In his time work, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This may come as a surprise to anyone who has gotten to know Zitron through his podcast, social media, or newsletter, where he writes two-handed things like “Sam Altman is full of shit” and “Mark Zuckerberg is a rotten ghoul.” Flacks don’t usually say that. Flacks send crude, grunting emails to members of the media who, on sporadic occasions, speak this way. The Flacks want to reach out, hop on the phone and clarify a few things regarding the allegations that their CEO is a “chunderfuck.”
“And that’s what it’s like with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic,” Zitron said over burgers on a stunning September afternoon in Manhattan. “I work with founders all the time. I guess I’m a founder myself – I don’t like that title. But when you’re the person who has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business and you see these chunders burning $5, 10 billion a year – and everyone celebrates it? That’s offensive“
We talked about whether Zitron’s tirades about the AI industry were costing him business on the PR side. He said no. There was one customer who thought Zitron was a little mean to Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the biggest nut of all when it comes to Zitron. Starting a business is challenging, said the client. “I said, ‘I appreciate the comment, but it’s not about you,’” Zitron told me. “His company is burning through billions of dollars. He’s a terrible businessman.”
All in all, it was an Ed Zitron-style riff, in the tone of personal insult, populist in the style of a tiny business owner who stinks at the unpunished waste of huge industry. (Whether these CEOs would be less offensive, one wonders, if their companies were like that.) making billions of dollars?) He built an incredible little empire for himself based on such wry comments. His weekly podcast, Better offlineabout “the impact of the tech industry and the manipulation of society” was included in Spotify’s list of the 20 best tech shows, and his newsletter: Where’s Your Ed by Ed Zitronhas grown north of 80,000 subscribers. Ed Zitron’s media experience also includes a bad Bluesky account, a football podcast, the occasional baseball write-up, lots of conversations with r/BetterOffline users, and a book coming out next year about, as he puts it, “why everything stopped working.” In other media, it has become a major source of negativity about artificial intelligence. When Slate What’s next: to be determined podcast or WNYC In the media they needed someone to talk about bursting the AI bubble, they called Zitron. It wasn’t just the production volume that put it on the map; it’s his offended style that criticizes media personalities and industry titans alike.
Not long ago, volume and style came together to create the quintessential Zitron media: an article for its newsletter titled “How to Argue with an AI Amplifier.” It was 15,000 words long.
Edheads abound these days. Nearly 200 people purchased the $24 Better Offline Challenge coin, which was engraved with Zitron’s mantra: “NEVER FORGIVE THEM FOR WHAT THEY DID TO THE COMPUTER.” I saw someone put Ed’s words on a motivational poster, using some ambiguous register of irony. One Threads user described her “parasocial crush on a critic and technical writer,” whose name is not given, but who is apparently Zitron. “I just want him to take me out to dinner, take me gently but firmly by the hand and, in his confusing, jumbled British accent, tell me to throw away my damn phone,” she sighed. “It 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 either doing something very right or very wrong.”)
Functionally, Zitron meets the need for an equal and opposing voice to counter the inevitable AI hype. Critics of the approach to artificial intelligence from different points of view. There are people who fear that industry will introduce some world-shattering superintelligence; there are denialists who do not believe that artificial intelligence will ever replace human decision-makers. Zitron is planning something different. What it offers people in a time of amoral support and amidst casual loathing of the tech industry is a moral language of hate for generative AI. “He approaches the topic like a journalist because he’s hungry for information, but the institutions have liberated him,” says Allison Morrow, a business reporter at CNN and a repeated guest on the show Better offline. “Most journalists don’t want to root for the industry’s collapse. The institutions we work for don’t want to get involved in this kind of mission.”