What We're Fighting For

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2:28in the last episode i know i know we talked about something i talk about all the time the growing shittiness of tech and how the media is kind of playing into it and the fact that all of this is caused by the rot economy which is the growth at all costs mindset that means everything must grow revenue, engagement, time on app, everything, at all costs, at all times, and how, well, the things you change to make growth happen, they're pretty terrible. And they hit you everywhere. And they hit you in manifest ways, manifold ways, in ways that just fill you full of little poisons every day. And it's these little things that are mostly overlooked, mostly by the media.

3:04See, the modern tech clash narrative pushed by the media hasn't been focused on anything other than big, meaty problems, like Meta's Cambridge Analytica scandal, while ignoring the gradual destruction of the products we use every day. In the space of a decade, Google made its ads on search look near identical to regular search results, and only a few websites, like Search Engine Land, for example, seemed to take that and the other changes made to the algorithm of one of the single most important sources of information in the world with any kind of seriousness. The fact that I, a part-time blogger with a podcast that runs a PR firm during the day, was the one to uncover and discuss how the ads team made Google search worse for money nine months after the associated emails were made public, it's just a glaring example of the misalignment of the tech media with what actually affects people on a daily basis.

3:52But let me give you another example. NVIDIA, one of the most single-covered tech companies of the last year, has effectively lied about the launch of its RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards, doing something called a paper launch, where stores like Micro Center received as few as 233 RTX 5090 graphics cards nationwide. While Nvidia did warn of stock shortages, it's laughable to even call this a launch, and I'd argue that the tech media has, well, basically no interest in covering it, despite this being a very, very significant story about how Nvidia is misleading people about its consumer and prosumer graphics cards, which by the way make up billions of dollars of revenue and a large percentage of it at that, and it does not appear to be able to deliver them on time or in any kind of value or volume.

4:40These events hit millions of consumers in a tangible way. NVIDIA, despite all its financial success selling AI chips to companies like Microsoft and Amazon, appears to be spurning one of its core customer bases, the one it built its name on by by the way. And the response from the consumer tech media has been tepid. The Verge covered this, by the way. Tom's hardware has done it. Like, there are people covering it. And this is all despite the fact that PC gaming revenue is comparable in size to console gaming. It's $43.2 billion in 2024 compared to the$51.9 billion that console gaming brought in according to research from NewZoo.

5:14And PC gaming, by the way, is one of the only things that's growing right now. It's growing 4 % year over year compared to a 1 % contraction in console revenue. This shit's really important. But things are worse. Things are worse than I'm even saying. NVIDIA's 5080 graphics cards, well, they kind of suck, and they represent how NVIDIA is treating PC gamers in 2025, according to Paul's Hardware, a fantastic YouTube channel. And they skewered NVIDIA for slowly reducing the amount of performance gains you'll get out of mid-range graphics cards like the 5080 and the previous generations. And this is a cynical attempt to make it so that anyone looking for a real upgrade to their graphics card has to spend upwards of$2 ,000 in a 5090, a card that they can't find.

5:55And there's more, by the way. And I can't really speak to this fully as I'm not super into the hardware space, but I'll include a YouTube. Right now, there is a massive scandal going on that tech media really isn't jumping on. NVIDIA's 5090 graphics cards may have been poorly load balanced. Sounds technical, right? It means all the power's going into like two wires and literally melting cards. This may lead to a recall. This is significant. I don't see anything on the New York Times about it. Guess something else is happening. Guess they're busy. But anyway, this is significant. This is really significant.

6:31This is like Apple slowly over the course of years reducing the efficiency and performance of the regular iPhone in the hopes of juicing sales of the iPhone Pro. Yet the only people that are taking stories like these seriously appear to be video creators like Paul's Hardware, who I've mentioned, and Gamers Nexus. Stephen Burke, the fucking legend. Stephen, come on my show, please. If you know Stephen, email me at my web zone, ez at betteroffline.com. That's ez at betteroffline.com. Please, Stephen. By the way, these are not small channels. 1.5 million subscribers on Paul's Hardware, 2.4 million on Gamers Nexus.

7:05And time and time again, these guys, specifically, they've taken on real stories that affect real consumers, like Gaming PC Builder NZXT creating a PC rental program that actively conned consumers with rates worse than a payday loan company. And they act like Stephen and Paul, they protect consumers from active harm as the mainstream media chases their tails about whatever half-broken bullshit Sam Altman has farted out on their heads. NVIDIA, a company disgust by what it feels like every single business and tech out there, has a documented pattern of misleading and short-changing customers. Why is this not everywhere.

7:40Huh. It's almost as if the only reason that anyone's talking about NVIDIA is that there's a herd mentality in what stories are important to the modern media, rather than any kind of relationship to the effects that these companies might have on actual customers. The mainstream media, especially when it comes to technology, does not seem capable or willing to discuss the real, tangible, obvious problems with the modern tech ecosystem, instead choosing to attack things piecemeal or blandly reporting news with as little context as necessary and with as many company quotes as possible. Look, people are pissed off at the tech industry because the tech industry is actively pissing them off.

8:16They're getting less value from the products they pay for and they're paying more for them too and they're aware that the free products they use are getting worse as a means of making them more profitable. Stories about distrust in big tech continually fail to talk about the simplest most obvious problems. Facebook sucks, Instagram sucks, our apps suck microsoft team sucks zoom sucks google meet sucks it sucks they suck they're all like i'm not even being polemic here these are factual statements these products are worse they are worse everything feels like it's built to subtly fuck with us and this is a problem that affects billions of people one that's discussed so rarely that i am considered creative for writing a thousand words about the literal experience of using a shitty laptop as i did in my newsletter that'll never forgive them, which are turned into the invisible war criminals.

9:06You know how the process goes, folks. It's way more fun when I read it anyway. These problems are everywhere. They're everywhere, and they're real, meaningful stories, ones that are more important than Dario Amadei of Anthropic farting into a microphone about how in maybe two years AI will be smarter than humans. These fucking assholes just go and bloviate, and the media lines up like fucking idiots to go, oh, Mr. Amaday, tell me how smart you are. Fuck you. I'm referring to Amaday. I'm not telling the tech media to go fuck themselves. Regular people are not really, in my opinion, from my experience from talking to people, not pissed off at big tech for any complex or multifaceted series of events that made them pissed off.

9:50The shit they pay for sucks. The shit they use sucks. The shit they trade their data for sucks. The products are broken or in the process of actively breaking. And when consumers look to these companies, they're told, yeah, well, what if you had some generative AI? What do you think? Do you like it? What do you think? And the customer's like, I fucking hate that. Can I take it off? And they go, no. But let me give you another example. And this one for my listeners, the real Ed heads going back to the beginning, you're finally getting it. I'm finally going in on fucking Apple. The App Store is a complete mess.

10:25On loading it up, the first ad I received is for Truth Social, you know the Donald Trump social network, followed by popular iPhone apps, including Bumble, which is a microtransaction heavy dating app, Paramount +, Zoom Max, that's HBO Max, I don't know, Amazon Prime Video, and of course Tinder, another microtransaction heavy dating app, followed by another microtransaction heavy mobile gaming app, Madden NFL 25 Mobile Football, followed by another microtransaction heavy mobile game, Clash of Clans, followed by another microtransaction game, Archero, followed by helpful apps for every day, which included Strava, a fitness app that I use, Letterboxd, the social network for people to review movies, Storygraph, an app for tracking books you've read, Peanut, an app for mothers to connect with each other, and then some sort of app for discovering IRL plans near you called Pi and Partival, an app for planning parties, immediately followed by an ad for Apple's own party invite app that specifically competes with them.

11:21It'd be so cool if we had antitrust. Now, the next carousel is for 10 great dating apps, the first of which is OkCupid, a dating app with a 1 out of 5 star rating on Trustpilot, with the first review saying that, and I quote, everything is designed to force you into paying, and even when you do, you quickly realize it's not worth it. OkCupid is owned by the publicly traded Match Group, which owns three of the other apps on the list, Hinge, Tinder, and Plenty of Fish. And the reason I'm agonizingly breaking down these problems is because I believe the problems the modern tech industry are far simpler and far more pervasive than the media will face.

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12:37Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-iHeart to get started. That's 844-844-IHART. Jan Marselech 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 metres 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.

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14:29Apple's App Store, a trillion-dollar marketplace where Apple takes a 30 % of almost every buck a developer makes actively promotes and profits off of exploitative free-to-play mobile games that academics believe rob consumers of their right to self-determination and an online dating industry that has adopted these very same ideas to turn romance into its own kind of free-to-play game. I'm single, by the way. My single friends all experience this. These apps are insane. These apps are completely bonkers. They are asking you for money constantly. They very clearly hide the best matches behind paywalls this is what online dating is now it's a fucking gacha game it's a slot machine it's a mess it's absolutely abominable and you know who makes a shit ton of money off of that abominability mr timothy cook of apple the app store largely promotes apps and their associated features from public companies with billions or trillions of dollars in market capitalization.

15:28And much like Google Search, only functions to bring you results that are convenient for Apple. And they no longer highlight apps based on anything other than shadowy partnerships and profit incentives. No, I do not believe the App Store editorial group is going, huh, what if we advertise the literal apps that everyone has? The apps that people know about already. Or maybe they just want more microtransaction revenue. It's that. It's so obvious. And this is the way that tens if not hundreds of millions of people are introduced to software. And the software they're introduced used to is inherently exploitative.

15:58It's like if every Kroger store sold bread that cost an extra three dollars if you wanted to cut it into slices, or bacon that required you to subscribe to Bacon Plus if you kept it in the fridge for longer than two days. I'm not even being facetious, this is the actual scale of the harms being done against actual consumers by a company with a market capitalization of 3.5 trillion dollars. When somebody buys a new iPhone, they're not thinking like me or you or someone else deeply aware of the incentives behind these companies. They blindly, because nobody really explains this shit or takes it seriously in the media, download whatever apps they see promoted by Apple.

16:33Consumers trust Apple, and as a result trust the companies that Apple chooses to promote, at which point whatever malevolent mechanisms these companies use are more effective because consumers believe that Apple, a company with a multi-trillion dollar market cap, wouldn't allow nakedly exploitative apps on their phones. Except they do. They don't just let them in. They give them a comfy fucking chair to beat the shit out of your wallet. Apple could very easily use its unilateral control over the entire app store to prevent these companies from existing, or at least choose not to promote them. Instead, they choose to both insure and profit from their success by putting them in front of millions and millions of consumers every day.

17:11And I want to be explicit here. Apple could just not accept dating apps that use microtransactions. They could say, hey, this seems like it's just fucking with consumers. they could do the same with these mobile games that use manipulative psychological tricks to make you do these things and it's ridiculous it's ridiculous because they it's not that they just allow it it's not like this is just a we're being egalitarian we let these companies in we let everyone in and as long as they apply to our standards also what standards that's fine they're like yeah baby it's it's apple time join the apple wagon you want to be on the front of the app store fuck yeah.

17:50I hope you scammed someone. Give us that 30%, baby. While microtransactions aren't inherently evil, when unrestrained, they naturally lead to evil outcomes. As I've repeatedly said, modern dating apps effectively require users to buy both a monthly subscription and piecemeal items that make your message or profile more prominent in an app dominated by spam profiles. Mobile gaming, an industry that makes tens of billions of dollars of yearly revenue has become dominated by free-to-play games that require you to spend money to progress, using deceptive psychological techniques to push users into spending money in small amounts that naturally add up to much more than a AAA gaming title on a console or a computer.

18:30I hammer so hard and repetitively on these, because they make up the majority of the promoted content on Apple's App Store. Good lord. Good fucking lord. we would scream if a city was dominated by people just selling drugs at every corner if our streets were unsafe even if they're not unsafe republicans still go on tv and talk about how unsafe they are somehow this is okay though somehow this is okay despite this being a direct portal into people's lives and into people's wallets it's just disgusting it pisses me off and as i've said to be abundantly clear, Apple had and has the power to kill any of these industries or at the very least limit their harms.

19:12Apple controls every single thing that goes on the App Store and could very easily make dark patterns that manipulate consumers, which are, by the way, in the majority of subscription apps. You could just make them against the rules and harshly penalize the apps that use microtransactions. Apple could do this tomorrow. They could do it today. Apple could easily take a stand against these companies that combine microtransactions with loot boxes, which are essentially in-game content, but you don't know what you're buying ahead of time. You hit a button, money goes in, thing pops out. You could, they could get rid of that.

19:41And by the way, this is a way of introducing kids to gambling. What do you think? Kids go and use games like Fortnite, and they just fuck it. Does Fortnite have loot boxes? I'm 100 years old. Nevertheless, Roblox, another title on there, principally aimed at children with microtransactions. All of this is great. It's so good. I love watching this. This makes me happy. And one could argue that it's the companies themselves, not Apple, choosing to make these decisions. But at the scale at which Apple operates, they're effectively a kind of government, and any government regulation controls the kinds of products and services that can be offered to a consumer.

20:16But Apple's app store isn't like a regular government or a democracy. It's a kleptocracy, where sleazy companies like the Match Group, who, as I mentioned, they own Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, and OkCupid, and Supercell, who makes Clash of Clans, they can make Apple billions of dollars in app store fees by tricking and hurting consumers. Apple, through sheer scale, dictates exactly how the economics of apps and consumer purchasing at large, to an extent, operate. And it's their decisions that have allowed these poisonous flowers to bloom. This, I'd argue, is one of the largest-scale consumer harms in existence.

20:51There are hundreds of millions of people with iOS devices, and Apple has perpetuated and profited off of economics that are actively harmful, manipulative, and cruel, and will continue to do so unless meaningful regulation or media pressure makes them do otherwise. The latter would require the media to actually discuss this problem. I can find no major media outlet that's run anything even close to an evaluation of the state of the modern app store, nor can I find any condemnation of the very obvious harms perpetuated by Apple or Google with their app stores outside of the lawsuit between Epic and Apple, which hasn't so much been about the harms themselves, but the extent to which Apple has profited off of them and stopped other people from profiting themselves.

21:32Similarly, there's little coverage of the destruction of Google search or the horrifying state of Instagram and Facebook. While outlets have had dalliances and little flirtations with the collapse of search, Charlie Walser at The Atlantic was earlier than most, myself included, these are usually one and done features, a momentary hmm in the slop of breaking news and hot takes. If these stories even happen at all, you might argue that one cannot simply write these stories again and again, to which I say, skill issue. The destruction of the products at the core of society, the fabric of society, is real important.

22:05It should be in the news constantly. And like I said, they talk about crime all the time in modern metropolitan areas. This is a crime. It's not illegal, but I consider it criminal in the Zitron justice system I will now be building. And please, on the Reddit, let me know other things that need to be in the Zitron justice system. Companies like Google, Meta, and Apple have been allowed to expand their wealth and influence to the point that they're effectively nation-states, and I believe they should be reported on as such. The manifold ways in which Mark Zuckerberg has manipulated Facebook's users as a means to express growth to the public markets is a perpetual act of abuse, globally perpetuated.

22:44Yet it remains relatively undiscussed because the media refuses to discuss technology in a way that actually affects people. The same goes for Apple's App Store and the same goes for Google Search. And shit, I'd argue most of them on the internet. How is it not a bigger story that the mobile browsing experience on most websites ranges from awful to impossible to use because your browser crashed? And I think this is the thing that really confuses me. How the fuck is this not being written about? You see it anytime you use your phone, it's everywhere, always, all the time. There's so many examples, yet tech coverage is always about news or how to do something on your computer or phone that isn't obvious without any acknowledgement that the reason that that piece has to exist, the reason that something isn't obvious, is because user interface design is terrible.

23:28They don't care anymore. And also you want your website to rank high on Google search. And I'd argue that regular people are experiencing these pains at scale and they're so frustrated because they know beneath the layers of abstraction, of warring incentives and abusive UI choices, there's something they want or something they need. And I'm not just angry at Mark Zuckerberg for turning Facebook into an actively harmful product. I'm angry that he's done so in a way that took away something that made the internet magical, in the same way that I despise Prabhagar Raghavan and Sundar Pesha for doing the same with Google Search.

24:00And I'm not just angry at one of the many different quarter-page-sized ads that block an article I want to read. I'm angry that one of the coolest things on the internet, access to varied media sources on the toilet, is literally obfuscated by the demands of growth.

24:24Parking 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. 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. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.