Today is the day we on the web remember Om Malik. September 29 is his birthday. Om died on June 24 at the ridiculous age of 59.
I knew Om for many years, he was an early blogger, a user of our software who stayed close, and gave us great advice about where to take it.
Later he helped found Automattic. Matt Mullenweg, founder of the company, says “All roads lead to Om.” His story of Om, filled in a lot of pieces for me. We were even closer than I knew.
Om was a NY sports fan, he lived here many years ago, he was a Yankees fan, and I of course am a Mets fan.
Om and I got sick for the first time in a major way around the same time. I had bypass surgery in 2002, he had a heart attack in 2007. A few years later he visited me in Berkeley, and we went for a walk in the hills where I lived. Two veterans of tech who were so immersed the new life, and we were smokers, didn’t eat well, didn’t exercise enough, and worked too hard. We were both lucky that we had time to reflect on this, and that perhaps is the biggest thing we have in common. We got the disease early in life, in time for it to make a difference in how we live.
When I was thinking about what I wanted to write here today, I came across a short tweet he wrote in 2014.
Perfect, simple and true.
Today, the problem is much worse. The crisis Om explained in 2014 was real. Two years later we would elect a president on Twitter. Anything we could have done then or could do now, to add more human intelligence to the social networks, and that’s something a writer like Om would be sensitive to, would give us a chance to organize without having to copy/paste the writing into a dozen different tiny little textboxes.
By 2014 it was obvious what we lost when we reduce writing to 140 characters, no editing, no titles, no links or MP3s. How could we capture the whole web in such a severely limited space. I used to joke on my blog about Microsoft wanting to lock us in the trunk in the 90s, and now here we were, in the teens having been locked in the trunk by Evan Williams, Fred Wilson and Jack Dorsey. These were supposed to be the good guys!
Ello was the thing that was meant to give us our freedom back. It didn’t. But a lot of people who believed in the open power of the web wanted it to be.
We did elect Trump with social media, and the web had been turned into a burned out mess. That was the contribution of a tech industry that now is concerned that they might be the source of the end of our species. I would take that seriously. It’s not just about this one thing, but the whole way it toxifies every good idea to emerge from creativity and broaden it so much that all you’re left with is grunts and snorts.
All that is my way of saying what Om said. We’re not happy with social media. That, to me, is still the big agenda item.
And thank you Om for sharing yourself and your ideas and observations, and good common sense with courage, and facing the future with both awe and fear and adding a balance to the mindless greed of tech.