The Best of Om Malik

I had never heard of Om Malik be­fore he died.

In the time since, I’ve pe­rused his ex­ten­sive cat­a­log of blog posts and ar­ti­cles. No de­scrip­tion of his writ­ing could be more ac­cu­rate than just one word: en­gross­ing. In­deed, I could barely stop my­self from spend­ing all my time read­ing.

In the (admittedly Westernized) ver­sion of Buddhism in which I was raised, Om is the sound that con­tains the en­tire uni­verse. Ac­cord­ing to my par­ents, the uni­verse did not start with a bang, but with a slow and pro­gres­sively louden­ing gut­tural hum. An “Om”.

It’s pos­si­ble I am bi­ased and my brain was sim­ply do­ing a kind of word as­so­ci­a­tion. Al­though they ap­pear to merely be words on a page, I of­ten feel that Om’s work al­most al­ways car­ries a rare in­tro­spec­tive in­sight. Per­haps it’s truth. Perhaps it’s some­thing else.

In any case, I wanted to ded­i­cate my blog post to­day to Om and some of the writ­ing that I find to be some of his best work. I do not claim to be an Om scholar, so I would be shocked if these truly con­sti­tute his “best” work. In­stead, I’d like you to view this as a list of some my fa­vorite pieces that I have read in the short time since his un­for­tu­nate pass­ing.

We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World

I’m not sure the les­son con­tained in this blog post could be writ­ten down in any form other than with the pre­cise words Om used to de­liver it, so I won’t try. Here’s a taste of the core les­son I took away.

The tech in­dus­try has evolved from a place run by in­sti­tu­tions who iden­ti­fied them­selves as op­posed to cor­po­rate greed to a place pop­u­lated by profit seek­ing ban­dits. There are some who seek to fight the good fight (like the won­der­ful peo­ple at Automattic), but most sim­ply don’t care. Many jus­tify im­moral be­hav­ior by claim­ing it’s for the greater good.

The hard part, Om says, is that it’s be­come dif­fi­cult to fil­ter out the peo­ple who care from the peo­ple that don’t. In many ways, we’ve in­vented our­selves into the very world Pinocchio’s story warns us about.

“Pinocchio is a story about a so­ci­ety or­ga­nized around de­cep­tion.”

— Om Malik

It of­ten feels like that’s the so­ci­ety we live in to­day.

A Final Goodbye

In read­ing both this ar­ti­cle and the nu­mer­ous sim­i­lar ar­ti­cles that have cropped up af­ter his death, I am re­minded that we in the world of tech­nol­ogy are of­ten my­opic in our at­ten­tion to tech­nol­ogy. We fo­cus on the most re­cent ad­vance­ments and ne­glect to pay at­ten­tion to the peo­ple be­hind them. Even when we do pay at­ten­tion to the hu­mans be­hind the cur­tain, we still so rarely view them as any more than sub­jects of ad­mi­ra­tion.

When we build prod­ucts, too, we for­get about the peo­ple we do it with. It’s all lost to the sea of Jira tick­ets and Codex ses­sions.

I think Om un­der­stood this bet­ter than most, and he strove to do bet­ter.

Social Internet Is Dead. Get Over It.

In a sim­i­lar spirit to the first item in my list to­day, this ar­ti­cle paints a pic­ture of the “social” in­ter­net as it is to­day.

Om claims that the evo­lu­tion from the healthy so­cial in­ter­net of old to the one we have to­day be­gun “to at­ro­phy from the mo­ment we started treat­ing them as our per­sonal mar­ket­ing chan­nels.”

This idea closely mir­rors some­thing I’ve heard time and time again from Jason Adams: A well run busi­ness does­n’t need mar­ket­ing; it needs a mis­sion that unites it­self with its cus­tomers. Om de­scribes an early in­ter­net (that I was­n’t old enough to wit­ness at the time) that did ex­actly that. Early in­ter­net com­pa­nies had bold vi­sions to im­prove the lives of every­one on Earth. Their cus­tomers re­sponded to that well, and were happy to help in any way pos­si­ble.

Today’s in­ter­net com­pa­nies feel cor­po­rate. Their only mo­tive: Seeking share­holder value.

There’s noth­ing in­her­ently wrong with that, but it has cre­ated an in­ter­net that feels, well, like it’s been or­ga­nized around de­cep­tion.

What Are Your Favorites?

Om pub­lished a seem­ingly in­fi­nite amount of con­tent in his time. What are some of the best pieces I’ve missed?