Tommy Craggs of Wired profiles tech critic Ed Zitron, whose media empire keeps growing.
Craggs writes, “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.”
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