Om Malik

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

Aerial magic with iPhone 14 Pro

I am fortunate enough to have traveled to many exotic locations. Still, the biggest thrill is when the plane slowly makes its way around the bay area and settles into a slow approach over the San Francisco Bay towards the San Francisco Airport. The bigger the bird, the slower it is in its approach.

As we float over the bay, approaching from the Southern end of the Bay Area, occasionally, I find myself sitting on the window seat on the plane’s right side. My vantage point gives me a view of the San Mateo bridge and the salt ponds that have been part of the bay since the California Gold Rush. The 16,500-acre ponds once were part of the wetlands.

Almost every single time, I marvel at these ponds’ colors and the minimal beauty of their geometric shapes. Recently, I snapped a few photos with the new iPhone 14 Pro

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On Photography
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Musk overload 

blue and white heart illustration

If you were a teenager (or slightly older) in the eighties, there is a good chance you tried out Calvin Klein cologne. It was quite the thing — it was everywhere, so much so that you couldn’t tell if the cologne smelled like the magazines or the magazines smelled like the cologne. The musky smell was a bit too much, and you started to despise the smell and its omnipresence after a little while. I have been reminded of that overwhelming experience where the scent became a stench over the last few days on Twitter. 

And the reason, of course, is again too much musk. 

I am mostly a live-and-let-live kind of person: I don’t really care about the psychodramas of other people. But it is too much to ignore when they start to inch into your reality and cause unnecessary anxiety. My timeline is full of Elon references —

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A Letter From Om, Technology
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What I am reading today

woman in red shirt reading book

John Scalzi, a veteran blogger, reminded us that even as we deal with the demise of the social media web, we should make a special effort to link to other bloggers and their work. So, today’s reading list constitutes all the good stuff I have read on other blogs.

The Buy and Hold Mindset — Fred Wilson, a very successful venture capital investor, has a great post about investing. He compares real estate investing and investing in big(ger) technology stocks. It is a worthy read — I read it twice to understand what Fred was saying: you must constantly think about the long term, regardless of what you invest in. 

Machines of loving understanding — Pete Warden, one of my favorite engineers/thinkers and an expert on connected devices, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, notes that “the recent advances in machine learning is that they’re starting to give computers the ability to understand us

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My Reading Picks
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TikTok & The Tiny Tune Trend

black smartphone showing time at 12 00

Even though we like to blame the shortening length of music tracks on TikTok, the fact is that songs have been getting shorter ever since we started to live on the Internet. Just as written content went from being longer to more ephemeral tweets, the same has happened with music, and TikTok has made things worse — much like how Twitter impacted the written word. 

“Just as more blog posts or tweets get more traffic and attention, shorter songs get more attention on streaming services. Did you know the average “top 100 pop song has shed 40 seconds, dropping from 4:10 in 2000 to around 3:30 in 2018?”

“The portion of sub-three-minute top 10 hits ballooned from just 4% in 2016 to 38% so far in 2022,” reports Billboard. In the sixties, you had sub-two minutes songs that hit the top 40. TikTok, like Twitter, has made things even shorter.

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Technology
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What’s Worth Reading: Thanksgiving Weekend Edition

I returned from a quick trip to London on the day of Thanksgiving, thus missing the bonhomie of the weekend. While I did miss the slices of pie, it was good to spend the time watching The Silence of Water on PBS Masterpiece (via Amazon Prime.) The Italian crime show is beautiful in location, cinematography, and acting. And despite having to follow the subtitles, it is worth binging. 

The show was an excellent way to stay away from the incessant come-hither siren call of Black Friday — a disease that has also spread to the United Kingdom. I used the opportunity to stock up on memory cards, but that’s all. For the rest of America — despite economic doldrums, it seems to be the season of shop till you drop. I call this the consumerism curse.

The long weekend was also a good time to reflect and read. 

What I am reading: 

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A Letter From Om, My Reading Picks
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How FTX built a house of cards

A few months ago, news broke of an insider trading ring at Coinbase, one of the many crypto exchanges hoping to make the world of magical Internet money easy for normals. SEC and other authorities acted swiftly and nailed down the perpetrators; their ill-gotten gains were around million-and-a-half dollars. The accused awaits sentencing. The swift action, in that case, is in sharp contrast to the largest cryptocurrency failure at FTX. 

The founder of the bankrupt exchange, and the man at the heart of this multi-billion dollar scandal, Sam Bankman-Fried, is instead invited to the U.S. Congress for “hearings.” 

Instead of being behind bars in custody, SBF is giving interviews to publications like Vox and The New York Times. Both these articles are a disgrace because both publications failed to ask the only question that mattered. Instead, they allowed SBF to come up with justifications, reasons, and bullshit excuses. Others are giving legitimate coverage

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A Letter From Om, Technology
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In My Newsletter I Trust

blue and white logo guessing game

No matter how often this happens, we don’t learn our lessons — we continue to till other people’s proverbial land and keep using their social spaces. Whether it is Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Medium, we get trapped in the big platforms because they dangle the one big carrot in front of our eyes: the reach, the audience, and the influence. 

And we keep doing their bidding — they use our social networks, our work, and our attention — and, in the process, help make their networks gigantic and indispensable. We become pawns in their end game. And then they change the rules of the game — after all, if you own the league, you make the rules.

I have known the truth about social platforms. I quit Facebook and Instagram years ago, and candidly I am better for it. I don’t need 5000 friends — 15 good ones will do.

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A Letter From Om, Technology
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Reflections!

I crave these moments of stillness. I occasionally find myself in the right place with the right camera and capture the moment precisely the way I feel it. Of course, it takes a bit of an effort to get rid of the distracting color 😉

I hope you are having a great day, where ever you are!

November 15, 2022. San Francisco

On Photography
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In Good Times, FOMO beats Diligence

red and blue light streaks
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

Ever since the FTX story broke, I have had two recurring thought. This company reminds me of Enron, the energy company that wanted to make markets in everything — especially in gullibility. I wrote about their remarkable similarities in my piece for The Spectator, which is a news outlet where I have recently become a contributor.  

In my piece, I wrote:

“Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Softbank, Lightspeed, Temasek, Blackrock and others invested over a billion in the company which at one time was valued at $32 billion. FTX and Alameda Research’s intermingled ownership should have raised eyebrows, but history shows greed trumps diligence.”

According to media reports, Sequoia wrote off its entire $213.5 million investment in the company. The question is not just Sequoia, but how did all these giants of risk capitalism not notice the most basic of all risks?

They aren’t

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Technology
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