In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like \u201cSam Altman is full of shit” and \u201cMark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul.\u201d Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this. Flacks want to touch base, hop on the phone, clear up a few things about the allegation that their CEO is a \u201cchunderfuck.\u201d<\/p>\n
“And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic,\u201d Zitron was saying over burgers on a fine Manhattan afternoon in September. \u201cI work with founders all the time. I\u2019m a founder myself, I guess\u2014I don\u2019t like the title. But when you are a person that has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business, and you see these chunderfucks burning 5, 10 billion dollars in a year\u2014and everyone’s celebrating them? It’s offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n
We were talking about whether any of Zitron\u2019s ranting about the AI industry had cost him business on the PR side of the ledger. He said no. There was the one client who felt Zitron was being a little mean toward Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the biggest chunderfuck of all, as far as Zitron is concerned. Founding a company is hard, the client said. \u201cI said, \u2018I appreciate the comment, but, like, this isn’t about you,\u2019\u201d Zitron told me. \u201cHis company is burning billions of dollars. He’s a terrible businessman.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was, in all, a very Ed Zitron sort of riff, pitched in the key of personal affront, populist in the manner of a small business owner stink-eyeing the unpunished wastefulness of big industry. (Would these CEOs be any less offensive, one wonders, if their companies were making billions of dollars?) He has built an improbable little empire for himself out of tart commentary like this. His weekly podcast, Better Offline, about \u201cthe tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society,\u201d has cracked Spotify\u2019s top 20 among tech shows, and his newsletter, Ed Zitron\u2019s Where\u2019s Your Ed At, has grown north of 80,000 subscribers. The Ed Zitron media experience also includes a scrappy Bluesky account, a football podcast, some occasional baseball writing, a lot of to-and-froing with the users of r\/BetterOffline, and a book due next year about, as he puts it, \u201cwhy everything stopped working.\u201d In other media, he has become a go-to source for AI naysaying. When Slate\u2019s What\u2019s Next: TBD podcast or WNYC\u2019s On the Media needed someone to talk about the bursting of the AI bubble, they called on Zitron. It isn\u2019t just the volume of output that has put him on the map; it is the aggrieved style that he brings to criticisms of media figures and industry titans alike.<\/p>\n
Not long ago, volume and style came together to produce the quintessential bit of Zitron media: a piece for his newsletter titled \u201cHow to Argue With an AI Booster.\u201d It was 15,000 words long.<\/p>\n
Edheads abound now. Nearly 200 people have purchased a $24 Better Offline challenge coin, engraved with what has become the Zitron mantra: \u201cNEVER FORGIVE THEM FOR WHAT THEY’VE DONE TO THE COMPUTER.\u201d I have seen someone put Ed\u2019s words on a motivational poster, operating at some ambiguous register of irony. One Threads user described her \u201cparasocial crush on a tech critic & writer\u201d who is not named but who is quite obviously Zitron. \u201cI just want him to take me to dinner, take me gently but firmly by the hand, and tell me in his confusing, muddled British accent to throw away my goddamn phone,\u201d she sighed. \u201cThis would fix me. I\u2019m sure of it.\u201d (As one tech journalist who\u2019d seen the Threads post put it to me, \u201cIf you\u2019re getting to a point where your writing is causing people to lust after you, you\u2019re doing something either very right or very wrong.\u201d)<\/p>\n
As a functional matter, Zitron is meeting a demand for an equal-and-opposite voice to counter the inescapable AI hype. Critics of AI approach from any number of angles. There are doomers who fear the industry is ushering in some world-shattering superintelligence; there are denialists who don\u2019t believe AI will ever replace human decisionmakers. Zitron is up to something different. What he offers people, in a time of amoral boosterism and amid a free-floating revulsion for the tech industry, is a moral language for hating generative AI. \u201cHe approaches the subject like a journalist in that he\u2019s ravenous for information, but he is unshackled by the institutions,\u201d says Allison Morrow, a business reporter at CNN and a frequent guest on Better Offline. \u201cMost journalists don\u2019t want to root for an industry\u2019s demise. The institutions we work for don\u2019t want to be engaged in that kind of mission.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":336039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,8294,16026,6459,67673,1595,158,166259,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-336038","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-communications","11":"tag-longreads","12":"tag-money","13":"tag-propaganda","14":"tag-startups","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-the-ai-issue","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115446208494588280","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}