This week’s Better Offline is a recording of a panel held by Clarion West in Seattle earlier this year with Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron, discussing enshittification, The Rot Economy, and the destruction of modern tech platforms, moderated by Whitney Beltrán.

Original Air Date: 11.12.25

Cory Doctorow: https://craphound.com/
Whitney Beltrán: https://brightwhitney.com/

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Clarion West is a nonprofit literary organization that runs an acclaimed six-week residential workshop every summer, online classes and workshops, one-day and weekend workshops, a reading series every summer, and other events throughout the year. At Clarion West, you’ll be among award-winning and best-selling writers in science fiction, fantasy, games, horror, and more. Our workshops and classes are taught by world-class instructors from across the field of speculative fiction. Wherever you may be in your career, whether novice or sage, we offer a diverse listing of classes that is packed with valuable information to take your writing to the next level.

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how 70-80% of Amazon and Microsoft’s AI revenue and capacity is taken up by OpenAI and Anthropic, and how capacity constraints across the industry are a result of hyperscalers sacrificing their infrastructure to the least-profitable startups of all time.

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On this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron digs into Palantir’s 22-point manifesto with Caleb and June from Kill The Computer.

The Manifesto: https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312

Caleb and June
https://bsky.app/profile/birdrespecter.bsky.social

https://bsky.app/profile/killthecomputer.com

https://bsky.app/profile/junlper.beer

https://x.com/canteverdie

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how OpenAI must grow its revenue by 1000% in the next three years and raise at least another $200 billion for it to be able to pay its compute deals with Oracle and other providers, and how Oracle dies if OpenAI fails to pay its bills.

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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by computer science professor and writer Cal Newport to talk about the Claude Mythos marketing scam, the lies around AI job loss, and why LLMs shouldn’t talk like they’re people.

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New Yorker archive: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron discusses how AI labs’ dangerous rhetoric around AI capabilities and job loss are antagonizing and terrifying people that are already on edge, and that de-escalation starts with Altman and Amodei talking about LLMs as normal software.

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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker to talk about introspection-free venture capital, the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse effect of LLMs, and trying to find a better future to focus on.

https://bsky.app/profile/adambecker.bsky.social
https://www.youtube.com/@DreamingAgainstTheMachine
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/9781541619593/

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In a special episode of Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by writers Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker to talk about their massive investigation into Sam Altman, his ouster from OpenAI, and the consequences of trusting Silicon Valley with the future.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted

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