Shirt a Phobia

Sample Page

Ed Zitron (born 1986/1987) is an English author, podcaster, and public relations specialist.[1][2][3] He is a critic of the technology industry, particularly of artificial intelligence companies and the generative artificial intelligence boom of the 2020s. He hosts the Better Offline podcast, and writes the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter.[4]

Early life and education

Zitron was born in Hammersmith[5] in 1986 or 1987.[6] He was privately educated at Latymer Upper School.[7][5] He then attended Aberystwyth University in Aberystwyth, Wales,[8] spending one year as an exchange student at Pennsylvania State University.[9]

Career

Zitron began his career as a journalist, writing for a London-based video games magazine. He later worked for PC Zone until around 2008, during which time he also began working in public relations.[10] He later worked for a New York City-based public relations firm and served as communications director for a company called Hometalk.com.[11] In 2013, he founded the public relations agency EZPR.com,[12] where he is the CEO.[13] In the following years, he published two books about public relations.[14][15][6] He has also been a critic of the PR industry.[10]

In 2016, he started a podcast with Felix Biederman called The Scumbag.[16] This lasted for two seasons between 2016 and 2018 and was a satirical look at darker corners of the internet.

Zitron began writing a newsletter about the tech industry in 2020, titled Where’s Your Ed At, which had more than 50,000 subscribers as of February 2025.[6][17] Zitron laid out his thesis that technology firms have focused on growth above all else, stifling innovation and harming consumers, in a 2023 newsletter issue titled “The Rot Economy”. The post went viral.[17] Zitron’s “rot economy” theory has been likened to Cory Doctorow‘s concept of enshittification.[1][18] In April 2024, a post titled The Man Who Killed Google Search sparked outcry about the company after Zitron accused Google CTO Prabhakar Raghavan of “killing” Google’s search product by prioritizing profits for Google’s advertising business over delivering relevant results.[19][20]

In 2023, Cool Zone Media invited Zitron to create a podcast on their network. The podcast, called Better Offline, focuses on Silicon Valley and the tech industry, and particularly on the AI bubble.[6]

Zitron is writing a book about the ossification of major technology companies and the need for startups to challenge them, titled Why Everything Stopped Working.[21]

Views

Alex Kirshner writing for Slate has described Zitron as “one of the most pugnacious critics of Big Tech“.[17] Zitron has been described as an “AI skeptic”[6][17] or “AI critic”,[22] and has criticized both technology companies and the media for contributing to what he views as unwarranted hype around large language models.[17] He has called the 2020s AI boom a bubble, and predicts it will pop.[23][1]

In 2021 and 2022, Zitron wrote several articles defending remote work.[24] In an article for The Atlantic, he argued that executives and middle managers advocating for mandatory in-office work feared remote work would make their jobs obsolete.[13][25][26] Speaking to Vanity Fair, he explained, “I believe there is a large chunk of extremely performative work that is having a midlife crisis right now.”[25]

Publications

As of 2025 Zitron has authored two books:

  • Zitron, Ed (2013). This Is How You Pitch: How To Kick Ass In Your First Years of PR.[2]
  • Zitron, Ed (2018). Fire Your Publicist: The PR and Publicity Secrets That Will Make You and Your Business Famous.[3]

Personal life

Zitron lives in New York City and Las Vegas, Nevada.[27] In 2012, he married psychology professor Jillian Knapp; they later divorced.[8][28] Zitron later remarried and divorced again, having a child from the marriage.[5]

Zitron has developmental coordination disorder and ADHD.[7] He is a fan of the Las Vegas Raiders.[29]

References

  1. ^ a b c Doctorow, Cory (2025). Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-83674-222-7. OCLC 1530163694. I will never forgive them for what they did to the computer
  2. ^ a b Zitron, Ed (2013). This Is How You Pitch: How To Kick Ass In Your First Years of PR. OCLC 2013. [ISBN missing]
  3. ^ a b Zitron, Ed (2018). Fire Your Publicist: The PR and Publicity Secrets That Will Make You and Your Business Famous. OCLC 1472753801. [ISBN missing]
  4. ^ www.wheresyoured.at Edit this at Wikidata
  5. ^ a b c Kinder, Tabby (25 September 2025). “Ed Zitron is mad as hell: How a British-born hobbyist blogger became one of Big Tech’s punchiest critics”. ft.com. London: Financial Times.
  6. ^ a b c d e Peleg, Oren (10 March 2025). “Can Artificial Intelligence Stir-Fry?”. The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  7. ^ a b Zitron, Ed (2 February 2021). “Living With Feeling Stupid”. wheresyoured.at. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  8. ^ a b Anon (12 November 2012). “Jillian Knapp, Edward Zitron”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  9. ^ Zitron, Ed (18 July 2022). “Living In The Actual Global Village”. Medium. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  10. ^ a b Schonfeld, Zach (30 December 2014). “The World’s Most Self-Loathing PR Person”. Newsweek. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  11. ^ Strauss, Karsten (30 August 2013). “‘Reporters Hate PR People, And They Should’“. Forbes. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  12. ^ Anon (2025). “EZPR Media relations that actually works. No fluff, no jargon. Just results”. ezpr.com.
  13. ^ a b Zitron, Ed (29 July 2021). “Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future”. The Atlantic. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  14. ^ Zitron, Ed (22 June 2015). “A Brit plays the tech PR game in America”. USA Today. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  15. ^ Bort, Julie; Kosoff, Maya (11 September 2014). “The 50 Best Public Relations People In The Tech Industry In 2014”. Business Insider. Retrieved 26 March 2025S.
  16. ^ “The Scumbag”.
  17. ^ a b c d e Kirshner, Alex (2 February 2025). “One of Big Tech’s Angriest Critics Explains the Problem”. Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  18. ^ MacLeod, Riley (10 July 2024). “Welcome To Xbox’s Rot Economy”. Aftermath. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  19. ^ Colomé, Jordi Pérez (4 May 2024). “The day Google started to get worse: ‘We are getting too close to money’“. El País English. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  20. ^ Zitron, Ed (23 April 2024). “The Man Who Killed Google Search”. Where’s Your Ed At?.
  21. ^ Bellan, Rebecca (5 March 2025). “Growth at all costs is destroying the internet. PR maven Ed Zitron says that’s an opportunity for startups”. TechCrunch. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  22. ^ Tangermann, Victor (29 January 2025). “OpenAI Hit With Wave of Mockery for Crying That Someone Stole Its Work Without Permission to Build a Competing Product”. futurism.com. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  23. ^ Brooke, Gladstone (29 January 2025). “Brooke Talks AI With Ed Zitron”. wnycstudios.org. On the Media. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  24. ^ Ongweso Jr, Edward (19 July 2022). “Good News: Economy Sucks, You’re Screwed, and It’s All Your Fault, Economists Say”. Vice. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  25. ^ a b Cai, Delia (6 September 2022). “The Professional Try-Hard Is Dead, But You Still Need to Return to the Office”. vanityfair.com. Vanity Fair. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  26. ^ Miall, Laurence (20 November 2021). “Remote Work Won’t End Exploitation”. Jacobin. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  27. ^ Zitron, Ed (26 January 2024). “About Where’s Your Ed At”. Where’s Your Ed At?. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  28. ^ Zitron, Ed (29 May 2021). “Divorce in the digital age”. The Daily Dot. Retrieved 26 March 2025.
  29. ^ Roth, David (16 January 2025). “The Future Feels Like The Raiders, With Ed Zitron”. Defector. Retrieved 26 March 2025.