningless, fake masculine bullshare because
(37:50):
he realizes he doesn't have much left. He may have
all that money, but his platforms suck, his users hate them.
He's twisted and hurt people, billions of people time. He
knows that the party's ending. Online advertising is falling apart.
I think things are going to get very interesting in
the next years. And frankly, in the next months. But
(38:11):
I'll leave you with some hope. Again, none of these
companies are unkillable. Every single company in tech history that's
thought they were died. MySpace died, and yeah it was
a different circumstance. But Meta, while they may seem unstoppable,
relies on advertising for ninety nine percent of their revenue.
(38:32):
Things like ad blockers, things like even subtle changes in
the EU about how ads can be served to customers,
like the opt in feature for ads is deadly for them.
If anything happens to online ads, Meta will die. AI
is not going to save them. AI will not save
Mark Zuckerberg. And if he truly pulls the top off
(38:53):
of this and says, you know what, I'm just going
to serve them shit at scale, I'm just going to
slop them up, slop them up, AI, slop in every profile.
No one's going to go on Facebook anymore. They're already
losing traffic. If they do that to Instagram, which is
the one meaningful thing they still have, they're completely double fucked.
And if you think that Google Search can't be competed
(39:14):
with eh, I don't even think that that's the case either.
I think the remedies of that trial mean that they
have to start sharing their search data. All of these
companies can be beaten with or without regulation, but it
also starts with not using their shit anymore. I'm really
working out how I can start deleting myself from these services.
I don't know how I'm going to do it. I'm
(39:35):
already going to delete myself from Threads after this. I
need Instagram. That are people that like I can't talk
to elsewhere. I don't know, not super close friends, or
just people that like talking on them more than elsewhere.
Some of you probably feel like that too. Don't give up, hope,
all right, don't There's the whole thing about not bending
the knee and all that, But a big thing that
(39:56):
authoritarianism really wants from you is to give up in advance.
It's not just about controlling you. It's about making it
so that you don't stay angry, that you don't stay
outraged at these people. I'm trying really not to tell
you how to feel here. I'm just saying, if you
feel the frustration with these companies, all that these people
Zuckerberg especially have is their names. You think Mark Zuckerberg's
(40:19):
going on the Joe Rogan experience and going m men
and men are mistreated because he's secure. No, all of
these men, all they have is their names. So talk
about the things they've done. Tell people about how bad
Facebook is now maybe they know, maybe they've never really
looked close enough. I can't give you the exact skeleton
(40:40):
key to life, but I can tell you things get
better through discussions. Things get better through everybody agreeing that
things should be better. It's a start. I really appreciate
all of you listening to this show. Better Offlone's going
to be so weird this year. The whole talk radio
segment was so good in CES and I enjoy doing
them in person at the beautiful Eyeheart Radio Studios, New York.
(41:00):
If you've made it this far, you must really like
well boys, So thank you for listening. We will be
back next week. We'll be back next week with another
talk radio segment. Thank you, Thank you for listening to
Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline
(41:23):
theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of
his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M
A T T O, S O W s ki dot com.
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 at
(41:44):
to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better
Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much
for listening.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. H
As media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. Of course, I'm your
host ed zitron, Here to Serve, Here to podcast. In
the last episode, I walked you through the how the
so called sudden magnification of Meta is really just them
(00:27):
formalizing the rot economy, the growth of all costs bullshit
that drives the entire company, making the products worse to
grab more advertising impressions, to make Mark Zuckerberg richer, while
also making the life of the average Facebook user that
bit worse. And I believe that had Meta and Mark
Zuckerberg been ever really held accountable, truly accountable in the
(00:47):
last decade, that things might have gone a little differently. Zuckerberg,
like many tech executives, has been allowed to destroy the
user experience in broad daylight because the media, despite writing
about Facebook as a product all the time for years,
doesn't seem capable of writing the blunt truth about how
shit it is, how bad it works, how everything is
kind of getting there but nowhere worse than Facebook. Really,
(01:09):
the problem, I believe is there are some people that
simply want the tech executives to have power. They want
to make friends with the rock stars, they want to
be in their orbit to humor their ideas and celebrate
their victories, which is so strange because said victories are
usually just the rich just got even richer, and where
that's not the case, there's just a lack of willingness
to say that something is bad, and the consequences are
(01:33):
that these platforms have been left unchecked. To be clear,
there are plenty of reporters who have done great work
reporting on specific parts of Matt's problems, Kevin Russel at
The Times with crowd tang, or Jeff Horwitz and the
rest of the team who did the Facebook files at
the Wall Street Journal, for example. But there's been this
bigger and nastier and more obvious problem that no one's
really put down. In blunt words, the core product of
(01:56):
Facebook has gone incrementally worse, seemingly every month since two
thousand and eight. And while I understand that it's hard
to just write thing bad every week, but I fucking
do it. Journalism is fully capable of doing this in
other ways. Think about it when they write about crime
or wars. How is a social network used by billions
of people less important than that, or less important than
(02:17):
how many people have allegedly broken into a CVS cabinet.
If a tanker overturned on a highway, spilling various poisons
and acids and such into local water sources and burning
people alive in the middle of a fucking freeway, that
would be news, right, But somehow billions of people being
actively misled, manipulated and harmed every single day just isn't relevant. Now,
(02:39):
one argument might be, well, it isn't really clear what
the harms of social media are. We have some reporting,
but it's just not that obvious. Well, my retort's also
fairly obvious and goes back to something I just said.
The media seems fully capable of writing about the rise
of retail theft, for example, and that led to a
whole thing with pharmacies like I mentioned, locking in entire
parts of the store behind plastic, And it wasn't obvious
(03:01):
whether this was a real problem, but it didn't stop
the media writing hundreds of thousands of words about how
dangerous cities had gone, how dangerous, Oh, this retail theft,
it's all happening. And again it wasn't necessarily based on
anything other than editorial vibes. And whoever picked up the
tab at Balthazar that week it was craven, But at
(03:22):
least could we do like a craven thing with Facebook?
Because if streets were littered with needles and corpses and
fires and trash and violence, you would expect then used
to cover that. Why isn't Facebook treated the same way?
Why aren't social networks treat it the same way? We
can do this paranoid, sinophobic shit. We can do this
(03:45):
thing where we say TikTok is manipulating people with their algorithms,
as if Meta isn't doing the same thing with theirs.
But let's take it an abstraction above that and just
look at what we're really dealing with here. Facebook is
used by billy of people. It is a platform that
probably has more effect on the people that use it
(04:05):
than many forms of entertainment by congressmen, even by local officials.
People are more aware of the things they see on
social media than they are of like civic things, And
I really want to be clear, with that level of exposure,
with that many people affected by how bad Facebook has got,
we should be treating this like a mass casualty event,
(04:28):
like a mass poisoning. We should be looking at the
quality of these platforms. But none worse than Facebook and
saying what is being done to people? And it's not
just about misinformation, it's not just about harassment, two things
which are very, very fucking important, especially the harassment. It's disgraceful.
It's disgraceful that trans people are now targeted on there.
(04:50):
But on top of that, it's just bad, flat out bad,
flat out harmful, flat out obviously horrible and unsafe and harmful,
full of scams and spams. But we treat it like
this cute little thing in the fucking corner. And the
basic quality of the Facebook experience really is quite terrible,
I need to repeat myself. And it actively deprives the
users of dignity in industry to make their own decisions,
(05:12):
and their experiences are constantly interfered with, and the majority
of the content that they see is provided by a
shadowy algorithm built to promote engagement rather than any kind
of utility. This is not a fair exchange of value.
If Facebook were a city, every second car would be
overturned and on fire. Men would solicit you on the
sides of the street for I don't know, drugs, or
just to steal from you, or maybe they just try
(05:34):
and confuse you like a carnival guy. Random people would
just bark at you from their windows. I think people
would just throwing faces out the fucking window, and the
governor would be actively selling pardons on television every day.
If that was happening in a city, that would be news.
But it happens on Facebook. It happens on Facebook every day.
The harms have been here for years, and we as
the media, have done jack fucking shit. You can report
(05:56):
on the obvious things, on the research on the harms
that Facebook know, fine, actually need to do that. We
need that journalism, But on top of it, we need
to treat this platform as how harmful it is, but
also how harmful it's going to get. And like I
said last episode, it's been like this for a while,
and it's kind of a comfortable lie I think to
(06:17):
say that Meta's suddenly done something bad here, because it
gives the media and society kind of a free pass
for ignoring this gaping wound in the side of the
fucking Internet. Two of the world's largest social networks are
run and have been run with this blatant contempt for
the user, misinforming and harming people at scale, making the
things they want to see harder, defiant and swamping them
(06:39):
in this endless stream of sponsored and recommended content that
either sells them something or gets them to engage further
with the platform, with little care as to why they
be doing so other than the fact that all things
are justified under growth. Worse still, there have been some
members of the media that have actively worked to support
and celebrate what Meta has done for years. You'll never
(07:00):
guess that I'm referring to Casey Newton of Platformer, who's
done an admirable job. I will repeat myself covering Meta
in the last few weeks and the horrifying anti LGBTQ
things that Matter has been doing. But it's also really
important to note that Casey was cheerfully covering Zuckerberg and
I quote his expansive view of the future as recently
as September twenty fifth, twenty twenty four, and he happily
(07:23):
published how and I quote again, Zuckerberg was back on
the offensive somehow, not seeing anything worrying about the fact
that Mark Zuckerberg's shirt referenced Julius Caesar, the historic dictator
that perpetuated the genocide in the Gaelic wars like this
is who he was months ago. Where was the alarm then?
Where was the worry then? But don't worry, I'm not
remotely done with you, Casey. Yeah, Casey felt it unnecessary
(07:46):
to mention at any time how utterly atrocious Facebook has got,
but he will happily quote Mark Zuckerberg saying things like
in every generation of technology, there is a competition of
ideas for what the future should look like. Yet the
most loathsome thing that Casey Newton published was the following
and I quote and all of these will be linked
to in the notes don't worry ahem, but it left
(08:07):
unsaid it referring to Meta what seemed to be the
larger point, which is that Zuckerberg intends to crush his rivals,
particularly Apple, into a fine pulp. His swagger on stage
was most evident when discussing the company's next generation glasses
as the likeliest next generation computing platform, and highlighted the
progress that Meta had made so far in overcoming the
(08:28):
crushing technological burdens necessary for that to happen. And Meta
also failed to capture just how personal all this seems
to Mark Zuckerberg. Burned by what he has called the
twenty year mistake of the company's reaction to the post
twenty sixteen tech backlash very weird. That that's not twenty years,
and Zuckerberg, in this case quoting again, is long haunted
(08:50):
by criticisms that Meta has been nothing more than the
competition crushing copycat since it released the news feed, Zuckerberg
has never seemed more intent on claiming for himself the
mantle of inn Well Don Casey great fucking journalism there
mate share, not a dry seat in the house, ridiculous,
cowardly paper tiger analysis, stenography for the powerful masters, deep thoughts.
(09:14):
This specific paragraph is exactly where Casey Newton could have
said something about how worrying Mark Zuckerberg modeling himself on
a Roman dictator was. I don't know. Maybe he could
have brought up how all the company was, despite winking
about how it's building the future, letting its existing products
deteriorate as it deliberately turned the screws to duce engagement.
Casey Newton has regularly and reliably turned his back on
(09:36):
the truth that Metascore products are really quite bad in
favor of pumping up various AI products and vague promises
from Zuckerberg about a future that just arrived in fucking sucks.
The reason I'm singling him out, by the way, is
that it's very very very very important to hold the
people that helped Mark Zuckerberg succeed accountable, especially as the
attempt to hint that they've always been an aggressive advocate
(09:58):
for the truth. J Newton is fully capable of real journalism,
as proven by the way by his recent coverage, but
he's chosen again and again to simply print whatever Mark
Zuckerberg wants to say. Now, I'm going harden the paint
against Casey for a reason, and it's because he wrote
something at the end of last year called The Phony
Comforts of AI Skepticism. It's one of the weirdest things
(10:19):
I've read in my life. It's this sloppily stapled together
piece of marketing collater or for AI companies, saying that
not only is AI the future, but those that are
critiquing it were doing so in this kind of cynical,
corrupt way for attention. And he singled out one person,
Gary Marcus, who's an independent critic. I've had my issues
with Gary, but let me tell you something. If you're
(10:40):
singling out a writer, You'll do it again. You'll gladly
choose an independent writer and single them out. Now I
should be clear, I'm doing the same thing with Casey
right now. But Casey has a bigger audience than I have.
He has more connections, he's more powerful ostensibly. But on
top of that, when you choose to single out a writer,
a writer who is critiquing the powerful, what are you doing?
(11:05):
Who do you work for? Casey? I'm not done with you,
not remotely. I've got plenty more to say here. But
I think the biggest question I ask for Casey Newton
is who are you defending? What are you defending? What
is it you do every day? Who are you writing for?
Because if you're going to choose an independent critic, a
critic who is critiquing multi billion dollar companies, to what
(11:30):
end are you doing? So what are you defending? But
let's keep going, though, because there was also another thing
that Casey said that I just didn't like. Right at
the end, he said, and I quote that he was
taking detailed notes on all bloggers writing financial analyzes, suggesting
that Open Eye will go bankrupts soon because it's not
profitable yet. Oh Casey, Casey, Casey, Casey, who could you
(11:52):
possibly be talking about there. I'm not going to say
I think it is. I'm just going to say this.
I do not like bullies, and I do not like threats.
Suggesting that one is taking detailed notes on bloggers is
an attempt to intimidate people that are seriously evaluating the
fact that open ai burns five billion dollars a year
(12:13):
and has no part of the profitability. I don't know
if this is actually about me, and I don't really
give a shit, but I will tell you something, Casey. Actually,
I'll tell you two things. One, don't fucking threaten people.
Don't talk about taking detailed notes on people. You have power,
you have a platform, You have responsibility to young journalists
(12:34):
as well as to yourself, and you seem to have
given up on all the rest of it. You seem
to have lost your weight. But then there's the second thing,
which is, Casey, I've been taking detailed notes on you
for some fucking time. Well. Newton's metaverse into View from
(13:00):
twenty twenty one was deeply irresponsible in how much it
quoted Mark Zuckerberg just saying complete crap, Arguably his most
disgraceful act was October twenty six, twenty twenty one, when
he wrote a piece called the Facebook Paper's Missing Piece,
an interview with an anonymous integrity worker that attempted to
undermine the Wall Street Journals reporting on the Facebook files,
(13:21):
a massive investigation and expose of how Facebook knew how
harmful their platform was. I should be clear the Facebook
file situation involved Francis Horgan coming forward, risking her life,
risking her safety. That woman is incredibly brave, as are
the reporters that covered this. This is important work. This
is necessary work. And Newton's pieces a disgrace to tech journalism,
(13:45):
a disqualifying one, a seeming attempt to discredit by proxy,
the bravery of a whistleblower that provided documents that led
to this meaningful reporting. And it's utterly repulsive corporate hand washing,
and its important context for any criticism that casing you
has anything of anything ever again. And I'm furious. I'm
furious because Casey could be better. I believe that Casey
(14:08):
could actually do meaningful things. And we need you right now, Casey,
we need you to fucking start working again. And indeed,
I think the only comfortable thing I hear, or at
least feel, is reading. How much of the powerful's messaging
you like to share? Casey Newton argued that while AI
(14:28):
companies have hit a scaling wall, it's actually okay. And
don't worry, I'll have plenty of links in the notes
that NFTs went finally mainstream in twenty twenty two. They didn't.
He argued that Clubhouse was the future and that live
audio was Zuckerbugs and I quote big bet on creators
in twenty twenty one due to and I quote again
the shift in power from institutions to individuals. I should
add that Facebook shut down their podcast service a year later.
(14:50):
And he also added, and I can't see the full
text here because it's payward, that metaverse pessimists were missing
something because Meta's grand vision was already well on its way.
He wrote this in November twenty twenty one. By the way,
he also wanted that Meta's leadership changed its mind about
its name because Facebook was not the future of the company.
Maybe that was accurate, I don't know. He also wrote
about Acxieinfinity, which is a cryptoweb three Pokemon clone thing
(15:13):
that created a kind of indentured servitude. There's like loan
sharks in the Philippines. That fuck, people have heard this.
It's insane. And by the way, back by Andres and Horowitz,
and he was claiming that the game turned gaming on
its head. It sucks absolutely. I could go on, it
shouldn't be this easy, man, It shouldn't be this easy
to find a bunch of really weird stuff. Because Casey
(15:34):
has also at times had real dalliancies with criticism. He
has criticized Facebook, but it's also hard to take those
criticisms seriously when Casey's also written a piece for The
Verge about how Google plans to win its antitrust trial.
They didn't win, by the way, and he printed the
legal and marketing opinion of one of the largest companies
in the world their general counsel, knowing full well the
(15:55):
Department of Justice could not respond. How would they respond?
The old Microsoft anti trust case ended up getting sucked
up because a judge responded to a journalist like, that's
the thing, Casey, use your power responsibly. Don't talk about
taking notes, mate, don't talk about taking notes. There's fighting words. Anyway,
the Google thing I brought up, maybe thinking why would
(16:17):
I bring up anythim with with Google. This is about
meta right, Well, there were emails revealed in the Department
of Justice is anti trust against trial against Google Search, which,
as you well know, for the man who cup Google Search,
I've read a lot of Well, Google specifically mentioned having
briefed Casey Newton with the intention of and I quote
looking for ways to drive headlines on Google's own terms. Now,
in Newton's defense, this is standard pr language, but it
(16:39):
is within the context of what I'm saying, quite hard
to ignore. And again, the reason I'm so fucking furious
about Casey Newton, it's these part of a media machine
that's helped whitewash Mark Zuckerberg and the people around Mark
Zuckerberg running these glossy puff pieces with scumbags like Nick
fucking Clegg and saying things like and I quote. The
transition away from Facebook's old friends and family dominated feeds
(17:01):
to metas algorithmic wonderland Jesus Christ seems to be proceeding
mostly without incident. By the way that line I AD
was published in twenty twenty three, two years after the
release of the Facebook files, which revealed that the company
knew its algorithmic timeline had a propensity to push users
into increasingly radical echo chambers, and one year after amidst,
the International published a report accusing Facebook's algorithms of and
(17:24):
I quote, supercharging the spread of harmful anti Rohinga content
in Nyamar amidst the genocide that saw an estimated million
displaced and tens of thousands massacred. KC. Case wake up, brother,
it's time to go back to work. It's time for
you to do a good job again. Case Is spent
years using his platform to subtly defend these companies, these
(17:46):
companies that actively make their shit worse, and he occasionally
proves he can be a real journalist. There is a
whole series of articles he wrote about the acquisition of
Twitter by Elon Musk that was genuinely important, fighting for
workers as well as members of the platform's trying horrible
things that Elon Musk was saying and doing. You can
do this, Casey, you can actually do this. But then
(18:07):
it feels like you slip back into am I being
too mean to meta? I'm not gonna single Casey out further,
and I really want to make it clear my frustration
here isn't that I think Casey's stupid or poorly connected.
Quite the opposite. I think Casey's quite smart. I think
Casey's fully capable of doing this. It's why it's so
(18:27):
sickening when you go and look back and see what
he's done. And I really need you to know how
important it is to have really great independent writers and
not have them scared to do things because a guy
who clearly has some allegiance with the powerful wants to
scare them. You can't scare Gary Markus. Nothing scares Gary
Marcus is actually kind of remarkable, actually kind of weird.
(18:50):
But this isn't about Gary. Now. The media and people
like Casey, and this is another frustrating thing as well.
They're super influential of a public policy and the overall
way that's I've used and judges tech as an experienced,
knowledgeable journalist, Casey is too regularly chosen to frame fear
and balanced as let's make sure the powerful get their
say too. As I've said and I will continue to say,
(19:11):
Casey is fully capable of doing some of the literal
best journalism in tech. And I always cite his Facebook
moderation stuff. It's really good. He fought for people that
were victims of a horrifying corporate machine. Yeah, he keeps
choosing not to do that, And I don't know what
it is. I'm not gonna I actually don't consider Casey
and Karaswish are the same thing. I don't know Casey's intentions.
(19:35):
All I know is what he's done. And all I
know is that if we are to push back on authoritarianism,
that if we're actually going to tell the truth to
people and help people understand what's happening to them, we
can't keep doing it this way. We can't. And the
cost of doing it this way is that the powerful
of used people in the media as mouthpieces to whitewash.
(19:55):
There's horrible, little fucking product decisions, these terrible things they've done.
And I don't know why Casey I mentioned it. I
don't know his intentions. I really don't. But what I
do know is that as a result of Casey Newton's work,
Mark Zuckerberg and his products have received a continual amount
of promotion for ideas and air cover for their failures,
(20:16):
and as a result, public policy has been directly influenced.
And it's just frustrating. It can be better, it should
be better. And while Newton has acted for years like
nothing was wrong with the quality of the platforms themselves.
He's been able to write with clarity and purpose about
other things. And if he did the same thing, and
I would be I will be completely serious. If he
(20:37):
changes his tune, I'd be so happy. We need Casey
Newton actually challenging these companies meaningfully. And I don't know
what would change that, but I will say, don't threaten
fucking writer as Casey, don't do that. I don't like bullying.
I won't tolerate in this fucking tech media. I know
oint can squeak at you all I possibly can. Don't
(20:59):
talk about taking detailed notes about people. It's greasy, it's gross.
And I think that the consequences of supporting these companies,
of making sure that when something bad happens they have
a newsletter with one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers that
they can go to and get a kindly story. That's
just worrying and it can be better in case he
(21:20):
can be better too, But the consequences here are horrifying
and they're all also just reading these stories again just
feels me full of bile, as if I'm usually that
calm putting aside the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is this
horrible career liar and this charlatan. He's deliberately hurting billions
of people. He has been doing this for a while,
(21:44):
and I believe that by being given air cover for
so long and now having this mask off moment where
he can just say, oh, give it's now, I would
not be surprised if Zuckerberg turns on the media. Well
maybe they'll help him. I don't know, but I think
that where we are right now, with this kind of unvarnished,
unrepentant Mark Zuckerberg, I think that all of the changes
(22:08):
he's making at Meta, it's going to create this new
era of decay. I think he is going to inspire
tech executives unburdened by the kind of flimsy approach to
societal norms and customer loyalty. I think he's going to
inspire them to make their shit even worse. From here,
I think Meta has fired the gun of the slop society.
And yes, I came up with a new term, because
(22:28):
this is the beginning of the shittiest shit that ever
did shit. In an interview with The Financial Times from
December twenty twenty four metas VP of Product for Generative AI,
Connor Hayes said that Meta expects AI to actually overtime
exist on metas platforms, kind of in the same way
that accounts to each one having their own bios and
profile pictures and the ability to and I quote generate
(22:50):
and share content powered by AI on the platform. This
came hot off the heels of Mark Zuckerberg saying in
a quarterly earning school that Meta would and I quote
add a whole new category of content, which is AI
generated or AI summarized content, or kind of existing content
pulled together by AI in some way, effectively promising to
drop AI slop into feeds already filled with recommended and
sponsored slop from real people that gets in the way
(23:12):
of you seeing the things you actually log onto their
platforms to look at. Now, this whole thing in the
Financial Times it led to a kind of scandal where
users discovered what they believed to be brand new AI profiles.
Karenattiir of The Washington Post were a long thread and
blue Sky, and a piece in the post itself about
her experience talking to a bot she fairly described as
digital blackface, with Meta receiving massive backlash for these bots
(23:34):
that would happily admit that they were trained by a
bunch of white people. It turns out, by the way,
that these bots had been around for over a year
in various forms that were so unpopular that nobody really
noticed in twenty twenty three until the financial time story
came up at the end of twenty twenty four, leading
to better deleting the bots, at least for now, though
I'm hearing reports you can still get to them if
you really need to talk to a chat GBT version
(23:55):
of what someone who thinks her a gay black person is.
And I'm really describing the literal bot here live is
the name? Really disgusting stuff. And I'm one hundred percent sure,
by the way, that these chatbots are coming back, because
it's fairly obvious that Meta intends to fill your feeds
with content, whether it's entirely generated or recommended or summarized
(24:16):
or whatever it is. And AI generated slop's already dominating
the platform, and has discussed earlier the quality of the
platform itself has already fallen into a kind of ultra disrepair,
mostly because Meta's only concern is keeping you on Instagram
or Facebook so that they can show you more ads
or content that they've been paid to show you, even
if the reason you're seeing it is because you can't
(24:37):
find the things you actually want to find. And I
keep repeating that point for a reason, because that's how
meta makes money. And all of this is because well,
(24:59):
like everything in this show, all roads lead back to
the rot economy, which the growth at all cost mindset.
That means that the only thing that matters is the
growth of revenue, which comes from showing you as many
ads as possible and you being engaged with the platform
as much as possible. But I'm gonna be honest, it's
almost ridiculous to call us users of Facebook at this point.
We don't use Facebook. Facebook uses us. It's tripe, but
(25:22):
it's true. We're victims. We're all victims of the rot economy.
And I said it at the end of last year,
But with Facebook, I really think it's at its most grotesque.
We're not users. We are the used. We're the punished,
the terrorized, the trick the scammed, the abused. We're constantly
using this app trying to get things that we actually want.
(25:43):
We're constantly forced to navigate through layers of abstraction between
the thing we're allegedly using and the features we'd like
to use. It's fucking farcical how little attention has been
given to how bad tech products have gone, and few
have decayed as severely as Facebook thanks to this near
monopoly they have over social media. I would rather not
use any of their products, but there are people I
(26:03):
know who really only speak to me on there, and
I know many people who have the same experience. Don't
call me a loser, all right, I've gone to a
lot of therapy. I don't call myself that anymore anyways.
Is Zuckerberg and his people are intimately aware though people
don't really have any whe else to go, which, along
with a lack of regulation and a fairly compliant media,
(26:24):
has given Mark Zuckerberg and Meta permission to do just
about anything they want to increase advertising impressions, which in
practice means giving you more reason to stay on the platform,
which means putting more things in the way of what
you want to see, rather than creating something you'd want
to see in the first place. It's the same thing
that happened with Google Search, where the revenue team pushed
the search team to make search results worse as a
(26:45):
means of increasing the amount of times that people search
for things on Google, because you know, a user that
finds what they're looking for quickly spends less time looking
at ads. And that's just not how it works with
Probagar Ragavan and said his name in a while. But
this is why the app store on Apple devices is
so chaotic and poorly curated as well, because they make
money on the advertising impressions they get from showing you
(27:06):
ads as you search for apps. Also, this is why
so many products on the App Store have expensive and
exploited in micro transactions too. Apple makes thirty percent off
of all apps store revenue, even if the app sucks,
even if the app tricked you and said, oh yeah,
we're going to charge you weekly, they hide the weekly.
You think, oh three ninety nine a month, right now,
it's weekly. It's in a tiny, little little note at
(27:28):
the bottom. Apple eventually gets rid of those people eventually.
And I believe that Mark Zuckerberg loosening community standards and
killing fact checking is just the beginning of texts real
era of decay. You think the rot economy is bad,
that they it's only getting worse. See it's Trump really
inspires people horrible people by bulldozing norms, doing things that
(27:52):
we would all agree we would never do, like being
noxious and toxic and racist, and in the process moves
the over window, which is the range of acceptable things
in the society, further and further and further into the toilet,
aggressively flushing it as he goes. But really, we've already
seen tech's Overton window shift for years. A lack of
(28:13):
media coverage of the actual decay of these products, and
a lack of accountability for tech executives, both in the
media and regulation. It's given these companies the permission to
quietly fuck up their stuff, to make the services worse,
to make more growth happen, and because everybody made things shittier.
Over time, it became accepted practice to punish and trick
customers with dark patterns, designed choices to intentionally mislead people,
(28:33):
to the point that the FTC found last year that
the majority of subscription apps and websites use them. I believe, however,
that Zuckerberg is going to move the tech Overton window
a little bit further. Look, he's publicly saying we are
going to fill your feeds with slop, we're firing five
percent of our workers because they're not good, and we're
going to have AI profiles instead of real people on
(28:53):
the site. You visit to see the real people you know.
And we don't really give a shit about marginalized people
to the point of formalizing it in policy, rendering our
DEI initiatives, and people are too mean to men. These
are the things that Mark Zuckerberg is using to signal
the fact that he does not give a rap fuck
about you or the users of his products, and he
knows that, in his position of the CEO, is one
(29:14):
of the most powerful companies in the world, let alone
tech companies. By the way, people are going to follow,
not just in tech, but are really in tech. Tech's
already taken liberties with the digital experience, and I believe
this SLOP era is going to be one where experiences
will begin to subtly and overtly rot, with companies proudly
boasting that they're making adjustments the user engagement that will
(29:35):
provide better business forward outcomes, which will be code for
make things worse so we make more money. I realize
this also an obvious thing. I'm not saying that the
Trump administration isn't going to be any kind of regulatory
force against big tech. Trump is perhaps the most transactional
human being to ever grace the earth. Big tech knows this,
which is why all of them have been donating random
one million dollar checks to him to his inorganization fund.
(29:58):
It's why Trump is completely revert this position on TikTok,
which is banned or unbanned depending on what's happening today.
I'm recording this. It's back up. I don't use it. It's weird.
I don't like it. Something's wrong there. I don't even
mean with the app before it like, something's weird with it.
Now you can't post about meta negatively. But tech knows,
or at least thinks, that by kissing the ring, they
can do whatever they want. Now. I should be clear
(30:22):
that previous governments have not been particularly effective at curbing
the worst excesses of big tech, though. I think we
can all agree on that he has done some stuff.
But even then, the qualities, there's no quality standards. Outside
of the last few years, and specifically the work done
by the FTC under Lena Khan Anti Trust against big
tech has been incredibly weak and really has been pretty
(30:42):
weak against everyone else as well, and no meaningful consumer
protections exist to keep websites like Facebook or Google functional
for consumers or limit how exploitative they can be. Like
they can't just have vats of piss in your drinking water.
Why is this any different? And yes, I consider spam
a form of piss. But the media really has failed
to hold them accountable at scale, which has in turn
(31:03):
allowed the Overton window to shift on quality. And now
that Trump and the general magnified mindset of you can
do or say whatever you want if you do so
confidently or loudly enough, has risen to power again, and
so too will an era of outright selfishness and cruelty
within the products that consumers use every day. Except this time,
I believe these tech companies finally have permission to enter
(31:23):
their real, dirtiest, sloppiest eras. I also think that Trump
gives them the confidence that monopolies like Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft
three sixty five, which is Microsoft's enterprise monopoly over business
productivity software, things like Google Search and Google Advertising, which
I realize remedies are coming for, but I really think
a lot of these are going to remain unchallenged, and
(31:44):
even if they're not, I don't think anything exists to
make these companies start getting better. But what I'm really
describing is an era of industrial contempt for the consumer,
a continuation of what I described in the Invisible War
and the Invisible War criminals from last year take decides
that they will do whatever they want to consume us
within the boundaries of the law, but with little consideration
(32:05):
of good taste, user happiness, or anything other than growth.
Now how this manifests in Facebook and Instagram will be
fairly obvious. I believe that the already fucked up state
of these platforms will just massively accelerate. Meta is going
to push as much aislop as it wants, both created
by its generative models and their users, and massively up
content that riles up users with little regard for the consequences.
(32:27):
And I wouldn't be surprised if the generative content is
political too. Instagram will become more exploitative and more volatile.
Instagram ads have been steadily getting more problematic, and I
think Meta will start taking ads from just about anyone,
and this will internal lead to an initial revenue bump.
But then I hypothesize a steady bleed of users that
will take a few quarters to truly emerge, and we're
(32:49):
already kind of seeing it with Facebook. Go back to
the rock combubble from last year. Sadly, I think we're
already seeing the abuse. These abusive practices come out elsewhere.
Both Google and Microsoft are now forcing generative AI features
onto customers, with Google drifting business users by increasing the
cost of Google Workspace by two dollars per user per
month along with adding AI features that they didn't want,
(33:12):
and Microsoft has now raised the price of consumer office subscriptions,
justifying the move by adding Copilot AI features that again
nobody really wants. The informations. John Victor and Aaron Holmes
add that's yet to be seen what Microsoft does with
their corporate customers using Microsoft three sixty five Productivity Suite.
Adding Copilot costs, by the way, thirty dollars per use
(33:34):
per month. But I also hypothesize that they're going to
do exactly the same thing that Google did. They're going
to knock up the prices and they're going to go
but you've got free AI isn't free? Isn't free? If
I have to pay more? Mate, that's not how free works.
I should also be clear that the reason they're doing
this is because they're desperate. These companies must express growth
every single quarterly earnings or see their stock prices. Creator
(33:57):
and big tech companies have oriented themselves around growth as
a result, meaning that they're not really used to having
to do things like compete for a customer or make
a product that the customer might like. For over a decade,
tech has been rewarded for creating growth opportunities empowered by
monopolistic practices. And I'd argue that the cultures that created
the products that people remember actually liking, Yeah, they're dead.
(34:20):
They've been killed. And the people that did them, the
people that built those products, well, they've been strangled to
they've been pushed out of the tech industry. The soldiers
of the rot economy are manifold, and they're willing to
do whatever it takes to make things grow. And you
are more than likely already seeing signs that this is happening.
(34:40):
The little features on products you use that feel broken,
like when you try and crop an image and iOS
and it sometimes doesn't actually crop it, and when the
copy link button on Google Docs doesn't work, when a
Google search gives you a page of forum links that
don't answer your question. I expect things to get worse,
possibly a new and incredibly frustrating ways, and being a
little dramatic with all that stuff. But these are the
(35:01):
little niggling problems in your head. These are things poking
you in the head as you use these apps every day.
Don't pretend like this shit doesn't piss you off. Don't
pretend that the little interruptions, the little problems you get
from these things don't annoy you. And if they don't, great,
I wish I could engage you the level of calm.
I'm very mentally healthy. It may not come across in
(35:22):
the podcast, but I find these things just very frustrating
because there's no way in hell that the people using
these products don't see them, or they don't use their products.
Both of these are utterly reprehensible, and I deeply worry
that we're going to enter now into the most irresponsible
era of tech, yet not just in the harms that
companies allow or perpetuate, but in the full rejection of
(35:44):
their stewardship from the products themselves. Our digital lives are
already chaotic and poisonous, different incentives warring for our attention,
user interfaces corroded by those who believe everything is justified
in pursuit of growth. And I fear that the subtle
little problems you see every day will both multiple and expand,
and that the core services we use will break down
(36:04):
because I believe the most powerful people in tech never
really gave a shit and no longer believe that they
have to pretend otherwise. Now, like the end of every episode,
you may think, head, that's all just very sad. There
is a funny thing I'm hypothesizing happens. I think as
crappy as these companies are going to get, I think
(36:24):
users are just gonna stop using stuff. They're all saying, oh, well,
they don't have anywhere else to go. We've got more
Facebook and Instagram. They're fucked. What they're gonna do not
use Instagram or Facebook. Yes, yes, I actually think that
that's what's really coming. I think that these companies assume
that they are unkillable. They assume that because they've never
(36:48):
really been held accountable, not by governments, not by the media,
though there are people in the media who have nevertheless
never consistently accountable and certainly not for the quality of
the services they provide. They're arrogant, they're lazy. There are
probably startups that could come for them. There are genuinely
ways that these companies can be stopped. And though they
(37:08):
may be unrepentant in the dogshit they serve you, they're
only doing that because they're desperate, but also because they
don't think there's ever gonna be other competition, and history
has kind of proven that that never happens, that there
is always a bigger fish. To quote Qui gon Jin
in The Phantom Menace, classic movie about trade. Anyway, the
(37:30):
port are making is nothing's nothing is unkillable, nothing's unstoppable.
Every empire, even the worst one, ends. There is a
good chance in the next ten years that Meta actually collapses.
Mark Zuckerberg is doing this meaningless, fake masculine bullshare because
(37:50):
he realizes he doesn't have much left. He may have
all that money, but his platforms suck, his users hate them.
He's twisted and hurt people, billions of people time. He
knows that the party's ending. Online advertising is falling apart.
I think things are going to get very interesting in
the next years. And frankly, in the next months. But
(38:11):
I'll leave you with some hope. Again, none of these
companies are unkillable. Every single company in tech history that's
thought they were died. MySpace died, and yeah it was
a different circumstance. But Meta, while they may seem unstoppable,
relies on advertising for ninety nine percent of their revenue.
(38:32):
Things like ad blockers, things like even subtle changes in
the EU about how ads can be served to customers,
like the opt in feature for ads is deadly for them.
If anything happens to online ads, Meta will die. AI
is not going to save them. AI will not save
Mark Zuckerberg. And if he truly pulls the top off
(38:53):
of this and says, you know what, I'm just going
to serve them shit at scale, I'm just going to
slop them up, slop them up, AI, slop in every profile.
No one's going to go on Facebook anymore. They're already
losing traffic. If they do that to Instagram, which is
the one meaningful thing they still have, they're completely double fucked.
And if you think that Google Search can't be competed
(39:14):
with eh, I don't even think that that's the case either.
I think the remedies of that trial mean that they
have to start sharing their search data. All of these
companies can be beaten with or without regulation, but it
also starts with not using their shit anymore. I'm really
working out how I can start deleting myself from these services.
I don't know how I'm going to do it. I'm
(39:35):
already going to delete myself from Threads after this. I
need Instagram. That are people that like I can't talk
to elsewhere. I don't know, not super close friends, or
just people that like talking on them more than elsewhere.
Some of you probably feel like that too. Don't give up, hope,
all right, don't There's the whole thing about not bending
the knee and all that, But a big thing that
(39:56):
authoritarianism really wants from you is to give up in advance.
It's not just about controlling you. It's about making it
so that you don't stay angry, that you don't stay
outraged at these people. I'm trying really not to tell
you how to feel here. I'm just saying, if you
feel the frustration with these companies, all that these people
Zuckerberg especially have is their names. You think Mark Zuckerberg's
(40:19):
going on the Joe Rogan experience and going m men
and men are mistreated because he's secure. No, all of
these men, all they have is their names. So talk
about the things they've done. Tell people about how bad
Facebook is now maybe they know, maybe they've never really
looked close enough. I can't give you the exact skeleton
(40:40):
key to life, but I can tell you things get
better through discussions. Things get better through everybody agreeing that
things should be better. It's a start. I really appreciate
all of you listening to this show. Better Offlone's going
to be so weird this year. The whole talk radio
segment was so good in CES and I enjoy doing
them in person at the beautiful Eyeheart Radio Studios, New York.
(41:00):
If you've made it this far, you must really like
well boys, So thank you for listening. We will be
back next week. We'll be back next week with another
talk radio segment. Thank you, Thank you for listening to
Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline
(41:23):
theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of
his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M
A T T O, S O W s ki dot com.
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 at
(41:44):
to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better
Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much
for listening.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
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 Heart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. H
Host
Ed Zitron
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