34 episodes
Better Offline Cool Zone Media
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- Technology
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.
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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.