Monologue: Why We Need Tech Criticism More Than Ever

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Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

I think we will see a Twitch stream or a president, maybe within our lifetimes.

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Hello, and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

I'm Ed Zittra, I'm your host.

Better Offline.

As a reminder, you can buy Better Offline merchandise now.

You'll find a link to it in the episode notes.

You all seem to really like it.

It's cool stuff.

But I know some of you have also said recently recently that I've done too much AI stuff recently.

And I wanted to take a little time to explain why I've been doing so in part because I'm not going to change.

The generative AI boom is about far more than artificial intelligence or cloud storage or data centers or what part of Hawaii Mark Zuckerberg will buy next.

I believe this movement is symbolic of a greater rot in the tech industry and indeed in media criticism, both inside and outside of the tech media, and that the nature of criticism must indeed change to meet this moment.

Now, a few of the most consistent critiques in my work are mostly around my tone.

I'm a hater, I'm a cynic, I'm a skeptic, I'm too emotional, I've gone overboard, the local townspeople should throw tomatoes at me, I should be treated in the way of shrek and exiled from society, things like that.

But in all seriousness, it seems the only way my work is reliably critiqued is to suggest that my emotions invalidate my criticism somehow, and that saying fuck somehow weakens my arguments.

Basically, that giving a shit

is invalidating when it comes to criticizing something.

And I find that putrid, by the way, but it's how things are.

And I kind of get it.

Most financial tech criticism is expected to be dry and clinical, and any emotional content should be positive or at the very least optimistic.

And I do not believe this tone is sufficient for the seriousness of the matters at hand.

We are, as I have said repeatedly, several years into a hysterical illogical bubble, one launched off the back of two smaller yet no less hysterical bubbles, at times by the same people, some of them writing for the New York Times or The Verge.

We as a society have accepted the terms that the generative AI companies want us to.

That we must destroy the environment, that we must steal from millions of people, that we must burn billions of dollars, all in pursuit of a vague and specious outcome that will never really arrive.

This isn't to say that we've had much choice in said acceptance.

The media has repeatedly accepted and promoted these narratives, helped justify these costs, and presented ridiculous narratives as sensible ones.

The outcome has been a massive transfer of wealth upwards, both into the market capitalization of hyperscalers and into the pockets of Sam Altman and other founders pretending generative AI will will become some sort of conscious intelligence or the next hypergrowth market, regardless of whether of these things is possible.

The other outcome has been the rise of many new kinds of grifters.

The ether mollocks of the world that create scientific sounding yet specious reviews of AI models, the slop-filled AI newsletters with fake subscriber counts and the many, many AI influences that exist as extensions of AI companies' PR departments.

Yet the most worrying part has been the members of the media that have allowed this to happen.

This isn't to say anybody is, even Kevin Roos and Casey Newton are are included here.

I don't think anyone's corrupt, but the media is unprepared, unwilling, or unable to push back on the narratives.

The structures that hold up tech and business media are not built to truly explain or criticize what's happening in the tech industry or even the economy at large.

These structures are built not to ask, is this real or will this work, but when this works, what will it look like?

They're built not to question whether an industry is like real at all, but to assume that there are always risks in building anything and thus the most important part is discussing what the person in question wants to happen.

Media's desperation for objectivity regularly deprives the reader of the value of being objective because objectivity is being conflated with being passive.

True objective journalism, which is impossible by the way, would say that both that OpenAI raised a bunch of money and loses billions a year and that to continue doing business they'll have to raise unbelievable sums of money every year.

Instead, articles in OpenAI just print that they raised money and why they raised it or that their products do something.

No interest in finding out what that something is whether it's important and whether it will lead to any outcome probably because it won't the initial consequences of this passivity are that venture capitalists and a select few startup founders have become very very rich the big tech firms have had something new to hock to their customers and the access journalists have had a new thing to pretend they care about and also a fellow tech industry has had something to get excited about None of this money has trickled down to anybody other than the powerful, nor have any mass market productivity gains been realized, nor has society improved as a result.

The only things that appear to have changed is that these companies need more money and they don't even need to tell anybody why.

The media just assumes they need it to build powerful AI.

I think it's fair to say at this point that the generative AI boom hasn't done much of anything other than create new ways for software companies to sell software or access to models.

There are no killer apps, no major shifts in the way we live our lives outside of innovations in fraud and harms to our power grid, and whatever use cases there may be for large language models are minuscule in comparison to the way that AI is discussed in the media.

I am justifiably angry because because I watch these bubbles form again and again in exactly the same way.

At every single point, with the metaverse, with cryptocurrency, and now with generative AI, there have been obvious moments to say, yeah, I get that this is what you say will happen, but what's happening today doesn't suggest that it'll happen at all.

And every time, those moments have been missed.

And the media has opted instead to ask, but what if it was true?

When the media opts to trust whatever comes out of the mouth of a powerful person, the beneficiary is always, always the powerful person in question.

Yet a better world would be one where the Altmans and Amadeis have to actually justify themselves, show what the models can do, give realistic projections, know that they can't just say whatever and get quoted automatically, because this kind of accountability would make their current work, overstating their models' capabilities and running unsustainable and destructive businesses, impossible, or at least much more difficult.

A better tech industry is one where the products we hear about actually exist, where hype cycles are built based on execution and outcomes rather than whether something may or may not be in the future.

While there is always a place in the tech media to dream, to guess what might come next, to talk to people inventing things, to talk to researchers and stuff, I have no problem with that.

And it's fine to anticipate what the effects of these things could be.

So much of this industry has become about those dreams, to the point that innovation is far less relevant than whether you can convince enough people that something might happen.

Nevertheless, there is definitely something missing in Better Offline, and that's excitement.

The feedback I got from my last monologue around fitness and tech I liked was profound and I will be looking forward to doing more episodes like that, especially these monologues on the things that I use that I really enjoy or the cool stuff that tech is actually doing.

It's going to be a process to get there but I think you're really going to like what you hear when I start doing it.

Don't worry though, there's still so much rot economy bullshit to unpack, as you'll hear in tomorrow's episode.

Oh, Gecko, I just love being able to file a claim in under two minutes with the Geico app.

Could you sign it?

Sign what?

The app?

Sure.

Oh, it rubbed off the screen when I touched it.

Could you sign it again?

Anything to help, I suppose.

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Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Should I be telling this thing all about my loved life?

I think we will see a Twitch streamer president maybe within our lifetimes.

You can find Close All tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?

Yes,

it did.

But he was a charming man.

It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.

I often ask myself now, did I

know the true Jan at all?

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