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.”