There’s more to being a hater than blindly hating on the mob target of the week. In fact, that tendency is directly at odds with haterism as a philosophy and an intellectual pursuit. On a very special Hater Week episode of Aftermath Hours, we bring in one of the internet’s foremost experts to show everybody how it’s done.
This time around, we’re joined by the crown prince of haters himself, Ed Zitron, writer of numerous 8,000-15,000-word Hater’s Guides to a rogue’s gallery of awful tech companies. We talk to Ed about what it means to be an effective hater in his wheelhouse—going after the motherfuckers that are taking everyone for a ride (to hell) on the AI Express—and beyond.
But whether the topic is games, tech, or whatever else, one truth pervades: To be a good hater, you must also, at your core, be a lover. You’ve got to be equally studious whether you’re obsessing over something genuinely cool or something that deserves to be ground to pulp by a thousand garbage disposals. In that spirit, we also discuss our greatest hates and our greatest loves. And of course, we decide which JoJo from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is the biggest hater.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, leave a review so that we can travel to Ed’s ancestral homeland and be transformed into the kinds of people who can regularly pen 8,000-15,000-word Hater’s Guides. Then, finally, Hater Week will be unstoppable.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Ed: The reason a lot of my hating is appealing—and Aftermath does this very well as well—[is that] people are so used to decorum, people are so used to being told “Oh, you can’t say that; that’s not fair.” And fair usually means “I’m going to give an exact balance of both sides and give affordance to none of the criticisms. I’m going to pull my punches unilaterally, and I’m gonna talk up the positives way more—and that, to me, is balance.” I think that readers and viewers and listeners are fucking tired of it. If they need sterile, market consensus bullshit, there are nine million outlets that can do that.
There are a million games outlets that can do that. If they need something that is just ruinously hateful—that is not from a place of enjoying video games but is just being mad about them—that’s most of YouTube. But if they need people who are lovingly upset with stuff or hating on stuff, that’s why Aftermath rocks. That’s why my work rocks.
People appreciate people who give a shit. I think that is actually hating—when you’re a good hater, when you’re a well-defined hater—that’s why people read you. It’s not because you’re mad; it’s not because you’re angry. It’s really easy for detractors to describe it in that way, because it’s a cheap out. If you say, “Oh, someone’s just angry, someone’s just mad,” then you don’t have to deal with their views.
I think hating’s marvelous. I think hating is something everyone needs to do. I think if you hate, it means that you know the reasons that you’re mad at things. Because there’s a very big difference between being a hater and being hateful.
Nathan: You were talking about the idea of hating versus just hate, and I think even at the outset of Hater Week, we got some of this. I think people’s expectation or assumption was that we were just going to be doing a bunch of hatred for hate’s sake—as opposed to what we’ve been engaging in, which is much more built around the idea of understanding something and talking about it from a place of that sort of knowledge. But I think that just goes to show what the internet has become on that front—that that is the default expectation, that is what people tend to see, that is how people tend to interact.
Ed: Yeah, I also don’t think people tend to realize that being a hater is an intellectual pursuit. It genuinely is. My Hater’s Guides are 8,000-15,000 words.
Nathan: They’re mindblowing to me. I cannot believe how many of these you’ve written. I mean, I’ve written a book, and there are a scant few times when a single piece—a chapter, even—has been that long. And you just do it regularly. What the fuck, man? How do you manage it?
Ed: Austim’s a beautiful thing. But also I find this intellectually interesting. I don’t write about anything I find boring. The amount of times I’ve talked to my editor, and he’s like “Why don’t we do this,” and I’m like “I don’t fucking care about that.”
Probably my most disliked company is Oracle. I think I may be one of the few people who truly understands Oracle outside of the company. I do that because I fucking hate [Larry] Ellison. I think he’s a twat; could’ve said a much worse word there, but I’m growing. I didn’t say the word I wanted to. But learning about that company—and actually being a hater, truly hating—gave me stories that no one else had. Oracle’s revenue has been flat for 15 years. I’d have never been able to find that.
But because I was like “Huh, wonder how much of a big piece of shit this company is?” [I found out] that they buy companies every few years to keep their revenue from declining. It’s hilarious. That’s not a story that was out there, but that’s a story I got through hating. That’s something I got from being a hater. Because I was like “I’m not gonna do the disservice to my readers—or, indeed, Larry Ellison—of just being mean. I’m gonna be mean with style.”
I’m gonna know why I’m hating, and I think people need to realize that. It’s the same pathway as love. It’s an intellectual pursuit. It’s lazy to just hate—to just be mad. It’s the only criticism I get that genuinely frustrates me. People are like “He’s just negative for the sake of it.” Fuck you, no I’m not. I’m negative for very defined reasons that I will list at length. I have many reasons I’m negative about this. I can talk about them for hours. That’s my job.
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
