20 episodes
Better Offline Cool Zone Media
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- Technology
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4.6 • 19 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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AI Is Breaking Google
On May 14th 2024, Google introduced their Search Generative Experience, a service that uses hallucination-prone artificial intelligence to generate answers to queries rather than just presenting links, all so that they could Wall Street that they're innovative and future-forward. The result is an even-more-broken search experience, and in this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through the rotten state of Google, and speaks with Lily Ray, a 15-year veteran of the search engine optimization industry, about how Google abandoned the web.
LINKS:
Lily Ray: https://lilyray.nyc/ https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc
The Verge's Interview With Sundar Pichai: https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interview
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
We're Watching Facebook Die
For three years, Facebook's monthly active users have been declining dramatically, with Facebook.com losing 397 million unique monthly visitors since May 2021. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how Mark Zuckerberg's abominable growth-at-all-costs mindset has turned Facebook into a dystopia of AI-generated slop, dangerous misinformation and outright pornography, all as a result of Zuckerberg's intentionally harmful approach to social media.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
How Mark Zuckerberg Deliberately Made Facebook Worse
In the last decade, Mark Zuckerberg and his internal growth team have repeatedly and intentionally made Facebook and Instagram harder and more dangerous to use in the pursuit of perpetual growth, and in this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through multiple horrifying insider stories about Facebook's disgusting approach to user happiness.
LINK for documents: https://www.wheresyoured.at/killingfacebook/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
OpenAI's Video Generating AI Is Dead On Arrival
Earlier in the year, OpenAI debuted Sora, an AI that can generate videos that almost look realistic. In this episode, Ed walks through why generating video with AI is a near-impossible task, and speaks with Walter Woodman of Shy Kids, who made a movie called "Air Head" using the tool. LINKS: Shy Kids' Air Head - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4wJ4WeJrz4 Mira Murati Interview with Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/video/series/joanna-stern-personal-technology/openai-made-me-crazy-videosthen-the-cto-answered-most-of-my-questions/C2188768-D570-4456-8574-9941D4F9D7E2
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
Enron Musk Ft. Ed Niedermeyer
On April 26 2024, the NHTSA, the government body responsible for keeping roads safe, found Tesla's Autopilot and Full-Self-Driving software created a "critical safety gap" with drivers, killing and injuring people in the process, in the very same week that Elon Musk fired most of Tesla's team behind their Supercharger electric vehicle charging moment. Ed Zitron brings on E.W. Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, to explain exactly what the hell is going on.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
The Cult of Failing Upwards
Ed Zitron walks you through how career manager Adam Mosseri pushed out Instagram's original founders, turning it into an ultra-profitable app that barely works, and how Sam Altman, the so-called hero of the AI boom, is a lobbyist dressed as a technologist best-known for being an absent, self-obsessed demagogue.
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!
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