Tech Used to Be Bleeding Edge, Now it’s Just Bleeding
CYBER
VICE
4 • 645 Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2024
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ten years ago, Big Tech reached a peak. Facebook had wormed its way into the lives of billions of people. The mainstream news covered iPhones releases like they were Taylor Swift concerts. Elon Musk was promising to colonize Mars and fill the streets with self-driving cars. In 2024, the wheels have come off all these dreams. Musk has filled the sky with satellites, but no colonists, and constantly fights people on X. Self-driving cars are killing people. Apple has released a $3,500 VR headset that’s been met with middling reviews. And Facebook’s only recent innovation is eating its own tail to churn out massive profits.
How did it come to this? This week on Cyber, PR provocateur and tech critic Ed Zitron stops by to tell us about everything he saw at the Consumer Electronics Show, the problem with most tech journalism, and why we all turned against Big Tech. He’ll explore these topics more in depth on his new podcast, Better Offline, which launches later this month.
Stories discussed in this episode:
How Tech Outstayed Its Welcome
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | TAM! It's got the code. It's going to launch. |
| 0:10.7 | It's a unit system. I know this. |
| 0:15.1 | It's how all the files are the whole park. It tells her everything. |
| 0:19.0 | Sir, he's uploading the virus. |
| 0:21.8 | The Eagle One, the package is being delivered. |
| 0:26.8 | So, Ed, thank you for coming onto the show. |
| 0:29.7 | Can you tell people who you are, who this lovely voice is, and what your new project is? |
| 0:35.1 | So I'm Ed Zittron. |
| 0:36.4 | I run a PR film called EasyPr. I also write the Where's Your |
| 0:39.2 | At Newsletter? And I have an upcoming show with IHartRadio and Cool Zone Media, the |
| 0:44.9 | better offline podcast, this weekly tech show. |
| 0:47.9 | And what is the, what's the theme of the weekly tech show other than we shouldn't be |
| 0:51.8 | online at all, apparently? |
| 0:53.7 | Well, something I've |
| 0:56.0 | noticed with a lot of tech coverage and principally tech podcasts is that many of them don't seem |
| 1:01.5 | to actually cover anything from an informed perspective. It's either two guys limply discussing |
| 1:06.5 | something in a way that somehow makes you know less by the end of it or it's one extremely |
| 1:15.0 | pallid man mumbling out questions forgetting them mid-sentence and then asking them for a second |
| 1:21.4 | time in a broken manner not talking about anyone specifically especially not someone called lex |
| 1:26.0 | and the problem i've also found with a lot of |
| 1:30.0 | tech coverage in general, I've seen this from both sides, is that I actually really believe that |
| 1:35.9 | the format of objective journalism, which is going to get me in some trouble, I realize saying it, |
... |
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