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34 episodes
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Better Offline Cool Zone Media
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- Technology
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4.7 • 20 Ratings
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Better Offline is a weekly show exploring the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society - and interrogating the growth-at-all-costs future that tech’s elite wants to build.
Combining narrative-form storytelling, one-on-one interviews and panel-based discussions, Better Offline cuts through the buzzwords and obfuscation of the tech industry, investigating and evaluating the schemes and scams of everyone from cryptocurrency scumbags to the greediest of the venture capital elite. Tech industry veteran Ed Zitron and a dynamic coterie of guests will help listeners understand the who, how and why of how tech’s most powerful players are changing the world - for better or for worse.
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Rot Economics with MIT's Daron Acemoglu
In this episode, Ed Zitron sits down with famed MIT economist Daron Acemoglu to talk about the economics of the tech ecosystem, the ridiculousness of generative AI's promises, and the realities of tech's growth-at-all-costs ecosystem.
Newsletter: wheresyoured.at
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron;
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
CrowdStruck
On Friday July 19, millions of Windows PCs entered a doom-loop that rendered them non-functional thanks to an update sent by a little-known company called CrowdStrike - and in this emergency Better Offline dispatch, Ed Zitron walks you through exactly what happened, why it's so bad, and why both CrowdStrike and Microsoft executives should face criminal prosecution for such a catastrophic managerial failure. These are the dark consequences of the growth-at-all-costs movement.
Newsletter: wheresyoured.at
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
LINKS: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
The Academics That Think ChatGPT Is BS
In a paper released earlier this year, three academics from the University of Glasgow classified ChatGPT's outputs not as "lies," but as "BS" - as defined by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in "on BS" (and yes I'm censoring that) - and created one of the most enjoyable and prescient papers ever written. In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by academics Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater in a free-wheeling conversation about ChatGPT's mediocrity - and how it's not built to represent the world at all.
LINKS:
Paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
Michael Townsen Hicks: https://www.townsenhicks.com/
Joe Slater: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/joeslater/
Newsletter: wheresyoured.at
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
Pop Culture
When the money gets nervous, so should you. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through a remarkable report from global investment bank Goldman Sachs where multiple economists call BS on the AI movement - and why it's time for the rest of the world to follow suit.
LINKS: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
Newsletter: wheresyoured.at
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline
Discord chat.wheresyoured.at
Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
How Shareholders Are Destroying The Tech Industry
The shareholder supremacy has eaten the tech industry, driving private and public companies to chase unprofitable, unsustainable ideas like generative AI as a means of expressing eternal growth to the markets. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how this destructive mindset has created an entirely new kind of manager - one disconnected from labor and creation - and how the dark hand of shareholder supremacy is behind everything strange and bad in tech in the last few years
LINKS: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
Newsletter: wheresyoured.at
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline
Discord chat.wheresyoured.at
Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
The Shareholder Supremacy
In this episode, Ed Zitron tracks the history of the growth-at-all-costs rot economy to a court case in 1916 that established the Shareholder Supremacy, and set the terms for General Electric's Jack Welch to fundamentally break capitalism, an era where companies moved away from building lasting, sustainable companies that created things and instead began focusing on pleasing shareholders - and how it leads to today's terrible tech companies and leaders.
LINKS: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
Newsletter: wheresyoured.at
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline
Discord chat.wheresyoured.at
Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Customer Reviews
An important and timely podcast
This bleakly entertaining podcast explains in clear terms why the tech we all have to use in every aspect of our daily lives keeps getting worse, and lays out the broader implications of this for society. Zitron is a well-informed, eloquent and personable host, and his heartfelt indignation at the industry’s grifts, greed and squandered opportunities is palpable. Maintain the rage, Ed! I’ll be listening.
Too angry.
Too angry and ranty for me.
I get it, Ed is angry about the current state of the Internet and tech. I am too. It's perfectly reasonable to be angry at the destruction of something we love and have come to rely on for so many things. But there's only so much of that anger I can take when expressed in a 45 minute podcast. It just gets exhausting listening to a man angrily rant for so long and I honestly think it undermines the message and will potentially alienate listeners who might not agree with Ed and who otherwise might have been convinced by a calmer, more matter-of-fact delivery.
I feel like this anger can still be expressed without coming across as an extended beligerant rant, and I would be happy to return to this podcast if it becomes a little more relaxed in the future.
I wish Ed all the best with the podcast. It is highlighting very important issues, it's just not for me.
Makes you think…
Ed really makes you think about the world that we are buying into, or perhaps the top 1% of the world that is buying us. There are plenty of “stop the world, I want to get off” revelations in the content, even for people who are in this space and are already aware of the concerns of the modern digital economy. Enjoy, if it doesn’t make you too depressed in the process!