February 19, 2025 • 27 mins
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy has used software to poison so many parts of our lives - and how the tech media can rise to the challenge and fight for a better Silicon Valley by aligning with consumers against big tech.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
A zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zichron.
And you know, sometimes recording this show kind of feels
like narrating the end of the world and watching is
(00:25):
the growth of or costs right economy. It kind of
poisons every corner of our digital lives, changing everything in
search of growth, growth of revenue, growth of engagement metrics,
growth of anything. And my core frustration isn't just how
shitty things have got, but how said shittiness has become
insanely profitable for so many companies. Meta made twenty point
eight billion dollars of profit in its last reported quarterly
(00:48):
earnings off the back of products that are bordering on
non functional. Microsoft made twenty four point one one billion
dollars in profit with an increasingly deteriorating series of productivity
products and cloud based solutions that its customers absolutely fucking hate.
And Google made twenty six point five billion dollars in
profit from multiple monopolies and making its core search product
worse as a means of increasing the amount of times
(01:09):
that people search for stuff. You see the business of
making our shit worse to increase revenue growth year of
a year. It's absolutely booming. The products you use every
day are more confusing and more frustrating to use because
everything must grow, which means in practice that product decisions
now driven in many cases by companies trying to make
you do something rather than do something for you, which
(01:30):
in turn means that basic quality control things like I
don't know usability or functionality, they're more secondary considerations to
the grander rot economy thing. It's why your Facebook newsfeed
doesn't show your posts from friends and family, but happily
bombards you with ai generated slot of weirdly shiny faced
old people celebrating their birthday alone with a weird heartstring
(01:51):
tug in caption that doesn't really make any sense. It's
why whenever you search for something, not just on Google
but anywhere, the keywords you use aren't treat. There's an
explicit instruction of something you want to do or see,
but a kind of interpretive dance of information where maybe
something you want comes out of the end. Look, we
don't use the computer. We negotiate with it to try
(02:13):
and make it do the things we want it to do.
Because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align
with the user. Too often, when you open up an app,
you start bargaining with the company behind it, Like Dropbox
is a great example. You log in and it says, hey, look,
you could save money switching to an annual plan this
big pop up and if you agree to that, they've
just secured your annual recurring revenue and they've done something
(02:36):
that they hope you'll forget, which is switch you from
a monthly to a yearly subscription. You forget that while
you're stuck with them for a year. Tech companies have
the perseverance and desperate hunger for your money of a
timeshare salesman, and they're even more craven. And by the way,
all of these things I'm talking about with negotiating with
the computer, this is assuming whatever you're doing actually loads.
(02:56):
We're all familiar with the tense moment when you open
up Microsoft Teams and just hope it doesn't crash, or
that maybe I don't know your camera or your video works,
or your audio works, whether anything actually works. We live
in this weird state of constant digital microaggressions, and as
I said last year, it's everywhere. Banking apps that now
have helpful assistance that get in the way of flipping
(03:17):
banking pop ups during online shopping that promise discounts and
exchange for our emails and phone numbers. They can spam
us notifications from apps that are built to push us
to interact further rather than like and by the way,
a great example here is Instagram. Someone just posted a
comment on someone else's post notifications not sure if you've
got those, Or like the emails we get from Amazon
about an order shipping that don't include any of the
(03:38):
actual information. These are things that are happening not because
the company is like, oh, well, this's better for the customer,
but because they need you to do something or they
need to stop someone doing something else. In the case
of your Amazon emails, by the way, if you're wondering
why you don't get you don't actually get to see
what's in an Amazon package when it ships now, well
the reason is because Google was scraping your Gmail finding
(04:00):
out stuff about what people were buying on Amazon. So
Amazon just stopped doing that. They stopped providing any of
that information when your stuff shipped. Now, Amazon absolutely makes
money off of this themselves. This is Amazon's business, not Google. No, no, no, no,
you can't rot our customers. There are to rot yet,
and I'm going to imagine your frustration with tech isn't
(04:22):
born with any kind of hatred of technology, or a
dislike of the Internet, or a lack of appreciation of
what it can or could or used to do, but
the sense that all of this was once better, and
that these companies have turned impeding our use of the
computer into a kind of weird, Charlatan filled bacchanalia of capital.
And so much of the pushback I get on my work,
(04:42):
and the pushback I've seen toward other critics as well,
is that I hate technology. But I'd like to argue
that my profound disgust and anger is born of a
great love of technology and a deep awareness of the
positive effects it's had on my life. I don't turn
on the computer every day wanting to be pissed off,
and I don't imagine any of you do either. We're
not logging onto whatever social networks were on because we're
ready to be pissed off, or we want to have
(05:03):
our lives interrupted by weird slop. If anything, we'd love
to be delighted by the people we chose to connect
with and the content we consume, and want to simply
go about our business without just these microaggressions created by
this growth desperation from companies that are just running out
of runway. They're running out of things to sell us,
and well, they don't know how to build things we'd
like anyway. Technology has in many ways stopped being about
(05:26):
using technology to help people do things, or at the
very least help the user do something that they want
to do. Software has, as Mark Andrewsen said, it would
in twenty eleven, eat in the world, and it's done
so in the nakedly cynical and usurious way that Mark
Andrewson really wanted it to, prioritizing the invasion of our
life through prioritizing growth and the collection of as much
data as possible in the user over any particularly particular
(05:49):
utility or purpose or value in a stock and dres
and hint his ilk Saw and I believe they still
see software not as a thing that provides value, but
as a means for the tech industry to penetrate and
disrupt as many industries as possible, pushing legacy providers to
and I quote transform themselves into software companies rather than
(06:09):
using software to do things or make products better. And
recent describes Pixar the studio that made movies like Toy
Story and Inside Out, and they were required by Disney
in two thousand and six. By the way, he describes
them as a software company rather than the company that
uses software to make movies, and that distinction is really important.
I realize it sounds like semantics, but let me put
(06:29):
it another way. Software has for the tech industry become
far more about extracting economic value than it has in
providing it. When the tech industry becomes focused on penetrating
markets to quote Andrews and software companies taking over large
swards of the economy, there's little consideration of whether said
software is prioritizing the solution to a problem. And nowhere
is this more obvious than the software we use in
(06:51):
our professional lives. Microsoft Teams is one of the single
worst products I've ever used, because Microsoft's goal isn't to
make it easy to have digital meetings, but to make
a product good enough and cheap enough to make it
easy for your boss to buy the entire Microsoft three
sixty five Sweet, even if most of the sweet sucks
and people hate it and it doesn't work sometimes or
(07:11):
a lot of the time, and here's another great example,
Google Drive. Google Drive is one of the worst products
of all time. The people responsible for designing Google drives
user interface should be made to explain themselves before a judge.
Why can't you sort files by side? Why does it
only show an image and video thumbnails when viewing a
folder and a grid layout? Why when you attempt to
(07:32):
move a file to a folder are the suggested folders
literally the first window you say, always wrong without fail.
I know these things sound like I'm just complaining, goddamn
am I, but this is what it is today. This
is Google, a company with well it's like three trillion
dollar market cap, and they can't fucking make their cloud
storage product work. Jesus Christ. Look, the proliferation of software
(07:56):
throughout society has been led by the stewards of the
raw economy, as software, along with its associated managed services,
can effectively proliferate infinitely and can take advantage of how
many corporations are run by management consultants and of course
filled with middle managers. And they are the enemy as well.
And these people don't do any real work or have
any true connections to the problems they're solving. When your
(08:16):
goal is winning the market or dominating the market. You're
not necessarily optimizing for having a great product or even
really happy customers. Selling software to a big company doesn't
require you to speak to everybody who might use it.
You're selling hundreds or thousands of seats users who might
access the product. That's what that means. By the way,
to management, in kind of the dished out just this
idea of we're selling to a blob of people, and
(08:38):
what would the person at the top who wouldn't necessarily
touch this, what would make them feel horny, what would
make them feel happy, what's going to make them feel
warm and fuzzy inside? Because let's be honest, your manager
or their manager isn't really using any of this shit.
They just want to see what it looks like and
it feels good to buy, and it fits within the budget,
and they get taken out to a nice dinner, or
perhaps the person mentions they watch the same baseball team
(09:01):
some bullshit like that. You see the people leading the
charge in the tech industry. And Andrews and the Horowitz,
by the way, they've been one of the biggest and
most influential players in Silicon About the history and now,
Andres and has something to do with the Trump administration.
(09:22):
I'm just trying not to think about it. They've never
really seen their primary purpose as the creation of value
for anybody other than the people's selling software. And this
manifests in the rest of your daily lives in far
simpler ways. Pop ups some shopping apps you downloaded to
make just one purchase, or misleading notifications from Instagram shouting
about how you have new views that don't actually lead anywhere,
(09:45):
or auto playing adverts that proliferate on every single news
and reviews website. It's having to relog into websites and
use websites in particular every day because everyone must pay
and nothing could possibly get through. They could not possibly
have you read a New York Times article or a
Forbes article for free anymore. And it's emails from online
retailers you swore you unsubscribed from, and perhaps you did,
(10:07):
but you have no way of tracking for sure, and
there's not really a government body that gives a shit
about that anymore, maybe in the future. And it's all
the times you've had to create new passwords because of
another data breach that happened, and the company didn't even
bother to meet the basic security standards, because again, who
would stop them. All of these annoying little examples are
inherently hostile towards you, the user, and they're a direct
(10:30):
result of a tech industry oriented around growth, driven by
the pernicious and aggressive poison of growth focused software. The
rot economy has changed the incentives of everything you see
and do on the computer. The websites you read that
inexplicably recommend laptops that are actively painful to use because
of the affiliate revenue they drive to the website's owners,
(10:51):
with the intent being driven by the way, not by
the rights, but by managers who don't really look at
the product or care about the laptop. They just care
about number going up. It's when Instagram swaps the location
of your notification and message buttons, discounts on stores that
require both your email and your phone number, social networks
that put things in the way of you trying to
find the people and the things you actually logged on
(11:12):
to see. All ways in which software can be used
to extract from you, trick you, and mislead you, and
control you. And when I say control, I don't mean
that these companies have the ability to subconsciously manipulate you
and your desires. It's more that they have spent decades
finding new ways to gaslight you and bully you into
doing things they'd like you to. Everybody knows that Instagram sucks,
(11:34):
and it sucks because there's things that you actually want
to do on Instagram that matter is hidden behind hundreds
of little user interface quirks optimize to create increase your
time on the app and thus the amount of money
you make them by being on there. What so as
On the side, have you ever tried to search for
something on Instagram? You can't just type in words and
see what you want to see and like it allows
(11:56):
you to search for certain phrases, and it's not really
clear what makes a phrase acceptable. On not or work,
you can have two queries, each with the same words
but arranged in a slightly different order, and Instagram will
let you search for one and not the other. It's
just so weird, and the post you'll see will contain
only some of the keywords, which in the end makes
search irrelevant. The other day, I search for the name
(12:16):
of an event with the word live in it, hoping
to see whether someone had live streamed it. Instead I
got hundreds of posts that just had the word live.
I love the future, I love living in the future,
I love the Facebook and Meta. They just make like
twenty billion dollars a quarter and their product just fucking sucks.
And even if you get semi relevant results, they won't
even be organized in any particularly coherent fashion. You'll see
(12:38):
content from recent weeks mixed in with stuff from over
a decade ago. You can't even search recent posts using
a hashtag. Instagram removed that feature a couple of years ago,
and no amount of cater walling from users has persuaded
them to put it back, because they don't really give
a shit, and it's not like Instagram's alone in doing this.
Everybody knows that Google Search sucks because it's optimized to
provide results that make the company more money by showing
(13:00):
you more ads. But we use it because, well, the
Internet's a very big place, and Search, while broken, provides
enough of a service that it's useful to the point
that we'll push through the bullshit to get to the
things we kind of want. And now, to quote the
comedian Connor O'Malley, fucking computer's bullshit. It's fucking sick. It's
not cooling where it's not fun. It's not fun to
(13:21):
me on the fucking computer. They changed everything about it used.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
To be so pol.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Google search was at one point extremely cool, something that
used to give us as a sense of peace and
then control over an internet they'd grown so vast it
was kind of hard to grasp and even once felt
like a place you'd go to find like a crazy
idea with Google a quality search result. Facebook was instrumental
in me building my life here in America when I
moved in two thousand and eight, both in connecting with
(13:51):
the people who went to college with at Penn Stay
and operating is a kind of digital address book where
people and this is an insane concept, I know, used
to post updates about their life and pictures of things
that they were doing on Facebook. I know that this
is a strange concept to some of you, but there
was a time when people did that on Facebook. In
a way it might someone might describe it as like
(14:12):
social networking. Crazy right, anyway, Once upon a time, Apple's
app store had actual quality standards, both in the apps
themselves and the services they sold, which made downloading a
new app feel kind of exciting because your first pop
up wasn't for some sort of monthly subscription products solved
sold in a weird way where it's like, oh, it's
actually a weekly one, and with the X to get
(14:33):
away from it hidden on a white background with a
white X. I know, I know, I'm romantics. I think
things a little bit. Capitalism is capitalism. These companies were
still worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and
evil incentives still exists, and I realized that Microsoft and
its monopoly over operating system is a really good example
of how wrong this might be. But nevertheless, the experience
(14:55):
of using hardware and software felt like it was fucking
you less, it was less exploitative. The stuff we used
felt like it worked. And for the absolute avoidance of doubt,
none of this is to say that these companies were
ever perfect, or even good, or even had good intentions,
Nor is any of this an attempt to cheerlead for them.
This is not a shift to me becoming more fair either,
(15:15):
which is usually, by the way, euphemism for waving away
the actual wrongs of a company. I don't get free share,
and even if I did, I'd tell you. I would
tell you if someone wants to send me a free
laptop brilliant, It won't change my mind about shit anyway.
As much as I may like any given product, these
companies are providing a service as a means of making money.
I am as you are a customer. And the fact
(15:36):
that so many of these companies are making so much
more money as they make these products so much worse.
It feels me full of fucking poison. It makes me
very angry. And the reason I'm so onerously explaining this
is that I do not believe that the majority of
people actually hate technology. They hate what the technology industry
has become in search of growth. In fact, I'd argue
that deep down many people love technology. We love that
(15:58):
we can instantly connect to friends using little computers in
our pockets, or that we can share photos or videos
with effectively anyone with an Internet connection. And I quote
someone talking about me here by the way, as one
of big Tech's angriest critics, I must confess that I
absolutely love what I can do with the computer. As
deep down, I'm kind of a broken hearted romantic that
can see beneath all the slop on the shit and
(16:20):
the growth and the bullshit, there are many different things
I truly, deeply love. I love that I can write
a script or a newsletter and I can share it
with my head of the thousands of miles away, that
we can work on an idea or a sentence in
real time, despite being an entire land mass and a
nocean apart. I love that I can be in New
York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas and make a
podcast that gets beamed around the world through fiber optic
(16:41):
cables and satellite connections. I love that I can run
a business online from anywhere with a stable Internet connection.
And I love that during work I can also quickly
and easily catch up with my friends wherever they are.
I can be there for people and people have been
there for me, and it's wonderful. Beneath the bullshit of
Google Search lies the ability to research decades of journalism
in academia, and my fury and discuss comes from seeing
(17:01):
such a great product get mangled by fucking Prodagar Ragavan
and sun Darpischei so they can make more fucking money.
And the problem is that we as a society still
act like technology is some distinct things separate from our
real lives and that, in turn, technology is some sort
of hobbyist pursuit. Mainstream media outlets have a technology section
with technology reporters that are hired to cover, and I
(17:21):
could the tech industry optimizing not for any understanding or
experience in using technology, but some thirty thousand foot view
of what the computer people are doing this week. This
may have made more sense twenty years ago, though I'd
add that back in two thousand and eight you have
multiple national newspapers with multiple tech columnists, and computers were
already an integral part of our work and personal lives.
(17:44):
But in the year twenty twenty five, it's fundamentally fucking
stupid and a failure of modern media. Every single person
you meet in every single part of your life likely
interfaces with technology as much as, if not more, than
they do with other people in the real world, and
the tech coverage they read in the newspaper online does
not represent that experience. It's why a relatively modest software
(18:06):
update for Android or Windows earns vastly more column inches
than the fact that Google, a product that we all use,
does not work anymore. And you could argue, well a
software update for Android that it's a lot of people, Wow, cool, right,
it's frankly, it's not like they cover that much anymore either.
It used to be that new android lord should actually
have some stuff and people talk about it. It's fun,
(18:26):
but it isn't fun anymore. As a result, it's worth
considering that billions of people actually really like what tech
(18:46):
does for them, and in turn, they're extremely pissed off
and frustrated with what technology does to them. The problem
is that modern tech media has become oriented around companies
and trends rather than the actual experience of a real
person living in reality. Generative AI would never have been
any kind of movement or industry if the media had
approached it from the perspective of a customer and said, okay, right,
(19:10):
what does this do exactly? And by the way, the
same goes for metaverse and crypto no real products there,
but fuck it right, it's what the market's like. And
rather than fold their arms and demand the takeover lord's
actually proved themselves, the media decided that they would be
the ones that would prove it for them, describing chat
GPT as a revolution without ever really expressing why, parroting
narratives driven by massive corporations or associated interests, of course,
(19:34):
and tutting at those who would disagree. Thank you, KC.
There were multiple other companies doing exactly what GPT three
did months before chat GPT launched. It only caught fire
because the media insisted it did so. To this day,
I still can't find a single journalist who has a
cogent explanation as to why chat GPT is big, other
than the fact that lots of people use it and
(19:55):
a lot of rich people want it to be big.
The problem, I believe, is that the technique he has
been poisoned by a mixture of ignorance and cynical optimism,
where the narratives are driven not by any particular interest
or domain expertise, but by whatever they believe the market
or the powerful people they admire would like it to be.
And if you hear this and you're getting offended in
the media, I shouldn't be talking about you. If you
(20:16):
think I'm talking about you, that's your fucking problem. You
need to wipe your own ass. Don't come shit at
me anyway. I know for the fact that senior editorial
staff are the problem too, because they're handling technology at
multiple major mainstream publications and don't really care about it,
or understand it, or have any real interest in tech
other than a vague attachment to the idea that maybe
it's important somehow. As a result, mainstream tech coverage is
(20:39):
focused on market effects like AI or where whatever the
other thing everybody wants to read about, and by everybody,
I mean rich people and editors that don't fucking read,
And it's never really directing that coverage towards what is
happening to real people as a result of or from
being affected by technology or using technology. And I also
think that the tech media has been infiltrated and controlled
(21:02):
by people that want to be famous or associate with
famous people. I think they want them to win. They
want a benevolent dictator. They want their products to do
so well so they can get the interview with the
big name founder or CEO on stage at a conference
and have Siam Moltman say some bullshit that gets quoted everywhere.
They want access for big interviews, and they want to
make sure that they get the first look at the
next product release, even if eleven other people are doing
(21:24):
so too well. One might argue that people want to
hear about AI. What people want to hear about is
largely driven by the media narratives that the media creates
and agrees upon. You realize that if you just all
talked about turnips, it would be the fucking turnip news, right.
You could cover whatever you want. But the people parroting
these narratives, much like the executives they admire, do not
(21:45):
find any joy in tech at all, nor do they
experience or care about the problems that tech might solve
or create. For a real person, well, I don't care
whether a regular person has enthusiasm or domain expertise in tech.
I believe that anyone working in the tech media should
have genuine in in the tech itself, actual real domain expertise. Actually,
I want you to actually fucking use the products you're
(22:07):
working on. If you want to talk about agents to me,
I want you to come out and fucking use one.
I want you to talk about it because you'll know
it's bullshit. And I want you in the tech media,
if you're listening to this and you're not already someone
that's talked to me and agrees with me or whatever,
I want to have the ability to say, Okay, for
a regular person, does any of this shit actually fucking matter.
And I don't want you to extrapolate from there and say, well,
(22:28):
in the future maybe no no no no no, no,
no no no. If you turned over a theoretical draft,
would your editor fucking run it? Now? The tech media
continually acts without context or conscience with any kind of
appreciation of how much worse things have got. Well, I
understand that it's hard to break editorial direction at a
major newspaper. Any and all coverage of Facebook should, by rights,
(22:49):
cover the fact that Facebook is fucking broken and has
been for years and has never made more money than
it does today, because that in and of itself is
completely horrifying. Any discs of chat GPT should add that
it lacks any real killer app and that the company
that runs at open ai burns billions of dollars a year.
And I don't know, discuss how this thing doesn't really
have any real fucking use cases and never did, And
(23:11):
how do we hide? Why do we hype this? What's
going on? What are we doing here? What are we doing? Really?
If you're in the tech media, what are we fucking doing?
Why do you cover AI? Why are you covering generative AI?
What does this do? Why? Do you care? Other than
it's big? Why do you care? Why do you care?
Why do you care? Email me at my website, easy
better offline dot com. You have my phone number more
than likely I don't know, contact me, tell me and
(23:34):
I if I swear to God, if you say to me,
it's because there's a lot of money. I don't care.
I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I
feel crazy. I don't care. I feel like I'm going
insane when I have these conversations because the actual AI
products they just fucking they fucking suck. They fucking suck.
There are some use cases, sure, the AI companions whatever,
(23:55):
the AI journals fine, is that a trillion dollar industry?
Not my not my ass fucking them? By the way,
those what's going on? Why is this important? Questions? These
are the things I get from my readers and my
listeners every single day, and I love hearing from all
of you. By the way, keep getting in touch regular people,
(24:15):
people that work outside of the tech industry. Teachers right as, artists, authors, academics,
criminals and someone have been asking what the fuck any
of this was since the beginning, and the fact they're
still asking is a damning indictment of the tech media
writ large, We're still regular people. Regular people are also
furious that the state of software and fully aware that
(24:37):
they're being conned. Yet the tech media continually frames the
growing distrust of the tech industry as some results of
political or social change or accumulation of scandals, rather than
the big unspoken scandal called how the tech industry made
things worse than the pursuit of growth and the greater
scandal of exactly how much contempt tech regularly treats their
customers with. And more importantly, people feel like they're being
(25:01):
gas lit by the tech media. I'm regularly told by
the people that listen and read me that they're glad
to have someone say simple things like hey, the apps
we use that, do you ever feel like they're fucking
with you? Or like, hey, yeah, that ain't that's true,
that's not you being crazy. That actually happens. And here's how,
and doing that regularly helps people. If you're in the
tech media listening to this, this is where you actually
(25:23):
need to be doing things. I don't give a rap
fuck about generative AI anymore. It's really frustrating, and I
know I'm going on and on and on. But the
feedback I regularly receive is that there are too many
articles about technology that seem fundamentally disconnected from reality, or
at least disconnected from the people at the receiving end
of the product. You talk about how much money open
(25:45):
ai has, You talk about the three hundred million weekly users,
and that numbers kind of bollocks. By the way, I'm
going to get into that later pod. Why don't you
talk about what happens next? Why don't you talk about
how regular people actually use it? To shear a Vedo
at the Washington Post. She's been on this with chat
GPT since twenty twenty three. There are good members of
(26:06):
the tech media. It's just all of this is just
very frustrating. But at the risk of sounding like a cliche,
that's all the time we have today. But we're not done.
There's another episode coming up. Next episode, we're going to
talk about the people responsible for this mess and the
kind of marass of filth that our digital lives has become,
and I want to talk about their motivations behind it,
(26:28):
and I want to talk to you about how we
can fight back, because this is a fight and it's
one we need to win, and it's one I believe
we can win. I'll hear you in the next episode. Well,
I guess you'll hear me, but I'm not re recording that.
(26:49):
Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Metasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski dot com a 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
(27:13):
to chat dot where's youreaed dot at to visit the discord,
and go to our slash.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so
much for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zichron.
And you know, sometimes recording this show kind of feels
like narrating the end of the world and watching is
(00:25):
the growth of or costs right economy. It kind of
poisons every corner of our digital lives, changing everything in
search of growth, growth of revenue, growth of engagement metrics,
growth of anything. And my core frustration isn't just how
shitty things have got, but how said shittiness has become
insanely profitable for so many companies. Meta made twenty point
eight billion dollars of profit in its last reported quarterly
(00:48):
earnings off the back of products that are bordering on
non functional. Microsoft made twenty four point one one billion
dollars in profit with an increasingly deteriorating series of productivity
products and cloud based solutions that its customers absolutely fucking hate.
And Google made twenty six point five billion dollars in
profit from multiple monopolies and making its core search product
worse as a means of increasing the amount of times
(01:09):
that people search for stuff. You see the business of
making our shit worse to increase revenue growth year of
a year. It's absolutely booming. The products you use every
day are more confusing and more frustrating to use because
everything must grow, which means in practice that product decisions
now driven in many cases by companies trying to make
you do something rather than do something for you, which
(01:30):
in turn means that basic quality control things like I
don't know usability or functionality, they're more secondary considerations to
the grander rot economy thing. It's why your Facebook newsfeed
doesn't show your posts from friends and family, but happily
bombards you with ai generated slot of weirdly shiny faced
old people celebrating their birthday alone with a weird heartstring
(01:51):
tug in caption that doesn't really make any sense. It's
why whenever you search for something, not just on Google
but anywhere, the keywords you use aren't treat. There's an
explicit instruction of something you want to do or see,
but a kind of interpretive dance of information where maybe
something you want comes out of the end. Look, we
don't use the computer. We negotiate with it to try
(02:13):
and make it do the things we want it to do.
Because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align
with the user. Too often, when you open up an app,
you start bargaining with the company behind it, Like Dropbox
is a great example. You log in and it says, hey, look,
you could save money switching to an annual plan this
big pop up and if you agree to that, they've
just secured your annual recurring revenue and they've done something
(02:36):
that they hope you'll forget, which is switch you from
a monthly to a yearly subscription. You forget that while
you're stuck with them for a year. Tech companies have
the perseverance and desperate hunger for your money of a
timeshare salesman, and they're even more craven. And by the way,
all of these things I'm talking about with negotiating with
the computer, this is assuming whatever you're doing actually loads.
(02:56):
We're all familiar with the tense moment when you open
up Microsoft Teams and just hope it doesn't crash, or
that maybe I don't know your camera or your video works,
or your audio works, whether anything actually works. We live
in this weird state of constant digital microaggressions, and as
I said last year, it's everywhere. Banking apps that now
have helpful assistance that get in the way of flipping
(03:17):
banking pop ups during online shopping that promise discounts and
exchange for our emails and phone numbers. They can spam
us notifications from apps that are built to push us
to interact further rather than like and by the way,
a great example here is Instagram. Someone just posted a
comment on someone else's post notifications not sure if you've
got those, Or like the emails we get from Amazon
about an order shipping that don't include any of the
(03:38):
actual information. These are things that are happening not because
the company is like, oh, well, this's better for the customer,
but because they need you to do something or they
need to stop someone doing something else. In the case
of your Amazon emails, by the way, if you're wondering
why you don't get you don't actually get to see
what's in an Amazon package when it ships now, well
the reason is because Google was scraping your Gmail finding
(04:00):
out stuff about what people were buying on Amazon. So
Amazon just stopped doing that. They stopped providing any of
that information when your stuff shipped. Now, Amazon absolutely makes
money off of this themselves. This is Amazon's business, not Google. No, no, no, no,
you can't rot our customers. There are to rot yet,
and I'm going to imagine your frustration with tech isn't
(04:22):
born with any kind of hatred of technology, or a
dislike of the Internet, or a lack of appreciation of
what it can or could or used to do, but
the sense that all of this was once better, and
that these companies have turned impeding our use of the
computer into a kind of weird, Charlatan filled bacchanalia of capital.
And so much of the pushback I get on my work,
(04:42):
and the pushback I've seen toward other critics as well,
is that I hate technology. But I'd like to argue
that my profound disgust and anger is born of a
great love of technology and a deep awareness of the
positive effects it's had on my life. I don't turn
on the computer every day wanting to be pissed off,
and I don't imagine any of you do either. We're
not logging onto whatever social networks were on because we're
ready to be pissed off, or we want to have
(05:03):
our lives interrupted by weird slop. If anything, we'd love
to be delighted by the people we chose to connect
with and the content we consume, and want to simply
go about our business without just these microaggressions created by
this growth desperation from companies that are just running out
of runway. They're running out of things to sell us,
and well, they don't know how to build things we'd
like anyway. Technology has in many ways stopped being about
(05:26):
using technology to help people do things, or at the
very least help the user do something that they want
to do. Software has, as Mark Andrewsen said, it would
in twenty eleven, eat in the world, and it's done
so in the nakedly cynical and usurious way that Mark
Andrewson really wanted it to, prioritizing the invasion of our
life through prioritizing growth and the collection of as much
data as possible in the user over any particularly particular
(05:49):
utility or purpose or value in a stock and dres
and hint his ilk Saw and I believe they still
see software not as a thing that provides value, but
as a means for the tech industry to penetrate and
disrupt as many industries as possible, pushing legacy providers to
and I quote transform themselves into software companies rather than
(06:09):
using software to do things or make products better. And
recent describes Pixar the studio that made movies like Toy
Story and Inside Out, and they were required by Disney
in two thousand and six. By the way, he describes
them as a software company rather than the company that
uses software to make movies, and that distinction is really important.
I realize it sounds like semantics, but let me put
(06:29):
it another way. Software has for the tech industry become
far more about extracting economic value than it has in
providing it. When the tech industry becomes focused on penetrating
markets to quote Andrews and software companies taking over large
swards of the economy, there's little consideration of whether said
software is prioritizing the solution to a problem. And nowhere
is this more obvious than the software we use in
(06:51):
our professional lives. Microsoft Teams is one of the single
worst products I've ever used, because Microsoft's goal isn't to
make it easy to have digital meetings, but to make
a product good enough and cheap enough to make it
easy for your boss to buy the entire Microsoft three
sixty five Sweet, even if most of the sweet sucks
and people hate it and it doesn't work sometimes or
(07:11):
a lot of the time, and here's another great example,
Google Drive. Google Drive is one of the worst products
of all time. The people responsible for designing Google drives
user interface should be made to explain themselves before a judge.
Why can't you sort files by side? Why does it
only show an image and video thumbnails when viewing a
folder and a grid layout? Why when you attempt to
(07:32):
move a file to a folder are the suggested folders
literally the first window you say, always wrong without fail.
I know these things sound like I'm just complaining, goddamn
am I, but this is what it is today. This
is Google, a company with well it's like three trillion
dollar market cap, and they can't fucking make their cloud
storage product work. Jesus Christ. Look, the proliferation of software
(07:56):
throughout society has been led by the stewards of the
raw economy, as software, along with its associated managed services,
can effectively proliferate infinitely and can take advantage of how
many corporations are run by management consultants and of course
filled with middle managers. And they are the enemy as well.
And these people don't do any real work or have
any true connections to the problems they're solving. When your
(08:16):
goal is winning the market or dominating the market. You're
not necessarily optimizing for having a great product or even
really happy customers. Selling software to a big company doesn't
require you to speak to everybody who might use it.
You're selling hundreds or thousands of seats users who might
access the product. That's what that means. By the way,
to management, in kind of the dished out just this
idea of we're selling to a blob of people, and
(08:38):
what would the person at the top who wouldn't necessarily
touch this, what would make them feel horny, what would
make them feel happy, what's going to make them feel
warm and fuzzy inside? Because let's be honest, your manager
or their manager isn't really using any of this shit.
They just want to see what it looks like and
it feels good to buy, and it fits within the budget,
and they get taken out to a nice dinner, or
perhaps the person mentions they watch the same baseball team
(09:01):
some bullshit like that. You see the people leading the
charge in the tech industry. And Andrews and the Horowitz,
by the way, they've been one of the biggest and
most influential players in Silicon About the history and now,
Andres and has something to do with the Trump administration.
(09:22):
I'm just trying not to think about it. They've never
really seen their primary purpose as the creation of value
for anybody other than the people's selling software. And this
manifests in the rest of your daily lives in far
simpler ways. Pop ups some shopping apps you downloaded to
make just one purchase, or misleading notifications from Instagram shouting
about how you have new views that don't actually lead anywhere,
(09:45):
or auto playing adverts that proliferate on every single news
and reviews website. It's having to relog into websites and
use websites in particular every day because everyone must pay
and nothing could possibly get through. They could not possibly
have you read a New York Times article or a
Forbes article for free anymore. And it's emails from online
retailers you swore you unsubscribed from, and perhaps you did,
(10:07):
but you have no way of tracking for sure, and
there's not really a government body that gives a shit
about that anymore, maybe in the future. And it's all
the times you've had to create new passwords because of
another data breach that happened, and the company didn't even
bother to meet the basic security standards, because again, who
would stop them. All of these annoying little examples are
inherently hostile towards you, the user, and they're a direct
(10:30):
result of a tech industry oriented around growth, driven by
the pernicious and aggressive poison of growth focused software. The
rot economy has changed the incentives of everything you see
and do on the computer. The websites you read that
inexplicably recommend laptops that are actively painful to use because
of the affiliate revenue they drive to the website's owners,
(10:51):
with the intent being driven by the way, not by
the rights, but by managers who don't really look at
the product or care about the laptop. They just care
about number going up. It's when Instagram swaps the location
of your notification and message buttons, discounts on stores that
require both your email and your phone number, social networks
that put things in the way of you trying to
find the people and the things you actually logged on
(11:12):
to see. All ways in which software can be used
to extract from you, trick you, and mislead you, and
control you. And when I say control, I don't mean
that these companies have the ability to subconsciously manipulate you
and your desires. It's more that they have spent decades
finding new ways to gaslight you and bully you into
doing things they'd like you to. Everybody knows that Instagram sucks,
(11:34):
and it sucks because there's things that you actually want
to do on Instagram that matter is hidden behind hundreds
of little user interface quirks optimize to create increase your
time on the app and thus the amount of money
you make them by being on there. What so as
On the side, have you ever tried to search for
something on Instagram? You can't just type in words and
see what you want to see and like it allows
(11:56):
you to search for certain phrases, and it's not really
clear what makes a phrase acceptable. On not or work,
you can have two queries, each with the same words
but arranged in a slightly different order, and Instagram will
let you search for one and not the other. It's
just so weird, and the post you'll see will contain
only some of the keywords, which in the end makes
search irrelevant. The other day, I search for the name
(12:16):
of an event with the word live in it, hoping
to see whether someone had live streamed it. Instead I
got hundreds of posts that just had the word live.
I love the future, I love living in the future,
I love the Facebook and Meta. They just make like
twenty billion dollars a quarter and their product just fucking sucks.
And even if you get semi relevant results, they won't
even be organized in any particularly coherent fashion. You'll see
(12:38):
content from recent weeks mixed in with stuff from over
a decade ago. You can't even search recent posts using
a hashtag. Instagram removed that feature a couple of years ago,
and no amount of cater walling from users has persuaded
them to put it back, because they don't really give
a shit, and it's not like Instagram's alone in doing this.
Everybody knows that Google Search sucks because it's optimized to
provide results that make the company more money by showing
(13:00):
you more ads. But we use it because, well, the
Internet's a very big place, and Search, while broken, provides
enough of a service that it's useful to the point
that we'll push through the bullshit to get to the
things we kind of want. And now, to quote the
comedian Connor O'Malley, fucking computer's bullshit. It's fucking sick. It's
not cooling where it's not fun. It's not fun to
(13:21):
me on the fucking computer. They changed everything about it used.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
To be so pol.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Google search was at one point extremely cool, something that
used to give us as a sense of peace and
then control over an internet they'd grown so vast it
was kind of hard to grasp and even once felt
like a place you'd go to find like a crazy
idea with Google a quality search result. Facebook was instrumental
in me building my life here in America when I
moved in two thousand and eight, both in connecting with
(13:51):
the people who went to college with at Penn Stay
and operating is a kind of digital address book where
people and this is an insane concept, I know, used
to post updates about their life and pictures of things
that they were doing on Facebook. I know that this
is a strange concept to some of you, but there
was a time when people did that on Facebook. In
a way it might someone might describe it as like
(14:12):
social networking. Crazy right, anyway, Once upon a time, Apple's
app store had actual quality standards, both in the apps
themselves and the services they sold, which made downloading a
new app feel kind of exciting because your first pop
up wasn't for some sort of monthly subscription products solved
sold in a weird way where it's like, oh, it's
actually a weekly one, and with the X to get
(14:33):
away from it hidden on a white background with a
white X. I know, I know, I'm romantics. I think
things a little bit. Capitalism is capitalism. These companies were
still worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and
evil incentives still exists, and I realized that Microsoft and
its monopoly over operating system is a really good example
of how wrong this might be. But nevertheless, the experience
(14:55):
of using hardware and software felt like it was fucking
you less, it was less exploitative. The stuff we used
felt like it worked. And for the absolute avoidance of doubt,
none of this is to say that these companies were
ever perfect, or even good, or even had good intentions,
Nor is any of this an attempt to cheerlead for them.
This is not a shift to me becoming more fair either,
(15:15):
which is usually, by the way, euphemism for waving away
the actual wrongs of a company. I don't get free share,
and even if I did, I'd tell you. I would
tell you if someone wants to send me a free
laptop brilliant, It won't change my mind about shit anyway.
As much as I may like any given product, these
companies are providing a service as a means of making money.
I am as you are a customer. And the fact
(15:36):
that so many of these companies are making so much
more money as they make these products so much worse.
It feels me full of fucking poison. It makes me
very angry. And the reason I'm so onerously explaining this
is that I do not believe that the majority of
people actually hate technology. They hate what the technology industry
has become in search of growth. In fact, I'd argue
that deep down many people love technology. We love that
(15:58):
we can instantly connect to friends using little computers in
our pockets, or that we can share photos or videos
with effectively anyone with an Internet connection. And I quote
someone talking about me here by the way, as one
of big Tech's angriest critics, I must confess that I
absolutely love what I can do with the computer. As
deep down, I'm kind of a broken hearted romantic that
can see beneath all the slop on the shit and
(16:20):
the growth and the bullshit, there are many different things
I truly, deeply love. I love that I can write
a script or a newsletter and I can share it
with my head of the thousands of miles away, that
we can work on an idea or a sentence in
real time, despite being an entire land mass and a
nocean apart. I love that I can be in New
York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas and make a
podcast that gets beamed around the world through fiber optic
(16:41):
cables and satellite connections. I love that I can run
a business online from anywhere with a stable Internet connection.
And I love that during work I can also quickly
and easily catch up with my friends wherever they are.
I can be there for people and people have been
there for me, and it's wonderful. Beneath the bullshit of
Google Search lies the ability to research decades of journalism
in academia, and my fury and discuss comes from seeing
(17:01):
such a great product get mangled by fucking Prodagar Ragavan
and sun Darpischei so they can make more fucking money.
And the problem is that we as a society still
act like technology is some distinct things separate from our
real lives and that, in turn, technology is some sort
of hobbyist pursuit. Mainstream media outlets have a technology section
with technology reporters that are hired to cover, and I
(17:21):
could the tech industry optimizing not for any understanding or
experience in using technology, but some thirty thousand foot view
of what the computer people are doing this week. This
may have made more sense twenty years ago, though I'd
add that back in two thousand and eight you have
multiple national newspapers with multiple tech columnists, and computers were
already an integral part of our work and personal lives.
(17:44):
But in the year twenty twenty five, it's fundamentally fucking
stupid and a failure of modern media. Every single person
you meet in every single part of your life likely
interfaces with technology as much as, if not more, than
they do with other people in the real world, and
the tech coverage they read in the newspaper online does
not represent that experience. It's why a relatively modest software
(18:06):
update for Android or Windows earns vastly more column inches
than the fact that Google, a product that we all use,
does not work anymore. And you could argue, well a
software update for Android that it's a lot of people, Wow, cool, right,
it's frankly, it's not like they cover that much anymore either.
It used to be that new android lord should actually
have some stuff and people talk about it. It's fun,
(18:26):
but it isn't fun anymore. As a result, it's worth
considering that billions of people actually really like what tech
(18:46):
does for them, and in turn, they're extremely pissed off
and frustrated with what technology does to them. The problem
is that modern tech media has become oriented around companies
and trends rather than the actual experience of a real
person living in reality. Generative AI would never have been
any kind of movement or industry if the media had
approached it from the perspective of a customer and said, okay, right,
(19:10):
what does this do exactly? And by the way, the
same goes for metaverse and crypto no real products there,
but fuck it right, it's what the market's like. And
rather than fold their arms and demand the takeover lord's
actually proved themselves, the media decided that they would be
the ones that would prove it for them, describing chat
GPT as a revolution without ever really expressing why, parroting
narratives driven by massive corporations or associated interests, of course,
(19:34):
and tutting at those who would disagree. Thank you, KC.
There were multiple other companies doing exactly what GPT three
did months before chat GPT launched. It only caught fire
because the media insisted it did so. To this day,
I still can't find a single journalist who has a
cogent explanation as to why chat GPT is big, other
than the fact that lots of people use it and
(19:55):
a lot of rich people want it to be big.
The problem, I believe, is that the technique he has
been poisoned by a mixture of ignorance and cynical optimism,
where the narratives are driven not by any particular interest
or domain expertise, but by whatever they believe the market
or the powerful people they admire would like it to be.
And if you hear this and you're getting offended in
the media, I shouldn't be talking about you. If you
(20:16):
think I'm talking about you, that's your fucking problem. You
need to wipe your own ass. Don't come shit at
me anyway. I know for the fact that senior editorial
staff are the problem too, because they're handling technology at
multiple major mainstream publications and don't really care about it,
or understand it, or have any real interest in tech
other than a vague attachment to the idea that maybe
it's important somehow. As a result, mainstream tech coverage is
(20:39):
focused on market effects like AI or where whatever the
other thing everybody wants to read about, and by everybody,
I mean rich people and editors that don't fucking read,
And it's never really directing that coverage towards what is
happening to real people as a result of or from
being affected by technology or using technology. And I also
think that the tech media has been infiltrated and controlled
(21:02):
by people that want to be famous or associate with
famous people. I think they want them to win. They
want a benevolent dictator. They want their products to do
so well so they can get the interview with the
big name founder or CEO on stage at a conference
and have Siam Moltman say some bullshit that gets quoted everywhere.
They want access for big interviews, and they want to
make sure that they get the first look at the
next product release, even if eleven other people are doing
(21:24):
so too well. One might argue that people want to
hear about AI. What people want to hear about is
largely driven by the media narratives that the media creates
and agrees upon. You realize that if you just all
talked about turnips, it would be the fucking turnip news, right.
You could cover whatever you want. But the people parroting
these narratives, much like the executives they admire, do not
(21:45):
find any joy in tech at all, nor do they
experience or care about the problems that tech might solve
or create. For a real person, well, I don't care
whether a regular person has enthusiasm or domain expertise in tech.
I believe that anyone working in the tech media should
have genuine in in the tech itself, actual real domain expertise. Actually,
I want you to actually fucking use the products you're
(22:07):
working on. If you want to talk about agents to me,
I want you to come out and fucking use one.
I want you to talk about it because you'll know
it's bullshit. And I want you in the tech media,
if you're listening to this and you're not already someone
that's talked to me and agrees with me or whatever,
I want to have the ability to say, Okay, for
a regular person, does any of this shit actually fucking matter.
And I don't want you to extrapolate from there and say, well,
(22:28):
in the future maybe no no no no no, no,
no no no. If you turned over a theoretical draft,
would your editor fucking run it? Now? The tech media
continually acts without context or conscience with any kind of
appreciation of how much worse things have got. Well, I
understand that it's hard to break editorial direction at a
major newspaper. Any and all coverage of Facebook should, by rights,
(22:49):
cover the fact that Facebook is fucking broken and has
been for years and has never made more money than
it does today, because that in and of itself is
completely horrifying. Any discs of chat GPT should add that
it lacks any real killer app and that the company
that runs at open ai burns billions of dollars a year.
And I don't know, discuss how this thing doesn't really
have any real fucking use cases and never did, And
(23:11):
how do we hide? Why do we hype this? What's
going on? What are we doing here? What are we doing? Really?
If you're in the tech media, what are we fucking doing?
Why do you cover AI? Why are you covering generative AI?
What does this do? Why? Do you care? Other than
it's big? Why do you care? Why do you care?
Why do you care? Email me at my website, easy
better offline dot com. You have my phone number more
than likely I don't know, contact me, tell me and
(23:34):
I if I swear to God, if you say to me,
it's because there's a lot of money. I don't care.
I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I
feel crazy. I don't care. I feel like I'm going
insane when I have these conversations because the actual AI
products they just fucking they fucking suck. They fucking suck.
There are some use cases, sure, the AI companions whatever,
(23:55):
the AI journals fine, is that a trillion dollar industry?
Not my not my ass fucking them? By the way,
those what's going on? Why is this important? Questions? These
are the things I get from my readers and my
listeners every single day, and I love hearing from all
of you. By the way, keep getting in touch regular people,
(24:15):
people that work outside of the tech industry. Teachers right as, artists, authors, academics,
criminals and someone have been asking what the fuck any
of this was since the beginning, and the fact they're
still asking is a damning indictment of the tech media
writ large, We're still regular people. Regular people are also
furious that the state of software and fully aware that
(24:37):
they're being conned. Yet the tech media continually frames the
growing distrust of the tech industry as some results of
political or social change or accumulation of scandals, rather than
the big unspoken scandal called how the tech industry made
things worse than the pursuit of growth and the greater
scandal of exactly how much contempt tech regularly treats their
customers with. And more importantly, people feel like they're being
(25:01):
gas lit by the tech media. I'm regularly told by
the people that listen and read me that they're glad
to have someone say simple things like hey, the apps
we use that, do you ever feel like they're fucking
with you? Or like, hey, yeah, that ain't that's true,
that's not you being crazy. That actually happens. And here's how,
and doing that regularly helps people. If you're in the
tech media listening to this, this is where you actually
(25:23):
need to be doing things. I don't give a rap
fuck about generative AI anymore. It's really frustrating, and I
know I'm going on and on and on. But the
feedback I regularly receive is that there are too many
articles about technology that seem fundamentally disconnected from reality, or
at least disconnected from the people at the receiving end
of the product. You talk about how much money open
(25:45):
ai has, You talk about the three hundred million weekly users,
and that numbers kind of bollocks. By the way, I'm
going to get into that later pod. Why don't you
talk about what happens next? Why don't you talk about
how regular people actually use it? To shear a Vedo
at the Washington Post. She's been on this with chat
GPT since twenty twenty three. There are good members of
(26:06):
the tech media. It's just all of this is just
very frustrating. But at the risk of sounding like a cliche,
that's all the time we have today. But we're not done.
There's another episode coming up. Next episode, we're going to
talk about the people responsible for this mess and the
kind of marass of filth that our digital lives has become,
and I want to talk about their motivations behind it,
(26:28):
and I want to talk to you about how we
can fight back, because this is a fight and it's
one we need to win, and it's one I believe
we can win. I'll hear you in the next episode. Well,
I guess you'll hear me, but I'm not re recording that.
(26:49):
Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Metasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski dot com a 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
(27:13):
to chat dot where's youreaed dot at to visit the discord,
and go to our slash.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so
much for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Ed Zitron
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