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Ed Zitron Profile picture
@edzitron
May 4, 2023 • 9 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
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Today's newsletter is about how the pursuit of eternal revenue growth - along with media executives that never take part or interest in the creative process - is destroying creativity and the lives of workers in both the media industry and Hollywood.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap…
The problem of everything I've been writing about is the pursuit of eternal revenue growth - the quality of a product is now subordinate to shareholder value, meaning that the people at the helm in the media are fully disconnected from production itself.
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The WGA is on strike, fighting the AMPTP for both fairer pay structures for creatives and definitive protections against AI-generated content. Media executives love AI because they don't see media as creative - they just want *more of it to sell*.
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Vice was run into the ground by executives that wanted to sell ads over making a sustainable news outlet. They overstaffed and pushed recklessly into random, unprofitable markets, because they are not creators - they're private equitors by another name.
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The common refrain is that it's hard to make news pay, when the problem is that media execs see news as a commodity to sell ads against. You cannot grow a media organization that makes interesting stuff at the rapid speed that the markets desire.
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Politico (and Axel Springer) never gave Protocol a chance, because they set it up for failure by massively overstaffing the publication and immediately giving it multi-million dollar targets in a crowded tech media market. It's a victim of rot capitalism.
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Buzzfeed had, at one point, one of the best newsrooms in the world. They killed it because Jonah Peretti never tried to run Buzzfeed - let alone Buzzfeed News - as a sustainable enterprise, instead chasing eternal growth and a doomed SPAC IPO. Scummy.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… Image
Media orgs can be profitable if they're built sustainably. Defector is profitable. Platformer is profitable. Newcomer is profitable. All because they sell good content and built sustainable businesses while actually understanding the content itself.
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Every successful media story has been the result of reporters and writers and content creators creating something, and using their knowledge of this process to sell it to an audience. Every failure is a result of executive interference and ignorance.
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More from @edzitron

Ed Zitron Profile picture
Sep 26
Premium newsletter: Based on my analysis, OpenAI needs one trillion dollars in the next four years to build 17GW of data centers and other commitments, with at least $500 billion needed for company operations. There's not enough capital to fund it.

wheresyoured.at/openai-onetril…
I spoke with analyst Gil Luria at D.A. Davidson, asking if the capital existed to build OpenAI's promised 17GW of data centers: "Of course there isn't enough capital for all of this," but "enough capital to do this for a at least a little while longer."

wheresyoured.at/openai-onetril…Image
Between NVIDIA and Oracle, OpenAI has now committed to 17 gigawatts of AI data center capacity, and to be clear, it takes about 2.5 gigawatts and more than $32.5 billion per gigawatt. There is no way these data centers actually get completed before 2028.
wheresyoured.at/openai-onetril…Image
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Read 6 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Mar 3
Newsletter: Microsoft pulled back on over a gigawatt of planned data center capacity, suggesting that they do not think there is a growth future in generative AI. SoftBank, the only one that can afford to fund OpenAI, has to take out loans to do so.
wheresyoured.at/power-cut/
Last week analyst TD Cowen said Microsoft had canceled two data center leases - "a couple hundred MWs" of capacity. Most missed a detail - that Microsoft had let over 1GW of Letters of Intent expire, equivalent to as much as of 14% current capacity.
wheresyoured.at/power-cut/Image
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Data center buildouts take 3-6 years, especially with high MW/GW projects. Microsoft - the largest purchaser of NVIDIA GPUs in 2024 - appears to be cutting data center expansion at a time when generative AI is meant to be the future. This is concerning.
wheresyoured.at/power-cut/Image
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Read 12 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Nov 13, 2024
Newsletter: Blame the tech industry for the rise of authoritarianism. Blame a news media handicapped by a deference to power and a fear of bias. Blame the fact that our digital lives are unchecked ecological disasters.

Something must change.
wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-fu…
Why are we surprised that people don’t trust the media after years of them telling regular people that the economy is good, that their problems aren’t real, that the things that make them suffer are in their heads - and it's their fault things suck?
wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-fu…Image
Why would people trust a legacy media that treats workers like disobedient dogs that “quiet quit” when they went to work and did the job they were hired to do? Why would they trust a legacy media that critiques workers far more than the powerful?

wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-fu…Image
Read 15 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Nov 1, 2024
Newsletter: Microsoft is a cult driven by “The Growth Mindset,” a psuedo-science that informs recruitment, hiring, firing and promotion decisions, all while instructing employees and managers to generate performance reviews using hallucination-prone AI.

wheresyoured.at/the-cult-of-mi…
When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, he rebuilt their culture around a flimsy psuedo-science called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job performance is judged.
wheresyoured.at/the-cult-of-mi…Image
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When Satya Nadella took over, he instituted a cult-like focus on the Growth Mindset, and Microsoft employees were directly instructed in internal presentations to hype his book "Hit Refresh" to customers and partners - making it a bestseller as a result.
wheresyoured.at/the-cult-of-mi…Image
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Read 14 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Oct 2, 2024
Newsletter: OpenAI is a bad, unprofitable business, with most of its revenue coming from premium subscriptions, and only 27% ($1bn) coming from people licensing its technology, suggesting that the generative AI industry is much smaller than we thought.
wheresyoured.at/oai-business/
In the last week, OpenAI has lost their CTO and Chief Research Officer, all while trying to raise a $6.5bn+ round for a firm that loses $5bn/yr. They're so desperate they're raising from SoftBank, a VC famous for losing billions on terrible investments.
wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

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Yet there’s far more to worry about with OpenAI. The New York Times reported last week that the company will bring in $3.7bn of revenue in 2024, yet lose $5bn. In short, OpenAI spends $2.35 to make $1 - and growth is already slowing down.
wheresyoured.at/oai-business/


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Read 16 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Sep 26, 2024
Newsletter: The tech industry has its own growing commercial real estate bubble - the Software As A Service market is in decline, over-leveraging unprofitable generative AI in a desperate - and failing - attempt to restart growth...but it isn't working.
wheresyoured.at/saaspocalypse-…
The silent, powerful market-driver of the tech industry is the Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) industry, where swaths of the economy have outsourced their infrastructure to the cloud. Its core business model is making you trade convenience for freedom.

wheresyoured.at/saaspocalypse-…

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SaaS, while not inherently bad, has become synonymous with selling organizations “ecosystems” of products, and getting them to commit resources to customizing suites of mediocre apps - a sunk cost that makes it difficult to move even if they hate it.
wheresyoured.at/saaspocalypse-…

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Read 19 tweets

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