Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - Villains of Circumstance
Listen to my podcast Better Offline if you haven't already.
I want my fucking tech industry back.
Maybe you think I sound insane, but technology means a lot to me. It’s the way that I speak to most of my friends. It’s my lifeline when I’m hurting or when those close to me hurt, and it’s the way I am able to make a living and be a creative — something I only was able to become because of technology. Social networks have been a huge part of me being able to become a functional human being, and you can judge me for that all you want, but you are a coward and a hypocrite for doing so, and you’re going to read to the end of this blog anyway.
Really, seriously, honestly — the Ed Zitron you know was and is only possible because of my deep connection to technology. This was how I made friends. This was how I got the confidence to meet real people. This was how I started my company. This was how I met the people closest to me, people I love with all my heart. I was only able to do any of this because I was able to get on the computer.
I am bombastic and frankly a little much today, and was the literal opposite less than 5 years ago, and I was even more reserved 10 years before that. Technology allowed me to find a way to be human on my terms, in ways that I don’t think are possible anymore because most of the interconnecting fabric that I used has been interfered with by bad actors and the rest with slop and SEO.
I think there are far more people out there like me than will admit to it. I think more people miss the past, or at least realize now what they lost.
There was a time this didn’t suck, when it wasn’t a struggle to do basic things, when my world was not a constant war with my god damn apps, when things weren’t necessarily turn-key but my phone wasn’t randomly burning through half of its battery life in an hour and a half because one app on the App Store is poorly configured. I swear to god, back in like, 2019, Zoom just fucking connected. I remember things being better, and on top of that, I see how much better things could be.
But that’s not the tech industry we’re allowed to have, because the people that run the tech industry do not give a shit.
It’s not enough to have your data, your work, your art, your posts, your friends, the things you’ve taken photos of, and the things you’ve searched for. The industry must have that of your children, and their children, as early as possible, even if it means helping them cheat on their homework so that they too can live a life where they’ve skipped having any responsibility or learning anything about the world other than how one can extract as much as possible without having to give anything in return.
Big tech is sociopathic and directionless, swinging wildly to try and find new ways to drag any kind of interaction out of a customer they’ve grown to loathe for their unwillingness to be more profitable. Decades of powerful Big Tech Business Idiots have chased out true value-creation in Silicon Valley in favour of growth economics, sending edict after edict down to the markets and the media about what’s going to be “hot” next, inventing business trends rather than actual solutions to problems. After all, that might involve — eugh! — experiencing the real world rather than authoring a new version of it every few years.
Apple barely escapes the void because its principle value proposition has, on some level, always been “our stuff works.” The problem is that Apple needs to grow, and thus its devices are slowly but surely becoming mired in sludge. The App Store is an abomination, your iPhone settings look like a fucking Escher painting, and in its desperation to follow the pack it shoved Apple Intelligence out the door — one of the most invasive and annoying pieces of software to ever grace a computer.
Apple’s willingness to do this shows that it’s rotten just like the rest of them — it's just better at hiding it. After all, look at the way in which it flaunted court orders telling it to open up third-party payments as a means of squeezing every penny out of the App Store. Loathsome. And it still ended up losing.
I adore tech. Tech made me who I am today. I use and love technology for hours a day, yet that experience is constantly mangled by the warring intentions of almost every product I use. I’m forced to log into the newspaper website and back into Google Calendar multiple times a week, my phone randomly resets — as every single iPhone has for multiple years — at least twice a week, my Apple Watch stops being willing to read my heart rate, websites I want to read sometimes simply do not load, and sometimes when I load websites on an iPad they just won’t scroll.
Everything feels like a fucking chore, but I love the actual things that technology does for me, like letting me take notes with ease, like building and maintaining my fitness through a series of connected products like Tonal and Fight Camp, like using Signal to talk to friends hundreds or thousands of miles away, like posting dumb stuff on Bluesky and interacting with my followers, like recording a podcast wherever I am in the world because USB-C mics are cheap and easy to use and sound great.
There are so many great things about technology, things I fucking love, and Large Language Models do not resemble their form or intention. There is nothing about an LLM that feels like it’s built to provide a real service, other than some sort-of fraudulent copy of something else lacking its soul or utility. Those that actually use them in their daily work talk about them as exciting tools that help them improve workflows - not like they're the next big thing.
The original iPhone, even in its initial form, promised a world where two or three devices became one, where your music and a camera were always on you, and where you could do your banking and grocery shopping while sitting in the back of a taxi. It promised access to the world’s knowledge from a slab of glass in your pocket. If i’m honest, the smartphone has absolutely delivered on those promises — and more.
Where do we extrapolate from LLMs? What am I meant to be seeing in ChatGPT?
The “iPhone moment” wasn’t a result of one thing, but a collection of different bits that formed an obvious whole — one device that did a bunch of things really, really well.
LLMs have no such moment, nor do they have any one thing they do well, let alone really well. LLMs are famous not for their efficacy, but their inconsistency, with even ardent AI cultists warning people not to trust their output. What am I meant to see from here? They’re not autonomous, and have shown no proof that they can be, and in fact kind of feel antithetical to autonomy itself, which requires consistency, reliability and replicability, more things that LLMs cannot do.
And that, ultimately, was what made the smartphone amazing too. Within a few years, phones were competent web browsers. The mobile web took a minute to catch up, sure, but you could see it taking form immediately, as you could with the App Store. They immediately made sense as a way to listen to music, because they were effectively an iPod, a beloved MP3 player, and the iPhone’s camera was good enough for most people at the time, and quickly became better than most of the point-and-shoots that people used to take on vacations and to parties. Now, most people are pretty happy with their phone cameras regardless of who makes them.
All of this made total sense from the very beginning the moment you picked one up. What if the camera was better? It happened. What if the screen was bigger? It happened. There were immediate signs the iPhone would improve. It wasn’t fantastical to believe that in 10-to-20 years you’d have a bigger, faster and thinner iPhone with a camera that produced shots alarmingly close to what you’d capture with a DSLR.
It makes sense that Google freaked out the second it picked one up. It was fucking wild what it could do, even in its first form. Each iteration and improvement — as with other smartphones — offers a new twist on a formula you already know works, and sometimes “better” means something different. For example, I don’t use Android, but I think the foldable Motorola phones are cool as shit. Palm’s WebOS was a stroke of UI genius, and it’s criminal to see how HP mishandled the company after its acquisition, ultimately killing one of the earliest and most iconic mobile brands.
Sidenote: In anticipation of a “well, akchually” from the peanut gallery, different can also mean bad. 3D phones were portable migraine-causers. The BlackBerry Storm’s weird SurePress technology — where the touchscreen screen kind-of ‘clicked’ through haptic feedback whenever you pressed something — was an abomination that put RIM on a terminal trajectory. And Samsung’s decision to include a built-in firelighter in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 will remain one of the most expensive errors in mobile hardware history. It really blew up, but not in the way they wanted it to.
What does the “better” version of ChatGPT look like, exactly? What’s cool about ChatGPT? Where’s that “oooh” moment? Are you going to tell me you’re that impressed by the pictures and the words? Is it in the resemblance of its outputs to human beings? Because the actual answer is “a ChatGPT that actually works.” One that you can just ask to do some shit and know it’ll do it, and it’d also be very obvious what it could actually do, which is not the case right now. A better ChatGPT would quite literally be a different product.
What’s particularly horrifying about the AI bubble is that it’s shown that when they decide to, big tech can put hundreds of billions behind whatever the fuck they want. They are able to mobilize incredible amounts of capital and the industrial might of multiple companies with multi-trillion dollar market capitalisations to build entire infrastructure dedicated to one thing, and the one thing they are choosing is generative AI.
They’re all fully capable of uniting around an ideal — it’s just that said ideal exists entirely to automate human beings out of the picture, and even more offensively, it doesn’t seem to be able to do so, and the more obvious that becomes, the more obvious the powerful’s hunger becomes for a world where they never see or talk to us, and they get all of our money and attention.
And it’s not just their greed — it’s how obviously they love the idea of automating human beings away, and creating a world where we’re increasingly disconnected and beholden to technology that they entirely control. No creators, no connections, and best of all, no customers — just people cranking a giant, energy-guzzling slot machine and maybe getting the thing they wanted at the end.
Except it doesn’t work. It obviously doesn’t work. It hasn’t ever worked, and there’s never really been a sign of it working other than people very confidently saying “this will eventually work.”
They now need this to be several echelons BIGGER than the iPhone to be worth it. Hundreds of billions of capital expenditures and endless media attention are begging for an actual payoff — something truly amazing and societally relevant other than the amount of investment and attention it’s getting. They need this to be the single biggest consumer tech phenomenon ever while also being the panacea to the dwindling growth of the Software as a Service and enterprise IT markets, and it needs to start doing that within the next 12 months, without fail, if it even has that long.
You can fight with me on semantics, on claiming valuations are high and how many users ChatGPT has, but look at the products and tell me any of this is really the future.
Imagine if they’d done something else.
Imagine if they’d done anything else.
Imagine if they’d have decided to unite around something other than the idea that they needed to continue growing.
Imagine, because right now that’s the closest you’re going to fucking get.
Mid-break Soundtrack: Spinerette - A Prescription For Mankind
We all feel like we’re at war right now. Every person I know, on some level, feels like they’re in their own battle, their own march toward something, or against something, or away from something. It’s constant, a drumbeat, a war song, a funeral dirge, and so rarely an anthem.
All of us feel like we’re individually suffering. We echo with conflict and we reverberate with our own doubts, even the most confident and successful of us. Even our devices are wars within themselves — wars within software that is built to interfere with its own purpose, our ability to connect with others, or find the things we. This suffering is often an unfortunate byproduct of an advertising channel that makes Sundar Pichai or Mark Zuckerberg a hundred million dollars or more.
We struggle to do the things we need to do, as we do with the things we want to do, because there are so many warring incentives that it literally slows our mobile browsers down because they all want to shove a fucking cookie into our phones, or a page has to phone home to a hundred different tracking services. And we fail to see the big picture, how this is literally robbing us of the one thing we know to be finite — time.
We tell ourselves these problems are minor, because if we accept how frustrating they are, we must accept how frustrating all of them are, and how many of them there are, and that we’re surrounded by digital ants biting us with little or no rhyme or reason other than their thirst for their queen’s growth.
While we may feel increasingly divided, these problems unite us. Everybody faces them mostly in equal measure, though the poorer you are, the more likely you’re burdened by a cheap, shitty laptop like the ACER Aspire 1 that I used last year that took over an hour to set up and took forever to do anything in its advertisement-filled litterbox of an operating system. The more likely you’re unable to afford the subscriptions that afford you a bit of dignity in the digital world, like YouTube Premium, which saves you from having to see five minutes of advertising for every 10-minutes of video you watch.
We all use social networks that actively experiment on us to see how much advertising we’ll take, what content we might engage with — not like, enjoy — and we all have the same fucking awful version of Google Search. Even expensive iPhones are plagued with the cursed Apple Intelligence software, and even if you turn it off, you still deal with Apple’s actively evil App Store and a mobile internet full of websites that are effectively impossible to browse on a mobile.
We ache not so much for the old world of the computer, but the world we know is possible if these fucking bastards wouldn’t keep ruining it. It’s magical that we can have a video chat with someone halfway across the world, or play a fast-paced videogame with them, watch the same movies that we both stream, casually looking something up on a search engine, or looking at a friend’s photos they posted on a social network. Even if it’s for work, it’s kind of amazing that we can take big files and send them across the internet. The cameras in our phones are truly incredible. Connected fitness has changed my entire life. Handheld gaming PCs are cool as shit.
We live in the future, and the future is cool.
Or it would be cool, if it wasn’t for all these fucking bastards.
Even for those of us too young to remember a less-algorithmic internet, we can all see the potential. We see what technology can do. We see what the remarkable advances in smaller chips and batteries and processors have allowed us to do. We know what’s possible, but we see — whether we acknowledge it or just feel its sheer force shearing off bits of our fucking soul — what these companies are choosing to do to us.
There is nothing making Mark Zuckerberg force algorithmic Instagram and Facebook feeds upon people by default other than sheer, unadulterated greed and the growth-at-all-costs rot economics that have made him a multi-billionaire. We know what we want from his network, he knows what value we get out of it, but unlike Mark Zuckerberg, we have no voice in the conversation other than choosing to accept whatever punishment he offers. We know exactly what it is we want to do, and for some reason we rarely talk about the man responsible for getting in our way.
I don’t know, maybe you think I’m being dramatic, but I feel like shit about this, because I know it doesn’t have to be this way. I have spent the last year of my life cataloguing why companies like Google (Prabhakar Raghavan) and Facebook (Zuckerberg, Gleit, Mosseri, Backstrom, Sandberg, Bosworth) make their products worse, and I don’t know why more people don’t talk about the scale of these harms, and the unbelievable, despicable intentionality behind their decision making. Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg have personally overseen the destruction of society’s access to readily-available information. You can dance around it all you want, you can claim these things aren’t a big deal, but you’re fucking wrong.
Google and Facebook were, on some level, truly societal marvels, and they have been poisoned and twisted into a form of advertising parasite that you choose to let feed on you so that you can speak to your friends or find something out.
Let me put it in simpler terms: isn’t it fucking weird how hard it is to do anything? Don’t you remember when it was easier? It’s harder now because of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, and the information you look for is worse because of Sam Altman and Satya Nadella, whose deranged attachment to Large Language Models have pumped our internet full of bullshit at a time when Google had actively abandoned any duty to the web or its users.
This isn’t a situation with grey areas, especially when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, a man who cannot be fired. He chose to make things bad, and he chooses to keep them this bad every day. Sundar Pichai is responsible for the destruction of Google Search along with the now-deposed Prabhakar Raghavan.
Sam Altman is a con artist that worked studiously for over a decade to accumulate power and connections until he found a technology and a time when the tech industry was out of ideas, and from everything I’ve read, it feels like he fell ass-backwards into ChatGPT and was surprised by how much everybody else liked it.
In any case, he is a great salesman to a legion of Business Idiots that had run out of growth ideas — the Rot-Com Bubble I discussed a year ago — and would take something, anything, even if it was horrifyingly expensive, even if it wasn’t clear if it would work, because Sam Altman could spin a fucking yarn, and he’d spent a long time investing in media relationships to make sure that he’d have their buy in.
And honestly, the tech media was ready for a fun new story. I heard people saying in 2022 that it was “nice to get excited about something again,” and in many ways Altman gave hope to an industry that felt fucking bleak after getting hoodwinked twice by crypto and the metaverse, by which I mean a far more convincing story with an actual product to look at, sold by a guy the media already liked who had convinced everybody he was very smart.
Then Satya Nadella, a management consultant cultist of the growth mindset, lost, realizing there were no more growth markets, decided that he must have ChatGPT in Bing, and then Sundar Pichai chose to follow too. At any point these men could’ve looked ahead and seen exactly what would happen, but they chose not to, because there was nowhere else to shove their money, and both the markets and the media yearned for good news.
Notice how none of this — from the media to the executive sect — is about you or me. None of this is about products, or the future, or even the present, just whatever “the next big thing” might be that will keep the Rot Economy’s growth-at-all-costs party going.
Nowhere along the line did anyone actually see an opportunity to sell people something they wanted or needed. Large Language Models were able to generate a lot of text or generate pictures, and that barely approximated a thing that society wanted or needed other than it was something that people used to be willing to pay more for — and businesses had been interested in doing these things cheaper, usually by offshoring or underpaying contractors, and this allowed them to potentially reduce costs further.
The fact that three years later we still have trouble describing why these things exist is enough of a sign that the tech industry has no real interest in building artificial intelligence at all — because AI is, at least based on the time before ChatGPT, meant to be about doing stuff for us, which Large Language Models are pretty fucking poor at, because the idea of getting something “done for you” is that you’re outsourcing both the production and the quality control.
In any case, it’s enough to make anyone feel crazy. Over the last decade we’ve watched — and while I’m talking about the tech industry, I think we can all say it’s been everywhere else too — the things we love get distanced from us so that somebody else can get unbelievably rich, the things we used to do easily made more difficult, confusing and/or expensive, and the ways we used to connect with people become increasingly abstracted and exploitative.
I don’t know what to tell you about these people other than the fact that you should know that they are responsible for the world around you feeling like it’s in fucking ruins. I cannot give you a plan for the future, I cannot tell you what will fix things, but however things get fixed starts with people knowing who these people are and what they have done.
I can give you their names. Mark Zuckerberg. Sam Altman. Sundar Pichai. Satya Nadella. Tim Cook. Sheryl Sandberg. Adam Mosseri. Prabhakar Raghavan. There are others, many others, and they are fully responsible for how broken everything feels.
And some of the guilty aren’t tech CEOs, or fabulously wealthy, but rather their collaborators in the tech media that have carried water for the sociopaths ruining our digital — and, often, physical — world.
The reason I am so hard on my peers in the media is that it has never been more urgent that we hold these people accountable. Their ability to act both unburdened by regulation and true criticism has emboldened them to cause harm to billions of people so that they may continue to make billions of dollars, in part because the media continually congratulates them for doing so.
And let’s be honest, what they’re doing is horribly, awfully wrong.
Fighting back starts with the truth, said regularly, said boldly and clearly with emotion and sincerity. I don’t have other answers. I don’t have bold plans. I don’t know what to do, other than to explain how I feel, and if you feel the same, at the very least make you feel less afraid.
If you ever need to talk, email me at ez@betteroffline.com. I don’t care. I have cracked myself open and spilled myself onto my podcast and newsletter for no reason other than the fact that I feel more alive doing so, and have become a stronger and happier person doing so.
All this is possible thanks to technology, and while I have no plan, I know I feel more free and alive when I write and speak about this stuff. I write this knowing that speaking in this way feels “too much” or some other way of attacking me for experiencing emotion, and if you’re feeling that way reading this, look deep within yourself and see if you’re simply uncomfortable with somebody capable of feeling things.
We die alone, but we choose whether we live that way. Remember that billions of us are suffering in the same way, and remember who to fucking thank for doing it to us.
