Om Malik entered immortality on June 24th, after a couple of months in the Stanford ICU – from which he continued doing what he does. His last blog post, other than to say he was stepping away for a bit and might be some time, was a teardown of Anthropic, Mythos, and how the current state of Silly Con Valley is all about indulging myth rather than fact, and it was classic Om all the way down.
I was not lucky enough to know Om, except through his writing, which was always vital and always incisive. The first picture I ever saw of him was outside some event in Palo Alto, ever-present Yankee cap on head, with a cigarette and a Nokia 8800 in one hand, and my immediate thought was “this is a guy who will know where all the bodies are buried.” And he did, for a long time, first at Red Herring and other magazines and then at GigaOM, which was an indispensable source of industry news and opinion for years. And when he gave up being the 24/7 news guy, he became the incisive commentary guy, always experimenting with one format or another for his writing and his pictures and his conversations. And now he is gone, and this godforsaken Valley is far poorer for the loss of a teller of truth with institutional memory and no one to keep happy.
I thought for a long time that was the career arc I would follow – hot young firebrand turned wise elder – and until seven years ago it felt possible. But now it doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to happen, because institutional memory is not valued anywhere any longer and even my day-to-day work is an afterthought to the people who make decisions about whether we even need system administrators. When genuine Business Idiots (h/t Ed Zitron) don’t understand what AI can’t do and are always chasing buzzword compliance, stupid decisions will get made and ordinary workers will catch the shrapnel when it blows up in their faces. Sam Altman will probably be just fine when ChatGPT fails to be worth the money and OpenAI collapses like a flan in a cupboard, but will the people who patrol his buildings be all right? Will the people forced to retool their workflows to rely on burning as many tokens as possible for the sake of looking like they’re up with the times? Will the people who lost jobs because their managers were completely assured that AI could do what they did?
At some point, we as a society lost the ability to call bullshit what it is and cast it aside. Now, if someone says their ratchet chatbot will drive creation of data centers in space and address a larger market than the GDP of the United States, or if someone says Helen Keller never existed, or if someone says that terrorists are gouging the pool lining out of a reflecting pool, we are somehow obliged to engage with that as if it is valid, let alone important, and the energy necessary to refute bullshit remains an order of magnitude greater than it took to create it. And bullshit is the sea we swim in, the dank brown miasma that darkens the world and against which we have to constantly struggle just to stay upright.
Om was a light in that darkness. Now that light is no longer with us. I hope there are more lights like his and that we just haven’t seen them yet.