Monologue: Tech Skepticism Is Going Mainstream

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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.

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

I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

Before I go any further, if you ever want to reach out to me with information, contact me on signal, ezitron.76.

That's EZ or Z for the Canadians and UK people out there.

I T R O N.

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Tell me all your secrets.

I'd love to know them.

Anyway, this week I wanted to talk about the stuff that gets me through doing this show every week and start with the point that I was told when I was told I should do monologues as to really make them sometimes just kind of a rant about how I'm feeling.

So for once, you're actually going to get one of those rather than something I pre-prepare all neatly and nicely.

And if it's a bit self-indulgent, well, you know what?

What do you think you're getting with this podcast?

I'm a dramatic creature and I love it.

Anyway, today's really about what keeps me going through the grind and what I think this work can mean long term.

I realize I'm literally, by the way, a podcaster talking about the computer and that there are people with significantly harder jobs.

I'm not trying to be too dramatic, but...

This shit does kind of run you down a bit, if only because a large part of my work comes down to explaining at length why so many people are wrong about something in a way that may threaten our entire economy.

And a lot of them are doing it and it's quite strange.

I know some of you are going to say that this is Brandollini's Law, which talks about how disproving misinformation tends to require far more effort than creating it.

But this is different because we live in a time where our markets have become part of a death cult of short-terminism, where nothing bad ever happens until everything bad happens at once.

Yet, writing about this on some level is therapeutic.

It sounds a little deranged, but in writing about 45,000 words in the past two months for both the newsletter and the podcast, I've honed my arguments arguments and really gotten to a point where I'm finally happy with them.

Since build, I started building them in April 2024.

Real Ed Heads out there will remember the two-part episode I did about whether we'd hit PKI where I was on steroids because I got strep throat.

And I believe I threatened the computer itself.

And I think I said if I could ever find a way to give the computer strep throat, I'd do it.

I maintain that threat.

Anyway, the upcoming three-parter, which I'll record this weekend and it will go out next week, is my guide to arguing with AI boosters.

And it's allowed me to process my

kind of potent frustrations with their counterintuitive, thinly sourced, yet loudly crowed pseudo-arguments.

And also the kind of gaslighty nature of them.

And at a time when very little else feels stable, it feels nice to take the argument to people that have built media presences or small fortunes off of misleading people about what large language models are capable of.

And if I could say large language model correctly, that point would feel a lot better, but I'm keeping it.

I really do find this all quite reprehensible.

How they emphatically and aggressively manipulate people into falling in line with the narrative that AI was the future, and that what we're seeing today is just a taste of the power rather than being obviously the result of diminishing returns and nothing ever really happening.

And I genuinely feel moral outrage seeing these arguments weaponized at scale.

I just don't like people being lied to.

I don't like having skeptics treated with disdain, their works considered dangerous because they refuse to immediately ingest Clammy Sam Altman's latest info slot.

I do not like it when people are being told again and again and again to ignore their eyes and their ears about what AI can do and about whether ChatGPT is really that amazing.

And I do not like that so much data center sprawl has been created, so many billions have been burned, so many environs poisoned, and works stolen so that the most expensive software of all time can propagate until it exhausts a few hundred billion dollars of venture capital and private credit dollars.

And it feels good to have my work reach a certain scale and got there from telling the truth and doing so in an emotionally honest way.

I mean, who the fuck knows what you actually think of me, but at least I'm genuine in doing this.

I'm sit.

It's like 11:10 at night because this was the only time I could really get this out.

Not even the effort, just the emotion needed to be there.

Anyway, my ranting aside, it feels good to read headline after headline that we're actually in an AI bubble, because it means that on some level, the work I and people like me,

other skeptics are doing, even directly, is bringing an end to this abominable waste.

I do, however, believe something is growing out of this and out of these headlines and out of my work, and that's the willingness of the media to accept skepticism, to actually give space for it, and to more than just humor, but actually begin engaging with these arguments themselves.

Last week's relatively despondent monologue was more a result of my exhaustion at the end of that two-month 45,000 word fest.

But the truth is that I have been on television four times in the last week and a half, done three different interviews, and I'm getting substantially more space to explain my arguments in detail.

It's not me boasting.

This is a good thing for everyone.

This means that skepticism can truly be mainstream.

And there genuinely is this shift in the mainstream.

And this is one that opens the door to an entire legion of people to do this kind of meaningful, deep, emotional, and thorough analysis.

If my ideas can be mainstreamed, so can yours.

You just have to be willing to keep consistent and unrelenting in your beliefs and really do a thorough job.

Actually, really look at things in the cold, harsh light of day.

Be willing to be skeptical, but not brash with your skepticism and actually focus your energy on finding the truth, even if that truth isn't great.

If I'm completely honest, the premium newsletter this week, it started with me believing i had a huge scoop by the end of it i realized i didn't i still found something interesting to do because in the process of chasing this down i learned a lot about gpus yeah but anyway

the idea that my ideas are mainstreaming is a huge deal because it means more people are willing to consider that perhaps tech and business leaders might i don't know be full of shit And while this is not a victory lap of any sort, I'm not taking one of those until it's time.

And that will be when OpenAI or Anthropic finally shuts down.

But the true victory here is that you have big, serious publications writing stories about things based on my work.

The Wall Street Journal had a piece by Christopher Mims, and yes, I did inspire it, he said it on Blue Sky, you can look, talking about the cost of inference increasing.

This is a huge deal.

This is a major publication being willing to talk about serious, skeptical ideas that question the narrative that the entire market is chasing.

And Christopher Mims said, he also did that great piece on data center center sprawl and the cost and the capex.

He cited Paul Khodrovsky.

I'll get to that in a future podcast.

But nevertheless, these ideas are breaking through to the mainstream and narratives can be broken.

Ideas can be picked up and mainstreamed and suddenly the world is willing to consider true skepticism.

An increased presence of tech and business skepticism in the mainstream will be a net benefit to society, and it's an opportunity to hold companies accountable for the products and problems they create.

I also want to be clear that I am not the first to do this.

Alison Morrow at CNN has been leading tech skeptics since 2021 when she was one of the few to call bullshit on the metaverse, by the way.

But the level of mainstream interest I'm seeing in my work suggests that the world is finally ready to take this more big time, if I'm honest, to make this a more common thing you hear of, rather than this effusive dumb shit clapping at anything Sam Altman says.

And I realize it seems unrealistic, but with enough public pressure, with a fundamental shift in how we cover business and technology, we can affect true change.

I can't promise we'll change everything overnight, or that we'll stop every calamitous waste of money, or calatamus, as I was about to say.

But if we make it harder to do this financially wasteful bullshit quietly, we'll make it harder to do it again and again.

And it starts with accountability once the AI bubble bursts, which started four years ago for me when I started covering the bullshit of the metaverse.

Financial crises have never been covered in this detail by the media, or at least not so widely.

And though I believe the collapse of AI will be destructive for the tech industry and our markets, I think that for the first time, I and others have catalogued the exact destructive decisions and their consequences on multiple different levels.

To fully cover the AI boom does not require you just to cover finances.

It doesn't require you just to cover the businesses.

You have to deeply and meaningfully understand the people behind it.

Fucking Casey Newton suggested I don't do that.

This Friday, I'm talking with an actual software developer about a blog he wrote a guy called Colton, he's fantastic, and about how the whole myth of the 10x engineer doesn't really exist with AI.

Talking to these people is necessary because this isn't just a movement that grew from financial misdeeds, but it grew from a tech industry that's kind of disconnected from reality.

Breaking those illusions is necessary, and it's how we stop these things happening again.

The great financial crisis happened in a much less connected media environment with far fewer means of distribution for independent critics.

The mainstream media opening their arms to business and tech skepticism is an important opportunity to explain why this happened, how the market became illogical and what means we used to manipulate the media into telling that story.

Mainstreaming an education of how narratives are built allows people to pull apart future narratives.

Teaching people to be skeptical of companies selling things is a good thing and one that empowers people to make better decisions with their lives.

Now I should be clear, tech and business skepticism is not new.

There have been people doing doing it for 20 goddamn years.

What is new is the mainstream.

Making this mainstream, making financial skepticism mainstream can change the world.

And it can make the goddamn internet better.

It can fix the tech industry at a time when I don't think the tech industry has been more shitty.

And I truly love technology.

And it's brought me love, joy, happiness, community, and success.

And very little about what the current tech industry is focused upon feels like it's done in pursuit of of any of those things.

In fact, I don't even know what the current tech industry is focused on.

There are companies doing interesting things.

I like Framework.

I like Anchor.

I like seeing things that are truly changing the world.

And changing the world doesn't need to be this magical, ridiculous thing.

It can just be making the world a bit more fun and interesting.

And I don't see anyone in big tech doing that.

And I don't think 33% of startup funding going to AI is actually in pursuit of making anyone's lives better, anyone more efficient, making humans better, or even if I'm fucking honest, replacing humans.

I don't think anyone knows what they're doing, and I think where there are could be exceptions or on the fringes in really deep niche cases, I don't know, but I think the majority of generative AI is kind of nihilistic.

It's growth for growth's sake, and it's the real detritus of the rot economy.

And I think a collapse is inevitable.

I hope it isn't as bad as it could be.

But I think it's the inevitable consequence of taking software and hardware out of the hands of people that actually use it to do shit and putting it in the hands of management consultants like Satchy Nadella.

These companies cannot be swayed by regulation.

The CEOs are too rich.

Their businesses are too entrenched.

And thus the info poison we must use is educating as many people as possible in how to be skeptical of big tech's hype cycles.

And knowing the the names of people like Satchinadella and Mustava Suleiman at Microsoft, the people burning billions of dollars for no goddamn reason, or Clammy Sam Altman, mocking them, pointing at them, calling them what they are, that changes the world.

That makes things better.

And I'm touched by the amount of emails I get from you.

I'm genuinely blessed.

I know how hokey that sounds.

Whatever.

You know me.

I'm a dramatic fellow.

But I hear from so many of you that this is what you want.

That you want a better tech industry, but you also want people to be more skeptical of this one.

And I couldn't agree more.

We can have a better world.

I don't know how quickly we will.

There are times when it doesn't feel possible, but

I actually think it is.

Anyway, this monologue has gone on way too long.

Enjoy the three-part next week.

How to argue with an AI booster.

It's based on the newsletter.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

Shoot me an email, go on the subreddit, DM me on on blue sky or throw me a slub on goot thanks as ever for giving me your time

be honest how many tabs do you have open right now too many sounds like you need close all tabs from kqed where i morgan sung doom scroll so you don't have to Every week, we scour the internet to bring you deep dives that explain how the digital world connects and divides us all.

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