One of the people I love listening to these days is a guy called Ed Zitron.<\/p>\n
Zitron is an AI sceptic, but he is not just an AI sceptic. He is almost the AI sceptic. He reminds me of Michael Burry in The Big Short: the one person in a room full of people convinced that everything is fine who has actually gone away, looked at the underlying numbers and come back saying, \u201cThis does not make any fucking sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
While everyone else talks about the AI revolution, or alternatively the AI apocalypse, Zitron keeps dragging the conversation back to economics.<\/p>\n
He comes from a PR background, writes the Where\u2019s Your Ed At newsletter and hosts the Better Offline podcast, and over the past few years he has become one of the most relentless critics of the generative AI boom.<\/p>\n
What makes him interesting to me is not that I automatically believe everything he says. It is that he keeps asking the questions other people should have been asking all along.<\/p>\n
If these businesses are so extraordinarily successful, where are the profits? If this technology is already capable of replacing vast numbers of people, why has that not happened? If the economics work as brilliantly as we are constantly told they do, why is so much AI usage subsidised? Why do costs rise so dramatically when companies move customers towards paying for what they actually consume?<\/p>\n
Zitron has highlighted what he regards as increasingly circular relationships between the giant technology companies, cloud providers and AI laboratories, with investment, computing expenditure and projected AI revenues feeding back into one another. His argument is that beneath the gigantic valuations and breathtaking capital expenditure is an economic structure which may be far less healthy than the headlines suggest.<\/p>\n
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And there is outside institutional money tied up in all of this too.<\/p>\n
Pension funds, investment funds, companies building businesses around these technologies and countless firms making plans based on the assumption that the prices they are paying today will still make sense tomorrow.<\/p>\n
That is where Zitron\u2019s argument becomes interesting.<\/p>\n
He has repeatedly pointed to enterprise customers discovering what AI can actually cost when heavily subsidised access gives way to usage-based charging.<\/p>\n
One example he has cited is Uber burning through what had been intended as an annual AI budget in roughly a quarter once they actually paid for what they used; it\u2019s an extraordinary situation, which gives you a hint of the problems that lie ahead for companies who operate on tiny margins and can\u2019t afford to make that change.<\/p>\n
His view is essentially that the economics underneath this thing deserve far more scrutiny than they have received. Which brings us to his second major criticism; the one directed at the media which covers the AI industry.<\/p>\n
This is not just about the AI industry; it is about the whole technology-media ecosystem. Look at Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.<\/p>\n
That story might be one of the biggest warnings the AI industry will ever get.<\/p>\n
Holmes pitched technology that was highly complex and difficult for many of the people writing about it to independently assess. She made enormous claims about what it could do, attracted more than $700 million from investors, and built a media narrative around a product which ultimately could not do what she said it could.<\/p>\n
The lesson is not that every complicated new technology is snake oil.<\/p>\n
It is that when extraordinary technical claims meet enormous institutional money and a credulous media, somebody has to stop applauding long enough to check whether the machine actually works.<\/p>\n
And this is where I started thinking about Scottish football.<\/p>\n
Zitron\u2019s point is that professional media organisations should have been ahead of people like him. They should have been examining every claim these companies made, looking at the numbers available in the public domain and testing whether the behaviour of these businesses matched what they were saying about themselves.<\/p>\n
That is what journalism is supposed to do.<\/p>\n
There was a time when journalists went looking for stories. Increasingly, it feels as though too many simply wait for companies, PR departments, pundits and interested parties to hand stories to them.<\/p>\n
And the more I listen to Zitron talking about the technology press, the more it chimes with exactly what some of us have been watching in Scottish football for years.<\/p>\n
We have spent years sounding alarms, looking at structures, following money, examining claims and asking one very simple question: does this actually make sense?<\/p>\n
Think about the people in our media who spent years telling Celtic supporters that the board were geniuses.<\/p>\n
Some of those same people are now openly contemptuous of the Celtic board, arriving exactly where many of us have been at for years in spite of trophies piling up. We got here through cold blooded analysis. They had to wait for the writing on the wall in letters so big that not seeing them would have been an even bigger problem.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, we were subjecting our own club to that cold blooded analysis, not some faraway institution we didn\u2019t give a damn about. Even as we were winning things a lot of us were saying \u201cthis is all going to go wrong because the structure underpinning it is flawed and the people who are running it don\u2019t know how to fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where was the media\u2019s analysis? Where was the examination of the structures which were supposedly so brilliant? Where were the questions about recruitment, succession planning, European performance and the absence of a proper football operation?<\/p>\n
Then look across the city.<\/p>\n
I wrote earlier about Transfermarkt\u2019s valuations supposedly showing that the Ibrox squad is worth more than Celtic\u2019s. We have already established how little those theoretical numbers necessarily resemble what clubs actually pay when players become available. But once again, somebody puts numbers on a screen and people stop asking questions.<\/p>\n
Anybody who stands outside the hype and looks properly at the financial structure across the city should at least be asking whether the spending model is sustainable without regular European income.<\/p>\n
Even if I conceded every football argument for the sake of discussion, even if I accepted that they had assembled a squad capable of winning the league, that would tell me nothing about whether the economics underneath that squad make sense.<\/p>\n
Those are two completely different questions.<\/p>\n
Yet Scottish football coverage constantly confuses them.<\/p>\n
Manchester City has dredged all of this back up again because an independent Premier League commission has now found the club guilty of serious financial-rule breaches over a nine-season period, with sanctions still to be determined and City pursuing an appeal.<\/p>\n
Suddenly everybody wants to discuss financial governance.<\/p>\n
But only in the most basic, limited way, which is how you get Simon Jordan and David Murray sitting discussing Manchester City whilst Graeme Souness hosts the conversation. I compared it the other day to one of those true-crime podcasts where retired gangsters sit around discussing somebody else\u2019s heist.<\/p>\n
Why are these people treated as though they are detached observers when Scottish football has its own unresolved arguments about money, governance, regulation and what happened in 2012? Because we have been here before.<\/p>\n
When the old Ibrox club was trying to secure a deal with HMRC, the media continually encouraged the belief that some kind of pennies-in-the-pound agreement would ultimately be reached. Meanwhile, a handful of us in the blogosphere were telling people to go and read HMRC\u2019s own stated policies on what Rangers and MIH had done.<\/p>\n
Look at HMRC\u2019s position. Look at the wider incentives. Look at the political reality.<\/p>\n
Their position on tax avoidance was to cut no deals with organisations who had deliberately concealed their true positions, in order to minimise exposure.<\/p>\n
The politics were even more brutal; Rangers were not an institution capable of forcing the British state to rewrite tax policy. They were a major Scottish football club, absolutely, but they were operating in a small market while HMRC was looking at tax avoidance and remuneration structures far beyond Scottish football.<\/p>\n
We kept saying that HMRC could have reasons for preferring the corpse. A dead Rangers could send a much louder message than a sweetheart deal.<\/p>\n
The CVA was ultimately rejected by HMRC, Rangers went into liquidation, and the assets were subsequently acquired by Charles Green\u2019s consortium before a Rangers-named club entered the Scottish Third Division.<\/p>\n
The point is not that bloggers possess mystical powers.<\/p>\n
We do not. We simply looked at the evidence. We dug around for the facts. We went where they apparently didn\u2019t want to go, just as Zitron is doing now with AI.<\/p>\n
The Craig Whyte story was another extraordinary example.<\/p>\n
The Daily Record famously described Whyte as a \u201cself-made billionaire\u201d whose wealth was \u201coff the radar\u201d. The Guardian later used that episode as an example of Scottish football writers functioning as stenographers for spin doctors.<\/p>\n
When that story appeared, I did something anyone inside a newspaper office could have done. I looked.<\/p>\n
I went through the Sunday Times Rich List looking for Craig Whyte.<\/p>\n
I could not find him.<\/p>\n
That immediately suggested that this supposed billionaire required rather more investigation than simply printing the claim on a front page; nobody who could be on that list does not want to be on it. Even organised crime figures co-operate with the researchers to some degree because being featured in it is a status symbol.<\/p>\n
And plenty of other warning signs did exist.<\/p>\n
Even when Whyte completed the takeover, Rangers\u2019 own independent board committee publicly expressed concerns about whether he possessed the resources required to fund the club and meet possible tax liabilities.<\/p>\n
Whyte bought David Murray\u2019s controlling stake for \u00a31. It later emerged that the \u00a318 million Lloyds debt had effectively been financed through the sale of future season-ticket income to Ticketus. It was a Celtic site that broke that story, weeks before The Record caught up. Jackson and others continue to embarrass themselves to this day claiming at as an exclusive. All of us in Celtic cyberspace know better.<\/p>\n
That is what Burry did before the housing crash.<\/p>\n
Everybody around him believed the mortgage market was solid because everybody else believed it was solid. The ratings said everything was fine. The banks behaved as though everything was fine. The entire ecosystem reinforced the same assumption.<\/p>\n
Burry looked underneath. He examined what was actually inside the mortgage securities and when he saw what those securities were comprised of he knew what he needed to know.<\/p>\n
And that is what Zitron keeps demanding that technology journalism does with AI.<\/p>\n
Stop staring at the valuations. Stop repeating the claims. Stop being dazzled by the people making them. Look underneath.<\/p>\n
Yet so much modern journalism appears magnetically attracted to spectacle.<\/p>\n
A celebrity psychic predicts Celtic\u2019s next manager and suddenly that becomes a story. Transfermarkt publishes imaginary player prices and suddenly we have a Scottish football valuation table. A supercomputer crunches results which have already happened and tells us who will win games which have not happened yet, and newspapers publish the answer as though football need no longer bother taking place.<\/p>\n
The technology press has its own version.<\/p>\n
Somebody warns that artificial intelligence might end humanity and the extraordinary claim immediately becomes the headline. But what is the mechanism? What precisely is going to happen? What evidence supports the claim?<\/p>\n
If someone genuinely believes they are helping construct a machine which may destroy civilisation, why are they turning up for work on Monday morning to continue building it?<\/p>\n
Those seem like fairly basic questions.<\/p>\n
Yet sometimes the sensational claim is simply more exciting than examining whether it makes any sense. That is where I think large parts of journalism have gone wrong.<\/p>\n
There is too much creative imagination and not enough analytical intelligence.<\/p>\n
And I do not mean that journalists are stupid. I mean that too much journalism has become structurally lazy.<\/p>\n
I used the word \u201ccorrupt\u201d while thinking about this earlier, and that needs explaining because corruption does not necessarily mean somebody sliding a brown envelope across a table. Institutions can become corrupted in other ways.<\/p>\n
They can be corrupted by proximity to the people they cover. They can be corrupted by dependency on access. They can be corrupted by routine. They can be corrupted by deference to supposed expertise.<\/p>\n
How could all these clever people possibly be wrong? Well, start by refusing to assume that they are necessarily the cleverest people in the room. Start by checking.<\/p>\n
Scottish football journalism should have learned that lesson in 2012.<\/p>\n
The predictions then were apocalyptic.<\/p>\n
Without Rangers, Scottish football would collapse. Armageddon awaited us. The game would become commercially worthless. Yet Scottish football survived. The supposedly impossible happened and the world kept turning.<\/p>\n
Still, fourteen years later, we hear people casually say that Rangers were \u201crelegated\u201d, as though a straightforward sporting punishment explains what occurred, when liquidation, the sale of assets and the subsequent process by which a Rangers-named club entered the league system were far more complicated than that \u2026 but nevertheless, the documented reality which people still seem content to ignore.<\/p>\n
Now Manchester City has forced many of those old arguments back into the open, and the Scottish media finds itself trying to discuss the English case while avoiding some of the uncomfortable questions raised by its own history.<\/p>\n
It talks about punishment. It talks about consequences. It talks about relegation.<\/p>\n
But remarkably often, it does not want to talk about the underlying conduct which made questions of punishment relevant in the first place.<\/p>\n
I do not know exactly when journalism got here.<\/p>\n
But Ed Zitron made his name in new media, and a lot of us entered our version of that world after 2012 for essentially the same reason.<\/p>\n
When you realise you cannot simply trust official sources to get everything right, or even always to tell you the full truth, eventually you reach another conclusion.<\/p>\n
Perhaps somebody else should try.<\/p>\n
So now there are thousands of people outside the traditional media examining claims, analysing stories and pulling on whatever threads they can find. We will not find everything. We will get things wrong. I certainly have.<\/p>\n
But there is honesty and integrity in trying to look underneath the story instead of simply accepting what someone wants you to believe.<\/p>\n
That is why I still take this seriously. It is why I still love doing it. And yes, sometimes saying that makes me feel like a self-important tit.<\/p>\n
But it matters. It will always matter.<\/p>\n
Because otherwise we surrender the entire ecosystem to garbage: celebrity psychics choosing Celtic managers, supercomputers deciding championships and imaginary valuation tables telling us who has the best football team.<\/p>\n
That may be the media world we increasingly live in.<\/p>\n
But I will not live in it quietly.<\/p>\n
When everything around you has turned to shit, you have two choices. You can get used to the taste of shit, or you can pick up a shovel.<\/p>\n
I choose to dig. I might not dig my way out of it, but I will not meekly accept that this is simply the way things have to be. Nobody should.<\/p>\n
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