Wired Profiles Ed Zitron, AI's Loudest Critic and Its PR Man

Wired's Tommy Craggs built a long profile around a basic contradiction. Ed Zitron, the man whose newsletter calls Sam Altman "full of shit" and Mark Zuckerberg "a putrid ghoul," runs a tech PR firm called EZPR that still represents "mostly tech clients, including some in the AI space."

Zitron, as the piece puts it, is "an unrepentant technopessimist" who happens to be a publicist for the industry he dismantles weekly in podcast form.

The audience is not small. His weekly podcast *Better Offline*, about "the tech industry's influence and manipulation of society," has "cracked Spotify's top 20 among tech shows." His newsletter *Where's Your Ed At* has "grown north of 80,000 subscribers." A book "due next year" about, in his words, "why everything stopped working" is on the way, alongside a scrappy Bluesky account, a football podcast, occasional baseball writing, and a Reddit community (r/BetterOffline) he engages with.

Craggs doesn't suggest any of this is concealed; the firm's name is literally EZPR. The weight of the profile is simply that one of the most-quoted sceptics of generative AI makes part of his income from attention he generates for the companies building it.

Two of the AI commentators we follow in our directory shared the piece when it ran, a reminder that the economics of AI criticism are now a story in their own right, not just a sideshow to the models.