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On his day At his job, Ed Zitron runs a public relations company called EZPR. This may surprise anyone who knows Zitron from his podcast, social media or newsletter in which he writes two-fisted things like “Sam Altman is full of shit” and “Mark Zuckerberg is a corrupt ogre.” Flax, as a rule, tends not to talk that way. Flax sends initial, direct emails to media outlets that, on rare occasions, speak out in this way. Flax wants to reach out to the base, get on the phone, and explain a few things about the claim that their CEO is a “jerk.”
“That’s really one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic,” Zitron was saying over a burger on a gorgeous Manhattan afternoon in September. “I work with founders all the time. And I’m a founder myself, I guess — I don’t like that title. But when you’re someone who has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business, and you see these bastards burning through $5 or $10 billion a year — and everyone celebrates them? Hurtful“.
We were talking about whether any of Zitron’s rants about the AI industry cost him business on the PR side of the ledger. He said no. There was one client who felt that Zitron was a bit mean to Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the most senior person ever, in regards to Zitron. The client said that starting a company is difficult. “I said, ‘I appreciate the comment, but this is not about you,’” Zitron told me. “His company is burning through billions of dollars. He’s a bad businessman.”
It was, in its entirety, a kind of Ed Zitron propaganda, set in the key of personal insult, populism in the manner of a small-business owner eyeing extravagance that goes unpunished in big industry. (Would these CEOs be less aggressive, if their companies were? to prepare Billions of dollars?) He’s built himself an unlikely little empire out of snarky comments like this. His weekly podcast, Best offlineabout “the technology industry’s influence and manipulation of society,” ranked 20th on Spotify’s Top 20 among tech shows, and its newsletter, Ed Zitron Where’s your Edgrew to north of 80,000 subscribers. Ed Zitron’s media experience also includes a loose Bluesky account, a football podcast, some occasional baseball writing, a lot of debate with r/BetterOffline users, and a book due out next year about, as he puts it, “why everything stopped working.” In other media, it has become a primary source of objection to artificial intelligence. When I was entertained What’s next: TBD Podcast or WNYC On the media They needed someone to talk about bursting the AI bubble, so they called Zitron. It wasn’t just the scale of production that put him on the map; It’s the underdog tactic he uses to criticize media figures and industry giants alike.
Not long ago, volume and style came together to produce the quintessential piece of Zitron media: an article in his newsletter titled “How to Argue with an Augmented AI.” It was 15,000 words long.
Heads abound now. Nearly 200 people purchased a $24 Better Offline challenge coin, engraved with what became Zitron’s slogan: “Never forgive them for what they did to the computer.” I’ve seen someone put Ed’s words on a motivational poster, working on a vague register of sarcasm. One Threads user described her “parasocial crush on a tech critic and writer” who was unnamed but clearly Zitron. “I just want him to take me to dinner, gently but firmly take me by the hand, and tell me in his awkward, confused British accent to get rid of my damn phone,” she sighed. “That would fix me. I’m sure of it.” (As one tech journalist who saw the Threads post told me: “If you get to the point where your writing makes people lust after you, you’re doing something either very right or very wrong.”)
Functionally, the Zitron meets the demand for equal and opposite sound to counter the inevitable AI noise. Critics of AI approach it from any number of angles. There are those who fear that this industry may be the beginning of some kind of world-destroying superintelligence; There are those who deny this and do not believe that artificial intelligence will replace human decision-makers. Zitron is up for something different. What he offers people, in a time of unethical reinforcement and amid disgust with the tech industry, is a moral language to hate generative AI. “He approaches the subject like a journalist, because he’s hungry for information, but he’s not constrained by institutions,” says Allison Morrow, a CNN business correspondent and frequent guest on CNN. Best offline. “Most journalists don’t want to encourage the demise of an industry. The organizations we work for don’t want to be involved in that kind of task.”