Monologue: Why We Need Tech Criticism More Than Ever

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Zone Media. Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue.
I'm at Zychra and your host. As a reminder, you
can buy Better Offline merchandise now. You'll find a link
to it in the episode notes. You all seem to
really like it. It's cool stuff. But I know some

(00:24):
of you have also said recently that I've done too
much AI stuff recently, and I wanted to take a
little time to explain why I've been doing so, in
part because I'm not going to change the generative AI
boom is about far more than art, official intelligence, or
cloud storage or data centers or what part of Hawaii
Mark Zuckerberg will buy next. I believe this movement is
symbolic of a greater rot in the tech industry and

(00:46):
indeed in media criticism, both inside and outside of the
tech media, and that the nature of criticism must indeed
change to meet this moment. Now, a few of the
most consistent critiques in my work are mostly around my tone.
I'm a hater, I'm a cynic, I'm a skeptic, I'm
too emotional, I've gone overboard. The local townspeople should throw
tomatoes at me. I should be treated in the way
of Shrek and exiled from society, things like that. But

(01:08):
in all seriousness, it seems the only way my work
is reliably critiqued is to suggest that my emotions invalidate
my criticisms somehow, and that saying fuck somehow weakens my arguments. Basically,
that giving a shit is invalidating when it comes to
criticizing something. And I find that putrid, by the way,
but it's how things are, and I kind of get it.
Most financial tech criticism is expected to be dry and clinical,

(01:31):
and any emotional content should be positive or at the
very least optimistic, And I do not believe this tone
is sufficient for the seriousness of the matters at hand.
We are, as I have said repeatedly several years, into
a hysterical, illogical bubble, one launched off the back of
two smaller yet no less hysterical bubbles, at times by
the same people, some of them writing for the New
York Times of the verge, We as a society have

(01:52):
accepted the terms that the generative AI companies want us to.
That we must destroy the environment, that we must steal
from millions of people, that we must burn billions of
dollars all in pursuit of a vague and specious outcome
that will never really arrive. This isn't to say that
we've had much choice in said acceptance. The media has
repeatedly accepted and promoted these narratives, helped justify these costs,

(02:13):
and presented ridiculous narratives as sensible ones. The outcome has
been a massive transfer of wealth upwards, both into the
market capitalization of hyperscalers and into the pockets of Sam
Mortman and other founders pretending generative AI will become some
sort of conscious intelligence or the next hypergrowth market, regardless
of whether of these things is possible. The other outcome
has been the rise of many new kinds of grifters,

(02:35):
the ethermolics of the world that creates scientific sounding yet
specious reviews of AI models, the slop filled AI newsletters
with fake subscribe accounts, and the many many AI influencers
that exist as extensions of AI companies pr departments. Yet
the most worrying part has been the members of the
media that have allowed this to happen. This isn't to
say anybody is even Kevin rus and Case and Newton
are included here. I don't think anyone's corrupt, but the

(02:57):
media is unprepared, unwilling, or able to push back on
the narratives. The structures that hold up tech and business
media are not built to truly explain or criticize what's
happening in the tech industry or even the economy at large.
These structures are built not to ask is this real?
Or will this work? But when this works, what will
it look like. They're built not to question whether an

(03:18):
industry is like real at all, but to assume that
there are always risks in building anything, and thus the
most important part is discussing what the person in question
wants to happen. Media's desperation for objectivity regularly deprives the
reader of the value of being objective because objectivity is
being conflated with being passive. True objective journalism, which is impossible,

(03:39):
by the way, would say that both the Open AI
raised a bunch of money and loses billions a year,
and that to continue doing business they'll have to raise
unbelievable sums of money every year. Instead, articles in open
AI just print that they raised money and why they
raised it, or that their products do something. No interest
in finding out what there's something is whether it's important
and whether it will lead to any outcome, probably because

(03:59):
it won't. The initial consequences of this passivity are that
venture capitalist anders select few startup founders have become very,
very rich, The big tech firms have had something new
to hock to their customers, and the access journalists have
had a new thing to pretend they care about. And
also a fallow tech industry has had something to get
excited about. None of this money has trickled down to
anybody other than the powerful, nor have any mass market

(04:20):
productivity gains been realized, nor has society improved as a result.
The only things that appear to have changed is that
these companies need more money, and they don't even need
to tell anybody why. The media just assumes they need
it to build powerful AI. I think it's fair to
say at this point that the generative AI boom hasn't
done much of anything other than create new ways for
software companies to sell software or access to models. There

(04:41):
are no killer apps, no major shifts in the way
we live our lives outside of innovations in fraud and
harms to our power grid, and whatever use cases there
may be for large language models. Are miniscule in comparison
to the way that AI is discussed in the media.
I am justifiably angry because I watch these bubbles form
again and again in exactly the same way at every
single p With the metaverus, with cryptocurrency, and now with

(05:02):
generative AI, there have been obvious moments to say, yeah,
I get that this is what you say will happen,
but what's happening today doesn't suggest that it will happen
at all. And every time those moments have been missed,
and the media is opted instead to ask, but what
if it was true? When the media opts to trust
whatever comes out of the mouth of a powerful person,
the beneficiary is always always the powerful person in question. Yet,

(05:24):
a better world would be one where the altmans and
Amma days have to actually justify themselves, show what the
models can do, give realistic projections. Know that they can't
just say whatever and get quoted automatically, because this kind
of accountability would make their current work overstanding their models capabilities,
and running unsustainable and destructive businesses impossible or at least
much more difficult. A better tech industry is one where

(05:45):
the products we hear about actually exist, where hype cycles
are built based on execution and outcomes rather than whether
something may or may not be in the future. While
there is always a place in the tech media to dream,
to guess what might come next, to talk to people
inventing things, to talk to researchers, and I have no
problem with that, and it's fine to anticipate what the
effects of these things could be, so much of this

(06:05):
industry has become about those dreams, to the point that
innovation is far less relevant than whether you can convince
enough people that something might happen. Nevertheless, there is definitely
something missing in Better Offline, and that's excitement. The feedback
I got from my last monologue around fitness and tech
I liked was profound, and I will be looking forward
to doing more episodes like that, especially these monologues on

(06:25):
the things that I use that I really enjoy, all
the cool stuff that tech is actually doing. It's going
to be a process to get there, but I think
you're really gonna like what you hear when I start
doing it. Don't worry, though, there's still so much rots
economy bullshit to unpack, as you'll hear in tomorrow's episode

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Ed Zitron

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Monologue: Why We Need Tech Criticism More Than Ever