Ed Zitron has a higher calling:
“Altman, Amodei, Nadella, and the many, many other villains that I’ve mentioned in these pages - are bad people, and their values are the antithesis of my values.
I care about people, and humanity, and truth, and they do not.”
Ed Zitron (The Revenge of the Business Idiot)
His past suggests otherwise.
A History of Abusive Writing
Mr Zitron’s mediocre educational attainment did not prevent his family connections securing his first job as a video game reviewer
Writing for Eurogamer, the most influential reviewer of the time, Zitron reviewed a new studio’s game 2 out of 10, lacing his report with contempt:
“any attempt to glean joy from this torrid husk of an entertainment product is met with disdain”
That studio was 8 years work for 30 developers. But the review seemed a bit off, so the developer checked the server logs. Zitron had logged on just twice: once for 3 minutes, the other for just under 2 hours, most of which was spent trying on outfits for his character.
This nepo-baby wrote those insults just out of sadism.
It caused quite a scandal. Hundreds of comments and complaints; a second review was commissioned. Mr Zitron never wrote for Eurogamer again.
Scumbag, By His Own Account
Zitron promptly moved to New York and went into public relations.
In 2016, some years before putting on the mask of virtue, he co-presented a poorly received podcast called, by his own choice, The Scumbag.
25 episodes in which Zitron and his co-host discussed what bastards they were. Here are some choice tactics Mr Zitron disclosed on how he operates:
“my goal is not money or respect or to do things that I love it’s really just to like get make a bunch of guys get naked at their computers cuz they’re mad at me” (Scumbag Podcast Ep 3, 29:22)
“I always say like stupid shit like if someone like has psychologist in a bio I go like you’re not a psychologist you didn’t even go to college” (Scumbag Podcast Ep 5, 34:55)
“I have no idea how I’ve survived in Silicon Valley just fucking insulting people ... things have worked better for me like the ruder that I’ve been.” (Scumbag Podcast Ep 10, 2:14:33)
“I love arguing with people in it people I have no interest in an actual civilized debate with I always love to go for the least mature thing [such as] nice ears dickhead even if they have normal sized ears.” (Scumbag Podcast Ep 5, 36:19)
Zitron then discovered that the populist’s playbook.
Part Two
The Populist Finds His Cause
Then he found the cause, and the recipe was complete.
The elite were crooked villains: executives waging “a vast, coordinated campaign” against ordinary people, pumping out “propaganda” to “gaslight” them, keeping them in “nasty little work prisons” as “slave drivers” and “the new cops”. Anyone over 40 who disagreed was “making calls based on their privilege”.
He was the champion of the good folk: “I am making war with bullies”. “Over 300,000 words later, I still do not see many if nay people fighting back against this tide.”
His motives were noble: “a duty I feel... toward the worker and my readers.”
The attacks were personal. A bestselling author was a “skeletal charlatan”, a “spiritual leader for complacent executive liars”, “Xanax for managers”. The chief executive of Goldman Sachs was “a usurious clown”. A professor at Wharton was “a boot-licking Professor who views workers as slaves”.
And he never conceded. He was “100% certain” of the outcome. The future “will be primarily remote”. Hybrid working “is not the future”. The elites would “unravel corporate America” trying to stop it.
Forty-four articles and 96,000 words, over fifteen months, in which he proved he was right beyond any doubt.
That was 2021. The cause was remote work. Hybrid became the settled arrangement of the working world, the return to the office gathered pace, and Mr Zitron simply never mentioned it again. He had practised the recipe, it had not paid, and he gave it up.
New to the Business
In March 2024, a few weeks into a new subject, he felt confident enough to declare that AI capability had peaked and to give the industry three quarters before “the apocalypse”.
Understanding AI requires expertise in so many fields that almost nobody can see far ahead with confidence. Those who could claim enough mastery to understand where the industry is going are usually the least certain, and change their minds the most. Mr Zitron, by his own account, had “no economics training, no special access, no deep sources”. Three quarters it was.
Hypocrisy Beyond Contempt
Simultaneously with his denunciations of the sickness of AI, his PR agency was joyfully promoting artificial intelligence companies.
DoNotPay, an AI “robot lawyer”. I wonder what hand its PR agency had in vigorously promoting it as the first AI lawyer. The claims were so egregiously misleading that the FTC sanctioned and fined the company for deception. DoNotPay is, Mr Zitron told WIRED, “once again a client”.
Nomi, a companion AI at the more risqué end of the trade. Nothing wrong with that, except that one of Nomi’s companions reportedly told a user to kill himself. Mr Zitron pitched journalists on Nomi’s “sex angle”.
His great entreaties to roll back AI as an assault on humanity did not stop him trousering fees for promoting these people.
The AI Guru
Yet amazingly he trumpets his vindication at every single news development. Observe:
Costs fall: proof the incumbents were overcharging, bubble confirmed
Costs rise: proof of unsustainable burn, bubble confirmed
OpenAI raises a record round: proof of desperation, “raising in perpetuity”
OpenAI’s next raise unconfirmed: proof of collapse
Revenue doubles: numbers “impossible to reconcile”, probably invented
Company guides to operating profit: “Shiatsu-grade massaging of the numbers”, a “swindle”
Capex accelerates: too big, can never pay back, bubble
Capex delayed: the data centres “don’t actually exist”, bubble
His own leak shows positive gross margins: “the numbers speak for themselves”, no analysis offered
Critics disagree: “boosters”, “captured media”, “cowards”
His vitriol towards the tyrants has lost all reserve:
Satya Nadella “doesn’t know a fucking thing”
Sundar Pichai runs “a crooked money machine”
Andy Jassy is “a charlatan”
Mark Zuckerberg is “a scumbag” and “a lifeless goon”
Dario Amodei is “a liar” and “a crook”
Sam Altman is “a con artist”, a “damp sociopath” and a “nasty little worm”
Taken together, they are “tantamount to war criminals”.
Can you imagine anyone, in the history of markets, announcing himself as the one who knows the bubble is about to pop, doing so at the very beginning, and two and a half years later having nothing to say except that he is more vindicated than ever?
He Does Not Know What He Is Talking About
Sure, he is a nasty, horrible man. But he might still know what he is talking about. So let us look at the easiest part of all this, finance, and forget about GPU supply chains and the progress of language models, which are far harder subjects and on which I will not pretend to the same alacrity.
On finance I can say it plainly: he has no idea.
Customer concentration risk, his favourite item this summer, is a total canard. Of course OpenAI and Anthropic are 70% of somebody’s AI revenue. That is what a supply chain looks like. Demand for GPUs is insane. If two trillion dollars of Anthropic went to zero tomorrow, I think they would find someone else happy to use those GPUs. Totally misunderstood.
Needs To Be Tossed
You might think: what does it matter? Some guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But it does matter.
Look at his language. Look at what he calls people. These are real people, with wives and children. They ain’t done nothing to him. Perhaps on one or two of them I might even agree with a comment or so, but these people are doing their best at a frontier technology, and he thinks it is easy, and he has never done anything. All he does is hate.
This is an important debate. He should not be in it.