November 20, 2024 • 38 mins
Blame the tech industry for the rise of authoritarianism. Blame a news media handicapped by a deference to power and a fear of bias. Blame the fact that our digital lives are unchecked ecological disasters. In this episode, Ed Zitron draws a direct line from the rot of the digital ecosystem for what happened on November 5.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
A Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed
ze Tron. It's been a hard couple of weeks. It's
been pretty hard to focus. I've written a few newsletters,
I've gone to Portugal, I've done a bunch of shit
(00:27):
just trying not to think about everything happening outside. But
it's time to do so. Seemingly every single person on
Earth with a blog or a podcast, or even a
Twitter account or XD everything, Apple whatever it's called now,
they've all tried to drill down into what happened on
November fifth, to find the people that blame, to explain
what could have gone differently, really looking for who to
(00:50):
blame though, and find out why so many actions led
to a result that will overwhelmingly home woman, minorities, immigrants,
LGBTQ people, and lower income work. Because it's terrifying. It
fucking sucks. I'm not going to mince words, not that
I would usually anyway, and I don't feel fully equipped
to respond to the moment. I don't have any real answers,
(01:12):
at least not political ones. I'm not a political analyst,
and I'd feel disingenuous trying to dissect either the Harris
or the Trump campaigns, because I just feel like there's
a take Olympics right now. It's the Dunning Kruger Festival
out there. Everyone is trying to rationalize and intellectualize these
events that ultimately come down to something quite simple. People
(01:32):
don't trust authority, and yet it's pretty ironic that this
often leads them towards authoritarianism. Now, I don't want to
give you the impression that I'm going to go on
my crank mode that and somehow against institutions on their face,
I'm not. But at the same time, understanding this moment
requires us to acknowledge that institutions have failed us and
(01:53):
failed most people, and how certain institutions missteps have led
us to exactly where we are today. Legacy media, and
while oftentimes they're staffed by people who truly love their
readers and care about their beats, they're weighed down by
this hysterical, nonsensical attachment to the imaginary concept of objectivity
and the will of the markets. Case in point, regular
(02:15):
people have spent years watching the price of goods increase
due to inflation, despite the fact that the increase in
pricing was mostly driven by get this corporations raising their prices. Now,
that's not to say that external factors like the war
in Ukraine or lingering COVID restrictions in China, these things
did play a role in it. They did. But the
(02:35):
bulk of these price increases were caused by these fucking
companies raising the prices. It was in their earnings. It
was right there, Pepsi Cola said it on the news.
Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming
amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even
going against their own reporting. And there will be links
(02:56):
in the episode notes I promise as a means to
provide balanced coverage, insisting again and again that the economy
is actually good, contorting their little bodies to prove that
prices aren't actually higher, even as companies literally boasted about
raising their prices on earnings. In fact, the media spent
years debating with itself whether the price scuging was actually happening,
(03:17):
despite years of proof that it was. Some of them
even reported that the price gouging was happening. So like,
get this, I just don't think people trust authority, and
they especially don't trust the media, especially the legacy media.
It also probably didn't help. The legacy media implored readers
and viewers to ignore what they saw at the supermarket
(03:38):
or at the pump and the growing hits that their
wallets from the daily necessities of life. It was just
a national level gas lighting and it was disgusting. And
I know some of you might say, you know where
to email me. Oh, it's not just this. No, of course,
it's not just this asshole, but I think this is
a big thing. Now, before I go any further, I've
(03:59):
used the termgacy media here repeatedly, but don't completely intend
for it to come across as a pejorative. Despite my criticisms,
and believe me, I've got a few of them, there
are people in the legacy media doing a good job.
They're reporting the truth, they're doing the kinds of work
that matters, and they're actually trying to teach their reader's
stuff and tell them what's happening and giving them context.
(04:19):
I read and pay for several legacy media outlets. I
think the world is a better place for them existing,
despite their flaws. The problem is, as I'll explain, is
this editorial industrial complex and how these people are writing
about the powerful don't seem to be able to, or
maybe they don't want to actually interrogate the powerful. This
could be an entire episode on its sign, but I
(04:41):
don't think the answer to these failings is to simply
discard legacy media entirely. But I want to implore them
to do better and to strive for the values of
truth hunting and truth telling and actually explaining what's happening
and criticizing the people that don't have PR firms and
lobbying groups and lawyers and the means to protect them
cells from the world. The time for fucking around is over,
(05:05):
and we're currently finding out now. Anyway, as you know,
as a person existing in the real world, the price
of everything has kept increasing despite the fact that wages
are stagnating. It's forcing many of the poorest people to
choose between food and fuel or I don't know, eating
and having heat simultaneously. Businesses have spent several years telling
(05:26):
workers they're asking for too much and doing too little,
telling people a few years ago they were quiet quitting,
which is a fucking stupid term that just means going
to your job and doing the thing you're paying to do. Anyway,
and a year later, in twenty twenty three, they insisted
that the years of remote work were actually bad because
profits didn't reach the same profit levels of twenty twenty one,
(05:47):
which was something to do with remote work. Now, did
anyone actually prove this, did anyone actually going No, they didn't.
They just well, I just listened to Mark Benioff, who's
one of the more evil people alive. Now. I also
think a lot of these problems come to twenty twenty
one a year that we really need to dig into more.
We might not do so today, but we will in
the future. But one of the big things that punish
(06:08):
workers and led to so many layoffs in twenty twenty
three was the fact that we couldn't get back to
the post lockdown boot of twenty twenty one, when everyone
bought everything always as they left the house for the
first time in a while. Now, any corporation would be
smart enough to know that that was a phase, that
that was not going to be forever. Except every single
(06:30):
big company seemed to make the same mistake and say
number going up forever, line go up forever. When it didn't, Well,
they started punishing workers and they started thinking, well, could
it be that we as companies, We set unrealistic expectations
for the markets and we just thought that we'd keep
growing forever. Or maybe it was the people using the
computer at home. Yeah, that seems way better anyway. Well,
(06:54):
the majority of people don't work remotely. From talking to
the people I know outside of tech or business, there's
this genuine sense that media has allied itself with the bosses,
and I imagine it's because of the many articles that
literally call workers lazy and have done so for years.
Yet when it comes to the powerful legacy, media doesn't
seem to have that much pisson vinegar. They just have
much more guarded critiques. The appetite for shaming and finger wagging.
(07:18):
It's always directed that middle and working class workers and
seemingly disappears what a person has a three character job
title like CEO. It's fucking stupid, it's insulting, and yes,
it's demoralizing for the average person. Despite the fact that
Elon Musk has spent years telegraphing is intent to uses
billions of dollars to wild power equivalent to that of
a nation state. As you may remember from my first
(07:38):
episode of Anything over On, it could happen here too.
Much of the media, both legacy and otherwise, responded slowly, cautiously,
failing to call him a liar, a con artist, and aggressor,
a manipula of rasis the deadbeat dad, you know all
the thing's actually happening. No, no, no. They kind of
danced around him. They reported stories that might make you
think that they may be noticed it. But there's this
(08:00):
desperation to guard objectivity, and it was just it lacked
any real intent, It lacked any interest in calling account
to a man who has pretty much bought an election
for Donald Trump, a racist billionaire using his outsized capital
the ben society to his will. Just isn't a fucking
problem for the media, or at least not as much
(08:21):
of a problem as a worker who might not work
fifty to one hundred hours a week for a boss
who makes one hundred and thirty times what they do.
The news, at least outside of the right wing, is
always separate from opinion, always guarded, always safe for fear
that they might piss somebody off and be declared biased,
something that happens anyway, And while there are columnists are
(08:42):
given some space to have their own thoughts. Sometimes in
the newspaper sometimes online, The stories themselves are delivered with
the kind of reserved hmmmm tone that often fails to
express any actual consequences or context around the news itself,
and just doesn't seem to care about making sure or
that the reader or listener learns something. My mate Casey
(09:04):
has a good point about podcasts, and I apply it
to some of the news too, that there's too much
stuff out there that is there to make you feel
intelligent rather than make you intelligent. I think this falls
into it. Now. This isn't to say that outlets are
incapable of doing this correctly. I love the Washington Post.
They've done an excellent job on analyzing major text stories.
But a lot of these outlets feel custom built to
(09:24):
be bulldozed the moment an authoritarian turns up this force
that exists to crush those desperately attached to norms and objectivity.
Authoritarians know that they're ideologically charged. Words we quoted adverbatum
with the occasional ah, this could mean little dribble, this drizzle,
this spunk of context that's lost in the headline, that
repeats exactly what the fucking authoritarian wants them to and
(09:47):
guess what. Some people don't read the article, they just
read the headline, and Musk is the most brutal example
of this. By the way, despite the fact that he's
turned Twitter into a website pump full of racism and
hatred that literally helped make Donald Trump president, Musk was
still able to get mostly positive coverage from the majority
of the mainstream media for his fucking robotaxi nonsense, despite
(10:09):
the fact that he spent the best part of a
decade lying about what Tesla will do next. There are
entire websites just based on how much Elon Musk lies,
yet they still report this shit. It makes me very upset.
And it doesn't matter that some of these outlets, by
the way, had a company in coverage that suggested that
the markets weren't impressed by Tesla's theoretical robotaxi plans or
(10:32):
their fakeass robots run by people. Musk is still able
to use the media's desperation for objectivity against them, and
he knows that they never dare to combine reporting on
stuff with thinking about stuff for fear that Elon Musk
might say their bias, which he has been doing for years.
Do you see my goddamn point. Yet, and this, by
(10:53):
the way, is not always the fault of the rayers.
There are entire foundations of editors that have more faith
in the market and the powerful than they do the
people writing or the people reading their fucking words. And
above them are entire editorial superstructures that exist to make
sure that the editorial vision never colors too far outside
the lines or informs people a little too much. I'm
(11:15):
not even talking about Jeff Bezos or Lauren Powell Jobs
or any number of billionaires who are in any number
of publications, but the editors editing business and tech reporters
who don't know anything about business and tech, or the
senior editors there terrified of any byline that might dare
get the outlet under fire from somebody who could call
their boss it's fucking cowardice. There are, however, I should add,
(11:48):
also those who simply defer to the powerful, that assume
that this much money can't be wrong, even if said money,
in the case of Elon Musk, is repeatedly wrong. And
there's an entire website about the wrongness and the lies
and the bullshit, and I'm talking about Elon Musk still Obviously,
these editors are the people that look at the current
crop of powerful tech companies that have failed to deliver
any truly meaningful innovation in years, and they go ooh oh,
(12:10):
send me more. Daddy showed me more of the apps.
It's fucking disgraceful. Just look at the coverage of Sam
Mortman from the last year. You know, the guy who
spent years lying about what AI can do, and tell
me why every single thought he says must be uncritically cataloged,
His every goddamn decision, applauded, his every claim, trumpeted as
certain his brittle little company that burns five billion dollars
(12:31):
a year talked about like it's a fucking living god.
Sam Altman is a liar who's been fired from two companies,
including open Ai, and yet because he's a billionaire with
a buzzy company, he's left totally unscathed. The powerful get
a completely different set of rules to live by and
exist in a totally different media environment. Their geniuses, entrepreneurs,
fire brands. Their challenges are framed as missteps and their
(12:52):
victories framed as certainties by the same outlets that told
us that we were quiet, quitting and that the economy
is actually good and that we're the problem for high prices. Well,
it's correct to suggest that the right wing is horrendously
ideological and they're terribly biased. It's very hard to look
at the rest of the media and claim that they
are not. The problem is that the so called left media,
which usually is just the center, isn't biased towards what
(13:15):
we may consider left wing causes like universal health care,
strong unions, expanded social safety and that's you know, the
stuff that would actually be helpful. Now they're biased in
favor of pilating an ever growing carousel of sociopathic billionaire assholes,
elevating them to the status of American royalty, where they
exist above expectations and norms that you and I must
live by. This is the definition of elitism. The media
(13:38):
has literally created a class of people who can lie
and cheat and steal, and rather than condemn them for it,
they're celebrated. While it might feel a little tangential to
bring technology into this, I truly believe that everybody is
affected by the rot economy, the growth or costs ecosystem
where number must always go up because everybody is using technology.
(13:59):
All that and the technology in question is getting worse.
This election cycle saw more than twenty five billion text
messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was
cram full of random election advertising. Here's the thing about elections.
They're not really always about policy. No, they're a referendum
on the incumbent party or president, and by proxy, a
(14:20):
poll on how people feel. And the reality is that
most people are fucking miserable. There's this all encompassing feeling
that things are just harder now. It's harder to pay
your bills, it's harder to keep in touch with your friends,
it's harder to start a family, it's harder to buy
a house, it's harder to fall in love, it's harder
to do everything. And what we're seeing is an in
shitification of existence. To use mister doctor Roe's phrase, everything
(14:44):
just I don't want to be this much of a commudgeon,
but everything just kind of sucks. It's all terrible, it's miserable,
and hardly anyone thinks it's going to get better. And
this creates the kind of fertile conditions for a strong
man to have emerged, one who arises and says that
only he can fix thing, even if he spent four
years proving how he could not. And the problem for
democrats and for institutions more broadly is that the all
(15:06):
encompassing nature of this milieu is kind of hard to solve.
It's hard to change the perception that everything's terrible when
you're reminded of it when you're trying to do the
most basic of tasks. Our phones are full of notifications
trying to growth hack us into doing things that companies want.
Our apps are full of micro transactions. Our websites are
slower and harder to use, with endless demands of our
emails and our phone numbers, and the need to log
(15:27):
back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to
someone who dared to consume a Washington Post article. And yes,
I'm talking about the Post, which I fucking pay for,
despite the fact that it logs me out all the time.
Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely
show us the things who want them to anymore. With
executives dedicated to filling our feeds full of AI generated
slop because despite being the customer, were also the revenue mechanism,
(15:48):
our search engines do less as a means of making
us use them more. Our dating apps have become vehicles
of private equity to add a toll to falling in love.
Our video games are constantly nagging us to give them
more money, and despite it costing money and being attached
to our account, we don't actually own any of the
streaming media we purchase. We're drowning in spam, both in
our emails and our phones, and at this point in
our lives, we've probably agreed to three million pages of
(16:09):
privacy policies allowing companies to use our information as they
see fit. We get one value transaction with every company
they get eleven, they get one hundred. We really actually
don't know because there's no legislation to tell us what
they're fucking doing. And these are the issues that hit
everything we do all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is
(16:30):
our lives. Now. We wake up, we use our phone,
we check our text, three spam calls, two spam texts.
We look at our bank balance, two factor authentication check.
We're riad the news. A quarter of the pages bot
bone advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to
hide the button to get rid of them and then
we log into slack and feel a pang of anxieties.
Fifteen different notifications appear in a way there is really
not built for us to find what we need, just
(16:52):
to let us know something happen. Modern existence is just
engulfed in sludge. The institutions that exist are cut through.
It seem to bounce between the ignorance of their masters
and this misplaced duty to objectivity. Our mechanisms for exploring
and enjoying the world are interfered with by powerful forces
that are just basically left unchecked. Opening our devices is
(17:15):
wilfully subjecting us to attack after attack after attack from applications, websites,
and devices that are built to make us do things
for them, rather than operate with dignity and freedom that
much of the Internet was actually founded upon. These millions
of invisible acts of terror are too often left undiscussed
because accepting the truth requires you to accept that most
of the tech ecosystem is rotten, and that billions of
(17:38):
dollars are made harassing and punishing billions of people every
single day of their lives through the devices that we're
required to use in order to exist in the modern world.
Most users suffer the consequences, and most of the media
fails to account for them, and in turn, people walk
around knowing something is wrong, but not knowing who to
blame until somebody provides a convenient excuse, like immigrants, the Democrats,
(18:01):
like whatever fucking works, because we can't actually call the
people out, the corporations crushing our existence. Why wouldn't people
crave change? Why wouldn't people be angry living in the
current world? Absolutely fucking sucks. Sometimes it's miserable, it's bereft
of industry and filthy with manipulation. It's undignified, it's disrespectful,
(18:22):
and it must be crushed if we want to escape
this depressing, goddamn world we've found ourselves in. Our media
institutions are fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems,
but it starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating
them without fearing accusations of bias that, as I've said, repeatedly,
happen either way. The truth is that the media is
(18:45):
more afraid of accusations of bias than they are of
misleading their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope,
and it may very well be one, there must be
room to inject the writer's voice back into their work,
and a willingness to call out bad actors as such,
no matter how rich they are, no matter how big
they're products are, no matter how willing they are to
bark and screen that things are unfair as they accumulate
more power and money. We need context in our news.
(19:08):
We need it, We need it now. We need opinion,
we need voice, we need character, we need life, because
as long as we follow this bullshit objectivity path, we're screwed.
And if you're in the tech industry and hearing this
and saying, oh, the media is teed creticill of tech,
you flat fucking wrong, kiss my asshole. Everything we're seeing
happening right now is a direct result of a society
(19:29):
that let technology in the ultra rich run rampant, free
of both the governmental guardrails that might have stopped them
and the media ecosystem that might have actually held them
in check. Our default position in interrogating the intentions and
actions of the tech industry has become that they will
work it out as they continually redefine what work it
out means and turn it into make their products worse,
but more profitable. Covering Meta, Twitter, Google, open Ai, and
(19:53):
other huge tech companies as if the products they make
are remarkable and perfect is disrespectable to the reader's intelligence
and a disgust abdication of responsibility, as their products, even
when they're functional, are significantly worse, more annoying, more frustrating,
and more convoluted than ever. And that's before you get
to the ones like Facebook and Instagram that are out
right broken. I don't give a shit if these people
(20:15):
have raised a lot of money unless you use that
as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with the tech industry.
Meta making billions of dollars of profit is a sign
that something is wrong with society, not proof that it's
a good company or anything that should grant Mark Zuckerberg
any kind of special treatment. Shove your chains up your ass.
Mark open Ai being worth one hundred and fifty seven
billion dollars for a company that burns five billion or
(20:38):
more a year to make a product that destroys our environment,
for a product yet to find any real meaning, isn't
a sign that it should get more coverage or be
taken more seriously. No, it should be a sign that
something is broken, that something is wrong with society. Whatever
you may feel about chat GPT, the coverage it received
is outsized compared to its actual utility and the things
built on top of it. And that's a direct result
(20:59):
of a media industry that seems incapable of holding the
powerful accountable or actually learning about the subject matter in question.
It's time to accept that most people's digital life fucking sucks,
as does the way we consume our information, and that
there are people directly responsible. Be as angry as you
want at Jeff Bezos, whose wealth and the inherent cruelty
of Amazon's labor practices makes him an obvious target, but
(21:22):
please don't forget Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sander Peshai, Tim Cook,
and every single other tech executive that has allowed our
digital experiences to become fucked up through algorithms that we
know nothing about. Similarly, governments have entirely failed to push
through any legislation that might stop the row, both in
terms of dominance and a patness of algorithmic manipulation and
(21:44):
the ways in which take products exist with few real
quality standards. We may have, at least for now, consumer
standards for the majority of consumer goods, but software is
left effectively untouched, which is why so much of our
digital lives are such unfettered. Doug shit. And if you're
hearing this and say I'm being a hater or a pessimists,
shut the fuck up. I'm tired of you. I'm so
fucking tired of being told to calm down about this
(22:06):
as we stare down the barrel of four years of
authoritarianism built on top of the decay of our lives,
both physical and digital, with a media ecosystem that doesn't
do a great job explaining what's being done to the
people in an ideologically consistent way. There's this extremely common
assumption in the tech media based on what I'm really
not sure, that these companies are all doing a good job,
(22:26):
and that good job means having lots of users and
making lots of money, and it drives tons of editorial
decision making. If three quarters of the biggest car manufacturers
were making record profits by making half of their cars
or the break that sometimes didn't work, that'd be international news.
Government inquiries would appen, people will go to prison. And
this isn't even conjecture. It actually happened after Volkswagen was
(22:47):
caught deliberately programming its engines to only meet emission standards
during laboratory testing. They were left to spew excessive pollution
into the real world, but once lawmakers found out, they
responded with civil and criminal action. The executives and engineers
responsible were indicted. One received seven years in jail, and
their former CEO is currently being tried in Germany and
being indicted in the US too. And here we are
(23:10):
in the tech industry. Facebook barely Works used to nigenocides
and bullied people and harassed teen girls. Pedophiles run rampant
on there. There was a Wall Street Journal about story
about it. They're fine. So much of the tech industry
consumer software like Google or Facebook, Twitter and even chat GBT,
and business software from companies like Microsoft and Slack. It sucks.
(23:33):
It sucks. It's bad. You use it every day. You've
been listening to Ramble for fifty episodes. Now you know
what I'm talking about. It's everywhere. Yet the media covers
it just like, ah, you know, it's just how things
are mate now. Meta, by the admission of its own
internal documents, makes products that are ruinous to the mental
health of teenage girls, and it hasn't made any substantial
(23:53):
changes as a result, nor has it received any significant
pushback for failing to do so. Little bit of a
side note, big shout out to Jeff Horwitz and the
rest of the Wall Street General people who did the
Facebook files. There are are legacy media people doing a
good job on this. Nevertheless, Meta exercises this reckless disregard
for public safety, kind of like the auto industry in
(24:14):
the sixties, and that was when Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe
at Any Speed in his book. It actually brought about change.
It led to the Department of Transportation and the passage
of seat belt laws in forty nine states, and a
bunch of other things that can get overlooked. But the
tech industry is somehow inoculated against any kind of public
pressure or shame because it operates in this completely different
world with this different rule book and a different criteria
(24:34):
for success, as well as this completely different set of expectations.
By allowing the market to become disconnected from the value
(24:55):
it creates, we enable companies like I don't know in
video that reduced the quality of services they make more
money for their g Force now service or Facebook. They
can just destroy our political discourse, so they can facilitate
genocide in Myanmar, and then well they get headlines about
how good a CEO Mark Zuckerbig is and how cool
his chains are, and how how everything's just fine with
(25:15):
Facebook and they're making more money. No. No, I actually
want to take a step back, though. I want to
take a little bit of step back. I previously mentioned
I said it twice now, Oh, Meta enables genocide and
it destroys our political discourse. I want to be clear
when I say that everything is justified at Meta, I'm
(25:35):
actually quoting their chief technology officer. That's quite literally what
Andrew Bosworth said in an internal memo from twenty sixteen
where he said that and I quote ahem, all the
work Facebook does in growth is justified, even if that includes,
and I'm quoting him directly, somebody dying in a terrorist
attack coordinating using Facebook's tools. A mere mention of violent
(26:01):
crime is enough to create dreams of articles questioning whether
society is safe and whether we need more plastic in
our walgreens. Yeah, our digital lives are this wasteland that
people still discuss like a utopia, seriously putting aside the
social networks. Have you visited a website on the phone recently.
Have you tried to use a new app? Have you
tried to buy something online starting with a Google search?
(26:22):
Within those experiences, sis, has anything gone wrong? You know it,
I know it has, you know it has. It's time
to wake up. We the users of products. We're at
war with the products we're using and the people that
make them, and right now we are losing. The media
must realign to fight for how things should be. This
(26:44):
doesn't mean that they can't cover things positively, or give
credit where credit is due, or be willing to accept
that something could be something cool. But has the change
is the evaluation of the products themselves, which have been
allowed to decay to a level that has become at
best annoying and at worst actively harmful for society. Our
networks are rotten, Our information ecosystem is poisoned, with its
(27:04):
pure parts ideologically and strategically concussed. Our means of speaking
to those that we love and making new connections are
so constantly interfered with that personal choice and dignity is
all but removed. But there is hope. There really is.
Those covering the tech industry right now have one of
the most consequential jobs in journalism if they choose to
fucking do it. Those willing to guide people through the wasteland,
(27:27):
those willing to discuss what needs to change, how bad
things have gone, and hold the powerful accountable and say
what good might look like, have the opportunity to push
for a better future by spitting in the faces of
those ruining it. I don't know where I sit, by
the way, I don't know what to call myself. Am
I legacy media? I got my start writing in print magazines.
Am I an independent contractor? Am I an influencer? Am
(27:49):
I content? I truly don't know, and I don't know
over care. But all that I know is that I
feel like I'm at war two and that we, if
I can be considered part of the media, are at
war with people that change the terms of innovation so
that it's synonymous with value extraction. Technology is how I
became a person, how I met my closest friends and
loved ones. And without it, I wouldn't be able to write,
(28:09):
I wouldn't be able to read this podcast. I wouldn't
have got this podcast. And I feel this poison flowing
through my veins as I see what these motherfuckers have
done and what they're continuing to do, And I see
how inconsistently and tipidly they're interrogated. Now is the time
to talk bluntly about what is happening. The declining quality
(28:31):
of tech products, the scourge of growth, hacking, the cancellor
us growth at all cost mindset. These are all the
things that need to be raised in every single piece,
and judgments must be unrelenting. The companies will.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Squeal ooh that they're being so unfairly treated by the
biased legacy media. Oh oh, save me, hey, Nell Patel
interview with Sondar Pishai. This is how you sounded when
you handed him your phone.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
It was pathetic. They should be scared of you, Nile.
The powerful should be scared of the media. They shouldn't
be sitting there sending letters to the editor like fucking
customer support. No, they should see this podcast, They should
see these news letters. They should see everything published by
the tech media and go uh oh. And there can
be good people. There can be good boys and girls
(29:17):
than others. There can be plenty of people that make
good products and get great press for it. But do
you really think meta Google, Apple to an extent. Frankly,
do you think Amazon looks good right now? Do you
think it's easy to find stuff? Or do you think
it's slop full of more slop? Mark Zuckerberg said on
an earning score the other day that he intends there
(29:38):
to be an AI specific slop feed that should These
are harmful things. This is pouring vants of oil into
rivers and then getting told you're the best boy in town.
These companies, they're poisoning the digital world, and they must
be held accountable for the damage they're causing. Readers are
(29:58):
already aware. But ah, and this is really thanks to
members of the media, by the way, the gaslighting themselves
into believing that, oh, I just don't catch I don't
keep up with technology. He is getting away from me.
I'm not technical enough to use this, when the thing
that they don't get, that the average person doesn't get,
is that the tech industry has built legions of obfiscations,
legions of legal tricks, and these horrible little user interface
(30:22):
traps specifically made to trick you into doing things, to
make the experience kind of subordinate to getting the money
off of you. And I think that this is one
of the biggest issues in society. And yes, of course
I'm biased. I'm doing a podcast about tech, but for real, though,
billions of people use smartphones, billions of people are on
the computer every day. It's how we do everything. And
(30:44):
it stinks. It stinks so bad. This is the rot economy.
We're in the rot society. But things can change, and
for them to change, it has to start with the
information sources, and that starts with journalism. And the work
has already begun and we'll continue, but it must scale up,
and it must do so quickly. And you, the user,
(31:04):
have the power. Learn to read a privacy policy. And
the link there is to the Washington Post. Yes, there
are plenty of great reporters there. Fuck Bezos. You can
move to Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app that
works on just about everything. Get a service like delete me,
and by the way, I pay for it, I work
from four years ago. I have no financial relationship with them,
but they're great for removing you from data brokers. Molly White,
(31:26):
who's a dear friend of mine and even better right
you might remember from one of the early episodes about Wikipedia.
She's also written this extremely long guide about what to
do next that are linked to in the notes, and
it runs through a ton of great things you can
do unionization, finding your communities, dropping apps that collect and
store sensitive data, and so on. I also heartily recommend
Wired's guide to Protecting Yourself from Government Surveillance, which is
linked in the show notes. Now, before we go, I
(31:52):
want to leave you with something that I posted on
November sixth on the Better Offline redditpp the last twenty
four hours of felt bleak, and we'll like feel more
bleak as the months and years go on. It'll be
easy to give into doom, to assume the fight is lost,
to assume that the bad guys are permanently won and
there will never be any justice or joy again. Now's
the time for solidarity to crystallize around ideas that matter,
(32:13):
even if their a position in society is delayed. Even
as the clouds darken and the storm's brew and the
darkness feels all encompassing and suffocating, reach out to those
you love and don't just commiserate. Plan It doesn't have
to be political, it doesn't even really have to matter.
Put shit on your fucking calendar. Keep yourself active and busy,
and if not distracted at very least animated. Darkness feeds
(32:35):
an idleness. Darkness feasts on a sense of failure and
a sense of inability to make change. You don't know
me very well, but know that I'm aware of the
darkness and the sadness and the suffocation of when things
feel overwhelming. Give yourself some mercy and then the days
to come. Don't castigate yourself a feeling gutted. Then keep going.
I realize it's little solace to think, well, if I
(32:57):
keep saying stuff out loud, things will get better. But
I promise you do it so as an effect and
actually matters. Keep talking about how fucked up things are,
Make sure it's written down, make sure it's spoken cleanly,
and with the rage and fire and piss and vinegar
it deserves. Things will change for the better, even if
it takes more time than it should. Look. I know
(33:18):
I'm imperfect, emotional, off kilt At times I get emails
saying that too angry. I'm sorry if it's ever triggered.
You really do mean that. It's not intentional. I just
I feel this in everything I do. I use technology
all the time, and it is extremely annoying. But also
I'm aware that I have privilege, and the more privilege
(33:38):
you have with intake, the more you're able to escape
the little things. Go and buy a cheap laptop today.
Try and see what two hundred, three hundred dollars laptop is.
It's slow, It's full of eighteen pop ups trying to
sell you access to cloud storage, to shit that you'll
never use, tricking grannies and people who can't afford laptops,
so people that just don't know. When I see this stuff,
(33:58):
it enrages me. Not just for me, but because I
know that I'm at least lucky enough to know how
to get around this shit. Spent most of my life online,
spent most of my life playing with tech and now
how it works. And I know I have my tangents
and my biases, but I wear them, can't let my
heart on my sleeve. I care about all this stuff
(34:18):
in a way that might be a little different to some.
And it's because I've I've watched an industry that really
made me as a person, that allowed me to grow
as a person, to actually meet people, to not feel
as alone. And I imagine some of you feel like
this too, And then watching what happens to it every day,
(34:39):
watching the people who get so rich off of making
it so much worse, and then seeing what happen on
November fifth, and you can draw a line from it.
People are scared, they're lost, Their lives are spent digitally,
and your digital lives are just endless terrorism, endless harm.
(34:59):
Some of you know your way around takes, so you
can escape some of it, but it's impossible to escape
all of it. Try meeting people these days, you can't.
Everything is online, and everything online, everything on your phone
is mitigated and interfered with. It's an assault on your senses,
one deprived of dignity. And I see the people doing
(35:20):
this and it feels me full of fucking rage, and
it makes me angry for you and for me, for
my son growing up, and what will probably be a
worse world, for my friends and loved ones who are
harder to see, harder to speak to, whose lives too
are interfered with. And there are the millions and millions
of people who have no fucking idea it's happening, that
(35:43):
just exist in this swill, in this active digital terrorism,
poked and prodded and nagged and notified constantly. And I
don't want. Early on in this I got a message
saying don't tell people to be angry, and I stick
by that. But I'm not going to hide that I am.
I'm not going to hide the pain I feel. I'm
(36:04):
not going to hide the pain I feel seeing this
shit happen. And I've watched this thing that I love technology,
Really do love tech, I really do deeply. I've watched
it corrupted and broken and the people breaking it. They
don't just make billions of dollars. They get articles in
they get interviewed on the news. Mark Zuckerbug, he wears
(36:28):
a chain and there's articles about how cool he is.
He should be in fucking prison. He should be on
a prison on a boat that just circles the world,
and he shouldn't have air conditioning or heat depending on
how the weather is. And I know that I'm kind
of errant, and again, tons of tangents, but look, the
reason I'm like this is because I really care. And
(36:48):
I think caring, I think being angry at the things
that actually matter and giving context as a result. I
think that's deeply valuable. And I realize I do fla
to handle a lot, but it really is because I care,
I care about you, I care about the subject matter.
I'm so grateful and so honored that you spend your
time listening to me every week, and I hope you'll
(37:10):
continue to do so. So I'm not going anywhere. Thank
you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer
of the Better Offline theme song is Metasowski. You can
check out more of his music and audio projects at
Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S O
(37:33):
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 youreaed dot at to visit the discord, and
go to our slash Better Offline to check out our reddit.
Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
(37:54):
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com to 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
ze Tron. It's been a hard couple of weeks. It's
been pretty hard to focus. I've written a few newsletters,
I've gone to Portugal, I've done a bunch of shit
(00:27):
just trying not to think about everything happening outside. But
it's time to do so. Seemingly every single person on
Earth with a blog or a podcast, or even a
Twitter account or XD everything, Apple whatever it's called now,
they've all tried to drill down into what happened on
November fifth, to find the people that blame, to explain
what could have gone differently, really looking for who to
(00:50):
blame though, and find out why so many actions led
to a result that will overwhelmingly home woman, minorities, immigrants,
LGBTQ people, and lower income work. Because it's terrifying. It
fucking sucks. I'm not going to mince words, not that
I would usually anyway, and I don't feel fully equipped
to respond to the moment. I don't have any real answers,
(01:12):
at least not political ones. I'm not a political analyst,
and I'd feel disingenuous trying to dissect either the Harris
or the Trump campaigns, because I just feel like there's
a take Olympics right now. It's the Dunning Kruger Festival
out there. Everyone is trying to rationalize and intellectualize these
events that ultimately come down to something quite simple. People
(01:32):
don't trust authority, and yet it's pretty ironic that this
often leads them towards authoritarianism. Now, I don't want to
give you the impression that I'm going to go on
my crank mode that and somehow against institutions on their face,
I'm not. But at the same time, understanding this moment
requires us to acknowledge that institutions have failed us and
(01:53):
failed most people, and how certain institutions missteps have led
us to exactly where we are today. Legacy media, and
while oftentimes they're staffed by people who truly love their
readers and care about their beats, they're weighed down by
this hysterical, nonsensical attachment to the imaginary concept of objectivity
and the will of the markets. Case in point, regular
(02:15):
people have spent years watching the price of goods increase
due to inflation, despite the fact that the increase in
pricing was mostly driven by get this corporations raising their prices. Now,
that's not to say that external factors like the war
in Ukraine or lingering COVID restrictions in China, these things
did play a role in it. They did. But the
(02:35):
bulk of these price increases were caused by these fucking
companies raising the prices. It was in their earnings. It
was right there, Pepsi Cola said it on the news.
Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming
amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even
going against their own reporting. And there will be links
(02:56):
in the episode notes I promise as a means to
provide balanced coverage, insisting again and again that the economy
is actually good, contorting their little bodies to prove that
prices aren't actually higher, even as companies literally boasted about
raising their prices on earnings. In fact, the media spent
years debating with itself whether the price scuging was actually happening,
(03:17):
despite years of proof that it was. Some of them
even reported that the price gouging was happening. So like,
get this, I just don't think people trust authority, and
they especially don't trust the media, especially the legacy media.
It also probably didn't help. The legacy media implored readers
and viewers to ignore what they saw at the supermarket
(03:38):
or at the pump and the growing hits that their
wallets from the daily necessities of life. It was just
a national level gas lighting and it was disgusting. And
I know some of you might say, you know where
to email me. Oh, it's not just this. No, of course,
it's not just this asshole, but I think this is
a big thing. Now, before I go any further, I've
(03:59):
used the termgacy media here repeatedly, but don't completely intend
for it to come across as a pejorative. Despite my criticisms,
and believe me, I've got a few of them, there
are people in the legacy media doing a good job.
They're reporting the truth, they're doing the kinds of work
that matters, and they're actually trying to teach their reader's
stuff and tell them what's happening and giving them context.
(04:19):
I read and pay for several legacy media outlets. I
think the world is a better place for them existing,
despite their flaws. The problem is, as I'll explain, is
this editorial industrial complex and how these people are writing
about the powerful don't seem to be able to, or
maybe they don't want to actually interrogate the powerful. This
could be an entire episode on its sign, but I
(04:41):
don't think the answer to these failings is to simply
discard legacy media entirely. But I want to implore them
to do better and to strive for the values of
truth hunting and truth telling and actually explaining what's happening
and criticizing the people that don't have PR firms and
lobbying groups and lawyers and the means to protect them
cells from the world. The time for fucking around is over,
(05:05):
and we're currently finding out now. Anyway, as you know,
as a person existing in the real world, the price
of everything has kept increasing despite the fact that wages
are stagnating. It's forcing many of the poorest people to
choose between food and fuel or I don't know, eating
and having heat simultaneously. Businesses have spent several years telling
(05:26):
workers they're asking for too much and doing too little,
telling people a few years ago they were quiet quitting,
which is a fucking stupid term that just means going
to your job and doing the thing you're paying to do. Anyway,
and a year later, in twenty twenty three, they insisted
that the years of remote work were actually bad because
profits didn't reach the same profit levels of twenty twenty one,
(05:47):
which was something to do with remote work. Now, did
anyone actually prove this, did anyone actually going No, they didn't.
They just well, I just listened to Mark Benioff, who's
one of the more evil people alive. Now. I also
think a lot of these problems come to twenty twenty
one a year that we really need to dig into more.
We might not do so today, but we will in
the future. But one of the big things that punish
(06:08):
workers and led to so many layoffs in twenty twenty
three was the fact that we couldn't get back to
the post lockdown boot of twenty twenty one, when everyone
bought everything always as they left the house for the
first time in a while. Now, any corporation would be
smart enough to know that that was a phase, that
that was not going to be forever. Except every single
(06:30):
big company seemed to make the same mistake and say
number going up forever, line go up forever. When it didn't, Well,
they started punishing workers and they started thinking, well, could
it be that we as companies, We set unrealistic expectations
for the markets and we just thought that we'd keep
growing forever. Or maybe it was the people using the
computer at home. Yeah, that seems way better anyway. Well,
(06:54):
the majority of people don't work remotely. From talking to
the people I know outside of tech or business, there's
this genuine sense that media has allied itself with the bosses,
and I imagine it's because of the many articles that
literally call workers lazy and have done so for years.
Yet when it comes to the powerful legacy, media doesn't
seem to have that much pisson vinegar. They just have
much more guarded critiques. The appetite for shaming and finger wagging.
(07:18):
It's always directed that middle and working class workers and
seemingly disappears what a person has a three character job
title like CEO. It's fucking stupid, it's insulting, and yes,
it's demoralizing for the average person. Despite the fact that
Elon Musk has spent years telegraphing is intent to uses
billions of dollars to wild power equivalent to that of
a nation state. As you may remember from my first
(07:38):
episode of Anything over On, it could happen here too.
Much of the media, both legacy and otherwise, responded slowly, cautiously,
failing to call him a liar, a con artist, and aggressor,
a manipula of rasis the deadbeat dad, you know all
the thing's actually happening. No, no, no. They kind of
danced around him. They reported stories that might make you
think that they may be noticed it. But there's this
(08:00):
desperation to guard objectivity, and it was just it lacked
any real intent, It lacked any interest in calling account
to a man who has pretty much bought an election
for Donald Trump, a racist billionaire using his outsized capital
the ben society to his will. Just isn't a fucking
problem for the media, or at least not as much
(08:21):
of a problem as a worker who might not work
fifty to one hundred hours a week for a boss
who makes one hundred and thirty times what they do.
The news, at least outside of the right wing, is
always separate from opinion, always guarded, always safe for fear
that they might piss somebody off and be declared biased,
something that happens anyway, And while there are columnists are
(08:42):
given some space to have their own thoughts. Sometimes in
the newspaper sometimes online, The stories themselves are delivered with
the kind of reserved hmmmm tone that often fails to
express any actual consequences or context around the news itself,
and just doesn't seem to care about making sure or
that the reader or listener learns something. My mate Casey
(09:04):
has a good point about podcasts, and I apply it
to some of the news too, that there's too much
stuff out there that is there to make you feel
intelligent rather than make you intelligent. I think this falls
into it. Now. This isn't to say that outlets are
incapable of doing this correctly. I love the Washington Post.
They've done an excellent job on analyzing major text stories.
But a lot of these outlets feel custom built to
(09:24):
be bulldozed the moment an authoritarian turns up this force
that exists to crush those desperately attached to norms and objectivity.
Authoritarians know that they're ideologically charged. Words we quoted adverbatum
with the occasional ah, this could mean little dribble, this drizzle,
this spunk of context that's lost in the headline, that
repeats exactly what the fucking authoritarian wants them to and
(09:47):
guess what. Some people don't read the article, they just
read the headline, and Musk is the most brutal example
of this. By the way, despite the fact that he's
turned Twitter into a website pump full of racism and
hatred that literally helped make Donald Trump president, Musk was
still able to get mostly positive coverage from the majority
of the mainstream media for his fucking robotaxi nonsense, despite
(10:09):
the fact that he spent the best part of a
decade lying about what Tesla will do next. There are
entire websites just based on how much Elon Musk lies,
yet they still report this shit. It makes me very upset.
And it doesn't matter that some of these outlets, by
the way, had a company in coverage that suggested that
the markets weren't impressed by Tesla's theoretical robotaxi plans or
(10:32):
their fakeass robots run by people. Musk is still able
to use the media's desperation for objectivity against them, and
he knows that they never dare to combine reporting on
stuff with thinking about stuff for fear that Elon Musk
might say their bias, which he has been doing for years.
Do you see my goddamn point. Yet, and this, by
(10:53):
the way, is not always the fault of the rayers.
There are entire foundations of editors that have more faith
in the market and the powerful than they do the
people writing or the people reading their fucking words. And
above them are entire editorial superstructures that exist to make
sure that the editorial vision never colors too far outside
the lines or informs people a little too much. I'm
(11:15):
not even talking about Jeff Bezos or Lauren Powell Jobs
or any number of billionaires who are in any number
of publications, but the editors editing business and tech reporters
who don't know anything about business and tech, or the
senior editors there terrified of any byline that might dare
get the outlet under fire from somebody who could call
their boss it's fucking cowardice. There are, however, I should add,
(11:48):
also those who simply defer to the powerful, that assume
that this much money can't be wrong, even if said money,
in the case of Elon Musk, is repeatedly wrong. And
there's an entire website about the wrongness and the lies
and the bullshit, and I'm talking about Elon Musk still Obviously,
these editors are the people that look at the current
crop of powerful tech companies that have failed to deliver
any truly meaningful innovation in years, and they go ooh oh,
(12:10):
send me more. Daddy showed me more of the apps.
It's fucking disgraceful. Just look at the coverage of Sam
Mortman from the last year. You know, the guy who
spent years lying about what AI can do, and tell
me why every single thought he says must be uncritically cataloged,
His every goddamn decision, applauded, his every claim, trumpeted as
certain his brittle little company that burns five billion dollars
(12:31):
a year talked about like it's a fucking living god.
Sam Altman is a liar who's been fired from two companies,
including open Ai, and yet because he's a billionaire with
a buzzy company, he's left totally unscathed. The powerful get
a completely different set of rules to live by and
exist in a totally different media environment. Their geniuses, entrepreneurs,
fire brands. Their challenges are framed as missteps and their
(12:52):
victories framed as certainties by the same outlets that told
us that we were quiet, quitting and that the economy
is actually good and that we're the problem for high prices. Well,
it's correct to suggest that the right wing is horrendously
ideological and they're terribly biased. It's very hard to look
at the rest of the media and claim that they
are not. The problem is that the so called left media,
which usually is just the center, isn't biased towards what
(13:15):
we may consider left wing causes like universal health care,
strong unions, expanded social safety and that's you know, the
stuff that would actually be helpful. Now they're biased in
favor of pilating an ever growing carousel of sociopathic billionaire assholes,
elevating them to the status of American royalty, where they
exist above expectations and norms that you and I must
live by. This is the definition of elitism. The media
(13:38):
has literally created a class of people who can lie
and cheat and steal, and rather than condemn them for it,
they're celebrated. While it might feel a little tangential to
bring technology into this, I truly believe that everybody is
affected by the rot economy, the growth or costs ecosystem
where number must always go up because everybody is using technology.
(13:59):
All that and the technology in question is getting worse.
This election cycle saw more than twenty five billion text
messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was
cram full of random election advertising. Here's the thing about elections.
They're not really always about policy. No, they're a referendum
on the incumbent party or president, and by proxy, a
(14:20):
poll on how people feel. And the reality is that
most people are fucking miserable. There's this all encompassing feeling
that things are just harder now. It's harder to pay
your bills, it's harder to keep in touch with your friends,
it's harder to start a family, it's harder to buy
a house, it's harder to fall in love, it's harder
to do everything. And what we're seeing is an in
shitification of existence. To use mister doctor Roe's phrase, everything
(14:44):
just I don't want to be this much of a commudgeon,
but everything just kind of sucks. It's all terrible, it's miserable,
and hardly anyone thinks it's going to get better. And
this creates the kind of fertile conditions for a strong
man to have emerged, one who arises and says that
only he can fix thing, even if he spent four
years proving how he could not. And the problem for
democrats and for institutions more broadly is that the all
(15:06):
encompassing nature of this milieu is kind of hard to solve.
It's hard to change the perception that everything's terrible when
you're reminded of it when you're trying to do the
most basic of tasks. Our phones are full of notifications
trying to growth hack us into doing things that companies want.
Our apps are full of micro transactions. Our websites are
slower and harder to use, with endless demands of our
emails and our phone numbers, and the need to log
(15:27):
back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to
someone who dared to consume a Washington Post article. And yes,
I'm talking about the Post, which I fucking pay for,
despite the fact that it logs me out all the time.
Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely
show us the things who want them to anymore. With
executives dedicated to filling our feeds full of AI generated
slop because despite being the customer, were also the revenue mechanism,
(15:48):
our search engines do less as a means of making
us use them more. Our dating apps have become vehicles
of private equity to add a toll to falling in love.
Our video games are constantly nagging us to give them
more money, and despite it costing money and being attached
to our account, we don't actually own any of the
streaming media we purchase. We're drowning in spam, both in
our emails and our phones, and at this point in
our lives, we've probably agreed to three million pages of
(16:09):
privacy policies allowing companies to use our information as they
see fit. We get one value transaction with every company
they get eleven, they get one hundred. We really actually
don't know because there's no legislation to tell us what
they're fucking doing. And these are the issues that hit
everything we do all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is
(16:30):
our lives. Now. We wake up, we use our phone,
we check our text, three spam calls, two spam texts.
We look at our bank balance, two factor authentication check.
We're riad the news. A quarter of the pages bot
bone advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to
hide the button to get rid of them and then
we log into slack and feel a pang of anxieties.
Fifteen different notifications appear in a way there is really
not built for us to find what we need, just
(16:52):
to let us know something happen. Modern existence is just
engulfed in sludge. The institutions that exist are cut through.
It seem to bounce between the ignorance of their masters
and this misplaced duty to objectivity. Our mechanisms for exploring
and enjoying the world are interfered with by powerful forces
that are just basically left unchecked. Opening our devices is
(17:15):
wilfully subjecting us to attack after attack after attack from applications, websites,
and devices that are built to make us do things
for them, rather than operate with dignity and freedom that
much of the Internet was actually founded upon. These millions
of invisible acts of terror are too often left undiscussed
because accepting the truth requires you to accept that most
of the tech ecosystem is rotten, and that billions of
(17:38):
dollars are made harassing and punishing billions of people every
single day of their lives through the devices that we're
required to use in order to exist in the modern world.
Most users suffer the consequences, and most of the media
fails to account for them, and in turn, people walk
around knowing something is wrong, but not knowing who to
blame until somebody provides a convenient excuse, like immigrants, the Democrats,
(18:01):
like whatever fucking works, because we can't actually call the
people out, the corporations crushing our existence. Why wouldn't people
crave change? Why wouldn't people be angry living in the
current world? Absolutely fucking sucks. Sometimes it's miserable, it's bereft
of industry and filthy with manipulation. It's undignified, it's disrespectful,
(18:22):
and it must be crushed if we want to escape
this depressing, goddamn world we've found ourselves in. Our media
institutions are fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems,
but it starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating
them without fearing accusations of bias that, as I've said, repeatedly,
happen either way. The truth is that the media is
(18:45):
more afraid of accusations of bias than they are of
misleading their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope,
and it may very well be one, there must be
room to inject the writer's voice back into their work,
and a willingness to call out bad actors as such,
no matter how rich they are, no matter how big
they're products are, no matter how willing they are to
bark and screen that things are unfair as they accumulate
more power and money. We need context in our news.
(19:08):
We need it, We need it now. We need opinion,
we need voice, we need character, we need life, because
as long as we follow this bullshit objectivity path, we're screwed.
And if you're in the tech industry and hearing this
and saying, oh, the media is teed creticill of tech,
you flat fucking wrong, kiss my asshole. Everything we're seeing
happening right now is a direct result of a society
(19:29):
that let technology in the ultra rich run rampant, free
of both the governmental guardrails that might have stopped them
and the media ecosystem that might have actually held them
in check. Our default position in interrogating the intentions and
actions of the tech industry has become that they will
work it out as they continually redefine what work it
out means and turn it into make their products worse,
but more profitable. Covering Meta, Twitter, Google, open Ai, and
(19:53):
other huge tech companies as if the products they make
are remarkable and perfect is disrespectable to the reader's intelligence
and a disgust abdication of responsibility, as their products, even
when they're functional, are significantly worse, more annoying, more frustrating,
and more convoluted than ever. And that's before you get
to the ones like Facebook and Instagram that are out
right broken. I don't give a shit if these people
(20:15):
have raised a lot of money unless you use that
as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with the tech industry.
Meta making billions of dollars of profit is a sign
that something is wrong with society, not proof that it's
a good company or anything that should grant Mark Zuckerberg
any kind of special treatment. Shove your chains up your ass.
Mark open Ai being worth one hundred and fifty seven
billion dollars for a company that burns five billion or
(20:38):
more a year to make a product that destroys our environment,
for a product yet to find any real meaning, isn't
a sign that it should get more coverage or be
taken more seriously. No, it should be a sign that
something is broken, that something is wrong with society. Whatever
you may feel about chat GPT, the coverage it received
is outsized compared to its actual utility and the things
built on top of it. And that's a direct result
(20:59):
of a media industry that seems incapable of holding the
powerful accountable or actually learning about the subject matter in question.
It's time to accept that most people's digital life fucking sucks,
as does the way we consume our information, and that
there are people directly responsible. Be as angry as you
want at Jeff Bezos, whose wealth and the inherent cruelty
of Amazon's labor practices makes him an obvious target, but
(21:22):
please don't forget Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sander Peshai, Tim Cook,
and every single other tech executive that has allowed our
digital experiences to become fucked up through algorithms that we
know nothing about. Similarly, governments have entirely failed to push
through any legislation that might stop the row, both in
terms of dominance and a patness of algorithmic manipulation and
(21:44):
the ways in which take products exist with few real
quality standards. We may have, at least for now, consumer
standards for the majority of consumer goods, but software is
left effectively untouched, which is why so much of our
digital lives are such unfettered. Doug shit. And if you're
hearing this and say I'm being a hater or a pessimists,
shut the fuck up. I'm tired of you. I'm so
fucking tired of being told to calm down about this
(22:06):
as we stare down the barrel of four years of
authoritarianism built on top of the decay of our lives,
both physical and digital, with a media ecosystem that doesn't
do a great job explaining what's being done to the
people in an ideologically consistent way. There's this extremely common
assumption in the tech media based on what I'm really
not sure, that these companies are all doing a good job,
(22:26):
and that good job means having lots of users and
making lots of money, and it drives tons of editorial
decision making. If three quarters of the biggest car manufacturers
were making record profits by making half of their cars
or the break that sometimes didn't work, that'd be international news.
Government inquiries would appen, people will go to prison. And
this isn't even conjecture. It actually happened after Volkswagen was
(22:47):
caught deliberately programming its engines to only meet emission standards
during laboratory testing. They were left to spew excessive pollution
into the real world, but once lawmakers found out, they
responded with civil and criminal action. The executives and engineers
responsible were indicted. One received seven years in jail, and
their former CEO is currently being tried in Germany and
being indicted in the US too. And here we are
(23:10):
in the tech industry. Facebook barely Works used to nigenocides
and bullied people and harassed teen girls. Pedophiles run rampant
on there. There was a Wall Street Journal about story
about it. They're fine. So much of the tech industry
consumer software like Google or Facebook, Twitter and even chat GBT,
and business software from companies like Microsoft and Slack. It sucks.
(23:33):
It sucks. It's bad. You use it every day. You've
been listening to Ramble for fifty episodes. Now you know
what I'm talking about. It's everywhere. Yet the media covers
it just like, ah, you know, it's just how things
are mate now. Meta, by the admission of its own
internal documents, makes products that are ruinous to the mental
health of teenage girls, and it hasn't made any substantial
(23:53):
changes as a result, nor has it received any significant
pushback for failing to do so. Little bit of a
side note, big shout out to Jeff Horwitz and the
rest of the Wall Street General people who did the
Facebook files. There are are legacy media people doing a
good job on this. Nevertheless, Meta exercises this reckless disregard
for public safety, kind of like the auto industry in
(24:14):
the sixties, and that was when Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe
at Any Speed in his book. It actually brought about change.
It led to the Department of Transportation and the passage
of seat belt laws in forty nine states, and a
bunch of other things that can get overlooked. But the
tech industry is somehow inoculated against any kind of public
pressure or shame because it operates in this completely different
world with this different rule book and a different criteria
(24:34):
for success, as well as this completely different set of expectations.
By allowing the market to become disconnected from the value
(24:55):
it creates, we enable companies like I don't know in
video that reduced the quality of services they make more
money for their g Force now service or Facebook. They
can just destroy our political discourse, so they can facilitate
genocide in Myanmar, and then well they get headlines about
how good a CEO Mark Zuckerbig is and how cool
his chains are, and how how everything's just fine with
(25:15):
Facebook and they're making more money. No. No, I actually
want to take a step back, though. I want to
take a little bit of step back. I previously mentioned
I said it twice now, Oh, Meta enables genocide and
it destroys our political discourse. I want to be clear
when I say that everything is justified at Meta, I'm
(25:35):
actually quoting their chief technology officer. That's quite literally what
Andrew Bosworth said in an internal memo from twenty sixteen
where he said that and I quote ahem, all the
work Facebook does in growth is justified, even if that includes,
and I'm quoting him directly, somebody dying in a terrorist
attack coordinating using Facebook's tools. A mere mention of violent
(26:01):
crime is enough to create dreams of articles questioning whether
society is safe and whether we need more plastic in
our walgreens. Yeah, our digital lives are this wasteland that
people still discuss like a utopia, seriously putting aside the
social networks. Have you visited a website on the phone recently.
Have you tried to use a new app? Have you
tried to buy something online starting with a Google search?
(26:22):
Within those experiences, sis, has anything gone wrong? You know it,
I know it has, you know it has. It's time
to wake up. We the users of products. We're at
war with the products we're using and the people that
make them, and right now we are losing. The media
must realign to fight for how things should be. This
(26:44):
doesn't mean that they can't cover things positively, or give
credit where credit is due, or be willing to accept
that something could be something cool. But has the change
is the evaluation of the products themselves, which have been
allowed to decay to a level that has become at
best annoying and at worst actively harmful for society. Our
networks are rotten, Our information ecosystem is poisoned, with its
(27:04):
pure parts ideologically and strategically concussed. Our means of speaking
to those that we love and making new connections are
so constantly interfered with that personal choice and dignity is
all but removed. But there is hope. There really is.
Those covering the tech industry right now have one of
the most consequential jobs in journalism if they choose to
fucking do it. Those willing to guide people through the wasteland,
(27:27):
those willing to discuss what needs to change, how bad
things have gone, and hold the powerful accountable and say
what good might look like, have the opportunity to push
for a better future by spitting in the faces of
those ruining it. I don't know where I sit, by
the way, I don't know what to call myself. Am
I legacy media? I got my start writing in print magazines.
Am I an independent contractor? Am I an influencer? Am
(27:49):
I content? I truly don't know, and I don't know
over care. But all that I know is that I
feel like I'm at war two and that we, if
I can be considered part of the media, are at
war with people that change the terms of innovation so
that it's synonymous with value extraction. Technology is how I
became a person, how I met my closest friends and
loved ones. And without it, I wouldn't be able to write,
(28:09):
I wouldn't be able to read this podcast. I wouldn't
have got this podcast. And I feel this poison flowing
through my veins as I see what these motherfuckers have
done and what they're continuing to do, And I see
how inconsistently and tipidly they're interrogated. Now is the time
to talk bluntly about what is happening. The declining quality
(28:31):
of tech products, the scourge of growth, hacking, the cancellor
us growth at all cost mindset. These are all the
things that need to be raised in every single piece,
and judgments must be unrelenting. The companies will.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Squeal ooh that they're being so unfairly treated by the
biased legacy media. Oh oh, save me, hey, Nell Patel
interview with Sondar Pishai. This is how you sounded when
you handed him your phone.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
It was pathetic. They should be scared of you, Nile.
The powerful should be scared of the media. They shouldn't
be sitting there sending letters to the editor like fucking
customer support. No, they should see this podcast, They should
see these news letters. They should see everything published by
the tech media and go uh oh. And there can
be good people. There can be good boys and girls
(29:17):
than others. There can be plenty of people that make
good products and get great press for it. But do
you really think meta Google, Apple to an extent. Frankly,
do you think Amazon looks good right now? Do you
think it's easy to find stuff? Or do you think
it's slop full of more slop? Mark Zuckerberg said on
an earning score the other day that he intends there
(29:38):
to be an AI specific slop feed that should These
are harmful things. This is pouring vants of oil into
rivers and then getting told you're the best boy in town.
These companies, they're poisoning the digital world, and they must
be held accountable for the damage they're causing. Readers are
(29:58):
already aware. But ah, and this is really thanks to
members of the media, by the way, the gaslighting themselves
into believing that, oh, I just don't catch I don't
keep up with technology. He is getting away from me.
I'm not technical enough to use this, when the thing
that they don't get, that the average person doesn't get,
is that the tech industry has built legions of obfiscations,
legions of legal tricks, and these horrible little user interface
(30:22):
traps specifically made to trick you into doing things, to
make the experience kind of subordinate to getting the money
off of you. And I think that this is one
of the biggest issues in society. And yes, of course
I'm biased. I'm doing a podcast about tech, but for real, though,
billions of people use smartphones, billions of people are on
the computer every day. It's how we do everything. And
(30:44):
it stinks. It stinks so bad. This is the rot economy.
We're in the rot society. But things can change, and
for them to change, it has to start with the
information sources, and that starts with journalism. And the work
has already begun and we'll continue, but it must scale up,
and it must do so quickly. And you, the user,
(31:04):
have the power. Learn to read a privacy policy. And
the link there is to the Washington Post. Yes, there
are plenty of great reporters there. Fuck Bezos. You can
move to Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app that
works on just about everything. Get a service like delete me,
and by the way, I pay for it, I work
from four years ago. I have no financial relationship with them,
but they're great for removing you from data brokers. Molly White,
(31:26):
who's a dear friend of mine and even better right
you might remember from one of the early episodes about Wikipedia.
She's also written this extremely long guide about what to
do next that are linked to in the notes, and
it runs through a ton of great things you can
do unionization, finding your communities, dropping apps that collect and
store sensitive data, and so on. I also heartily recommend
Wired's guide to Protecting Yourself from Government Surveillance, which is
linked in the show notes. Now, before we go, I
(31:52):
want to leave you with something that I posted on
November sixth on the Better Offline redditpp the last twenty
four hours of felt bleak, and we'll like feel more
bleak as the months and years go on. It'll be
easy to give into doom, to assume the fight is lost,
to assume that the bad guys are permanently won and
there will never be any justice or joy again. Now's
the time for solidarity to crystallize around ideas that matter,
(32:13):
even if their a position in society is delayed. Even
as the clouds darken and the storm's brew and the
darkness feels all encompassing and suffocating, reach out to those
you love and don't just commiserate. Plan It doesn't have
to be political, it doesn't even really have to matter.
Put shit on your fucking calendar. Keep yourself active and busy,
and if not distracted at very least animated. Darkness feeds
(32:35):
an idleness. Darkness feasts on a sense of failure and
a sense of inability to make change. You don't know
me very well, but know that I'm aware of the
darkness and the sadness and the suffocation of when things
feel overwhelming. Give yourself some mercy and then the days
to come. Don't castigate yourself a feeling gutted. Then keep going.
I realize it's little solace to think, well, if I
(32:57):
keep saying stuff out loud, things will get better. But
I promise you do it so as an effect and
actually matters. Keep talking about how fucked up things are,
Make sure it's written down, make sure it's spoken cleanly,
and with the rage and fire and piss and vinegar
it deserves. Things will change for the better, even if
it takes more time than it should. Look. I know
(33:18):
I'm imperfect, emotional, off kilt At times I get emails
saying that too angry. I'm sorry if it's ever triggered.
You really do mean that. It's not intentional. I just
I feel this in everything I do. I use technology
all the time, and it is extremely annoying. But also
I'm aware that I have privilege, and the more privilege
(33:38):
you have with intake, the more you're able to escape
the little things. Go and buy a cheap laptop today.
Try and see what two hundred, three hundred dollars laptop is.
It's slow, It's full of eighteen pop ups trying to
sell you access to cloud storage, to shit that you'll
never use, tricking grannies and people who can't afford laptops,
so people that just don't know. When I see this stuff,
(33:58):
it enrages me. Not just for me, but because I
know that I'm at least lucky enough to know how
to get around this shit. Spent most of my life online,
spent most of my life playing with tech and now
how it works. And I know I have my tangents
and my biases, but I wear them, can't let my
heart on my sleeve. I care about all this stuff
(34:18):
in a way that might be a little different to some.
And it's because I've I've watched an industry that really
made me as a person, that allowed me to grow
as a person, to actually meet people, to not feel
as alone. And I imagine some of you feel like
this too, And then watching what happens to it every day,
(34:39):
watching the people who get so rich off of making
it so much worse, and then seeing what happen on
November fifth, and you can draw a line from it.
People are scared, they're lost, Their lives are spent digitally,
and your digital lives are just endless terrorism, endless harm.
(34:59):
Some of you know your way around takes, so you
can escape some of it, but it's impossible to escape
all of it. Try meeting people these days, you can't.
Everything is online, and everything online, everything on your phone
is mitigated and interfered with. It's an assault on your senses,
one deprived of dignity. And I see the people doing
(35:20):
this and it feels me full of fucking rage, and
it makes me angry for you and for me, for
my son growing up, and what will probably be a
worse world, for my friends and loved ones who are
harder to see, harder to speak to, whose lives too
are interfered with. And there are the millions and millions
of people who have no fucking idea it's happening, that
(35:43):
just exist in this swill, in this active digital terrorism,
poked and prodded and nagged and notified constantly. And I
don't want. Early on in this I got a message
saying don't tell people to be angry, and I stick
by that. But I'm not going to hide that I am.
I'm not going to hide the pain I feel. I'm
(36:04):
not going to hide the pain I feel seeing this
shit happen. And I've watched this thing that I love technology,
Really do love tech, I really do deeply. I've watched
it corrupted and broken and the people breaking it. They
don't just make billions of dollars. They get articles in
they get interviewed on the news. Mark Zuckerbug, he wears
(36:28):
a chain and there's articles about how cool he is.
He should be in fucking prison. He should be on
a prison on a boat that just circles the world,
and he shouldn't have air conditioning or heat depending on
how the weather is. And I know that I'm kind
of errant, and again, tons of tangents, but look, the
reason I'm like this is because I really care. And
(36:48):
I think caring, I think being angry at the things
that actually matter and giving context as a result. I
think that's deeply valuable. And I realize I do fla
to handle a lot, but it really is because I care,
I care about you, I care about the subject matter.
I'm so grateful and so honored that you spend your
time listening to me every week, and I hope you'll
(37:10):
continue to do so. So I'm not going anywhere. Thank
you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer
of the Better Offline theme song is Metasowski. You can
check out more of his music and audio projects at
Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S O
(37:33):
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 youreaed dot at to visit the discord, and
go to our slash Better Offline to check out our reddit.
Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
(37:54):
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com to check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Host
Ed Zitron
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