Editor's Note: For those of you reading via email, I recommend opening this in a browser so you can use the Table of Contents. This is my longest newsletter - a 16,000-word-long opus - and if you like it, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. Thanks for reading! In| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - Villains of Circumstance Listen to my podcast Better Offline if you haven't already. I want my fucking tech industry back. Maybe you think I sound insane, but technology means a lot to me. It’s the way that I speak to most of| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Windows 10 support ends in October, and the company is telling millions of users their machines can’t support Windows 11. That’s simply not true.| Technical.ly
Hello Where’s Your Ed At Subscribers! I’ve started a premium version of this newsletter with a weekly Friday column where I go over the most meaningful news and give my views, which I guess is what you’d expect. Anyway, it’s $7 a month or $70 a| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Today's links| Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Like this newsletter? Why not listen to the podcast version on Better Offline? Part 1 is out now (here're other links), and Part 2 comes out Friday May 2nd! I'm sick and god-damn tired of this! I have written tens of thousands of words about this and still, to this| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
When Google killed blogs| cgbrooke.substack.com
The steady decay of search| cgbrooke.substack.com
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Did you learn to use the Internet in the 90s like me? There's a| search.technomancy.us
Soundtrack: Bad Religion — The Resist Stance A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world — watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every corner of our digital lives. My core frustration isn't just how shitty things have gotten, but how said shittiness| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
A look at how the 2023-2024 Google changes and rise of AI technology are negatively affecting travel blogs and other small publishers.| A Dangerous Business Travel Blog
In the last week we've seen the emergence of the true Meta — and the true Mark Zuckerberg — as the company ended its fact-checking program, claiming that (and I quote) "fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created" on both Instagram and Facebook, the| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: Spinnerette - The Walking Dead - (Alt: Postmodern Jukebox - Radioactive) Thanks so much to everybody that has supported me in the last year. This newsletter started as a way for me to process the complex feelings I have about the technology industry, and still remains, in a way,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Before we get going — please enjoy my speech from Web Summit, Why Are All Tech Products Now Shit? I didn’t write the title. What if what we're seeing today isn't a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn't actually capable| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
An essay on getting away from the scroll. Plus, a new LP recommendation and a gig recap of Bobby Weir and Wolf Bros with the Chicago Philharmonic.| www.noexpectations.fyi
Soundtrack: Post Pop Depression - Paraguay I haven't wanted to write much in the last week. Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog has tried to drill down into what happened on November 5 — to find the people to blame, to somehow explain what could've been done differently,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Last week, in the midst of the slow, painful collapse of the generative AI hype cycle, something incredible happened. On Monday, a Federal Judge delivered a crushing ruling in the multi-year-long antitrust case filed against Google by the Department of Justice. In 300-pages of dense legal text, Judge Amit Mehta| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: Masters of Reality - High Noon Amsterdam I have said almost everything in this piece in every one of these articles for months. I am not upset, but just stating an obvious truth. The current state of affairs effectively pushes against the boundaries of good sense, logic and reason,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
I promise you, everything that's happening makes sense. It all feels so chaotic, so utterly, offensively stupid, so disconnected from reality that it's hard to understand how Meta can run a terrible company with decaying services that's also wildly profitable, or how Meta, Microsoft and Google can proliferate unprofitable, unsustainable| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Hi there. Do you like this post? Did you know that I also do a podcast called Better Offline? If not, please immediately download it on your podcast app. Follow the show. Download every episode. Share with your friends, and demand they do the same. I did an entire episode| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
This April, I gave a talk at ETE 2024 called “The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI.” I think people expected me to list my predictions for profitable shovels to sell in the AI1 gold…| Chelsea Troy
What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about various digital issues or pieces of internet infrastructure (much of which I rely upon here), I have yet to read to an answer to this question: What global digital architecture should we assemble if...| Robin Berjon
Like this newsletter? Subscribe to my podcast Better Offline - this week we've got a two parter digging into Sam Altman, with a deeper dive featuring Tom Dotan of the Wall Street Journal (Part 1) and Ellen Huet (Part 2, airing Friday.) I think you'll love the back-catalog too! The| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
If you enjoy this post, why not subscribe to my podcast Better Offline? This week's a two part deep dive into the Rot-Com Bubble. The noxious growth-at-all-costs mindset of the Rot Economy sits at the core of every issue that I've ever written about. It’s the force that drives| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Enjoy this post? Why not try the podcast version? Please download it, and also all the other episodes. Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Ed Zitron has Prabhakar Raghavan bang to rights.| Medium
A few months ago, OpenAI showed off “Sora,” a product that can generate videos based on a short prompt, much like ChatGPT does for text or DALL-E does for images, and I asked myself a pretty simple question: "...how can someone actually make something useful out of this?" and "how| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
SEO for an informational niche website is deader than dead!| Larry Ludwig
We sounded the alarm about independent publishers being demoted on Google to give way to big media sites. This is what happened next.| HouseFresh
Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the interventions of a managerial class.| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
