Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI

In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like “Sam Altman is full of shit” and “Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul.” Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this. Flacks want to touch base, hop on the phone, clear up a few things about the allegation that their CEO is a “chunderfuck.”

“And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic,” Zitron was saying over burgers on a 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.”

We were talking about whether any of Zitron’s ranting about the AI industry had cost him business on the PR side of the ledger. He said no. There was the one client who felt Zitron was being a little mean toward Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the biggest chunderfuck of all, as far as Zitron is concerned. Founding a company is hard, the client said. “I said, ‘I appreciate the comment, but, like, this isn’t about you,’” Zitron told me. “His company is burning billions of dollars. He’s a terrible businessman.”

It was, in all, a very Ed Zitron sort of riff, pitched in the key of personal affront, populist in the manner of a small business owner stink-eyeing the unpunished wastefulness of big industry. (Would these CEOs be any less offensive, one wonders, if their companies were making billions of dollars?) He has built an improbable little empire for himself out of tart commentary like this. His weekly podcast, Better Offline, about “the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society,” has cracked Spotify’s top 20 among tech shows, and his newsletter, Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At, has grown north of 80,000 subscribers. The Ed Zitron media experience also includes a scrappy Bluesky account, a football podcast, some occasional baseball writing, a lot of to-and-froing with the users of r/BetterOffline, and a book due next year about, as he puts it, “why everything stopped working.” In other media, he has become a go-to source for AI naysaying. When Slate’s What’s Next: TBD podcast or WNYC’s On the Media needed someone to talk about the bursting of the AI bubble, they called on Zitron. It isn’t just the volume of output that has put him on the map; it is the aggrieved style that he brings to criticisms of media figures and industry titans alike.

Not long ago, volume and style came together to produce the quintessential bit of Zitron media: a piece for his newsletter titled “How to Argue With an AI Booster.” It was 15,000 words long.

Edheads abound now. Nearly 200 people have purchased a $24 Better Offline challenge coin, engraved with what has become the Zitron mantra: “NEVER FORGIVE THEM FOR WHAT THEY’VE DONE TO THE COMPUTER.” I have seen someone put Ed’s words on a motivational poster, operating at some ambiguous register of irony. One Threads user described her “parasocial crush on a tech critic & writer” who is not named but who is quite obviously Zitron. “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 sighed. “This would fix me. I’m sure of it.” (As one tech journalist who’d seen the Threads post put it to me, “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.”)

As a functional matter, Zitron is meeting a demand for an equal-and-opposite voice to counter the inescapable AI hype. Critics of AI approach from any number of angles. There are doomers who fear the industry is ushering in some world-shattering superintelligence; there are denialists who don’t believe AI will ever replace human decisionmakers. Zitron is up to something different. What he offers people, in a time of amoral boosterism and amid a free-floating revulsion for the tech industry, is a moral language for hating generative AI. “He approaches the subject like a journalist in that he’s ravenous for information, but he is unshackled by the institutions,” says Allison Morrow, a business reporter at CNN and a frequent guest on Better 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.”

Maybe more importantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the seductive promise of some great comeuppance for the industry. Justice, of some kind, for an audience that isn’t seeing much of it in evidence anywhere. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written, “and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain that a collapse was coming, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.” So his analysis may wobble here and there on the abstruse particulars of, say, inference costs. He will not be deterred from his overall message: Judgment Day is just over the horizon. Somewhat lost in all the frog-raining opprobrium is the obvious contradiction of his work, which Zitron doesn’t hide but which he rarely discusses: that he makes a living, in part, from trying to gin up attention for AI companies. Can a flack be a prophet on the side?

Today, Zitron divides his time between New York and Las Vegas. He is 39, having spent the first half of his life in England and the latter in the United States, developing along the way a taste for such raffish but doomed Americana as minor-league baseball and the Las Vegas Raiders. But in many ways the Cassandra of the AI boom was shaped by his adolescence in London, where he grew up practically friendless, a “very fat and not particularly bright child,” who had the misfortune of attending a school known for theater kids and smarties. “From pretty much the moment I walked in to the moment I walked out,” he says, “I was bullied.”

What friends Zitron did have as a kid, he found via the computer. His dad had a laptop and a PCMCIA card, and Zitron would dial up and play Ultima Online and EverQuest, finding himself in mIRC chat rooms devoted to the games. “My initial experience with the internet was just kind of wonderment, but also wonderment at the chaos,” he says. “It wasn’t like I thought, ‘This is perfect.’” He was amazed at all the “real freaks” who’d exiled themselves there, interacting in a space that, unlike other realms of life, seemed “very egalitarian.”

Here, in the loneliness of a kid making connections through technology that he couldn’t forge in person, a sort of tech fetishism took root. It informs his work even today: the notion that tech drives social processes, not the other way around; that it is, in its very circuits, sociality itself. In this light, it isn’t hard to understand where his well-developed sense of personal outrage comes from. To misuse tech in some way, to exploit it or undermine it for personal or class gain, is to deny people the thing he’d found in those chat rooms with the freaks: the possibility of social connection. It is to be something like that very worst of things, a bully. When he says “never forgive them for what they’ve done to the computer,” it sounds a lot like “never forgive them for what they’ve done to me.”

The once-friendless Zitron now talks warmly of his many friendships, of his good mates and his dear mates and his best mates. During CES in Las Vegas, Zitron recorded his podcast from a makeshift studio in a hotel room, 13 and a half hours in all, guest after guest after guest popping by as if it were the Dean Martin Show. CES was a triumph for Zitron. Thanking some of the people in the room near the end of his final episode, Zitron began to choke up a little. “I was telling everyone how much I love them,” he tells me, only a little embarrassed. “I think we need way more of that in fucking media. We need more friendship.”

It was how he approached PR. Zitron had come to the industry in 2008, having studied communications at Penn State and completed a brief tour back in London writing about video games for PC Zone. He worked for a New York City PR firm, unhappily, then as the communications director for Hometalk, a startup social platform for home improvement. He made a point of cultivating relationships with media types. He said as much in his first book, This Is How You Pitch: How to Kick Ass in Your First Years of PR. “Getting to know your contacts on a personal level is a great way to make friends out of the people—like bloggers and journalists—who cover the industry. Let them be the one to bring up your field or your client. It will make you appear human, rather than just another hungry flack looking to get a story planted.”

It comes off so cynical there on the page, but maybe that was only for effect. Tech bloggers who can’t remember having ever been pitched by Zitron recall drinking with him at New York City bars in the 2010s, a guy on the scene but not on the make. In his book, Zitron marveled, “Some of these people may end up going to your wedding,” and indeed that’s what happened. John Herrman, the indispensable tech columnist at New York magazine, was there at Zitron’s first wedding. In attendance at his second wedding, in 2017, were a number of media people with the mordant sensibilities that would come to characterize Zitron’s own writing and podcasting later on: Chapo Trap House’s Felix Biederman, the acid polemicist Jeb Lund, sharp-eyed tech journos Mike Isaac and Sarah Emerson.

In 2012, Zitron the flack went indie. He was pretty good at this PR stuff, too. I know this because Forbes published a thousand-word story the next year about just how good he is at this PR stuff. In fact, some of his best message-shaping work was done on behalf of the brand known as Ed Zitron. The field of PR was a “fetid shit-pile,” he told one reporter in 2014. Zitron wanted people to know he was different. One year, he pranked his PR colleagues who were blasting out pitches in advance of CES, asking each to send him more information “via Updog.” He explained to Newsweek: “The first one to respond was, ‘I’m sorry, what’s Updog?’ The glint in my eye that is just despising most of my industry is like, ‘Oh, nothing much, what’s up with you?’ Screenshot, post.”

Zitron would write the odd piece on a freelance basis, often about PR, but it wasn’t until 2020 that he began to turn himself into a regular commentator. He started a Substack, writing at first about personal branding and other business issues, then about the fight over remote work, finding a voice and an audience for himself in clarifying the debate as a sort of class war within the office. In 2023, he wrote “The Rot Economy,” which attributed the derelictions of Big Tech to the appetite for “eternal growth at the cost of the true value of any given service or entity.” “That was when I’m like, I should try and divine meaning from all these things,” Zitron says.

The AI boom, and especially the follies of Sam Altman and OpenAI, offered the ideal subject for him. “I think Sam has more character than most of the Valley people,” Zitron tells me. “Doesn’t mean I like him, but he’s an operator. He’s good at it. And he’s very clearly good at”—and here a note of genuine admiration creeps in—“making enough friends but also exerting enough force to keep enemies away.” Altman isn’t an engineer. He is a “carnival barker,” in Zitron’s phrase, a man pushing “gobbledygook, nonsense, bullshit.” Who better to criticize a creature of hype than a professional hype man?

Zitron was a blogger now, doing enjoyable bloggy things like hanging rude epithets on CEOs and antagonizing the normie tech media. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the hosts of the New York Times’ relatively bullish Hard Fork podcast, quickly became prime targets. They’re too friendly with their subjects, says Zitron, who called Hard Fork a case study in journalists using “their power irresponsibly.” He recalls having pitched Newton once in his capacity as a flack, but nothing came of it. Newton, for his part, remembers meeting Zitron somewhere, maybe a decade ago, and Zitron saying something like, “I would really like to be friends.” Nothing came of that, either.

“It’s true of me that I just don’t enjoy interacting with agency PR people that much,” Newton says. He calls Zitron’s recent turn to commentary “a new gimmick for himself—AI hater number one” and says Zitron has a “one-sided beef” with him. (Zitron says it’s a “critique.”) He compares Zitron’s prolix style to “some cross between the Always Sunny meme of Charlie [with the murder board] and then a prisoner smearing shit on the walls to make a point.” Newton went on: “I think Ed has actually flown too close to the sun now, because he’s built this pedestal for himself, and he’s climbed on top, and he’s posing for glossy portraits in the Financial Times magazine and WIRED, wearing aviators like the fucking Temu Kara Swisher.”

As Zitron sees it, Hard Fork has sacrificed its critical faculties at the altar of friendship. Later he’ll allude to the fact—disclosed by Newton—that Newton’s boyfriend works at Anthropic. “I think that they have made friends with these people,” Zitron says. “You ever see Almost Famous? Don’t make friends with the rock stars.”

Other habits of ye olde blogosphere lived on in Zitron’s work. More important than the feuding is what we might call his tech-blogger eschatology. One longtime tech writer described it for me, drawing on his own experience in the 2010s: “You see something getting shittier and shittier, worse and worse, you see your authentic engagement with the core product just sort of dying, you see a shittily rotting thing, and you have this moral instinct that, therefore, it will all come crashing down.” But the crash rarely ever comes. It didn’t come for Facebook or Twitter. For that matter it didn’t come for crypto, which after a great deal of doomsaying merely wound up buying a presidency.

What people were actually witnessing as they watched a particular product get worse—enshittify, to use Cory Doctorow’s coinage—was not the slow approach of some inexorable fate, as many believed. It was, as the tech writer put it to me, “evidence of a company doing very well by being very bad.” A lot of sharp people still don’t see it, in part because of a faith, not yet exhausted, in some kind of self-correcting market mechanism: A costly and degraded product would be punished somehow. It simply had to be. Forget generative AI. That faith is the biggest bubble of all.

“Got a really unique one here,” the email began. It was Zitron, and in August 2024 he was pitching a journalist on an EZPR client: Fulcra Dynamics, a company that collects your information, including health data, and then connects it to LLM models like ChatGPT, allowing you to “talk” to your own data, ask it questions about your workouts or the ETA of an Instacart order. Fulcra is backed by the Winklevoss twins. While some AI skeptics could see it as the sort of predatory crap that, with any luck, could be sued into the ether before everyone’s biometrics get leaked on X.com, Zitron in his email expressed no such qualms about Fulcra or its leadership.

“These guys rock,” he wrote of the company’s founders. “I will stake my rep on them.”

As Zitron’s profile has risen, so has the delight with which some journalists pass around stories about him—the maverick scourge of AI—peddling pitches about this or that AI service, helping to inflate the bubble with one hand while poking at it with the other. One reporter I know, discomfited by Zitron’s seemingly conflicting personas, stopped replying to his messages altogether. Several journalists cited Zitron’s plumping for Nomi, which would become notorious for an incident in which one of the platform’s companions reportedly told a man to kill himself. (EZPR and Nomi have parted ways, and Zitron tells me he “won’t work with AI companions again.”) In his pitches, Zitron said there was a sex angle to the Nomi story, too, though no one I talked to pursued the idea long enough to find out what it was, exactly. “A hero for our time,” Newton scoffed in a text when he mentioned Zitron’s work with Nomi to me.

Zitron is an easy mark for journalists who consume both sides of his output. The gap between the eager-beaver simpering of the pitches and the spiky prose of his newsletter is laughable. There’s so much space between “these guys rock” and “these chunderfucks” that I think Meta just built a data center there. Newton feels that the AI critics deserve a better avatar. “We’re in a tribal time, and people look at [Zitron], and they think, ‘I want to be in the ‘fuck AI’ tribe,” Newton says. “There’s a lot of really great reasons to be in the ‘fuck AI’ tribe. I just think it should be led by somebody who’s not an AI publicist.” Another journalist, who broadly agrees with Zitron’s critique of the industry, laments with a sigh that “the Pied Piper of the anti-AI movement” wound up being “this guy.”

Today, EZPR has four clients, none of which, Zitron claims, is in the business of generative AI. “I don’t want to pitch generative AI,” he says. “It’s boring and shit. It sucks. I’ve dug into this stuff and tried to find things—like, it’s economically ruinous, it’s environmentally destructive, it steals from everyone. Is there something I’m missing? No.” He exempts Nomi on the grounds that “they use their own models, and they use their own training data.”

Zitron does rep AI services like DoNotPay, which once billed itself as the “world’s first robot lawyer.” He described it as “automation that can get you through bureaucracy, fill in forms, look up if you’re in a class-action suit, if you have lost money, that kind of thing.” Innocent as that description may seem, the company was hit with a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan, alleging that it made “deceptive claims about the abilities of its AI chatbot.” DoNotPay and the FTC reached a six-figure settlement in which the company neither admitted nor denied the agency’s claims. (Zitron had stopped working with DoNotPay before the FTC investigation, he says, though the company is now once again a client.)

Zitron was unbothered when I brought up his AI clientele. If his critics find in his day job evidence of a disqualifying hypocrisy or, at best, a sort of whimpery special pleading at odds with the ferocity of his overall critique, so be it. He seemed at ease in his choices. What hypocrisy, anyway? What special pleading? He works with the companies he likes, the companies he would stake his rep on, as he put it in that Fulcra pitch. Matthew Hughes, editor of Zitron’s newsletter, calls him a “technologist at heart” who is “open to a world in which … GenAI is actually good and isn’t harmful.”

In truth, Zitron’s two jobs aren’t in as much tension as they might seem to be. The PR wheedling and the critical needling come from the same place: He loves this stuff. He’s just mad it doesn’t work better. “I’m actually kind of a lover,” he said. “I love my friends, and I really love the computer.” The problem is that “they’re fucking it up. They’re fucking up the computer. They’re making it worse. AI does not do what they say it will. The Metaverse didn’t. Crypto doesn’t. Just these lies. And then the products we use every day get so much worse.”

Proudly unsnowed though he may be by the supposed propaganda of Sam Altman and the like, Zitron subscribes to a premise in line with the Promethean fantasies of the tech industry. In his schema, there is the computer, possessed of some essence, borne into the future by the tide of technological progress, and there are the they who act on it, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. It doesn’t occur to him that the computer comes to us already shaped by the desires of the they, among others—that it is a social product, not just a cause but an effect as well.

That’s the funny part of Zitron’s becoming the face of tech’s new pessimism. He is, in fact, its truest believer.

Zitron has a theory: This is mostly 2021’s fault. By “this” he means everything, not just the AI bubble, not just the intuition that everything in tech is getting worse, but the whole vertiginous sense that, given the central role of AI in the national economy, we’re all riding some bomb like Slim Pickens into an oblivion of our own fashioning. In 2021, companies that had hunkered down at the onset of the pandemic, anticipating a recession, now found themselves in a feast of fat things. Consumer demand for gadgets and online services was soaring, and the stock market was too. “Every number went up,” Zitron says. “Everyone was going crazy. And I think the tech companies have been chasing that growth ever since.”

Zitron and I were sitting in a café, having just left iHeartMedia’s disconcertingly barren Midtown Manhattan office, where he had recorded an episode of his podcast. The show had gone well, and he was riffing now as if the mic were still hot, emphasizing sundry outrages with an expression of pop-eyed incredulity.

There was a time not long ago when “the incentives had not eaten the product yet,” Zitron said. “It’s why I point to 2021, because they got to see how much growth they could pull out of these things. So the evil began.”

That’s one way of telling the story. It has compelling narrative elements: bad guys, greed, a golden age, a fall. It was more or less the story he told about Google in a newsletter piece last year, “The Man Who Killed Google Search.” “If you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology,” he wrote. Under Raghavan, then the company’s head of search, “Google has become less reliable, less transparent, and is dominated by search engine optimized aggregators, advertising, and outright spam.” Zitron cited the fuzzing of distinctions between organic search results and paid results. But whatever specific decisions Raghavan might’ve made, the process of subordinating Google’s search function to revenue imperatives had been set in motion years ago. The company launched its AdWords program in 2000, after all. (Per a Google spokesperson, the company will only roll out changes that they’ve “confirmed will improve the experience.”)

The AI explosion was a function of the post-2021 growth drive, too, in Zitron’s telling. But that story is too simple as well. The dream of machines without humans goes back a lot further. It is older than generative AI, older than Sam Altman himself, and it is underwritten by compulsions of industrial capitalism that are older still.

“Men behaving like machines paved the way for machines without men,” David Noble wrote in Forces of Production, his classic 1984 history of industrial automation. He meant that automating work could only become thinkable once workers had been reduced to automatons—that the machine emerged from the “basic relations of domination” that shape society. The development of “capital-intensive, labor-saving, skill-reducing” machine-tool automation was a sort of social and political fix in the guise of a technological leap, a way of shoring up hierarchies in the factory, disciplining the workers, and consolidating relationships with the military, all while presenting itself as no less natural and inevitable a transition than the one from stone tools to bronze. The AI boom that Zitron reproaches grew out of these same social dynamics, and so, to some degree, did the era of technology that he nostalgizes. The computer has never been innocent of the world that made it.

The week I met him, Zitron was feeling validated. The spirit of 2021 had beaten a retreat. Signs of an AI chill were general across the land. Meta was preparing to downsize its AI division. An MIT study had gone viral for its finding that, “despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI … 95% of organizations are getting zero return.” I asked Zitron what would have to happen before he could declare victory. He answered quickly: “OpenAI dying or being absorbed into Anthropic, or one of these major companies pulling capital expenditures.” Zitron thought a bit more. Wasn’t he making money as a writer, doing work he was enjoying immensely, taking it to the chunderfucks? Wasn’t he appearing on podcasts and TV as an expert in the field? Wasn’t he making a lot of friends—so many good mates and dear mates and best mates? He reconsidered. “I’ve already won.”

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