Better Offline
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Better Offline is a weekly show exploring the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society - and interrogating the growth-at-all-costs future that tech’s elite wants to build. Combining narrative-form storytelling, one-on-one interviews and panel-based discussions, Better Offline cuts through the buzzwords and obfuscation of the tech industry, investigating and evaluating the schemes and scams of everyone from cryptocurrency scumbags to the greediest of the venture capital elite. Tech industry veteran Ed Zitron and a dynamic coterie of guests will help listeners understand the who, how and why of how tech’s most powerful players are changing the world - for better or for worse.
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Hosts & Guests
You’ll learn a lot even if you think you don’t know much about tech
Aug 17
Glorious to hear Ed Zitron cursing the gigantic vultures of the tech industry in righteously indignant language that veers sometimes into iambic pentameter
Best Pod Anywhere including any industry
Aug 15
I listen to fun pods, educational pods, pods that are psychotherapy based, basketball pods, pods about marvel flicks, you get it…. what Ed does here is unmatched. The balance of left & right brain is on display. Ed’s passion & desire for tech to not suffer the same capitalistic sh💩t fate as other industries is admirable. He cares what is happening & wants to educate others.
Great Live to Tape Episode
Aug 7
Been a consumer of tech news-media for decades at this point, and Ed is right that the fun has been missing in action.
Misinformed Drivel
Aug 14
Ed occasionally makes a few uniquely good points (I particularly enjoyed some of his takes on OpenAI’s overly dramatic PR misdirections), but the show is unfortunately almost entirely misinformed drivel. A great example of this is the CrowdStrike episode, in which Ed faults managerial cost-cutting for an alleged failure to catch a null-pointer dereference, which he describes as a rookie error. There’s simply no evidence for the cost-cutting claim, and if it were so easy to catch memory errors like null-pointer dereferences in all cases in unsafe programming languages (or if it were so easy to switch everything to safe languages), then the world would be literally hundreds billions of dollars richer. It’s not necessarily Ed’s fault that he didn’t know the specific technical root cause of the CrowdStrike disaster the day after it happened, but it was irresponsible for him to opine about it so confidently yet so wrongly. I also found it quite disturbing how in his conversation with Cory Doctorow and some other guy whose name I forget, the three of them express support without a hint of irony for the proposition that the government should spend large amounts of public money to pursue lawsuits to make consumer products worse for end users so long as doing so nebulously “improves competition”. There are absolutely instances of monopoly abuse in the technology sector (Qualcomm and Nvidia are prime examples), but it’s undoubtedly easier “to compete” against a product that the government has artificially hobbled by making any useful differentiation illegal. So-called “Big Tech” is not monolithic, nor should it be.
About
Information
- Channel
- CreatorCool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
- Years Active2K
- Episodes44
- RatingClean
- Copyright2024 iHeartMedia, Inc. © Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from iHeartMedia
- Show Website
- ProvideriHeartMedia + Entertainment, Inc