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Author: Om Malik

On social, the line between idiot & genius is porus

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

A general rule of thumb that has helped me maintain perspective is that, given enough time, you are either proven to be an idiot or a genius. A corollary to that law is that you will eventually reveal your true self on social media. 

This brutal reality applies to aging bloggers, Twitter gurus, and influencers. It doesn’t matter who you are, how many degrees you have accumulated, or how many books you have written. And this is even true for the seemingly invincible of them all — the billionaire. Even the richest man in the world isn’t immune from echoing his limitations. You will almost always reveal your limitations and eventually lose that special sheen. 

For eternity, we have seen success, and financial security as a shorthand for visionary and expert. Nothing echoes smarts louder than the number of zeros in a person’s net worth. Just as people wanted opinions of the kings and the royals in the past, industrialists and newly minted billionaires are viewed as folks with all the answers. 

Of course, in the past, this idealized perception could be maintained through the carefully choreographed manipulation of the media. The British Royal family has done this by carefully engaging with “royal correspondents” in newspapers and television networks. Today’s royals — let’s face it, it is mostly tech billionaires — however, are different: they need to expound on everything, everywhere, all the time, or else they are forgotten. 

Attention — rather need for attention is an addiction. 

In the (Read more...)

So much AI, so little time!

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

I don’t know if the human body can change as fast as the changes being brought on by meta-sizing of everything. As someone who loves the possibilities of technology, it is inevitable we will need computers to augment our internal capabilities to deal with these changes. For now, even the best efforts are not good enough and we have a ways to go.

From my own blog in 2019, Why we need to slowdown time

For the past few weeks, I have immersed myself in various generative AI tools. It has been a while since I have woken up and been excited about what every new day will bring. There are so many tools and apps to try. And new things to learn. We may have a long way to go — ChatGPT is spectacularly wrong about my bio — but still, this feeling of something new is afoot is like a jolt of energy after taking a sip of an ultra-strong coffee. Again, don’t get me wrong — this phase of “AI” comes with all sorts of risks. However, there is no need to avoid it or not understand it. 

Wayne Shorter & Herbie Hancock, in an open letter to the next generation of artists, extoll them to think differently and think anew. 

The world needs new pathways. Don’t allow yourself to be hijacked by common rhetoric, or false beliefs and illusions about how life should be lived. It’s up to you to be the pioneers. Whether through (Read more...)

SVB, a week later

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

It is hard to imagine that it has already been a week since the start of the tumultuous events that led to the FDIC taking over Silicon Valley Bank, and coming to the rescue of the depositors. The rancor that has followed the takeover has been sobering and should be a wake-up call for Silicon Valley — but it won’t be because SV has become a loose collection of competing self-interested factions.

SVB’s failure also exposed Silicon Valley to the harsh reality: the larger world hates the tech industry and what it has come to represent. The outsized nature of the success, matched by the outsized bravado and machismo of its fake prophets, has eroded all goodwill for one of the most critical sectors of the US economy. As I pointed out earlier,

“Whether politicians and media like it or not, the technology sector is one of the few engines of growth that we have in the US. The long-term war with our new geopolitical rivals will continue to be fought on the technology front. I can understand that the general population, populist politicians, and media have faint regard for Uber-rich tech giants, blowhard billionaires, and the lack of empathy and morality in emergent technologies — but that’s missing the forest for the trees.”

A big reason for this growing apathy is that the industry is starting to be represented by voices that lack the empathy to understand the real world and the emotional impact of the intersection of technology and (Read more...)

Permanent Elegance of NY’s Flatiron Building

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

Flatiron Building in New York is coming up for auction soon. I learned about that when I posted a photo of the Flatiron Building being constructed on a social network. It triggered a chain of thoughts about permanence in what we build as a society. 

The building was started in 1901 and was finished in May 1902. The architect, Daniel Burnham, not only created a beautiful design to utilize what was not an attractive plot of land but also turned it into an urban icon. Since then, it has become as much a part of New York cityscape as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. 

Seeing how beautiful it still looks and inspires even today, is a testament to its good bones. One hundred and twenty years later, it is still standing tall & good. There is a lesson: good bones sound good quality is timeless! Flatiron Building is one of the most Instagrammed locations in North America, if not in the world. 

“The Flatiron Building and the picture postcard seemed made for each other,” Miriam Berman, an urban archivist and designer, once said. “The shapes were just right.” Of course, not everything in the building was perfect. There were issues galore, but the building has survived. How many of today’s buildings can stand the test of time? 

People argue that the speed with which our buildings are put together today is why we don’t have many iconic buildings. Speed to market isn’t new — Flatiron Building also (Read more...)

Kottke turns 25

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

Kottke, the blog that curates the best of the whimsical and creative web and reflects the eclectic personality of its founder, Jason Kottke, is turning 25. I have been reading and enjoying his blog for an eternity. He has kept the site the same, though he has paid some attention to the realities of the distribution of information on the Internet. “I’m not gonna go through the whole history of the site, but it eventually took off in a way that I didn’t anticipate,” he writes about his blogging milestone. Jason was one of the earliest believers in blogging, a few years following folks like me, who were a few years behind Dave Winer and Doc Searls. 

I turned my blog into a business, later lost control of my blogging destiny, and had to find a new home here. But Kottke has always been steadfast in his presence, design, and focus. His tenacity to keep going and doing it alone is admirable. In a (long) podcast conversation with John Gruber (who has been blogging on Daring Fireball for two decades himself), Kottke nerds out about the web, blogging, protocols like RSS, and, of course, name-checks some of the other veterans of blogging. 

Congratulations, Jason, on the journey and weaving a wonderful hypertext web!

March 14, 2023. San Francisco

PS: Jason and John, in their podcast, talk about how blogging has inspired many social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. I wrote about this about a decade ago, which is (Read more...)

Kottke turns 25

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

Kottke, the blog that curates the best of the whimsical and creative web and reflects the eclectic personality of its founder, Jason Kottke, is turning 25. I have been reading and enjoying his blog for an eternity. He has kept the site the same, though he has paid some attention to the realities of the distribution of information on the Internet. “I’m not gonna go through the whole history of the site, but it eventually took off in a way that I didn’t anticipate,” he writes about his blogging milestone. Jason was one of the earliest believers in blogging, a few years following folks like me, who were a few years behind Dave Winer and Doc Searls. 

I turned my blog into a business, later lost control of my blogging destiny, and had to find a new home here. But Kottke has always been steadfast in his presence, design, and focus. His tenacity to keep going and doing it alone is admirable. In a (long) podcast conversation with John Gruber (who has been blogging on Daring Fireball for two decades himself), Kottke nerds out about the web, blogging, protocols like RSS, and, of course, name-checks some of the other veterans of blogging. 

Congratulations, Jason, on the journey and weaving a wonderful hypertext web!

March 14, 2023. San Francisco

PS: Jason and John, in their podcast, talk about how blogging has inspired many social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. I wrote about this about a decade ago, which is (Read more...)

Streaks of Gold

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

Just around Thanksgiving in 2019, I visited Utah to experience some early winter landscapes. I wasn’t looking for anything specific – my desire then was to enjoy being out there. I went galavanting around the state with a friend from Salt Lake City.

We are both shoot-from-the-hip photographers: we don’t spend hours planning for a sunrise or a sunset. Maybe because I was a reporter for most of my life, I instinctively know what’s important when I see it. Not surprisingly, we spent much time crisscrossing the vast regions around Salt Lake City, including the Salt Flats. On one of our drives, we were caught in a snowstorm in Antelope Islands.

The snowstorm was intense, and it very quickly blanketed the entire region. As the storm passed, the sky and the clouds had this wonderful marriage of dark skies lit up by the reflected light from the snow. It had an otherworldly feel, and I sat there enjoying what was unfolding in front of me.
Everywhere I looked, there were all sorts of lines, shapes, and colors. White, grey, blue, and of course, even more shades of white. The roads peaked out from the under the snow. However, I marveled at the sage brushes and other foliage forcing its way out from under the fresh snow. Their golden hues stood in sharp contrast to the pristine snow.

It was a gift from mother nature – the sky, snow, and golden streaks of grass all aligned to produce one of the (Read more...)

Yellen offers (some) clarity on SVB

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, even though it isn’t clear as to when founders and wider Silicon Valley community can exhale, even for a minute. The US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen spoke to the Face the Nation this morning. Her comments reveal that the government doesn’t want it to become a contagion that spreads to other banks. As many have said, this could undermine the faith in US banking system from the point of view of depositors. 

TL:DR from a Silicon Valley point of view — there won’t be a bailout of the bank. Instead, the focus is going to be entirely on the depositors. She and other federal reserve regulators understand the gravity of the situation and need of the hour. 

Here are the bits from her comments that I found relevant. 

  • Whenever a bank, especially one, like Silicon Valley Bank with billions of dollars in deposits fails, it’s clearly a concern. From the standpoint of depositors, many of which may be small businesses, they rely on access to their funds, to be able to pay the bills that they have, and they employ tens of thousands of people across the country. 
  • We’ve been hearing from those depositors and other concerned people this weekend. So let me say that I’ve been working all weekend with our banking regulators to design appropriate policies to address this situation. 
  • We want to make sure that the troubles that exist at one bank don’t create contagion to (Read more...)

A Tough Weekend

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

After three decades of being part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem — as a reporter, writer, entrepreneur, and investor — I thought I had seen it all. The boom-bust cycles, stock market manias, startup insanity, attack on America itself, and the most significant financial calamity in nearly a century — living through history prepares you for every eventuality. Your own struggle with mortality prepares you for the unpredictability of everything. You embrace the impermanence and become one with it. And despite all that, you experience what Silicon Valley has experienced this weekend — a sense of helplessness, a feeling of dread, and, more importantly, a sadness about the fragility of our community.

This past week, the federal regulators took over Silicon Valley Bank. I won’t repeat what has been reported in the media (Insider and Axios have ongoing coverage.) I won’t share how we got there — these two links explain the problem quite well. However, what I will do is share what I am feeling — this might be the worst weekend I have experienced as part of the technology community. 

The bad news was like a marionette outside a car dealership when the dot bomb hit, swaying, falling, and rising with the shifting winds. The exodus, painful as it was, played out over a long period. It was quickly superseded by the American Tragedy of 9/11 when we as a country lost ourselves. The 2008 financial crisis was another rude reminder that Silicon Valley wasn’t as (Read more...)

ChatGPT is here! Now what?

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

a computer screen with a text description on it
Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

I view ChatGPT as one of those profound aha moments in the history of technology: I wasn’t around to see the birth of the first Apple machine, but I have read about it. I saw the world change when I started using the Netscape browser, even though I had used the Internet before. I was among the first few to experience pre-launch Google and then later at the launch of the iPhone. I picked these historical moments because they fundamentally changed our relationship with information.  

Netscape browser opened us up to the wonder of infinite information. Google made it easy for us to search and pull up whatever we needed, whenever we needed. The iPhone (and later smartphones) made information available anywhere, anytime. These three events changed our behavior and how we viewed and interacted with information. ChatGPT is one of those moments — after this, we will interact with information in an entirely different way: as an almost human conversation. 

We have been on this path for a long time. We have been typing complete questions into Google’s Search Bar and asking Siri and Alexa to do things for us. Our kids are growing up having a conversation with machines. For today’s kids, devices with no keyboard or ones that work with gestures and voice commands are as typical as a day starting with sunrise. ChatGPT and its progeny will be part of our future, where we experience reality through a thin veneer (Read more...)