Better Offline - The Invisible War

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

In this year's two-part finale, Ed Zitron enumerates the damage being done to billions of people by the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy - and why you need to have solidarity with your fellow user. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest,

SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them

and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me. Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show.

This is a place for raw, unfills of conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to The Clifford Show on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on, a Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know.

Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All Zone Media You were the victim of a con You have more than likely said to yourself Some time in the last few years, even ten years That you just didn't get tech Or you getting too old

Or that tech's gotten away from you Because you found a service or an app Or your computer annoying You or someone you love Have convinced themselves That their inability to use something Is a sign that they are deficient That they've failed to keep up with the times

As if the things we use every day Should be in a constant state of flux You're listening to Better Offline, and I'm Ed Zittron. And this is the two-part episode that ends this season of Better Offline, and it's about the true scale of the rot economy, and how the tech industry is waging an endless, invisible war against the user. And we're losing, by the way. We're losing really badly.

They're slowly taking everything away, adding tolls and growth hacks around basically every part of our lives, and they can't even give us the dignity of making sure the things that make them billions keep functioning. No, no, no, no. have to twist them at every goddamn corner to make them more profitable because they know in many cases that we have nowhere else to go. Think about it. The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same, right? Buttons on our cars might have moved around a bit, and I'm not talking about Tesla, by the way. We generally have a brake and an accelerator and a

wheel and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has mostly worked the same way since I started flying. Our trains, our buses, restaurants, toilets, houses, they all have the same mechanisms and we're not expected to update them or adapt to new circumstances. We don't walk into our apartments and the door opens a different way for some reason. The toilet still flushes, I believe, just used it, just checked. Now, what I'm getting into in this episode, there are some exceptions. Some people really just don't try and learn how to use the computer or a smartphone and they just kind of reject technology or they refuse to pick it up because it's not for them. These people exist. They are real. We all know them. And I don't think anybody hearing this falls into that camp.

Basic technological literacy is a requirement to live in society. And there is some responsibility on the user. But even saying that, even if we assume that these people are very common, and this is the case, should companies really take advantage of them? And the answer is no, of course. Now, our apps and platforms, the things we use every day, operate with a totally different moral and intellectual compass. two other things in our lives. Well, the idea of an update is fairly noble, or that something you've bought can be maintained and improved over time, that's a good thing. Many tech platforms see it as a means to further extract and exploit, to push users into doing things that either keep them on the app longer or take more profitable actions. We as a society need to reckon with this, and we need to reckon with how this twists us up. It makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive,

more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer, we suffer in these manifold ways. There's no digital world and physical world, by the way. They are and have been for some time quite the same thing. And reporting on tech as if this isn't the case is a failure of the user, failure of reality, and honestly a failure of curiosity, if you're still doing this as a writer, you're full of shit. And I want to be clear that I'm not just talking about one single product or company. I'm talking about most digital experiences. I'm talking about the digital interference with constantly having to dodge, the litany of buttons on every app that are all there to distract us, to off-fuscate the path of the things we actually want to do. I'll choose an example for you.

Now, my British-Canadian listeners are not going to love this, but as an app called Sleeper, which I used to play fantasy football, NFL, there are so many buttons to try and make me do different kinds of sports gambling. All I want to do is check my lineup. But no, no, no, no, sleeper must have a way to further monetize me. The way that apps present information in ways that are designed to be illogical and unhelpful is just disgusting. And they artificially force us to engage for longer with the apps in question. It's not about providing a service. And I sound kind of panicky and emotional, but I need you to understand how common this is in your lives. Every different digital experience is a small version of the little pieces that make up an annoying day at work,

except we're either paying for them or being actively monetised for the pleasure. Let me give you an example. Back in 2020, Spotify redesign its app too, and I quote the verge be part TikTok, part Instagram, and part YouTube, which in practice meant replacing a relatively clean and straightforward user interface with one made up of full-screen cards like TikTok and auto-playing video podcasts, also like TikTok. And CEO Daniel Eck claimed that this would, and I'm quoting Sky News here, make the platform come alive with different content on a platform that was built and sold as a place to listen to music. And the tech media, by the way, waved off this redesign without really thinking about it.

They didn't consider its significance. At the drop of a hat, hundreds of millions of people's existence, their experience of listening to music would change at the whim of a multi-billionaire, with the express purpose of forcing them to engage with completely different content than they sign up for as a means of increasing engagement, metrics and revenue for a public company. By all means, try and pretend that this is just an app. It's just music, right? No, people's relationships with music and entertainment are intrinsically linked to their moods and their motivations. And no matter how you feel, it's clear that Spotify, a company best known for fucking and exploiting its artists, treats its customers, both paying and otherwise, with a similar level of contempt. And they're far from

alone. Earlier in the year, smart speaker company Sonos released a redesign of their app that removed their accessibility features, the ability to edit song cues or play music from your phone, and this was an attempt in their words to modernize the interface, with Wired suggesting that these changes could potentially open the door to adding a subscription service of some sort to help solnosis, you never guess, ailing growth. Meta, great example as well, continually redesigns Facebook and Instagram, the latest of which happened in October, to focus Facebook on Gen Z users, and they're probably the most egregious example of the constant chaos of our digital lives. Well, we might complain about these things.

We're stuck with them because the conditions of our investment in tech are that we need accounts. We have the features that are customized for us. The more time we put into it, the more it becomes ours, but really, the more we become owned by the companies. We have ways we've set things up than mire us further to an ecosystem, and that's fine for a time. It's kind of like having to buy specific outfits for specific occasions, except they might stop fitting at random, and I don't mean based on your way, they just expand and contract at random. We load websites expecting something to go wrong, because it probably will, with mobile websites that cover entire screens with pop-up ads that can break the entire experience.

My favorite example, by the way, is IGN.com, which is a site that receives over 118 million unique monthly visitors that will regularly crash your mobile browser. No, really, go and look up the God of War Ragnarok guide right now, and try scrolling on your phone. If it doesn't crash your browser, I'll be very bloody surprised. Seemingly, every experience online demands our email address and giving them our email address adds another email to inboxes already stuffed with two types of spam, the actual get-the-bigest laser spam that immediately hits your junk folder, and then the growth-hack emails we receive from clothing brands we wanted to discount from or newspapers we pay that still feel it's necessary to email us three to five times a day.

Every app we use is intentionally built to growth hack, a term that means moving things around in such a way that the user does the things we want them to do as a company. Dating apps gauge your best matches behind $1.99 or more microtransactions. Uber puts suggestions and massive banners throughout their apps to try and convince you to use one of their other apps, or maybe you accidentally hit them, which gives Uber an better chance to get you to try them. Outlook, one of the most popular email platforms in the world,

puts advertisements in your email inbox that are near and distinguishable from new emails, and they're actually at the top of your inbox too. And meta, my favourite, they had these video carousels previously just on Facebook, but they just added them to Instagram, that intentionally only play the first seconds of a clip as a means of making you click, giving them more clicks, more engagement, and more things to trick the street with. What I'm getting at, and I think you kind of have experienced yourself, is that our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile. Our apps are ever changing, they're adapting not to us, not to our conditions or our needs, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics, things that don't really tell them anything other than how to knock us around to make us

do more. It isn't that you don't get tech, I must insist you understand this. It's that the tech you use every day is completely and utterly insane. Every app has a different design. Almost every design is growth hack to optimize your activity on said app, with each app trying to make you do different things, with some apps having entire growth hacking teams that continually evaluate what you do and what your friends are doing, and perhaps find new ways to mash them together so they can make more money come out. It doesn't matter if the experience sucks. That's not what they're there for. They're not there to make things better. I want you to realize that this is in almost every application you use. I know I'm repeating myself, but it's important. And I'm not saying this to complain,

but it's because I believe, as I've hinted to that previously, that we're in the midst of the largest-scale ecological disaster of our time, because almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively adversarial to the user. These issues hit everything we do all the time constantly. We're constantly interrupted, and I believe it's so much bigger than social media and algorithms, though I must be clear they're absolutely a big part of it. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygle and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim

Gavin Gaffigan, to Bob Odenkirk, to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because

your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Name suggestion. We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection.

Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's toy. twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's Iheartadvertising.com. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them?

On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness. professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel on.

Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light. up and smile. That means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can, like, I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's

Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds.

I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what you're saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th.

You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw,

unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment, and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music.

The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast, it's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So, if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right where you need to be. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, Follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. The average person's experience with technology is one so aggressive and so violative that I believe it leaves large parts of our society with a low-level trauma. I know it sounds dramatic. Some of you hearing this may scoff at the idea even. After all, you're smart, right?

You know about disinformation. You know about what these companies are doing. And thus, most people do, right? Wrong. Most people don't think about the things they're doing at all, and they're just trying to get by in a society that increasingly demands we make more money to buy the same things, with our lives both interfered with and judged by social networks, with aggressive algorithms that feed us more things based on what we'll engage with,

which might mean things that piss us off or actively radicalise us. People are nagged constantly by these goddamn notifications, an average of 46 a day, some useful, some advertisements, like, say, Apple telling us that there's a nail bite a college football game regardless of whether we've interacted with any football contact ever, or a Slack message saying that you haven't joined a group you were invited to a week ago, or Etsy letting you know that you can buy things for an upcoming holiday. It's all the time. It's everywhere. It's constant. It's relentless. And the more time you invest in using a device,

the more of these notifications you get, making you less likely or capable of turning them off. After all, how well are you doing keeping your inbox clean? How's that going? What's that? What was that? You get 25 emails a day, many of them from a different company owned by William Sonoma. Damn, that's crazy. But the indignities don't end there, because these people also have to be constantly aware of scams and outright misinformation, both on social networks that don't really care to stop it, and on the chum box advertisements below most major news publications. And if you don't know what that is, those are those weird little stories at the bottom promising miracle cures of trying to sell you weed or, well, fake weed from Cheech and Chong.

Plenty of people who read and write about technology have this insipid amount of privilege. They assume that it's natural that you'd know that there are entities out there trying to scam or trick you. And I'd argue that most people don't. Most people are just trying to get by. And to most people, a video from rumble.com may as well be the same thing as a video from CNN.com. And most people would believe that every advertisement is somehow verified for its accuracy versus the truth, which is it's sold at scale all the time to whoever will pay money. I want to give you a really good example.

And this one turns my fucking stomach. This one really pisses me off. And I want to just say, what I'm about to say, CNN.com, it's on NBCNews.com. And it's also on The Verge. Nile Patel, you need to fix this shit. It's disgusting. But let's talk about CNN.com, a website that had 594 million visitors in October 2024. At the bottom of CNN, when you scroll down, is something that says paid partner content,

including things from publications like finance bars that tell you about the, I quote, nine dumbest things smart people waste money on. Finance buzz immediately when you click through asks you to turn your notifications on, you know, so they can ping you when they have new articles. And each bullet on the story leads to one of a different kind of affiliate marketing arm of the company trying to sell you car insurance and credit cards where they get a little smidgen of commission every time someone buys something. And you're offered the chance to share your email address to receive,

and I quote, vetted side hustles and proven ways to earn extra cash sent to your inbox. which I assume includes things like the advertorial I was led to, where they were telling me that, yes, you could make money playing online bingo in games such as Bingo Cash against other people. And I saw that and I said, that doesn't sound true at all. So I went and looked him up. Papia Games, developer of Bingo Cash, was sued in March by rival gaming company's skills for using bots in allegedly skill-based games that are supposed to be between humans, and the Michigan Gaming Control Board issued a cease and desist order against the company for violating multiple gaming laws, including the lawful internet gaming act. To quote the lawsuit, Papaya's games are not skill-based

and users are often not playing against live actual opponents, but against Papaya's own bots that direct and rig the game so that Papaya itself wins its users' money while leading them to believe that they lost to a live human opponent. This is a website and its associated content that had prime placement on the front page of a major news outlet. As a normal person, it's reasonable to believe that CNN would not willfully allow advertisements

for websites that are in and of themselves further advertisements masquerading as trustworthy third-party entities. It's reasonable that you, as a normal person, would believe that finance buzz was a reputable website and that their intentions were to share great deals and secret tricks with you. If you think you're not this stupid,

you're privileged and need to have more solidarity with your fellow human beings. It's disgraceful. If you hear this and you're like, ha ha, stupid idiots, God damn you! People are being screwed. People are being screwed right now.

in this way that you might scoff at, that you might look down your nose at, but this is serious, and this is horrible, and companies like Outbrain and Tabula who make these chumbox advertisements, they make millions and millions of dollars doing this. And really, putting aside any privilege you might have, or maybe you don't, maybe you get what I'm talking about here, why wouldn't you think that the content on one of the most notable media outlets in the entire world is trustworthy? Now, nothing I'm saying is meant to be polemic or pessimistic or describing anything other than the shit that's happening in front of my eyes and your eyes and the eyes of billions of people.

Dismissing these things as just how it is, as we have for years, allows powerful people with no real plan and no real goals other than growth to thrive. And sneering at people dumb enough to get tricked by an internet and tech industry built specifically to trick them, suggests that you have no idea how you are being scammed because you're smug and arrogant. And I realize I'm possibly making up a person to be angry at, but I've had a few conversations recently with people who had this reaction. And it sucks. We all learn things for the first time, and it's like, if you never learned, how would you learn? And I'm trying to, I guess, make up this person, but if anyone listening have that attitude, it's important. I need you to stop trying

to explain away how fucking offensive using the internet and technology has become. I need you to stop making excuses for the powerful, and consider the sheer scale of the societal rat fucking happening on almost every single device in the world, and consider the ramifications of the difficulty that the human being using the internet has, trying to live an honest, dignified, and reasonable life. And maybe you're in the middle ground, maybe you didn't judge them, maybe it just wasn't you. Either way, I think it's important to put this down. To exist in modern society requires you to use these devices, or otherwise sacrifice large parts of how you'd interact with other people. You need a laptop or smartphone for work, probably both,

for school or for anything, really. You need messaging apps, otherwise you kind of don't exist. And as a result, there's this societal monopoly of sorts, or maybe it's more of a cartel, in the sense that for the most part, every tech company has accepted these aggressive anti-user positions, all in pursuit of growth. The stakes are so much higher than I think anyone realizes, especially in the tech media. And I don't know why they're not more willing to discuss the scale. They can pick the issues. They can say this is bad and this is bad.

And then they can run glossy coverage for Zuckerberg or Musk. But it's bad. It's worse. It's worse than a lot of things. And just it's undiscussed. And they feel almost like I'm saying something obvious, but I've looked. This isn't being put down like this. No one's just pointing at the everything.

The bad. The ex. And look, The extent of the damage, the pain, the frustration, the terror. It's so constant. And we're all in, some level just kind of numb to it, because discussing it requires accepting that a vast majority of people live poisoned lives, thanks to their phones and their laptops. And this isn't even an anti-technology position. I want it to be better. And as you'll hear soon, I do love the computer. But we really need to get into this. And we need to realize we all live in the ruins created by

the rot economy, where the only thing that matters is growth, growth of revenue, growth of business, growth of metrics related to said business, growth of engagement, of clicks, of time on the app, of purchases of micro-transactions, of ads, of things done that make executives feel happy and make the growth team see the number go up. It's goddamn sickening. However, if you want to feel better, I'm pretty sure that after I stopped speaking here, there's going to be an ad, and I am 100% confident that this ad follows, it will align with everything I've been saying. It won't be for something that has a kind of an ironic context considering my work. You're going to chuckle and chortle because of how right I am here,

not because the thing that follows is completely discordant. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygle and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, Help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriters, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group?

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle. A one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two. combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches,

champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Laila Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel like you don't feel like. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it.

An Olympic champs, Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladeke. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me, and that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard.

Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.

Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what you're saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th.

You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw,

unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment. And the next, we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast. It's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger.

So if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right where you need to be. Listen to the Clifford Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok. Talk Podcast Network on TikTok. And we're back. So, as you know as a listener, I'm a dickhead. And if you haven't been listening, you probably work that out by now. You're 20 minutes or so in and you've heard me get pissed off. But I was trying to work out as I wrote this script. How would I frame this?

How would I really show you the scale? So I went on Amazon.com, the everything store, and I bought the best-selling laptop, a $238 Asa Asper 1, with a four-year-old Celeron N4-500 processor, which I'd consider fairly representative of how millions of people interact with the internet. I also believe it's a powerful illustration of the damage caused by the rot economy and this abusive, poisonous and exploitative way in which the tech industry treats people in a very practical sense. So I opened this piece of shit up, and you're going to hear, as I discuss this,

the anger that I experience. So I hit on on it, and it took one minute and 50 seconds from touching that power button for the laptop to get to a setup screen. It then took another minute and a half to connect and begin downloading updates, which then took several more minutes. After that, I was faced with a licensing agreement where I agreed to binding arbitration to use Windows, another 24-second pause, and then I got shown a screen of different, and I quote, ways I could unlock my Microsoft experience with animations that shuddered and jerked violently. It really didn't feel good. It was just immediately you could tell this thing was cheap. Now, throughout using this thing, this cheap track pad on this laptop, it would just miss the

occasional click. And at this point, I was forced to create a Microsoft account and hand over my cell phone or another email address to receive a code, or I'd not be able to use the laptop at all. Each menu screen takes three to five seconds to load, and I'm asked to customize my experience with things like personalized ads, tips and recommendations, with every option turned on by default, by the way. And then I had to sign up for another account, this time with ASA. At one point, I'm simply shown an ad for Microsoft OneDrive and their cloud storage product with a QR code to download it on my phone, and then I'm told that Windows has to download a few updates, which I assume are different to the updates I did before. Now, I'm not just

complaining. I'm trying to explain how much stuff happens when a regular person who cannot afford a MacBook, who cannot afford a nice Dell laptop, just buys the first one off of Amazon, as we all do with different products. So, by the way, at this point, around 20 minutes have passed just to get to this screen. It then took another 33 minutes for the updates to finish, and then another minute and 57 seconds to log in, at which point a screen popped up telling me to set up a browser and discover the best of Windows, including finding the apps I love from the Microsoft store, and the option to create an AI-generated theme of my browser. or for my browser even. The laptop, by the way, between each screen, felt like it was just shaking

visually, like the animations juddered viciously. You just get this constant sense that this thing sucks from the moment you use it. And so I finally, at this point, got to my new laptop, my beautiful new Acer laptop that stunk. And then I opened the start bar, which is ostensibly a place where you'd have apps, right? Apps that you'd use on the computer. and I saw some of the things like Outlook, an email client that's not actually installed and requires you to download it. You click it and then downloads again. And an option for a travel website called booking.com. Just an ad, along with a link to LinkedIn, another ad for a Microsoft property.

One app, Clipchamp, was installed but immediately needed to be updated, which did not work when I hit Update, which then forced me to go find the updates page, which then showed me at least 40 different apps called things like Sweet Labs Inc. I do not know what any of this stuff was. It's just so strange. I typed Sweet Labs into the search bar, and it took a little shaky juddery, like the animations hitched a bit, and then it opened this giant menu,

with half of it dedicated to Mark Twain's birthday, which had two different Mark Twain-related links, a quiz of the day in four different games available for download. At this point, by the way, I've been able to do nothing on this computer. I could have loaded Edge, but I'll get to that in a minute. I also should be clear that the computer was pausing

slightly every time I typed a letter. Every animation felt so clunky and juddery. Even moving the windows around didn't feel smooth. It was just slow. It felt cheap in the operating system. Previously something I'd considered to be the thing that operates the computer. It's actively rotten.

It's full of ads, sponsored content, suggested ads and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user. Now, at this point, it's important to add what operating system it is. I'll get to that shortly. And the reason I'm explaining all of this in such agonizing detail is that this is the experience that I believe is more indicative of the average person's use of the computer than anybody else is. It's this. It's Windows, the crappiest

shittiest windows. And though it's tough to gauge how many of these things, these crappy laptops are sold to make it a bestseller on Amazon, laptops in this price point which use a specific version of Windows called 11 Home in S mode, dominate Amazon's bestseller lists, along with Apple's significantly more expensive MacBook Air and Pro series. It's reasonable to believe that a large amount of laptops sold in America match this price point and spec. There are two similar ones on Best Buy's bestsellers, or at least they were at the time I wrote this script, and as of writing this sentence down, which would have been very beginning of December, multiple different laptops of this very specific specification are on the front of Target's laptop page.

And if I haven't made it completely clear, this means that millions of people are likely using a laptop that's burdensomely slow, full of targeted advertising and content baked into an operating system in a way that's either impossible or difficult to remove. For millions of people, and it really could be tens of millions of people, considering the ubiquity of these laptops, the experience of using the computer is both actively exploitative and incredibly, incredibly slow. Even loading up MSN.com, the very first page you see when you open a web browser, in Windows Home S, immediately hits you with ads for eBay, QVC and QuickBooks, with icons that sometimes don't load. By the way, about Windows 11 Home in S mode,

that, you might not have heard of this. It's a special version of Windows where you can only use apps from the Windows store. And on top of that, it's supposedly more efficient. I've used quite a few of these laptops now, and they're the slowest, wonkiest pieces of shit ever, but they're cheap. And it's not just the crappy hardware either. It's every part of the operating system which feels like it's built to hound you to use some sort of Microsoft product or some sort of product that Microsoft or the laptop manufacturer has been paid to make you see.

While one can hope that people buying these laptops have an awareness of anything, the reality is they're being dumped into a kind of T.J. Max version of computing, except T.J. Max clothes don't sometimes scream at you to download T.J. Max Plus will stop functioning because you use them too fast. Now, I'll say this, I haven't shopped there in a while, but I assume this is still the case. Again, this is how most people are experiencing modern computing, and it isn't because this is a big business. It's because laptop sales have begun to fall, and they've been falling for over a decade, and manufacturers and Microsoft need as many ways to grow revenue as possible,

even if the choices they make are actively harmful to the consumer. Also, I swear to God, if your answer here is get a MacBook Air, there are only $600, I beg you, I plead with you to speak with people outside of your income bracket at a time when an entire election was decided in part because everything's more expensive. At this point, said person using this laptop can now log on to the internet, by the way, and begin using websites like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, all of which that have algorithms we don't really understand, but they have been regularly proven to be actively and deliberately manipulative and harmful. And I know I'm angry. I mean, whatever, you listen to this show. This is the finale.

of this year, you know how pissed off I am. But the picture I'm trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person's experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy sludge-like frame, and the wider internet opens up to said user, which has already been battered by a horrible user experience, by the way, they're immediately thrown into this heavily algorithmic feed of some sort, each different feed built to con them in a unique way, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in there as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like The Virgin NBC News feature stories from companies like World Trending.com, with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional

in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it's an ad. As they're clunky, shuddering, shitty laptop, hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com when the laptop slows to a crawl. Everything slows to a crawl. Why? Why, God damn it, is everything so fucking slow, these people say. I'll just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesn't crash half the time or trick me.

Sadly not. The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn't the algorithm but the convenience. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they're specifically engineered to manipulate you. Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta, and now that every website is so desperate for our email to show us ads

and to push stuff on us, it's either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online. So of course they're going to go to the big box websites. They feel comparatively safe even if they're not. When every single website needs to make as much money as possible because their private equity or hedge fund or massive corporate owners need to make more money every year without fail, the incentives of building the internet veer away from providing a service or information and towards putting you, the listener, in silent service of a corporation.

If you're technologically savvy in reading this, by the way, sit down and think. Think for a second about the amount of effort you've put into mitigating the problems with the internet and modern computing. Fresh in stores of windows on new machines. Avoiding certain websites because you've learned what the bad ones look like,

not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know that's what a spam bot looks like and so on and so forth. Think about it. I know a lot of you are very technologically savvy, but you're instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you. You're batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications, knowing that they all want something from you, and I need you to realize that most people are not like you, and you too are actively victimized by the tech ecosystem. As a result, and like I said a few weeks ago, I believe that most people are actively concussed by their daily lives,

because most people's daily lives are on the computer or their smartphones, and those lives have been stripped of dignity. When they look at the media, the best they'll get is a degree of, huh, algorithm bad? Is bad? Is computer, is Facebook not good? Actually, I take it back. You don't really get that either. You don't really get, you know how bad Facebook and Instagram are.

You don't even get the media really covering it. It drives me insane. Yet it's so much more than just the algorithm. It's almost the entirety of the digital ecosystem, from websites to apps, to the devices we use every day. The fact that so many people likely use a laptop that's equal parts unfit for the task and stuffed full of growth-hacked poison is utterly goddamn disgraceful, because it means that the only way to escape the poison is to simply have more money. Those who can't afford a $300 at least phone or a $600 laptop are left to use this offensively bad technology,

and we have, at societal scale, simply accepted that this is how things go. The result is that everything's a chaotic mess. And by everything, I mean almost every digital experience, like I've been saying. And if you still believe the digital world has no bearing on the physical world, you're a dumbass. Everything you do, for the most part, goes through apps and websites. It's impossible to avoid, and it gets harder to wade through if you aren't wealthy enough or lucky enough to have someone teach you or own a powerful enough device, which is not something that really happens in school in any case.

They're not really loading you up with the most powerful stuff, nor do I believe that schools are sitting there and telling people not just how to use the computer to make sure the computer doesn't use you. Yet even on the expensive devices, you're still a victim of algorithmic and growth hack manipulation. Even if you're aware of it, knowing allows you to fight back.

Even if it's just to stop yourself being overwhelmed by the mess and means that you can read things that can tell you what new horrors we can avoid next. But you're still the target, and you're still receiving hundreds of marketing emails a week. You still receive spam calls, and you're still unable to use Facebook or Instagram without being bombarded by ads and algorithmically charged content. And I realized in this episode, I've kind of brought the hammer down that I've called imaginary real people dumb asses, attack people listening. I'm not really angry at you. I'm not. I know it might sound like that, and it really isn't.

the conditions of society have adjusted so that we've just accepted how bad things are, that we've just said, it sucks, but you know it's everywhere, so what's you're going to do about it? And I'm angry about it because I feel like my peers in the tech media don't take it seriously either. They've just become numb to it like we all have. And it sucks. We shouldn't become numb to this. If we just had toxic dump in the streets and who knows with the upcoming EPA, whether we will, we'd say something. right? If we were getting burned by random things, we would be upset. We'd be like, oh,

ouch. But because these little attacks, these little indignities are so subtle and so common, they're everywhere. It's kind of hard to talk about. It's kind of hard to have language about. And in the next episode, I'm going to talk about why that language is so important, about how fighting back is discussing and raising these problems. And I don't mean with your congressman. I don't mean with elected officials, though that might work, that might help. It's about having a continual societal conversation. It's about the next time that you or your friend says, I just don't get out of the computer works.

Stopping or someone saying, no, probably not. It's that they keep changing how the computer works to make it work against us. It's why I've been so annoyed the last year. And in this two-part finale, I want you to remember that you're the victim. You're the victim of a con. And I can't wait for you to hear the next episode coming in a few days. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattersowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed.at to visit the Discord and go to R slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit.

Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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