Sometimes it takes a single piece in a jigsaw puzzle for the whole picture to come into shape. And that happened earlier this weekend. And it happened because of a 40-year-old piece of software @claudeai. A new essay, How AI goes to work. (warning: it's very long.) om.co/2026/02/06/h...

The word around Silicon Valley is that everyone from Meta to OpenAI to xAI wants a piece of OpenClaw and its creator. Zuck and Sam might even have met with him.

Not much in terms of conversation or engagement here. Sadly. A handful of people to talk. God I miss having a fun chat on social.

We are living in crazy, amazing, unhinged times. A simple reflection on our reality, from the perspective of a technology writer/observer. om.co/2026/02/04/o...

A couple of octogenarians were caught red-handed stealing fountain pens at a pen show in Germany. It got me thinking about their motivations and sent me down a deep rabbit hole of how social media has made FOMO the eighth deadly sin. An off-the-cuff blog post.

Trillion doesn't mean what it used to mean.

This is terrific from @om.co and I agree with every word. om.co/2026/02/01/w...

The whole brouhaha around Nvidia having second thoughts about pumping $100 billion into its biggest customer was a good reminder that we now live in a brave new world of "announcement economy," and it feeds the new information god— velocity. New essay, om.co/2026/02/02/o...

Wiz says Moltbook had a major flaw that exposed private messages, emails, and credentials; Wiz co-founder Ami Luttwak called the flaw a byproduct of vibe coding (Raphael Satter/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Silicon Valley “used to believe it could change the world. Now it just hopes the world won’t change its stock price.” Brilliant mini essay by Om Malik (@om.co) re: Tim Cook, Apple, Melania, Trump, ethics, and the stock market. om.co/2026/01/27/a...

more wisdom from @om.co om.co/2026/02/01/w...

As a follow-up to last week’s essay about “Velocity is the new authority,” I published a follow-up today about tech & media’s increasingly complicated (and often fraught) relationship.

In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Roy Bland captures a cynical, post-ideological, corrupt English society: “You scratch my conscience; I’ll drive your Jag.” You could say the same of today’s Silicon Valley. om.co/2026/01/27/a...

I have written many separate essays: cameras as witnesses, tribalism as blindness, velocity as authority, AI as reality distortion, half-truths. Suddenly, they have converged into an ugly reality. The early 90s when I first wrote about the Internet seem so long ago. om.co/2026/01/26/d...

I have been rereading some crime fiction from the late 1990s and early 2000s. They have been a joy. The question is why? And answering that question has turned into a new essay, Neo Noir. What is Neo Noir, and how is it different from classic noir, and why it makes sense to me om.co/2026/01/25/n...

Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. Here is why. om.co/2026/01/21/v...

What used to require shame and ostracism is now baked into the internet’s economic infrastructure. The algorithmic reality of technology platforms has codified conformity into the human condition. And it is very profitable—the real late-stage capitalism.

I appreciated Adam Mosseri's response to my essay about his “20-slide memo". I took into account what he said but also what Meta has done, and said, over the past couple of years since the AI tsunami swept over Silicon Valley. I published my thoughts today. om.co/2026/01/07/w...

Each issue will go deep on a specific region. We started with the most remote area from Tokyo but one of my favorites: the Yaeyama Islands of Ishigaki, Iriomote, Taketomi, and Yonaguni etc.

I am grateful to @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com for tolerating my internet connection's bizarre resistance to the podcasting software

Physical writing is so underrated, and it’s great to see people still value it. I started writing more last year - albeit on an iPad with Apple Pencil (not as elegant as @om.co) - and found that slow writing often beats typing for clarity and creativity. Don’t wait; write when you can.

I have been watching the evolution of @Instagram for a long time. Adam Mosseri’s era is definitely more lively and exciting. He does Zuck's bidding well, and as such, is a good way to understand how the politburo is thinking. AI has them spooked. And they have a master plan. om.co/2026/01/01/w...

Inspired by a prompt from @gatheringofcuriosities I ended up writing a long piece about my 2025 in pens, inks, paper and ephemera. omlovespens.com/2026/01/01/a...

Welcome to 2026. And just like that, we’re in a new year. A good day to grab a cup of coffee, reflect on the year that was and the year to come, and consider how best to live in the now. I wrote about this on blog, so give it a read. om.co/2026/01/01/w...

Om I think you’d enjoy Stephanie’s blog, as I do. 😀 climbtothestars.org

"I came here in an Uber this morning and asked the guy what street we were on. He had no clue. He said, 'I just follow it.'" -Rodney Brooks to @om.co crazystupidtech.com/2025/09/29/i...

This is technically the longest piece we have published on @crazystupidtech.com thus far. It is long because @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social is an interesting guy and I can wait to go for round two!

LLMs mean that no one has to write anything they don't care about, but they also mean that "writing anything" will get equated with "not caring" for most people. (If you really cared, you would video yourself talking about it on your phone.)

It took Apple to come up with a worthy follow-up to one of its best-ever phones — the iPhone X. The iPhone Air is a surprise, and it is at its peak Apple in more ways than one. My early impressions of a phone I didn’t need, want, or care about. om.co/2025/09/22/g...

This feels like an egregious missed opportunity. @katie-drummond.bsky.social your team has been doing so much good work lately, but there's not a single person in this lineup who's written a line of code, let alone critiqued an AI system or that knows about the half-century of AI prior to LLMs...

I couldn’t help myself and decided to do a post-game analysis of the iPhone 17 launch event — and I am impressed by some stuff. I explain in this piece, which went as a newsletter to my readers. om.co/2025/09/10/t...

Congratulations to @techmeme.com founder @gaberivera.bsky.social for celebrating two decades as “conversation” king of tech. My partner in writing adventures, @fvogelstein.bsky.social has a great story about tech.memorandum on @crazystupidtech.com crazystupidtech.com/2025/09/08/a...

Well, I couldn't help myself. I can't do video or podcasts. They take a lot of effort. But I love to write. So I started a newsletter devoted to what else -- but pens. Here is the first edition describing why I started this newsletter. omlovespens.com/2025/09/06/w...

"Venture is dead." I've heard this same prediction in every tech wave Web 1.0, crypto, and now AI. The argument is AI's capital efficiency makes VC obsolete. I believe the opposite. AI won't just save venture; it will restore value to the entire startup economy. trueventures.com/blog/the-tra...

The five things that were necessary before you could have podcasting: Blogging. HTTP. RSS. MP3. iPod. It's pretty simple, but this confluence eludes most tech people and journalists. scripting.com

Hey any one seen any screenshots of this Slack message from Sam Altman to his team. Lot of chatter about this. Just curious. Or maybe the old reporter in me wants to see before believing 🤪 www.perplexity.ai/discover/tec...

SoftBank buying a factory from Foxconn is a real rat king of "companies that have called things off in the past"

Am I the only one who finds this report pretty much worthless. What is the actual number of glasses shipped by Meta? That is the real number. Not some bullshit “percentage growth.”

Links to the full conversation: Spotify - open.spotify.com/episode/1Qk... Apple podcasts - podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/... YouTube - youtu.be/s8Bnd-5p0oA

I was watching this excellent conversation between Stripe co-founder John Collison and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, where the latter eloquently outlines non-financial reasons as to why the software sector is getting (and will keep getting) disrupted by AI. om.co/2025/08/06/w...

Om Malik Om Malik carries with him the quiet gravity of someone who has seen the world change and helped shape its direction. He is one of my oldest friends, someone I’ve known for more than twenty years. We have stood together on icy runways in Svalbard and watched the blue light stretch…

A brief history of the attention economy (via @om.co)

All this talk about Substack (including a wonderful piece by @gruber.foo ) prompted me to ask a few questions and try to answer the Why of Substack. om.co/2025/08/03/t...

A look at newsletter platform Beehiiv, which has hit $30M in ARR and fees starting at $43/month for 1,000 subscribers, unlike Substack, which takes a 10% cut (Jessica Roy/The Information) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand: $678M raised through those spam tactics $282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies. $11M to actual campaigns (1.6%) The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

An incisive and on-point read by @om.co om.co/2025/07/30/d...

Apple has now sold over 3B iPhones since its 2007 launch; it reached 1B sold in July 2016, and is estimated to have reached 2B around September 2021 (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Mark Zuckerberg has done a good job of making personal super intelligence his own idea. The phrase “personal super intelligence” was coined by Character.AI CEO and co-founder Noam Shazeer. I take a historical look at Zuck “Xerox Machine as a business strategy.” om.co/2025/07/31/m...

This is a good read, and you should read "Super-Intelligence" as well. An instructive comparison is to compare Zuckerberg's manifesto: www.meta.com/superintelli... with Dario Amodei's www.darioamodei.com/essay/machin...

Very good historical context to Zuck's latest manifesto. Has there ever been a company that announces so many things that never ever go anywhere? (e.g. Atlas ad network, programming platform, solar drones, hardware, VR, etc., etc.)? Their next announcement always covers up the failure of the last.