The Rot Society

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1:12This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads. Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-iHeart. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you.

1:50Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way? Yes, it did. But he was a charming man. It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?

2:33Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:46Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

3:01It's been a hard couple of weeks. It's been pretty hard to focus. I've written a few newsletters, I've gone to Portugal, I've done a bunch of shit. Just trying not to think about everything happening outside, but it's time to do so. seemingly every single person on earth with a blog or a podcast or even a twitter account or x the everything apple whatever it's called now they've all tried to drill down into what happened on november 5th to find the people to blame to explain what could have gone differently really looking for who to blame though and find out why so many actions led to a result that will overwhelmingly harm women minorities immigrants lgbtq people and lower income workers is terrifying.

3:43It fucking sucks. I'm not going to mince words, not that I would usually anyway. And I don't feel fully equipped to respond to the moment. I don't have any real answers, at least not political ones. I'm not a political analyst, and I feel disingenuous trying to dissect either the Harris or the Trump campaigns, because I just feel like there's a take Olympics right now. It's the Dunning-Kruger festival out there. Everyone is trying to rationalize and intellectualize these events that ultimately come down to something quite simple. People don't trust authority, and yeah, it's pretty ironic that this often leads them towards authoritarianism.

4:21Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm going to go on my crank mode, and somehow against institutions on their face. I'm not. But at the same time, understanding this moment requires us to acknowledge that institutions have failed us, and failed most people, and how certain institutions' missteps have led us to exactly where we are today. Legacy media, and while oftentimes they're staffed by people who truly love their readers and care about their beats, they're weighed down by this hysterical, nonsensical attachment to the imaginary concept of objectivity and the will of the markets.

4:54Case in point. Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase due to inflation, despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by, get this, corporations raising their prices. Now, that's not to say that external factors like the war in Ukraine or lingering COVID restrictions in China, these things did play a role in it. They did. But the bulk of these price increases were caused by these fucking companies raising the prices. It was in their earnings. It was right there. Pepsi-Cola said it on the news. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their own reporting, and there will be links in the episode notes, I promise, as a means of providing balanced coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is actually good, contorting their little bodies to prove that prices aren't actually higher, even as companies literally boasted about raising their prices on earnings.

5:54In fact, the media spent years debating with itself where the price gouging was actually happening, despite years of proof that it was. Some of them even reported that the price gouging was happening. So, like, get this, I just don't think people trust authority, and they especially don't trust the media, especially the legacy media. It also probably didn't help that the legacy media implored readers and viewers to ignore what they saw at the supermarket or at the pump, and the growing hits that had wallets from the daily incesties of life. it was a just a national level gaslighting and it was disgusting and i know some of you might say you knew nowhere to email me oh it's not just this no of course it's not just this arsehole but i think this is a big thing now before i go any further i've used the term legacy media here repeatedly but i don't completely intend for it to come across as a pejorative despite my criticism and believe me i've got a few of them there are people in the legacy media doing a good job they're reporting the truth.

6:53They're doing the kinds of work that matters, and they're actually trying to teach their readers stuff and tell them what's happening and giving them context. I read and pay for several legacy media outlets, and I think the world is a better place for them existing, despite their flaws. The problem is, as I'll explain, is this editorial industrial complex, and how these people are writing about the powerful don't seem to be able to, or maybe they don't want to, actually interrogate the powerful. This could be an entire episode on its own but i don't think the answer to these failings is to simply discard legacy media entirely but i want to implore them to do better and to strive for the values of truth hunting and truth telling and actually explaining what's happening and criticizing the people that don't have pr firms and lobbying groups and lawyers and the means to protect themselves from the world the time for fucking around is over and we're currently finding out now anyway as you know as a person existing in the real world the price of everything has kept increasing despite the fact the wages are stagnating it's forcing many of the poorest people to choose between food and fuel or i don't know eating and having heat simultaneously businesses have spent several years telling workers they're asking for too much and doing too little telling people a few years ago, they were quiet quitting, which is a fucking stupid term that just means going to your job and doing the thing you're paying to do.

8:17Anyway, anyway. And a year later, in 2023, they insisted that the years of remote work were actually bad because profits didn't reach the same profit levels of 2021, which was something to do with remote work. Now, did anyone actually prove this? Did anyone actually go? No, they didn't. They just, well, they just listened to Mark Benioff, who's one of the more evil people alive. Now, I also think a lot of these problems come to 2021, a year that we really need to dig into more. We might not do so today, but we will in the future. But one of the big things that punished workers and led to so many layoffs in 2023 was the fact that we couldn't get back to the post-lockdown boom of 2021, when everyone bought everything always as they left the house for the first time in a while.

9:01Now, any corporation would be smart enough to know that that was a phase, that that was not going to be forever. Except every single big company seemed to make the same mistake and say, number going up forever, line go up forever. When it didn't, well, they started punishing workers and they started thinking, well, could it be that we as companies, we set unrealistic expectations for the markets and we just thought that we keep growing forever? Or maybe it was the people using the computer at home. Yeah, that seems way better. Anyway, while the majority of people don't work remotely, from talking to the people I know outside of tech or business, there's this genuine sense that the media has allied itself with the bosses, and I imagine it's because of the many articles that literally call workers lazy and have done so for years.

9:49Yet when it comes to the powerful, legacy media doesn't seem to have that much piss and vinegar. They just have much more guarded critiques. The appetite for shaming and finger-wagging, It's always direct to the middle and working class workers, and seemingly disappears with a person as a three-character job title like CEO. It's fucking stupid, it's insulting, and yes, it's demoralizing for the average person. Despite the fact that Elon Musk has spent years telegraphing his intent to use his billions of dollars to wield power, equivalent to that of a nation-state, as you may remember from my first episode of Anything, overall, it could happen here.

10:23Too much of the media, both legacy and otherwise, responded slowly, cautiously, failing to call him a liar a con artist an aggressor a manipulator a racist a deadbeat dad you know all the things actually happening no no no they kind of danced around him they reported stories that might make you think that they may be noticed it but there was this desperation to guard objectivity and it was just it lacked any real intent it lacked any interest in calling account to a man who has pretty much bought an election for Donald Trump. A racist billionaire using his outsized capital to bend society to his will just isn't a fucking problem for the media, or at least not as much of a problem as a worker who might not work 50 to 100 hours a week for a boss who makes 130 times what they do.

11:09The news, at least outside of the right wing, is always separate from opinion, always guarded, always safe, for fear that they might piss somebody off and be declared biased, something that happens anyway. And while there are columnists that are given some space to have their own thoughts, sometimes in the newspaper, sometimes online, the stories themselves are delivered with the kind of reserved hmm tone that often fails to express any actual consequences or context around the news itself and just doesn't seem to care about making sure that the reader or listener learns something. My mate Casey has a good point about podcasts, and I'd apply it to some of the news too, that there's too much stuff out there that is there to make you feel intelligent rather than make you intelligent.

11:54I think this falls into him. Now, this isn't to say that outlets are incapable of doing this correctly. I love the Washington Post. They've done an excellent job in analysing major tech stories. But a lot of these outlets feel custom-built to be bulldozed the moment an authoritarian turns up. This force that exists to crush those desperately attached to norms and objectivity. Authoritarians know that they're ideologically charged words. We quoted ad verbatim with the occasional, huh, this could mean little dribble, this drizzle, this spunk of context that's lost in the headline that repeats exactly what the fucking authoritarian wants them to.

12:29And guess what? Some people don't read the article, they just read the headline. And Musk is the most brutal example of this, by the way. Despite the fact that he's turned Twitter into a website pumped full of racism and hatred that literally helped make Donald Trump president, Musk was still able to get mostly positive coverage from the majority of the mainstream media for his fucking robo-taxi nonsense, despite the fact that he spent the best part of a decade lying about what Tesla will do next. There are entire websites just based on how much Elon Musk lies, yet they still report this shit.

13:02It makes me very upset. And it doesn't matter that some of these outlets, by the way, had accompanying coverage that suggested that the markets weren't impressed by Tesla's theoretical robo-taxi plans or their fake-ass robots run by people. Musk is still able to use the media's desperation for objectivity against them, and he knows that they never dare to combine reporting on stuff with thinking about stuff for fear that Elon Musk might say they're biased, which he has been doing for years. Do you see my goddamn point yet? And this, by the way, is not always the fault of the writers. there are entire foundations of editors that have more faith in the markets and the powerful than they do the people writing or the people reading their fucking words and above them are entire editorial superstructures that exist to make sure that the editorial vision never colors too far outside the lines or informs people a little too much i'm not even talking about jeff bezos or lauren powerl jobs or any number of billionaires who own any number of publications but the editors editing business and tech reports who don't know anything about business and tech, or the senior editors that are terrified of any byline that might dare get the outlet under fire from somebody who could call their boss.

14:14It's fucking cowardice.

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15:41Jan Marseleck was a model of German corporate success. It seemed so damn simple for him. Also, it turned out, a fraudster. Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning myself. But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him? His secret office was less than 500 meters down the road. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong. I don't know if they followed me to my home. It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story. Because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.

16:26Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts What was that? Oh, my. We think NFL coverage should be informative and entertaining. And twice a week, that is exactly what you're going to get. Listen to NFL Cover Zero with Matt Jones and Drew Franklin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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17:20there are however i should add also those who simply defer to the powerful that assume that this much money can't be wrong even if said money in the case of elon musk is repeatedly wrong and there's an entire website about the wrongness and the lies and the bullshit and i'm talking about elon musk still obviously these editors are the people that look at the current crop of powerful tech companies that have failed to deliver any truly meaningful innovation in years and they go Ooh, send me more, Daddy. Show me more of the apps. It's fucking disgraceful. Just look at the coverage of Sam Altman from last year.

17:52You know, the guy who spent years lying about what AI can do. And tell me why every single thought he says must be uncritically catalogued. His every goddamn decision applauded. His every claim trumpeted as certain. His brittle little company that burns$5 billion a year talked about like it's a fucking living God. Sam Altman is a liar who's been fired from two companies, including OpenAI. and yet because he's a billionaire with a buzzy company he's left totally unscathed. The powerful get a completely different set of rules to live by and exist in a totally different media environment. They're geniuses, entrepreneurs, firebrands.

18:25Their challenges are framed as missteps and their victories framed as certainties by the same outlets that told us that we were quiet quitting and that the economy is actually good and that we're the problem for high prices. While it's correct to suggest that the right wing is horrendously ideological and they're terribly biased. It's very hard to look at the rest of the media and claim that they're not. The problem is that the so-called left media, which usually is just the centre, isn't biased towards what we may consider left-wing causes like universal healthcare, strong unions, expanded social safety nets, you know, the stuff that would actually be helpful.

18:57No, they're biased in favour of fellating an ever-growing carousel of sociopathic billionaire arseholes, elevating them to the status of American royalty, where they exist above of expectations and norms that you and I must live by. This is the definition of elitism. The media has literally created a class of people who can lie and cheat and steal, and rather than condemn them for it, they're celebrated. While it might feel a little tangential to bring technology into this, I truly believe that everybody is affected by the rot economy, the growth or cost ecosystem, where the number must always go up, because everybody is using technology all the time, and the technology in question is getting worse.

19:38This election cycle saw more than 25 billion text messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was crammed full of random election advertising. Here's the thing about elections. They're not really always about policy. No, they're a referendum on the incumbent party or president, and by proxy, a poll on how people feel. And the reality is that most people are fucking miserable. There's this all-encompassing feeling that things are just harder now. It's harder to pay your bills. It's harder to keep in touch with your friends. It's harder to start a family. It's harder to buy a house.

20:10It's harder to fall in love. It's harder to do everything. And what we're seeing is an inshittification of existence, to use Mr. Doctorow's phrase. Everything just, I don't want to be this much of a curmudgeon, but everything just kind of sucks. It's all terrible. It's miserable. And hardly anyone thinks it's going to get better. and this creates the kind of fertile conditions for a strong man to emerge one who arises and says that only he can fix things even if he spent four years proving how he could not and the problem for democrats and for institutions more broadly is that the all-encompassing nature of this milieu is kind of hard to solve it's hard to change the perception that everything's terrible when you're reminded of it when you're trying to do the most basic of tasks our phones are full of notifications trying to growth hack us into doing things that companies want our apps are full of microtransactions.

20:57Our websites are slower and harder to use with endless demands of our emails and our phone numbers and the need to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to someone who dared to consume a Washington Post article. And yes, I'm talking about the post, which I fucking pay for, despite the fact it logs me out all the time. Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely show us the things we want them to anymore, with executives dedicated to filling our feeds full of AI-generated slop, because despite being the customer, we're also the revenue mechanism. Our search engines do less as a means of making us use them more.

21:26Our dating apps have become vehicles of private equity to add a toll to falling in love. Our video games are constantly nagging us to give them more money. And despite it costing money and being attached to our account, we don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase. We're drowning in spam, both in our emails and our phones. And at this point in our lives, we've probably agreed to 3 million pages of privacy policies allowing companies to use our information as they see fit. We get one value transaction with every company. They get 11. They get 100. We really actually don't know because there's no legislation to tell us what they're fucking doing.

21:59And these are the issues that hit everything we do all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is our lives now. We wake up. We use our phone. We check our texts. Three spam calls. Two spam texts. We look at our bank balance. Two-factor authentication check. We read the news. A quarter of the page is blocked by an advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to hide the button to get rid of it. And then we log into Slack and feel a pang of anxieties, 15 different notifications appear in a way that is really not built for us to find what we need, just to let us know something happened.

22:31Modern existence is just engulfed in sludge. The institutions that exist are cut through it, seem to bounce between the ignorance of their masters and this misplaced duty to objectivity. Our mechanisms for exploring and enjoying the world are interfered with by powerful forces that are just basically left unchecked. Opening our devices is willfully subjecting us to attack after attack after attack from applications, websites, and devices that are built to make us do things for them rather than operate with dignity and freedom that much of the internet was actually founded upon. These millions of invisible acts of terror are too often left undiscussed because accepting the truth requires you to accept that most of the tech ecosystem is rotten and that billions of dollars are made harassing and punishing billions of people every single day of their lives through the devices that we're required to use in order to exist in the modern world.

23:22Most users suffer the consequences, and most of the media fails to account for them. And in turn, people walk around knowing something is wrong, but not knowing who to blame until somebody provides a convenient excuse, like immigrants, like the Democrats, like whatever fucking works because we can't actually call the people out, the corporations crushing our existence. Why wouldn't people crave change? Why wouldn't people be angry? Living in the current world absolutely fucking sucks sometimes. It's miserable. It's bereft of industry and filthy with manipulation. It's undignified. It's disrespectful.

23:57And it must be crushed if we want to escape this depressing goddamn world we've found ourselves in. Our media institutions are fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems, but it starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating them without fearing accusations of bias that, as I've said repeatedly, happen either way. The truth is that the media is more afraid of accusations of bias than they are of misleading their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope, and it may very well be one, there must be room to inject the writer's voice back into their work, and a willingness to call out bad actors as such, no matter how rich they are, no matter how big their products are, no matter how willing they are to bark and scream that things are unfair as they accumulate more power and money.

24:41We need context in our news. We need it. We need it now. We need opinion. We need voice. We need character. We need life. Because as long as we follow this bullshit objectivity path, we are screwed. And if you're in the tech industry and hearing this and saying, oh, the media's too critical of tech. You're flat fucking wrong. Kiss my asshole. Everything we're seeing happening right now is a direct result of a society that let technology and the ultra-rich run rampant, free of both the governmental guardrails that might have stopped them and the media ecosystem that might have actually held them in check.

25:13Our default position in interrogating the intentions and actions of the tech industry has become that they will work it out as they continually redefine what work it out means and turn it into make their products worse but more profitable. Covering Meta, Twitter, Google, OpenAI, and other huge tech companies as if the products they make are remarkable and perfect is disrespectful to the reader's intelligence and a disgusting abdication of responsibility as their products, even when they're functional, are significantly worse, more annoying, more frustrating, and more convoluted than ever. And that's before you get to the ones like Facebook and Instagram that are outright broken.