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