Better Offline with Ed Zitron

I started listening to Better Offline pretty soon after it started. I had tried Chat GPT (3.5-Turbo) once not too long ago and been singularly unimpressed, been taken in by the talk about AI's inherant energy inefficiency and "huge" global climate impact, and was mad about it, so I was looking for good criticisms of the whole bubble, and BO seemed like just the thing.

I was initially a little bit put off by the title — it seemed to indicate a sort of reactionary anti-technologism (colloquially known as Luddism, but which I'm not calling that because people are trying to reclaim that label and will get pedantic if I "misuse" it) that I'm not a fan of — but I pushed down my concerns and started listening.

At first, I enjoyed the podcast well enough, but then I began to notice a pattern. Look at its episode history: each episode is a long, winding rant talking about the same general ideas and talking points, with skewed data and a small rotating cast of characters.

Eventually, I began to see the deeper flaws that led to that endlessly repetitive pattern. Essentially: transcendental miserablism:

Admit that capitalism will outperform its competitors under almost any imaginable circumstances, while turning that very admission into a new kind of curse (“we never wanted growth anyway, it just spells alienation, besides, haven’t you heard that the polar bears are drowning …?”). […] denunciation of commercialized change, capitalistic variety and innovation has been totalized as difference without essential difference, just more of the same senseless dissimilarity […] Since time is the source of our distress […] how can any kind of evolution be expected to save us? Thus Transcendental Miserablism constitutes itself as an impregnable mode of negation.

For the Transcendental Miserablist, ‘Capitalism’ is […] unmasked by the Gnostic visionary as loss, decrepitude and death [e.g. Zitron's "The Rot Economy" thesis] […]

Hence the Transcendental Miserablist syllogism: Time is on the side of capitalism, capitalism is everything that makes me sad, so time must be evil.

The polar bears are drowning, and there’s nothing at all we can do about it.

Capitalism is still accelerating, even though it has already realized novelties beyond any previous human imagining. […] The Transcendental Miserablist has an inalienable right to be bored, of course. Call this new? It’s still nothing but change.

What Transcendental Miserablism has no right to is the pretence of a positive thesis.

The first thing is that Ed Zitron claims to believe that positive technological change, development, and growth, are possible — that technology is not purely evil. He even claims that he wants that to happen, and he's making this podcast because he wants things to get better. But he never discusses positive developments, or even what he imagines positive developments might be, let alone how to get there. He exclusively talks about each new disaster, bubble, and snafu that happens, in the most cynical and content-free terms possible. Sometimes you might feel like you're learning, but generally, you're not. More than that, his only vision for what positive technology might be is essentially just whatever existed in the 1990s or early 2000s. Combine these two things and it's clear that he only says he's not against technological change, just the current technology industry, so that he doesn't feel cognitive dissonance for liking the things that were around when he was born, irrespective of whether they also had massively unethical aspects, bubbles, or seemed useless at first, or had negative social effects, in ways he'd cynically criticize if they came to exist now. This is a man who is fundamentally reactionary.

This is, I think, why he quickly runs out of things to say. There's only so many times you can repeat the same points about how every new development is completely terrible, completely empty, "nothing but change," simply because it came with capitalism. You only have something new and interesting to say if you're actually building and experimenting with the new, the outside; if you actually have a vision for the future; if you're actually willing to at least understand, engage with, and experience the new things that are happening in the world, even as you critique them; otherwise your critiques themselves even will be boring. And it seems like people on his side of the aisle so to speak don't really have that.

This applies more generally to the podcast, too. It has no ideas. It has no program, it creates nothing, it exists purely to tear down in the same repetitive, reactionary way.

More than that, though, I think the thing that grated on me the most is that there's this sort of sense of smug superiority in the miserableism that Ed purveys. He claims to be upset that things are like this, to be disappointed and sad. I'm not a mind-reader, but I think there's more to it than that. While I don't think he's lying, I think he is omitting — or perhaps not even aware of — the deeper psychological motor that moves him and his podcast forward: that sadness and dissapointment is transformed in him almost immediately into cynicism and anger, as he readily admits, and he loves being cynical and angry, because it gives him a sense of being right, better, smarter — smugly superior in morality and correctness. Not just that, but I think he resents success, and in some sense his moral world is shaped around that. It makes sense to resent those who succeed at things you think are wrong, but that seems to have become the whole of his motivation, at least within the confines of his main podcast. Which is why every single episode just evolves into a long incoherent rant.

I think the moral superiority thing stretches farther though, and has bigger ramifications beyond just how unpleasant it is to listen to unless you, also, enjoy being angry and cynical, and agree with him perfectly. I think, once he has assigned a negative moral valence to something, he can't admit that there might be any more complexity to it. It has to be completely empty, unprofitable, and useless — a total net negative, and therefore something that must be removed from existence.

This is why, for instance, his haters guide to the AI bubble completely ignores like half of the story: firstly, that AI inference is actually very profitable if you're paying per token, which is pretty common, and that paying per token — as long as you have prompt caching — is also very cheap. Secondly, that — although this isn't morally good and I'd rather it didn't happen — there are plenty of ways to monetize users that aren't paying subscribers to AI services, such as ads, and data collection, and affiliate links, that would be perfect for, for instance, ChatGPT, because it has one of the biggest and fastest-growing user bases of any productivity app in history. To reiterate: I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing, or that I'd like it if AI companies did it, but because he thinks AI is bad and desperately wants it to fail, he just dismisses it entirely as an inevitable failure, ignoring the ways it could actually work — which, ironically, makes his outlook more positive than it should be!

And that's the final conclusion: not only is he a gratingly, smugly cynical reactionary that repeats himself constantly, at least in Better Offline — he's one who is so blinded by his reactionary cynicism that he can't even see the wider cynicism and warn people about it!