This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

CoolZone Media.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron. in the next two episodes i'm going to walk you through a theory i have about how the tech

industry and capitalism at large became the playground of asshole do-nothing management dictators

that see human beings as assets and the customer as kind of an annoying

diversion from growth. But before I go any further, please check the episode details of this

for a URL that has sources for everything that I'm talking about in this and future episodes.

I want you all to be able to follow along with everything I'm saying. Don't take my word for it,

take the many, many links that I've included. It's important that you're just as informed as I am here.

But now to the episode, and I promise you, once we're done with this two-parter, everything

that's happening will make a little bit more sense. Even though it all feels just chaotic

and offensively stupid, disconnected from reality.

In many ways, I've been working on this episode and its follow-up for years, watching these

trends, getting steadily more pissed off, as you've probably heard, unable to see the big picture

because I've been picking up things as I go. Even since 2020 when I started writing my newsletter, there was something going on that

I just couldn't quite get.

It's been really hard to understand how companies like Meta can run terrible companies

with decaying services that are also somehow wildly profitable, or how Meta, Microsoft,

and Google keep proliferating this

unprofitable, unsustainable, generative AI tech that takes water from the desert and strains

...