Speaker 1: Zone Media.
Speaker 2: What is a podcast a miserable little pile of secrets?
Speaker 2: I'm met Zeitron, and welcome to the conclusion of our
Speaker 2: three part episode of Better Offline and the phenomena known
Speaker 2: as the business Idiot. In the first episode, we met
Speaker 2: our first business idiot. The real princes of them sat
Speaker 2: in Adela and talked about the origin of the business
Speaker 2: idiot and the rotten ideology that drives them. Then we
Speaker 2: talked about the enablers of the business idiots, particularly those
Speaker 2: in the media. In this episode, I want to tell
Speaker 2: you about where all this goes. Nothing I've said in
Speaker 2: this three part should suggest that the business idiot is weak.
Speaker 2: In fact, business idiots are in full control. We have
Speaker 2: too many managers, and our most powerful positions are valorized
Speaker 2: for not knowing stuff, for having a general view that
Speaker 2: we can take the big picture from, not realizing that
Speaker 2: the big picture is usually made up of lots of
Speaker 2: little brushstrokes. Business idiots have a cultural cachet. Then we
Speaker 2: aspire to be business idiots, and our education pushes people
Speaker 2: to careers where the goal is to climb from the
Speaker 2: worker class of the oxygen starved apex of business idiot Mountain.
Speaker 2: Yet there are eventually consequences for everything being controlled by
Speaker 2: business idiots. Our current society, an unfair, unjust one dominated
Speaker 2: by half broken tech products that make their owners billions
Speaker 2: and that manipulate and mislead by design, is the real
Speaker 2: punishment wrought by growth, A brain draining corporate society, one
Speaker 2: that leads it to doing illogical things and somehow making
Speaker 2: money doing so. It doesn't make any fucking sense that
Speaker 2: generative AI got this big. The returns aren't there, the
Speaker 2: outcomes aren't there, and any sensible society would have put
Speaker 2: a gun to chat GPT's head and aggressively pulled the trigger.
Speaker 2: Generative AI is symbolic of the future of capitalism, one
Speaker 2: that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars, one that
Speaker 2: surrenders every human work the model can consume, and that
Speaker 2: accepts the destruction of our planet, all because everybody kind
Speaker 2: of agreed that this is what we're all doing now,
Speaker 2: with nobody able to give a convincing expert nation of
Speaker 2: what that even is or why we're doing it. Generative
Speaker 2: AI is revolting, both in how overstated its abilities are
Speaker 2: and in how continually it tests how lower standards somebody
Speaker 2: will take for a product, both in its outputs and
Speaker 2: in the desperate companies trying to integrate it into everything,
Speaker 2: and its proliferation throughout society and organizations is already fundamentally harmful.
Speaker 2: We're not just drowning in a sea of slop. We're
Speaker 2: in a constant state of corporate AI beta test. New
Speaker 2: features sprouting out of our products, like new limbs that
Speaker 2: sometimes function normally but often attempt to strangle us. You
Speaker 2: know what the stand in that episode of JoJo's Stop It.
Speaker 2: It's unclear of companies forcing these products on us have
Speaker 2: contempt for us, or simply don't know what good looks like,
Speaker 2: or perhaps it's both, with the business idiot resenting us
Speaker 2: for not scarffing down whatever they serve us, as that's
Speaker 2: what's generally worked before. They don't really understand their customers.
Speaker 2: They understand what a customer pays for and how a
Speaker 2: purchase is made, you know, like the leaders of banks
Speaker 2: and asset managers during the subprime mortgage crisis didn't really
Speaker 2: think about whether people could pay those mortgages, just that
Speaker 2: they needed lot of them to put in a cedo.
Speaker 2: The business Idiot's economy is one run and built for
Speaker 2: other business idiots. They can only make things that sell
Speaker 2: to companies that must always be in flux, which is
Speaker 2: the preferred environment of the business idiot, because if they're
Speaker 2: not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new innovations,
Speaker 2: they'd actually have to interact with the underlying production of
Speaker 2: the company and the people actually doing the work. Does
Speaker 2: the software work? Sometimes the successful companies exist that sell
Speaker 2: like this. Sure, but look at today's software and tell
Speaker 2: me with a straight face that things feel good to use.
Speaker 2: And something like generative AI was always inevitable. An industry
Speaker 2: claiming to change the world that never really does so,
Speaker 2: full of businesses that don't function as businesses, full of
Speaker 2: flim flamm half truths used to impress people who will
Speaker 2: likely never interact with it, or do so only in
Speaker 2: a passing way, by chasing out the people that actually
Speaker 2: build things in favor of the people that sell them.
Speaker 2: Our economy is built on production puppetry. Just like GENERATIVEAI,
Speaker 2: and especially like chat, GPT and Claude. These people are
Speaker 2: antithetical to what's good in the world, and their power
Speaker 2: deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive and honestly,
Speaker 2: any true innovation. The business city it thrives on alienation,
Speaker 2: on distancing itself from the customer and the thing that
Speaker 2: they consume, and in many ways, from society itself. Mark
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, and he said
Speaker 2: that to the Wall Street Channel Samuel and wants us
Speaker 2: to have fake colleagues in the form of the agency
Speaker 2: makes that don't fucking work and increase and an increasingly
Speaker 2: loud group of executives salivated the idea of replacing us
Speaker 2: with a fake version of us that will make a
Speaker 2: shittier version of what we make for a customer that
Speaker 2: said executive doesn't give a fuck about. And yeah, that
Speaker 2: is describing a form of slave, especially if it's conscious.
Speaker 2: I mean, if it's not conscious, it isn't. But the
Speaker 2: moment you make AGI, you've got a real fucking problem
Speaker 2: on your hands.
Speaker 3: They're never going to do it.
Speaker 2: Also, what if the AGI is just dumb? What if
Speaker 2: it doesn't want to work?
Speaker 3: Anyway?
Speaker 2: The business IDI it's a building products for other people
Speaker 2: that don't interact with the real world. We're no longer
Speaker 2: the real customers and so we're worth even less than before,
Speaker 2: which is as is the case in the world dominated
Speaker 2: by shareholder supremacy, not all that much to begin with.
Speaker 2: They don't exist to make us better. The business IDY
Speaker 2: it doesn't really care about the real world or what
Speaker 2: you do do, or who you are, or anything other
Speaker 2: than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is
Speaker 2: why so many squealing little middle managers look up to
Speaker 2: the Musks and Altman's of the world, because they see
Speaker 2: in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, somebody
Speaker 2: who's above work and thinking and knowledge and doing stuff disgusting.
Speaker 2: But one of the most remarkable things about the business
Speaker 2: IDIA is their near in vulnerability. Modern management is resource control,
Speaker 2: shifting blame away from the manager, who should hold responsibility.
Speaker 2: After all, if you don't, why do you have a
Speaker 2: fucking job onto the laborer, knowing that the organization and
Speaker 2: the media will back them up. Or you may think
Speaker 2: I'm making a generalization, the twenty twenty one to twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three anti remote work push in the media was
Speaker 2: grow tesque proof of where the media's true allegiance lies.
Speaker 2: The media happily manufactured consent for return to office mandates
Speaker 2: from large companies by framing remote workers some sort of
Speaker 2: destructive force doing all they can to discuss how modern
Speaker 2: management has no fucking idea how the workplace actually works now.
Speaker 2: These articles were effectively written as fan fiction for managers
Speaker 2: and bosses demanding that we return to the office, ridiculous
Speaker 2: statements about how remote work failed young people, which it didn't,
Speaker 2: or how employees needed remote work more than their employers
Speaker 2: because the chit chat and lunches and happy hours are
Speaker 2: so important that they're really not. I'm also going to
Speaker 2: link to these and in the notes, I've written a
Speaker 2: lot about the remote work push and the people who
Speaker 2: were pushing for us to return the office. It's actually
Speaker 2: where I got started, and it really was the ultimate
Speaker 2: jokification for me. It's what actually set me on the
Speaker 2: path the better offline, because it's when you saw both
Speaker 2: how little the bosses knew what was going on and
Speaker 2: how willing people in the media were to support them.
Speaker 2: And these were people people writing these stories were journalists
Speaker 2: that were going to be forced back to the office
Speaker 2: and ended up being so, and they were like, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is actually it's actually good that we go into
Speaker 2: the office. And when you ask the journalists, hey, what
Speaker 2: do you get to the office, they say well, one
Speaker 2: time I ran into someone and we had a good idea,
Speaker 2: or it was quicker to walk over to someone's desk.
Speaker 2: Does that mean the work was better? No, but the
Speaker 2: vibes felt better, I guess. I also't know way more
Speaker 2: people who just fucking hated working in the office. But
Speaker 2: these articles rarely, if ever, cared about whether remote work
Speaker 2: was more productive or the disconnect appeared to be between
Speaker 2: managers and workers. Now, had any of those reporters every
Speaker 2: spoken to an actual worker, they'd say that they valued
Speaker 2: more time with their families rather than the grind of
Speaker 2: a daily commute, so often with the promise of an
Speaker 2: occasional company pizza party, which usually happens outside of the
Speaker 2: typical working hours. Anyway, and these articles and this period,
Speaker 2: it was from the very beginning about crushing the life
Speaker 2: out of a movement that gave workers more flexibility and
Speaker 2: mobility while suppressing managers' ability to hide how little work
Speaker 2: they actually did. I do give credit to CNBC in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three for saying the quiet part out loud
Speaker 2: that and I quote, the biggest disadvantage of remote work
Speaker 2: that employeers cide is how difficult it is to observe
Speaker 2: and monitor employees, because when you can't do that, you
Speaker 2: have to hear, actually know what they're doing and understand
Speaker 2: their work. Jesus Christ. Now I'm with the managers, how discussing.
Speaker 2: But yet higher up the chain the invulnerability continues. CEOs
Speaker 2: may get fired I mentioned it before, and more getting
Speaker 2: fired than ever. It turns out, although sadly not the
Speaker 2: ones we want, they always receive a golden parachute at
Speaker 2: the end before walking into another role at another organization
Speaker 2: doing exactly the same level of nothing. Yet before that happens,
Speaker 2: CEO is allowed to pull basically every lever before they
Speaker 2: make they face any kind of accountability. They can lay
Speaker 2: people off, they can freeze pay, they can move from
Speaker 2: people from salary to contracted workers. They can close down sites,
Speaker 2: they can offshore, they can cut certain products. They can
Speaker 2: even spend more fucking money so they lose less. If
Speaker 2: you or I misallocated billions of dollars on stupid ideas,
Speaker 2: we'd be fired and we'd have real trouble finding more employment.
Speaker 2: We would be well known for our incompetence, and indeed
Speaker 2: we would be in real trouble and there would be
Speaker 2: real problems finding more work. If we were a big
Speaker 2: stupid piece of shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When CEOs do that, they get board placements, they get
Speaker 2: other positions. They can run companies head into the ground.
Speaker 2: Let me give you an example. Microsoft CEO Sachan Nedella
Speaker 2: said and I quote that the ultimate computer is the
Speaker 2: mixed reality world, and that Microsoft would be inventing new
Speaker 2: computers and new computing in twenty sixteen, pushing his senior
Speaker 2: executives to tell reporters that Hololenz was Microsoft's next wave
Speaker 2: of computing in twenty seventeen, selling hundreds of millions of
Speaker 2: dollars worth of headsets to the military in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: then debuting HoloLens two at Bill twenty nineteen, only for
Speaker 2: the on stage demo to break in real time, calling
Speaker 2: for a referendum on capitalism in twenty twenty, then saying
Speaker 2: he couldn't overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one. Now let's hear what Nadella had to say
Speaker 2: about it, and massive prompts the Preston Growler of Computer
Speaker 2: World for writing this piece. AHM. Nadella in that twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one keynote made big promises. When we talk about
Speaker 2: the metaverse, we're describing both a new platform and a
Speaker 2: new application type, similar to how we talked about the
Speaker 2: web and websites in the early nineties. In a sense,
Speaker 2: the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real
Speaker 2: world and to embed the real world into computing. Fucking
Speaker 2: what bringing real presence to any digital space. Years we've
Speaker 2: talked about creating the digital representation of the world, but
Speaker 2: now we actually have the opportunity to go into that
Speaker 2: world and participate on it. I just want to be clear,
Speaker 2: at this time, Microsoft had nothing of the sort. They
Speaker 2: had like websites, They had Microsoft Teams. They tried to
Speaker 2: claim Microsoft Teams was a matter of us fucked up,
Speaker 2: and as Grella notes, Nedella made big promises beefing up
Speaker 2: development in projects such as its Mixed Reality tool Kit MRTK,
Speaker 2: the virtual reality workspace project all Space VR, which it
Speaker 2: brought back in twenty seventeen, It's HoloLens Virtual Realities headset,
Speaker 2: and its Industrial Metaverse unit, among others, before firing all
Speaker 2: members of its Industrial Metaverse core team, along with those
Speaker 2: behind MRTK, and shutting down it's all Space VR in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three, before discontinuing Hololenz two entirely in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four. Guess that wasn't anything then, Just you know,
Speaker 2: it's like like a friend of yours is in a
Speaker 2: really chaotic relationship and they just the next stage tag
Speaker 2: like it's not happening, or someone tells you they've had
Speaker 2: a big moment in their life and they just pretend
Speaker 2: it doesn't happen. It was hundreds of millions of dollars
Speaker 2: and tons of media coverage where people said, this is
Speaker 2: what Microsoft's doing next, this is what happened. It's so
Speaker 2: insane that that happened. We really don't talk enough about
Speaker 2: how fucking insane. The metaverse thing was just like a
Speaker 2: year or so where everyone just played make believe, completely insane.
Speaker 2: I of course was right about it at the time,
Speaker 2: and it was very fucking clear, and there are a
Speaker 2: few people that were negative as well. There were also
Speaker 2: some people who claim they were negative who weren't. Their
Speaker 2: time will come now. Nadella was transparently copying meta and
Speaker 2: Mark Zuckerberg's ridiculous metaverse play, and absolutely nothing happened to
Speaker 2: him As a result. The media outlets like The Vergin
Speaker 2: Independence like Ben Thompson, happily boosted the Metaverse idea when
Speaker 2: it was announced, and conveniently forgot about it the second
Speaker 2: that Microsoft and Meta wanted to talk about AI. Not really.
Speaker 2: Both the verg and Ben Thompson were ready in waiting
Speaker 2: to do literally the same interview, but about a different subject,
Speaker 2: no consideration of what was previously said at all. A
Speaker 2: true business city it never admits wrongdoing, and the more
Speaker 2: powerful the business city is, the more likely there are
Speaker 2: power structures that exist to avoid them having to do so.
Speaker 2: The media, captured by other business idiots, has become powerfully
Speaker 2: poisoned by power, referring to its whims and ideals and
Speaker 2: treating CEOs with more respect, dignity, and intelligence than anyone
Speaker 2: who ever worked for them. When a big company decides
Speaker 2: they want to do artificial intelligence, the media's natural reaction
Speaker 2: is to ask how and why and write down the answer,
Speaker 2: rather than to think about whether it's possible whether the
Speaker 2: company might profit, say by increasing their shareholder price by
Speaker 2: having whatever they say printed advobatim. These people aren't challenged
Speaker 2: by the media or their employees because their employees are
Speaker 2: vulnerable all the time and often are encouraged to buy
Speaker 2: into whatever bullshit dju there is, like hostage is held
Speaker 2: captive until the media and corporate culture give them Stockholm syndrome.
Speaker 2: They're only challenged by shareholders ru agnostic about idiocy because
Speaker 2: it's not core to value in any meaningful sense, as
Speaker 2: we've seen with crypto, the metaverse, and AI, and shareholders
Speaker 2: will tolerate infinite levels of idiocy if it boosts the
Speaker 2: value of their holdings. It goes further too. Twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one saw the largest amount of venture capital invested in
Speaker 2: the last decade, a record breaking six hundred and forty
Speaker 2: three billion dollars, with a remarkable three hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: nine point five billion dollars of that invested in the
Speaker 2: US alone. Some of the biggest deals include Amazon reseller
Speaker 2: aggregate e Thrasio, which raised a billion dollars in October
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one and file for bankruptcy in February twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. Cloud security company lace Work, which raised five
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty five million dollars in January twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: then one point three billion dollars in October twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: and was rumored to be up for sale to Whiz,
Speaker 2: only for the deal to collapse and then they ended
Speaker 2: up selling for about two hundred million dollars to another company.
Speaker 2: And then, of course there was autonomous car company Crews,
Speaker 2: which had hundreds of headlines about being the future, raised
Speaker 2: about two point seventy five billion dollars in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: and was killed off in December twenty twenty four. Suddenly,
Speaker 2: the people who lose their livelihoods those who took stock
Speaker 2: in low of cash compensation, those who end up getting
Speaker 2: laid off at the end are always work while people
Speaker 2: like Lacework co CEO j Perick, who oversaw reckless spending
Speaker 2: and management dysfunction according to the information, can walk into
Speaker 2: highly paid positions at companies like Microsoft, as Jay did
Speaker 2: in October twenty twenty four, a few months after a
Speaker 2: file sale and the one I mentioned before, the two
Speaker 2: hundred million dollar one even to a company for fourt
Speaker 2: in it. Yeah, this is the behind the actor studio
Speaker 2: A bit. I got a little ahead of myself, But
Speaker 2: I'm not editing it. Why would I? It doesn't matter
Speaker 2: if these people are wrong or if they run their
Speaker 2: companies badly, because the business idiot is infallible and judged
Speaker 2: too by fellow disconnected business idiots. In a just society,
Speaker 2: nobody would ever want to touch any of the C
Speaker 2: suite that oversaw a company that handed out Nintendo switches
Speaker 2: to literally anyone who booked a meeting, as was the
Speaker 2: case with Lacework. Instead, the stank remains on the employees alone.
Speaker 2: One point about this, just an aside. Maya's most recent
Speaker 2: layoffs were explicitly said to target low performers, needlessly harming
Speaker 2: the future job prospects of those handed the pink slip
Speaker 2: in an already fucked tech job market. It was cruel
Speaker 2: and pointless, and I'm certain of big fat Meta is
Speaker 2: spending big on AI and has spent big on the metaverse,
Speaker 2: which went nowhere and owns two dying platforms Instagram and Facebook,
Speaker 2: and one that's hard to monetize in WhatsApp. It needs
Speaker 2: to get costs down and improve margins. Layoffs are one
Speaker 2: way to go, and things are getting bad enough to
Speaker 2: matter is now, according to the information walking around Silicon Valley,
Speaker 2: begging other big tech companies for money to train their
Speaker 2: open source Lama LLM as shit is. That is, the
Speaker 2: low performance Jive is an unnecessary twist of the knife
Speaker 2: demonstrating the metal would gladly throw its workers under the
Speaker 2: bus if it serves their interests, because the optics of
Speaker 2: firing low performers is different to say, firing a bunch
Speaker 2: of people because she keep spunking money on dead end
Speaker 2: vanity projects and me too products that nobody wants or
Speaker 2: wants to use or can understand. Mark Zuckerberg I add
Speaker 2: owns an island on Hawaii. The idea that he even
Speaker 2: thinks this much about meta is disgraceful. Go outside, you
Speaker 2: fucking freak. Anyway, It's so easy, and perhaps inevitable, to
Speaker 2: feel a sense of nihilism about this. Nothing matters, It's
Speaker 2: all symbolic. Wild is filled with companies run by people
Speaker 2: who don't interact with the business and that raise money
Speaker 2: from venture that neither run businesses nor really have any
Speaker 2: experience doing so. And despite the fact that these people
Speaker 2: exist several extractions from reality, the things that they do
Speaker 2: and the decisions they make impact us all, and it's
Speaker 2: hard to imagine how to fix it. I don't want
Speaker 2: you to live without hope. Understanding how evil these people
Speaker 2: are is the first step to things changing, and more
Speaker 2: people understanding is genuinely important. But we really do live
Speaker 2: in a system of inequity dominated by people that do
Speaker 2: not interact with the real world, who have created an
Speaker 2: entire system run by their fellow business idios. The rot
Speaker 2: economy's growth at all costs manor is a symptom of
Speaker 2: the grander problem of shareholders supremacy, and the single minded
Speaker 2: economic focus on shareholder value inevitably ends at an economy
Speaker 2: run by and for business idios. There is a line,
Speaker 2: and it ends here with layoffs, the destruction of our
Speaker 2: planet and our economy and our society, and a rising
Speaker 2: tide of human misery that nobody really knows where it
Speaker 2: comes from, and so we don't know who to blame
Speaker 2: and for what. If our economy actually works as a
Speaker 2: true mayor autocracy where we didn't have companies run by
Speaker 2: people who don't use their products or understand how they're made,
Speaker 2: and who hire similarly specious people, these people would collapse
Speaker 2: under the pressure of having to know their ass from
Speaker 2: their ear hole. Yet none of this would be possible
Speaker 2: without their enabling layers, and those layers are teeming with
Speaker 2: both business idiots and those unfortunate enough to have learned
Speaker 2: from them. The tech media has enabled every single bubble
Speaker 2: without exception, accepting every single narrative fed to them by
Speaker 2: vcs and startups, with even critical reporters still accepting the
Speaker 2: lunacy of companies like open Ai just because everyone else
Speaker 2: does too, and because the standard has been set of
Speaker 2: if a company raises money, they're real. Let's be honest
Speaker 2: when you remove all the money. Our current tech industry
Speaker 2: is kind of a disgrace. Our economy is held up
Speaker 2: by Nvidia, a company that makes most of its money
Speaker 2: selling GPUs to other companies, primarily so that they can
Speaker 2: start losing money selling software that might eventually make them money,
Speaker 2: just not today, and they're not sure how. In video
Speaker 2: is defined by massive peaks and valleys as it jumps
Speaker 2: on trends and bandwagons at the right time, despite knowing
Speaker 2: that these bandwagons always come to some sort of halt.
Speaker 2: The other companies feature Tesla, a meme stock car company
Speaker 2: with a deteriorating brand and a chief executive famous for
Speaker 2: his divorces from both reality and multiple women, along with
Speaker 2: a flagrant racism that may cost the company its life,
Speaker 2: a company that we're watching die in real time with
Speaker 2: a snagnant lineup, and an actual fucking competition from companies
Speaker 2: that are spending on innovation in Europe and elsewhere. Bid
Speaker 2: is eating Tesla's lunch, offering better products for half the
Speaker 2: price and with far less racism. And this is just
Speaker 2: the first big Chinese automotive brand to go global. Others
Speaker 2: like Cherry are enjoying rapid growth outside of China because
Speaker 2: these cars are actually good and affordable and even when
Speaker 2: you factor in the things like tariffs. Hey, remember when
Speaker 2: Tesla fired all those people and it's charging network despite
Speaker 2: the fact that it's one of the most profitable and
Speaker 2: valuable parts of the business, and they meant to then
Speaker 2: went and had to hire them back because it turns
Speaker 2: out they actually needed them. This is a good example
Speaker 2: of managerial alienation decisions made by non workers elon Musk
Speaker 2: who don't understand their customers, their businesses, or the work
Speaker 2: their employees do. And let's not forget about the cyber
Speaker 2: truck and monstrosity, both in how it looks and how
Speaker 2: it's sold. It's illegal to drive in the majority of
Speaker 2: developed countries because it's a death trap for drivers and
Speaker 2: pedestrians alike. Oh and nobody actually wants it. With Tesla
Speaker 2: sitting on a quarters worth of inventory they can't sell
Speaker 2: elsewhere is Meta a collapsing social network of ninety nine
Speaker 2: percent of its revenue based on an advertising model to
Speaker 2: an increasingly aged population, and a monopoly so flagrantly abusive
Speaker 2: in its contempt for its customers that at times it's
Speaker 2: difficult to call Instagram or Facebook a social network. Mark
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg had to admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that
Speaker 2: people don't use Facebook as a social network anymore. The
Speaker 2: reason why is because the platform is so fucking rotten
Speaker 2: run by a company alienated from its user base. It's
Speaker 2: the crepit product, actively hostile to anybody trying to use it.
Speaker 2: And more fundamentally, what's the point of posting on Facebook
Speaker 2: if your friends won't see it? Because metas algorithm decided
Speaker 2: it wouldn't drive engagement, monument to disconnection. A company that
Speaker 2: runs encounter to its own mission to connect people, run
Speaker 2: by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who hasn't had a good
Speaker 2: idea since he stole it from the Winkle Brothers. I'm
Speaker 2: meant to say that Winklevoss Brothers, I'm actually going to
Speaker 2: keep him the solution to all that ails him adding
Speaker 2: generative AI to every part of Meta, which are shit.
Speaker 2: It was meant to do something other than burn seventy
Speaker 2: two billion dollars in capital expenditures in twenty twenty five. Right,
Speaker 2: it isn't clear what was meant to happen, but the
Speaker 2: Wall Street Journals Jeff Horwitz reports that metas ai chatbots
Speaker 2: are and I quote empowered to engage in romantic roleplay
Speaker 2: that can turn explicit, even with children. In a civil society,
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg would be ousted immediately for creating a pedophile chatbot. Instead,
Speaker 2: four days after the story ran, everyone cheered they're better
Speaker 2: than expected earnings report in Redmond. Microsoft sits atop multiple monopolies,
Speaker 2: using tariffs as I mean toduce flailing Xbox revenue, as
Speaker 2: it invests billions of dollars into open Ai so that
Speaker 2: open Ai can spend billions of dollars on cloud compute,
Speaker 2: losing billions of dollars in the process, requiring Microsoft inverst
Speaker 2: further money to keep them alive, all because Microsoft wanted
Speaker 2: generative Ai'm bing what a fucking waste. And they're also
Speaker 2: raising the costs of their office suite too, while which
Speaker 2: is only something they've been able to hold on to
Speaker 2: because of an underhanded bullshit fest from their antitrustrial from
Speaker 2: the nineties. Amazon lumbers listlessly through life. It's giant labor
Speaker 2: abusing machines, shipping things overnight at whatever cost is necessary
Speaker 2: to crush the life out of any other possible source
Speaker 2: of commerce. It's cloud services and storage arm on shore
Speaker 2: of who to copy next, dumping billions into anthropic as
Speaker 2: a means of creating revenue for their dead end products.
Speaker 2: Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Who knows? Who knows
Speaker 2: what Amazon is anymore? But one analyst believes it's making
Speaker 2: five whole billion dollars in revenue from AI in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. And you know how much they've put in
Speaker 2: capital expenditures this year, one hundred and five billion dollars
Speaker 2: in capital expenditures. There are slot machines with better ROI
Speaker 2: than this bullshit. Again, Amazon is a company that's totally
Speaker 2: exploitive its customers, no longer acting as a platform that
Speaker 2: helps people find the shit they need, but directing them
Speaker 2: to products that pay the most for prime advertising real estate,
Speaker 2: no matter whether they're good or safe. Let's be clear,
Speaker 2: Amazon's recklessness will kill someone if it hasn't already. The
Speaker 2: products they allow on their are not safe. They do
Speaker 2: not give a fucking shit. But then there's the worst
Speaker 2: of them, Google, most famous for its namesake, a search
Speaker 2: engine that has been reduced as hard as possible and
Speaker 2: will continue to be juced before the inevitable anti trust
Speaker 2: sentencing that will rob Google of its power, along with
Speaker 2: the severance of its advertising monopoly along with them. But
Speaker 2: don't worry. Google has a generative AI think for some reason,
Speaker 2: and no, you don't have a choice about using it,
Speaker 2: because they've now replaced Google Assistant with Google Gemini and
Speaker 2: Google Search all but requires you to use their AI.
Speaker 2: They burn money for no reason. It sucks, and at
Speaker 2: no point do any of these companies seem to be
Speaker 2: focused on making our lives better or selling us any
Speaker 2: kind of real future. They exist to maintain the status
Speaker 2: quo where cloud computing allows them to retain their previous fifdoms.
Speaker 2: They're alienated from people, they're alienated from workers, they're alienated
Speaker 2: from consumers, and they're alienated from the world. They're deeply antisocial,
Speaker 2: they're narcissistic, they're sociopathic, and they're misanthropic, as demonstrated by
Speaker 2: zux moronic aisocial network comments, and AI is a symptom
Speaker 2: of a reckoning of the stupidity in hubris. They cut,
Speaker 2: they cut, they cut, the cut, they cut some more,
Speaker 2: and then they stagnated. Their hope is a product that
Speaker 2: will be adopted by billions of imaginary customers and companies
Speaker 2: and will allow them to cut further without becoming just
Speaker 2: a peer box and a domain name. We have to
Speaker 2: recognize that what we're seeing right now with generative AI
Speaker 2: isn't a fluke or a bug, but a feature of
Speaker 2: a system that's rapacious and short, termed by its very
Speaker 2: nature and doesn't define value as we do. Because value
Speaker 2: gets defined by a faceless shareholder as growth, the system
Speaker 2: can only exist with the contribution of the business idiot.
Speaker 2: These are the vanguard, the foot soldiers of this system
Speaker 2: and a key reason why everything is so terrible all
Speaker 2: the time and why nothing seems to be getting better.
Speaker 2: Breaking from that status quo would require a level of
Speaker 2: bravery that they do not have and perhaps isn't possible
Speaker 2: in the current economic system. These people are powerful and
Speaker 2: they have big platforms. They're people like Derek Thompson, famed
Speaker 2: co author of the Abundance Agenda, who celebrates the idea
Speaker 2: of a fictitious version of chat GPT that can entirely
Speaker 2: plan and execute a five year old's birthday party, or
Speaker 2: his co author Ezra Klein, who, while recording a podcast
Speaker 2: where his researchers likely listened, talk proudly about replacing their
Speaker 2: work with open ais broken deep research product because anything
Speaker 2: that can be outsourced must be and all researches is
Speaker 2: looking at stuff. It's relevant if you're a fucking idiot,
Speaker 2: and really that's the most grotesque part of the business idiom.
Speaker 2: They see every part of our lives as a series
Speaker 2: of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books
Speaker 2: they've read rather than content, have said books the way
Speaker 2: they made them feel, About how many hours they work,
Speaker 2: even though they never ever ever work that many, About
Speaker 2: how high level they are in a video game they
Speaker 2: don't actually play, about the money they've ated than the
Speaker 2: scale they've raised it at, and about how expensive and
Speaker 2: fancy their kitchen gadgets are, even if they use the
Speaker 2: wrong oils. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth, and possession over
Speaker 2: any lived experience because their world is one where the
Speaker 2: journey does not matter, because their journeys are riddled with
Speaker 2: privilege and persecution of others in the pursuit of success.
Speaker 2: These people don't want to auter make work, They want
Speaker 2: to automate existence. They fantasize about hitting a button and
Speaker 2: something happening, because experiencing living is beneath them, or at
Speaker 2: least your lives and your once and your joys are.
Speaker 2: They don't want to plan their kids birthday parties. They
Speaker 2: don't want to research things. They don't value culture or
Speaker 2: art or beauty. They want to give to the end.
Speaker 2: They want to hit fast forward on anything, because human
Speaker 2: struggle is for the poor, the unworthy, and the uneducated.
Speaker 2: When you're steeped in privilege and have earned everything basically
Speaker 2: through a mixture of stolen labor and office pantomime, the
Speaker 2: idea of effort is always a negative. The process of
Speaker 2: creation of a fiction of love, of kindness, of using
Speaker 2: time not just for an action or output, is disgusting
Speaker 2: to the business idiot, because those are the times that
Speaker 2: could be focused on themselves or some nebulous, self serving
Speaker 2: vision that is, when stripped back to its fundamental truth,
Speaker 2: either moronic or malevolent. They don't realize that you hire
Speaker 2: a worker not just for the output, but for their
Speaker 2: actual labor and their experience in creating that labor and
Speaker 2: their understanding of the world around it, which is why
Speaker 2: they don't see why it's so insulting to outsource their
Speaker 2: interactions with human beings. You'll notice that these people never
Speaker 2: bring up actual examples of automating actual work, the mind
Speaker 2: numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace,
Speaker 2: because they either don't really know what that is, or
Speaker 2: they don't really give a shit about what it is.
Speaker 2: They are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with
Speaker 2: other people, or existing outside of the gilded circles of
Speaker 2: socialite fucks and pleurocrats, or just things that are inevitable
Speaker 2: facets of working life, like reading an email, your son's
Speaker 2: birthday part or a conflict with a friend. Can indeed
Speaker 2: be stressful, but these are not problems to be automated.
Speaker 2: These are the struggles that make us human, the things
Speaker 2: that make us grow, the things that make us who
Speaker 2: we are, which isn't a problem for anybody other than
Speaker 2: somebody who doesn't believe they need to change in any way.
Speaker 2: It's both powerful and powerless at the same time. A
Speaker 2: nihilistic way of seeing our lives is a collection of
Speaker 2: events we accept or dismissed like a system, prompt the
Speaker 2: desperate pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel
Speaker 2: a thing until you die. I spent years talking about
Speaker 2: these people without giving them a name, because categorizing anything
Speaker 2: is difficult. I can't tell you how long it took
Speaker 2: me to synthesize the rot economy from the broader trends
Speaker 2: I saw in tech and elsewhere. How long it took
Speaker 2: me to thread that particular needle to identify the various
Speaker 2: threats that unified events that are otherwise separate and distinct.
Speaker 2: I am but one person. Everything you've read in my
Speaker 2: newsletter or artclesse I've written or heard on my podcast
Speaker 2: to this point has been something I've had to learn.
Speaker 2: Building an argument and turning it into words, often at
Speaker 2: the same time that other people read, doesn't really come
Speaker 2: naturally to anyone. It's something you have to work deliberately out.
Speaker 2: You might have talent, but you have to work towards them.
Speaker 2: It's imperfect. There are fuck ups. I sometimes mispronounced names
Speaker 2: and words, including my own name, which Metasowski has always
Speaker 2: been kind enough not to laugh at me. About these
Speaker 2: podcasts and newsletters, they increase in length and breadth and
Speaker 2: have so many links, and I'll never change my process
Speaker 2: because part of said process is learning, relearning, processing, messaging
Speaker 2: Casey saying Casey, I don't understand this, arguing with Casey
Speaker 2: a little bit, coming up with another idea and a
Speaker 2: chord is by text. Matt Hughes, I talk with Robert Evans,
Speaker 2: I go back and forth with everyone. I get more
Speaker 2: pissed off. Then I write, and I really write, and
Speaker 2: I speak, and so on and so forth. This process
Speaker 2: makes what I do possible, and the idea of someone
Speaker 2: automating it discuss me not because I'm special or important,
Speaker 2: but because my work is not the result of me
Speaker 2: reading a bunch of links or writing a bunch of words.
Speaker 2: The script for this piece is not just about thirteen
Speaker 2: thousand words long. It's the result of more than a
Speaker 2: million words, probably more than that that I wrote before it,
Speaker 2: the hundreds of stories I've read in the past, the
Speaker 2: hours and hours of conversations with friends and editors, years
Speaker 2: of accumulating knowledge, and yes, growing with the work itself.
Speaker 2: I as a person have grown with this show thanks
Speaker 2: to the wonderful feedback I get from all of you,
Speaker 2: from the conversations we have on the Reddit or just
Speaker 2: the emails. I get the occasional one of you who
Speaker 2: finds myself on which is really quite scary, but not
Speaker 2: many of you do, and please don't look. The thing is,
Speaker 2: imperfections are what make us human. Imperfections are what make
Speaker 2: art so great. The fun things that happen in our
Speaker 2: life are never from a moment of perfection or from
Speaker 2: crystallizing something that is immacular. Perhaps the timing is perfect,
Speaker 2: perhaps we're in the right place at the right time,
Speaker 2: but nothing about us is perfect. And through those imperfections
Speaker 2: we grow and we thrive. Business idiots don't give a
Speaker 2: fuck about that. Sam Mortman doesn't give a fuck about that.
Speaker 2: Satchinnidella doesn't give a fuck about that. They think they're
Speaker 2: fucking perfect. But true art and true joy and true
Speaker 2: solidarity is what's needed to dispatch with these people and
Speaker 2: to stop what they're doing. And really, the biggest thing
Speaker 2: that we can do early on the real starting block
Speaker 2: is anyone within the tech media listen to this. We
Speaker 2: need to change. We need to change how we cover
Speaker 2: these companies. We need to change that. Honestly, everything needs
Speaker 2: to be inverted. Trusting a company based on how much
Speaker 2: money it has and how big it is is the
Speaker 2: wrong way to go about this business. Business idiots have
Speaker 2: learned that, and they have moved their marketing strategies to
Speaker 2: create metrics that journalists accept and will print, and then
Speaker 2: they will sound good for people that don't know what
Speaker 2: they're talking about, because the journalists don't even bother to
Speaker 2: pull the metrics apart themselves. And I understand why everyone's
Speaker 2: doing what everyone else is doing. But we can change things,
Speaker 2: But you, as a listener, how can you change things
Speaker 2: You're already doing it. Over the last year, I've seen
Speaker 2: a remarkable growth in just regular people being willing to
Speaker 2: push back against these narratives, in pushing back in their businesses. Also,
Speaker 2: those of you with children can teach them not to
Speaker 2: aspire to be a fucking manager or an executive unless
Speaker 2: they know their fucking work. It is that simple. And
Speaker 2: I know it feels kind of bleak right now with
Speaker 2: everything going on in California, with everything going on with
Speaker 2: the government, with everything going on with Open AI, with
Speaker 2: the amount of stories about how AI is going to
Speaker 2: take everything and take everything we have and recreate it
Speaker 2: in a shitty way. The fact that they're so desperate
Speaker 2: means that they're scared, and they're scared of the fact
Speaker 2: that you are willing to talk about this and you
Speaker 2: are willing to spit in their face. If you don't
Speaker 2: want to use AI, don't use AI. If you are
Speaker 2: curious about what it does, don't bother looking or fuck
Speaker 2: around with the free version of bit so that you
Speaker 2: only lose the money. If these things would automate you,
Speaker 2: they'd be automating you already, if they were close to
Speaker 2: doing so, they would be previewing the world in which
Speaker 2: they do. So they're fucking scared. Well, the era of
Speaker 2: the business idiot is happening right now. It could potentially
Speaker 2: be coming to an end because as this movement ends,
Speaker 2: and I said this in the rock Kom bubble a
Speaker 2: year ago, they don't have any more growth markets. This
Speaker 2: is the end for them. I'm not saying the end
Speaker 2: of the companies. They'll work something out, but they don't
Speaker 2: have double digit growth in them past the next year.
Speaker 2: The revenues are small, and you the listener who've been
Speaker 2: sitting there the whole time saying, why the fuck does
Speaker 2: everyone say this thing is amazing whenever they use jet
Speaker 2: GPT and not really understanding why you're not the weird one.
Speaker 2: They are. They cannot beat us because we actually do things.
Speaker 2: If you're a business city yourself listening to this, open
Speaker 2: a book, go and learn something, Go and talk to
Speaker 2: a customer, Well, start your current in the garage. I
Speaker 2: don't really know. I really don't encourage you to do
Speaker 2: that necessarily. But the point I'm making is this middle
Speaker 2: managers ruin lives, business city. It's ruined lives. I think
Speaker 2: everyone listening to this is going to have experienced several
Speaker 2: of them. The fact that management as a concept and
Speaker 2: that management as a discipline has died is a big
Speaker 2: part of this as well. Labor is really fucking hurting
Speaker 2: right now. I realize them kind of rambling, but I'll
Speaker 2: end on the simpler note. If you are around people
Speaker 2: who are scared, be scared with them, Offer them kindness,
Speaker 2: Offer them solidarity and a generous ear. Support their work,
Speaker 2: Support independent creators. Support people at the Vox Union who
Speaker 2: are currently battling against the company that saw for to
Speaker 2: give Kara Swish to tens of millions of dollars, that
Speaker 2: continually pushes powerful people at the CEO of Airbnb, which
Speaker 2: is company which is ruined pretty much rentals everywhere. Don't
Speaker 2: know why Neli Pittella to talk to him about his
Speaker 2: house and the catskills, because that happened. When you hear
Speaker 2: these stories, push back on them, say I don't like this,
Speaker 2: Say fuck this. Support the Vox Union. In the event
Speaker 2: that the Vox Union does not get their contract, do
Speaker 2: not visit a single fucking Vox site. You must walk
Speaker 2: away from that. Support workers, support artists, support creators, support
Speaker 2: the people who actually do work, and fuck the business idiots.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
Speaker 2: composer of the Better Offline theme song is Metasowski. You
Speaker 2: can check out more of his music and audio projects
Speaker 2: at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S
Speaker 2: O W s ki dot com.
Speaker 3: You can email me at easy at better offline dot com,
Speaker 3: or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast
Speaker 3: links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
Speaker 3: you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot ad to
Speaker 3: visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline
Speaker 3: to check out our reddit.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us
Speaker 1: out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts.