Ed Zitron: The Duality of a PR Professional and Tech Critic

Ed Zitron, in his professional capacity, heads EZPR, a boutique public relations firm. This might strike as a contradiction to those familiar with Zitron through his podcast, social media, or newsletter, where he pens unfiltered statements such as “Sam Altman is full of shit” and “Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul.” Typically, public relations practitioners refrain from such language; instead, they send polite, carefully worded emails to media personnel, even when the latter occasionally use such colorful expressions. PR folks aim to establish communication, have phone conversations, and clarify issues, like the allegation that their CEO is a “chunderfuck.”

The AI Industry Critique

During a pleasant September afternoon in Manhattan, over burgers, Zitron shared his views. “Guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic are really something,” he said. “I constantly work with founders; I’m a founder myself, though I don’t fancy the title. When you’re in a position where you must turn a profit to keep your business afloat, and you see these so – called leaders burning through $5 – 10 billion in a year, all while being celebrated, it’s deeply offensive.”

We delved into whether Zitron’s rants about the AI industry had any negative impact on his PR business. He asserted that it hadn’t. There was one client, however, who thought Zitron was being a bit harsh on Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and, in Zitron’s eyes, the ultimate “chunderfuck.” The client argued that founding a company is arduous. Zitron responded, “I appreciate the comment, but this isn’t about you. His company is hemorrhaging billions. He’s a dreadful businessman.”

Zitron’s riffs are distinctively personal and populist, mirroring a small – business owner’s disdain for the unpunished wastefulness of large corporations. (One might wonder if these CEOs would be less offensive if their companies were generating billions.) Through such incisive commentary, he has built an unlikely media empire. His weekly podcast, Better Offline, focusing on “the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society,” has ranked in Spotify’s top 20 among tech shows. His newsletter, Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At, has amassed over 80,000 subscribers. His media presence also includes an active Bluesky account, a football podcast, occasional baseball writing, extensive interaction with r/BetterOffline users, and a book due next year about “why everything stopped working.” In the media landscape, he has become a go – to source for AI naysayers. When Slate’s What’s Next: TBD podcast or WNYC’s On the Media needed someone to discuss the bursting of the AI bubble, they turned to Zitron. It’s not just his output volume but his aggrieved style of criticizing media figures and industry titans that has put him on the map.

The Quintessential Zitron Media Piece

Not long ago, volume and style coalesced to create a quintessential Zitron media piece: a 15,000 – word article for his newsletter titled “How to Argue With an AI Booster.”

Zitron has amassed a dedicated following. Nearly 200 people have purchased a $24 Better Offline challenge coin, engraved with his mantra: “NEVER FORGIVE THEM FOR WHAT THEY’VE DONE TO THE COMPUTER.” I’ve seen someone use his words on a motivational poster, with an ambiguous blend of irony. One Threads user confessed her “parasocial crush on a tech critic & writer,” clearly 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 saw the Threads post told me, “If your writing elicits such a reaction, you’re either doing something very right or very wrong.”)

Meeting the Demand for an AI – Critical Voice

Functionally, Zitron is fulfilling a demand for a counter – voice to the omnipresent AI hype. AI critics come from various perspectives. There are doomers who fear the industry is birthing a world – shattering superintelligence, and denialists who don’t believe AI will ever replace human decision – makers. Zitron offers something different. In a time of amoral AI boosterism and widespread revulsion for the tech industry, he provides a moral framework for loathing generative AI. “He approaches the subject like a journalist, hungry for information, but unconstrained by institutions,” says Allison Morrow, a CNN business reporter and frequent Better Offline guest. “Most journalists don’t want to root for an industry’s downfall. The institutions we work for aren’t keen on such a mission.”

Perhaps more significantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the enticing promise of the industry’s comeuppance. He offers a sense of justice to an audience that perceives a lack of it. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written. “I believe that if we halted the venture – capital aspect tomorrow, it would vanish.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain of an impending collapse, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.” While his analysis might have some gaps in technical details, like inference costs, he remains steadfast in his overarching message: Judgment Day for the AI industry is near. Somewhat overlooked in his scathing criticism is the apparent contradiction in his work, which Zitron doesn’t conceal but rarely discusses: he earns a living, in part, by promoting AI companies. Can a PR professional also be a prophet of industry doom?

Zitron’s Background and Influences

Today, Zitron divides his time between New York and Las Vegas. At 39, he spent the first half of his life in England and the latter in the United States, developing a penchant for Americana like minor – league baseball and the Las Vegas Raiders, despite their uncertain futures. However, his adolescence in London significantly shaped him. He was a “very fat and not particularly bright child,” virtually friendless, attending a school known for its theater – inclined and intelligent students. “From the moment I entered until I left,” he says, “I was bullied.”

Zitron found his childhood friends through the computer. His dad had a laptop with a PCMCIA card, allowing him to dial – up and play Ultima Online and EverQuest, and he frequented mIRC chat rooms related to these games. “My initial experience with the internet was a mix of wonder and amazement at its chaos,” he says. “It wasn’t idyllic, but I was struck by all the ‘real freaks’ who found a home there, interacting in a seemingly egalitarian space.”

This early experience fostered a tech fetishism that still influences his work. He believes that tech drives social processes, not the other way around, and that it embodies sociality in its very nature. Misusing tech for personal or class gain, in his view, is like denying people the social connection he found in those chat rooms. It’s akin to being a bully. When he says “never forgive them for what they’ve done to the computer,” it echoes “never forgive them for what they’ve done to me.”

The once – friendless Zitron now speaks fondly of his many friendships. During CES in Las Vegas, he recorded his podcast from a makeshift studio in a hotel room for 13.5 hours, with guests络绎不绝, as if it were the Dean Martin Show. CES was a resounding success for Zitron. At the end of his final episode, thanking those present, he became a bit emotional. “I was telling everyone how much I love them,” he tells me, with a hint of embarrassment. “I think the media needs more of this. We need more friendship.”

Zitron’s PR Career

Zitron entered the PR industry in 2008, after studying communications at Penn State and briefly writing about video games for PC Zone in London. He worked unhappily at a New York City PR firm and then as the communications director for Hometalk, a startup social platform for home improvement. He made it a point to cultivate relationships with media professionals. As he wrote in his first book, This Is How You Pitch: How to Kick Ass in Your First Years of PR, “Getting to know your contacts on a personal level is a great way to befriend bloggers and journalists covering the industry. Let them bring up your field or client. It makes you seem human, not just another eager – beaver PR person.”

While this might seem cynical on paper, it might have been for effect. Tech bloggers who don’t recall being pitched by Zitron remember drinking with him at New York bars in the 2010s. He was a part of the scene without being overly pushy. In his book, Zitron noted, “Some of these people may end up at your wedding,” and indeed, that happened. John Herrman, the prominent tech columnist at New York magazine, attended Zitron’s first wedding. At his second wedding in 2017, several media figures with a similar mordant sensibility were present, including Chapo Trap House’s Felix Biederman, polemicist Jeb Lund, and sharp – eyed tech journalists Mike Isaac and Sarah Emerson.

In 2012, Zitron went independent. He was quite good at PR, as evidenced by a thousand – word Forbes story the following year highlighting his prowess. In fact, some of his best work was in shaping the brand of Ed Zitron himself. He described the PR field as a “fetid shit – pile” to a reporter in 2014, wanting to distinguish himself. One year, he pranked his PR colleagues who were sending out pre – CES pitches, asking them to send more information “via Updog.” He explained to Newsweek, “The first one to respond was, ‘I’m sorry, what’s Updog?’ My disdain for most of my industry was palpable as I replied, ‘Oh, nothing much, what’s up with you?’ Screenshot, post.”

Zitron would write occasional freelance pieces, often about PR. However, it wasn’t until 2020 that he became a regular commentator. He started a Substack, initially writing about personal branding and other business issues, then about the remote – work debate, finding his voice and audience by framing it as a class war within the office. In 2023, he wrote “The Rot Economy,” attributing Big Tech’s failures to the pursuit of “eternal growth at the expense of the true value of any given service or entity.” “That was when I thought I should try to make sense of all these things,” Zitron says.

The AI Boom and Zitron’s Critique

The AI boom, especially the actions of Sam Altman and OpenAI, provided the perfect subject for Zitron. “I think Sam has more character than most in Silicon Valley,” Zitron tells me. “Doesn’t mean I like him, but he’s an operator. He’s good at it. And he’s clearly good at” – here, a note of genuine admiration creeps in – “making enough friends and exerting enough force to keep enemies at bay.” Altman isn’t an engineer; he’s a “carnival barker,” in Zitron’s words, peddling “gobbledygook, nonsense, bullshit.” Who better to criticize a master of hype than a professional in the field?

Zitron, now a blogger, engaged in typical blog – like activities, such as slinging insults at CEOs and antagonizing the mainstream tech media. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, hosts of the New York Times’ relatively bullish Hard Fork podcast, were quick targets. Zitron claims they’re too chummy with their subjects, calling Hard Fork a case of journalists “irresponsibly using their power.” He recalls pitching Newton in his PR capacity, to no avail. Newton remembers meeting Zitron about a decade ago, with Zitron expressing a desire to be friends, which also led nowhere.

“It’s true that I don’t enjoy interacting with agency PR people much,” Newton says. He dismisses Zitron’s recent commentary as “a new gimmick—AI hater number one” and claims Zitron has a “one – sided beef” with him. (Zitron says it’s a “critique.”) Newton compares Zitron’s verbose style to “some cross between the Always Sunny meme of Charlie [with the murder board] and a prisoner smearing shit on the walls to make a point.” He adds, “I think Ed has overreached, having built a pedestal for himself, climbed on top, and posed for glossy portraits in Financial Times magazine and WIRED, wearing aviators like the fucking Temu Kara Swisher.”

Zitron believes Hard Fork has sacrificed its critical edge for the sake of friendship. Later, he alludes to Newton’s disclosure that his boyfriend works at Anthropic. “I think they’ve befriended these people,” Zitron says. “You ever seen Almost Famous? Don’t befriend the rock stars.”

Zitron’s Tech – Blogger Eschatology

Other aspects of the old blogosphere are evident in Zitron’s work. More significant than the feuds is what could be called his tech – blogger eschatology. One longtime tech writer described it based on his 2010s experience: “You see a product deteriorating, your engagement with it waning, and you have this moral intuition that it will all collapse.” But the collapse rarely occurs. It didn’t for Facebook, Twitter, or even crypto, which, despite much doom – saying, managed to influence a presidency.

What people witness as a product deteriorates (or “enshittifies,” as Cory Doctorow puts it) isn’t an inevitable fate but “evidence of a company succeeding by being bad,” as the tech writer told me. Many astute people don’t see this, in part due to an unwavering faith in a self – correcting market mechanism. They believe a costly and degraded product will be punished. But that faith, more than generative AI, might be the biggest bubble of all.

Zitron’s PR Pitches and the Contradiction

“Got a really unique one here,” an email from Zitron began in August 2024. He was pitching a journalist on an EZPR client, Fulcra Dynamics. The company collects information, including health data, and connects it to LLM models like ChatGPT, enabling users to “talk” to their data, querying it about workouts or Instacart order ETAs. Backed by the Winklevoss twins, while some AI skeptics might view it as predatory, Zitron had no qualms in his email. “These guys rock,” he wrote of the founders. “I will stake my rep on them.”

As Zitron’s profile has risen, so has the amusement among journalists at his dual roles. They relish sharing stories of the “maverick scourge of AI” promoting AI services, seemingly inflating the bubble with one hand and pricking it with the other. One reporter I know stopped responding to his messages due to discomfort with his seemingly conflicting personas. Several journalists cited his promotion of Nomi, which became infamous when one of its companions allegedly told a man to kill himself. (EZPR and Nomi have parted ways, and Zitron says he “won’t work with AI companions again.”) In his pitches, Zitron mentioned a sex angle to the Nomi story, though no one pursued it long enough to clarify. “A hero for our time,” Newton scoffed when mentioning Zitron’s work with Nomi.

Zitron is an easy target for journalists who consume both his PR pitches and critical writing. The contrast between the sycophantic pitches and his acerbic newsletter prose is laughable. Newton believes the AI – critical movement deserves a better figurehead. “We’re in a tribal era, and people look at [Zitron] and think, ‘I want to be in the ‘fuck AI’ tribe.’ There are valid reasons to be in that tribe, but it should be led by someone other than an AI publicist.” Another journalist, who generally agrees with Zitron’s industry critique, laments that “the Pied Piper of the anti – AI movement” turned out to be “this guy.”

Today, EZPR has four clients, none of which, Zitron claims, is in the generative – AI business. “I don’t want to pitch generative AI,” he says. “It’s boring, shit, and sucks. I’ve studied it and found it economically ruinous, environmentally destructive, and thieving. I’ve missed nothing.” He exempts Nomi because “they use their own models and training data.”

Zitron does represent AI services like DoNotPay, once billed as the “world’s first robot lawyer.” He described it as “automation that can help you navigate bureaucracy, fill out forms, check if you’re in a class – action suit, etc.” However, the company was hit with an FTC complaint under Lina Khan, alleging deceptive claims about its AI chatbot. DoNotPay and the FTC reached a six – figure settlement, with the company neither admitting nor denying the claims. (Zitron says he stopped working with DoNotPay before the FTC investigation, though it’s now a client again.)

Zitron is unfazed by the criticism of his AI clientele. If his critics see hypocrisy or special pleading in his day job, he’s at peace with his choices. Matthew Hughes, editor of Zitron’s newsletter, calls him a “technologist at heart” open to a world where GenAI is beneficial.

In reality, Zitron’s two jobs aren’t as conflicting as they seem. His PR persuasion and critical jabs stem from the same place: his love for the tech industry. He’s just frustrated that it doesn’t work better. “I’m actually a lover,” he says. “I love my friends and the computer. The problem is they’re ruining it. AI doesn’t deliver as promised, just like the Metaverse and crypto. And our everyday products keep getting worse.”

Zitron’s Underlying Premise and the Irony

Despite not being swayed by the likes of Sam Altman’s propaganda, Zitron subscribes to a premise in line with the tech industry’s Promethean fantasies. In his view, there’s the computer with an inherent essence, propelled into the future by technological progress, and then there are “they” who act on it, for good or ill. He fails to realize that the computer is already shaped by the desires of “they,” being a social product, both a cause and an effect.

This is the irony