How The Tech Media Can Beat The Rot Economy

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3:01Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

3:16And, you know, sometimes recording this show kind of feels like narrating the end of the world. I'm watching as the growth at all costs rot economy kind of poisons every corner of our digital lives, changing everything in search of growth, growth of revenue, growth of engagement metrics, growth of anything. And my core frustration isn't just how shitty things have got, but how said shittiness has become insanely profitable for so many companies. Meta made$20.8 billion of profit in its last reported quarterly earnings off the back of products that are bordering on non-functional. Microsoft made$24.11 billion in profit with an increasingly deteriorating series of productivity products and cloud-based solutions that its customers absolutely fucking hate.

3:57And Google made$26.5 billion in profit from multiple monopolies and making its core search product worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people search for stuff. You see, the business of making our shit worse to increase revenue growth year over year, it's absolutely booming. The products you use every day are more confusing and more frustrating to use because everything must grow. Which means in practice that product decisions now driven in many cases by companies trying to make you do something rather than do something for you. Which in turn means that basic quality control, things like, I don't know, usability or functionality, they're more secondary considerations to the grander rot economy thing.

4:37It's why your Facebook news feed doesn't show you posts from friends and family, but happily bombards you with AI-generated slop of weirdly shiny-faced old people celebrating their birthday alone with a weird heartstring-tugging caption that doesn't really make any sense. It's why whenever you search for something, not just on Google, but anywhere, the keywords you use aren't treated as an explicit instruction of something you want to do or see, but a kind of interpretive dance of information where maybe something you want comes out at the end. Look, we don't use the computer. We negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.

5:16Too often when you open up an app, you start bargaining with the company behind it. Like Dropbox is a great example. You log in and it says, hey, look, you could save money switching to an annual plan, this big pop-up. And if you agree to that, they've just secured your annual recurring revenue and they've done something that they hope you'll forget, which is switch you from a monthly to a yearly subscription. You forget that, well, you're stuck with them for a year. Tech companies have the perseverance and desperate hunger for your money of a timeshare salesman, and they're even more craven. And by the way, all of these things I'm talking about with negotiating with the computer, this is assuming whatever you're doing actually loads.

5:53We're all familiar with the tense moment when you open up Microsoft Teams and just hope it doesn't crash, or that maybe, I don't know, your camera or your video works or your audio works, whether anything actually works. We live in this weird state of constant digital microaggressions. And as I said last year, it's everywhere. Banking apps that now have helpful assistance that get in the way of banking. Pop-ups during online shopping that promise discounts in exchange for our emails and phone numbers so they can spam us. Notifications from apps that are built to push us to interact further rather than like, and by the way, a great example here is Instagram.

6:26Someone just posted a comment on someone else's post notifications. I'm not sure if you got those. or like the emails we get from Amazon about an order shipping that don't include any of the actual information. These are things that are happening not because the company's like, oh, well, it's better for the customer, but because they need you to do something or they need to stop someone doing something else. In the case of your Amazon emails, by the way, if you're wondering why you don't get, you don't actually get to see what's in an Amazon package when it ships now. Well, the reason is because Google was scraping your Gmail and finding out stuff about what people were buying on Amazon.

6:59So Amazon just stopped doing that. They stopped providing any of that information when your stuff shipped. Now, Amazon absolutely makes money off of this themselves. They just, this is Amazon's business, not Google. No, no, no, no. You can't rot our customers. They're ours to rot. Yet my, and I'm going to imagine your frustration with tech isn't born with any kind of hatred of technology or a dislike of the internet or a lack of appreciation of what it can or could or used to do, but the sense that all of this was once better and that these companies have turned impeding our use of the computer into a kind of weird charlatan-filled bacchanalia of capital.

7:36And so much of the pushback I get on my work and the pushback I've seen toward other critics as well is that I hate technology. But I'd like to argue that my profound disgust and anger is born of a great love of technology and a deep awareness of the positive effects it's had on my life. I don't turn on the computer every day wanting to be pissed off and I don't imagine any of you do either. We're not logging on to whatever social networks we're on because we're ready to be pissed off. We want to have our lives interrupted by weird slop. If anything, we'd love to be delighted by the people we chose to connect with and the content we consume and want to simply go about our business without just these microaggressions created by this growth desperation from companies that are just running out of runway.

8:15They're running out of things to sell us and well, they don't know how to build things we'd like anyway. Technology has in many ways stopped being about using technology to help people do things, or at the very least help the user do something that they want to do. Software has, as Marc Andreessen said it would in 2011, eaten the world, and has done so in the nakedly cynical and usurious way that Marc Andreessen really wanted it to, prioritizing the invasion of our life through prioritizing growth and the collection of as much data as possible on the user over any particular utility or purpose or value in a stock.

8:48Andreessen and his ilk saw, and I believe they still see, software not as a thing that provides value, but as a means for the tech industry to penetrate and disrupt as many industries as possible, pushing legacy providers to, and I quote, transform themselves into software companies rather than using software to do things or make products better. Andreessen describes Pixar, the studio that made movies like Toy Story and Inside out, and they were acquired by Disney in 2006, by the way, he describes them as a software company rather than a company that uses software to make movies. And that distinction is really important.

9:24I realize it sounds like semantics, but let me put it another way. Software has, for the tech industry, become far more about extracting economic value than it has in providing it. When the tech industry becomes focused on penetrating markets, to quote Andreessen, software companies taking over large swords of the economy, there's little consideration of whether said software is prioritizing the solution to a problem. And nowhere is this more obvious than the software we use in our professional lives. Microsoft Teams is one of the single worst products I've ever used, because Microsoft's goal isn't to make it easy to have digital meetings, but to make a product good enough and cheap enough to make it easy for your boss to buy the entire Microsoft 365 suite, even if most of the suite sucks and people hate it and it doesn't work sometimes or a lot of the time.

10:09And here's another great example. Google Drive. Google Drive is one of the worst products of all time. The people responsible for designing Google Drive's user interface should be made to explain themselves before a judge. Why can't you sort files by side? Why does it only show an image and video thumbnails when viewing a folder in a grid layout? Why when you attempt to move a file to a folder are the suggested folders, literally the first window you say always wrong without fail i know these things sound like i'm just complaining god damn am i but this is what it is today this is google a company with a what it's like three trillion dollar market cap and they can't fucking make their cloud storage product what jesus christ look the proliferation of software throughout society has been led by the stewards of the economy as software along with its associated managed services can effectively proliferate infinitely and can take advantage of how many corporations are run by management consultants and, of course, filled with middle managers, and they are the enemy as well.

11:07And these people don't do any real work or have any true connections to the problems they're solving. When your goal is winning the market or dominating the market, you're not necessarily optimizing for having a great product or even really happy customers. Selling software to a big company doesn't require you to speak to everybody who might use it. You're selling hundreds or thousands of seats, users who might access the product. That's what that means, by the way, to management in kind of the gestalt, just this idea of we're selling to a blob of people. And what would the person at the top, who wouldn't necessarily touch this, what would, what would make them feel horny?

11:38What would make them feel happy? What's going to make them feel warm and fuzzy inside? Because let's be honest, your manager or their manager isn't really using any of this shit. They just want to see what it looks like. And it feels good to buy and it fits within the budget and they get taken out to a nice dinner or perhaps the person mentions they watch the same baseball team some bullshit like that let's be real life happens kids spill pets shed and accidents are inevitable find a sofa that can keep up at washablesofas.com. Starting at just$699, our sofas are fully machine washable inside and out.

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13:07Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. There's a lot going on in Hollywood. How are you supposed to stay on top of it all? Variety has the solution. Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives. Where do you see the business actually heading? Featuring the iconic journalist of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton.

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14:29You see, the people leading the charge in the tech industry, and Andreessen Horowitz, by the way, they've been one of the biggest and most influential players in Silicon Valley history, and now, and recently, there's something to do with the Trump administration. I'm just trying not to think about it. They've never really seen their primary purpose as the creation of value for anybody other than the people selling software. And this manifests in the rest of your daily lives in far simpler ways. Pop-ups from shopping apps you downloaded to make just one purchase, or misleading notifications from Instagram shouting about how you have new views that don't actually lead anywhere, or autoplaying adverts that proliferate on every single news and reviews website.

15:07It's having to re-log into websites and news websites in particular every day because everyone must pay and nothing could possibly get through. They could not possibly have you read a New York Times article or a Forbes article for free anymore. And it's emails from online retailers you swore you unsubscribed from, and perhaps you did, but you have no way of tracking for sure, and there's not really a government body that gives a shit about that anymore, maybe in the future. And it's all the times you've had to create new passwords because of another data breach that happened, and the company didn't even bother to meet the basic security standards, because again, who would stop them?

15:42All of these annoying little examples are inherently hostile towards you, the user, and they're a direct result of a tech industry oriented around growth, driven by the pernicious and aggressive poison of growth-focused software. The rot economy has changed the incentives of everything you see and do on the computer, The websites you read that inexplicably recommend laptops that are actively painful to use because of the affiliate revenue they drive to the website's owners, with the intent being driven, by the way, not by the writers, but by managers who don't really look at the product or care about the laptop.

16:15They just care about number going up. It's when Instagram swaps the location of your notification and message buttons, discounts on stores that require both your email and your phone number, social networks that put things in the way of you trying to find the people and the things you actually logged on to see. All ways in which software can be used to extract from you, trick you, and mislead you, and control you. And when I say control, I don't mean that these companies have the ability to subconsciously manipulate you and your desires. It's more that they have spent decades finding new ways to gaslight you and bully you into doing things they'd like you to.

16:49Everybody knows that Instagram sucks, and it sucks because there's things that you actually want to do on Instagram that meta is hidden behind hundreds of little user interface quirks. Optimize to increase your time on the app, and thus the amount of money you make them by being on there. Well, so as an aside, have you ever tried to search for something on Instagram? You can't just type in words and see what you want to see. It allows you to search for certain phrases, and it's not really clear what makes a phrase acceptable or not, or work. You can have two queries, each with the same words, but arranged in a slightly different order, and Instagram will let you search for one and not the other.

17:24It's just so weird. And the post you'll see will contain only some of the keywords, which in the end makes search irrelevant. The other day, I searched for the name of an event with the word live in it, hoping to see whether someone had live-streamed it. Instead, I got hundreds of posts that just had the word live. I love the future. I love living in the future. I love that Facebook and Meta, they just make like$20 billion a quarter and their product just fucking sucks. And even if you get semi-relevant results, they won't even be organized in any particularly coherent fashion. You'll see content from recent weeks mixed in with stuff from over a decade ago.

17:58You can't even search recent posts using a hashtag. Instagram removed that feature a couple of years ago and no amount of caterwalling from users has persuaded them to put it back because they don't really give a shit. And it's not like Instagram's alone in doing this. Everybody knows that Google search sucks because it's optimized to provide results that make the company more money by showing you more ads. But we use it because, well, the internet's a very big place and search, while Broken, provides enough of a service that it's useful to the point that we'll push through the bullshit to get to the things we kind of want.

18:29And now to quote the comedian Connor O'Malley. Fucking computer's bullshit. It's fucking sick. It's not cool anymore. It's not fun. It's not fun to be on the fucking computer. They changed everything about it. It used to be so cool.

18:47Google search was at one point extremely cool, something that used to give users a sense of peace and control over an internet that had grown so vast it was kind of hard to grasp. And even once felt like a place you'd go to find, like, a crazy idea with Google, a quality search result. Facebook was instrumental in me building my life here in America when I moved in 2008, both in connecting with the people I went to college with at Penn State and operating as a kind of digital address book where people, and this is an insane concept I know, used to post updates about their lives and pictures of things that they were doing on Facebook.

19:20I know that this is a strange concept to some of you, but there was a time when people did that on Facebook In a way, someone might describe it as like social networking. Crazy, right? Anyway, once upon a time, Apple's App Store had actual quality standards, both in the apps themselves and the services they sold, which made downloading a new app feel kind of exciting, because your first pop-up wasn't for some sort of monthly subscription product, sold in a weird way where it's like, oh, it's actually a weekly one, and with the X to get away from it, hidden on a white background with a white X.

19:54I know I'm romantic I think things a little bit Capitalism is capitalism These companies were still worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars And evil incentives still exist And I realize that Microsoft and its monopoly over operating systems Is a really good example of how wrong this might be But nevertheless, the experience of using hardware and software Felt like it was fucking you less It was less exploitative The stuff we used felt like it worked And for the absolute avoidance of doubt None of this is to say that these companies were ever perfect or even good or even had good intentions, nor is any of this an attempt to cheerlead for them.

20:29This is not a shift to me becoming more fair either, which is usually, by the way, a euphemism for waving away the actual wrongs of a company. I don't get free shit, and even if I did, I'd tell you. I would tell you if someone wants to send me a free laptop, brilliant. It won't change my mind about shit. Anyway, as much as I may like any given product, these companies are providing a service as a means of making money. I am as you are a customer. And the fact that so many of these companies are making so much more money as they make these products so much worse, it fills me full of fucking poison.

21:00It makes me very angry. And the reason I'm so onerously explaining this is that I do not believe that the majority of people actually hate technology. They hate what the technology industry has become in search of growth. In fact, I'd argue that deep down, many people love technology. We love that we can instantly connect to friends using little computers in our pockets, or that we can share photos or videos with effectively anyone with an internet connection and i quote someone talking about me here by the way as one of big tech's angriest critics i must confess that i absolutely love what i can do with the computer as deep down i'm kind of a broken hearted romantic that can see beneath all the slop and the shit and the growth and the bullshit there are many different things i truly deeply love i love that i can write a script or a newsletter and i can share it with my editor thousands of miles away that we can work on an idea or a sentence in real time despite being an entire landmass in an ocean apart.

21:52I love that I can be in New York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas and make a podcast that gets beamed around the world through fiber optic cables and satellite connections. I love that I can run a business online from anywhere with a stable internet connection and I love that during work I can also quickly and easily catch up with my friends wherever they are. I can be there for people and people have been there for me and it's wonderful. Beneath the bullshit of Google search lies the ability to research decades of journalism and academia, and my fury and disgust comes from seeing such a great product get mangled by fucking Prabhagar Raghavan and Sondar Pishai so they can make more fucking money.

22:25And the problem is that we, as a society, still act like technology is some distinct thing separate from our real lives, and that in turn technology is some sort of hobbyist pursuit. Mainstream media outlets have a technology section, with technology reporters that are hired to cover, and I quote, the tech industry, optimizing not for any understanding or experience in using technology, but some 30 ,000-foot view of what the computer people are doing this week. This may have made more sense 20 years ago, though I'd add that back in 2008, you had multiple national newspapers with multiple tech columnists, and computers were already an integral part of our work and personal lives.

23:01But in the year 2025, it's fundamentally fucking stupid and a failure of modern media. Every single person you meet in every single part of your life likely interfaces with technology as much as if not more than they do with other people in the real world, and the tech coverage they read in the newspaper online does not represent that experience. It's why a relatively modest software update for Android or Windows earns vastly more column inches than the fact that Google, a product that we all use, does not work anymore. And you could argue, well, a software update for Android, that hits a lot of people.

23:34Wow, cool, right? Frankly, it's not like they cover that much anymore either. It used to be that the new Android launch would actually have some stuff and people would talk about it. It was fun, but it isn't fun anymore.