He was a man of his time job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. Zitron’s job is to run a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. “Sam Altman is full of shit” The following are some examples of how to get started: “Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul.” In general, flacks don’t tend to speak like that. On rare occasions, Flacks will send media contacts a throat-clearing email. The flacks are eager to get in touch, jump on the phone and clarify a few points about the allegations that their CEO was a “chunderfuck.”
“And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic,” Zitron said this over burgers one fine Manhattan afternoon, in September. “I work with founders all the time. I’m a founder myself, I guess—I don’t like the title. But when you are a person that has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business, and you see these chunderfucks burning 5, 10 billion dollars in a year—and everyone’s celebrating them? It’s offensive.”
Zitron was asked if his rants about the AI sector had hurt him on the business side. He replied that no. Zitron’s biggest mistake, in Zitron’s eyes, was to treat Altman as if he were a bad person. The client stated that founding a business is difficult. “I said, ‘I appreciate the comment, but, like, this isn’t about you,'” Zitron has told me. “His company is burning billions of dollars. He’s a terrible businessman.”
This was a very Ed Zitron-esque riff. It was in the style of a small company owner who is snarling at big business for its unpunished wastefulness. Would these CEOs have been less offensive if they were in charge of smaller companies? Making a Difference “Billions of Dollars?” This is how he has created an unlikely little empire. He has a weekly podcast. Improved Offline, about “the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society,” His newsletter has also cracked Spotify’s Top 20 for tech shows. Ed Zitron Where Is Your Ed?The number of subscribers to grew above 80,000. Ed Zitron’s media portfolio also features a Bluesky account with a scrawny look, an occasional football podcast, baseball articles, lots of back-and-forth between him and the r/BetterOffline users, plus a forthcoming book about, to quote Ed, “why everything stopped working.” Other media have turned to him as a reliable source when it comes to AI detractors. When Slate’s Next steps: to be determined podcast or WNYC’s In the media Zitron was called upon to speak about the burst of the AI bubble. The aggrieved tone of his criticisms, whether of industry giants or media personalities alike, has made him a household name.
A few years ago, Zitron’s newsletter featured a feature titled “The quintessential Zitron piece”. “How to Argue With an AI Booster.” This article was about 15,000 words.
Edheads are now everywhere. Zitron’s mantra, which is engraved on the $24 challenge coin: “NEVER FORGIVE THEM FOR WHAT THEY’VE DONE TO THE COMPUTER.” Someone has put Ed’s quotes on a poster that is ironic in some way. One Threads user described her “parasocial crush on a tech critic & writer” Zitron is a person who has not been named, but is very obvious. “I just want him to take me to dinner, take me gently but firmly by the hand, and tell me in his confusing, muddled British accent to throw away my goddamn phone,” She let out a sigh. “This would fix me. I’m sure of it.” As one tech reporter who saw the threads posted put it, “If you’re getting to a point where your writing is causing people to lust after you, you’re doing something either very right or very wrong.”)
Zitron meets a need for a voice that is both equal and opposite to the AI hype. AI critics come at the issue from many different angles. The industry’s critics come from all angles. There are those who are afraid that it will usher in a world-shattering level of superintelligence, and there are also denialists. Zitron’s plan is different. He offers the people a moral vocabulary for opposing generative artificial intelligence in an era of free-floating revulsion towards tech companies and amoral adulation. “He approaches the subject like a journalist in that he’s ravenous for information, but he is unshackled by the institutions,” Allison Morrow a CNN Business reporter, and a regular guest on Improved Offline. “Most journalists don’t want to root for an industry’s demise. The institutions we work for don’t want to be engaged in that kind of mission.”
