How an argument with Om about Wired spawned this newsletter. RIP brother.

Om – 

I hope this finds you well. Your post about Wired tickled just the right group of neurons to make me write something. It’s kind of a rant. But also something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Would love to reconnect. best fv

Hi Fred

Thanks for the note. I would love to chat — where are you posted up these days? More importantly, it would be great just to see you.

Also, where did you publish this piece, so I can link to it? It will be fun to respond to you on this one.

Let me know what works from a time perspective,

Om Malik

@om

Om Malik and I had this back and forth on Jan 8, 2024. He’d just written something about how Wired, the publication where I’d made my home for most of the previous 20 years, had lost its way. His beef was that it wasn’t optimistic enough about the future. He missed the Wired of the 1990s and 2000s. 

“It feels like just another run-of-the-mill magazine that is focused on highlighting the dark side of technology and all the havoc it’s going to wreak on the world,” he wrote. “We have problems (in the world), but we are also on the cusp of breakthroughs that solve these problems. An optimistic view would help explain the complex future and give everyone hope.”

I’d heard versions of this refrain dozens of times over the years. It always made my jaw tighten, even though I hadn’t worked there for four years. It usually came from someone deserving of Wired’s scrutiny. Om certainly wasn’t one of those people. But I’d known him for 25 years and knew he loved to start debates with his prose. So I wrote him a note in hopes of changing his mind. 

“Om, my friend. You’ve always known how to start a conversation, ” I began. “I loved some of the stories the old Wired did, when its motto was “How technology is changing the world.” Heck I wrote some of them. But do I pine for the same kind of optimism from them today? Not for a second.”

I said that Wired is different because Silicon Valley is different – that writing about tech today is like writing about Wall Street in the 1980s. That requires coverage that is much less dreamy and optimistic and much more focused and critical. “People still come to Silicon Valley to change the world. But a much bigger portion also come for the same reason they join investment banks: to get rich. “  

The other problem with returning Wired to its roots? I said. The idea that tech was going to change the world and humanity for the better has turned out to be dead wrong, naive even. (The whole letter is at the bottom of this post) 

We met a week later at his outdoor office – a bench in SF’s South Park. He told me that he was going emeritus at True Ventures, the VC firm, and that he was going to spend more of his time writing.

It was awesome to see him. Sitting on a bench with Om could be quasi religious. He talked so softly and deliberately that it forced you to slow down, lean in and forget about everything else. 

What became clear was that we actually saw the world the same way. We didn’t agree what Wired should be doing about it. But we did agree on this: While everyone was fixated on big tech, an explosion in tech innovation not seen in a generation was taking place. We both agreed that not enough people were writing about it.

“Maybe we should do something together then,” I said. 

And that is the origin story of the newsletter you are reading now. His piece about Wired and my reply back to him became the foundation of what we launched ten months later. 

I never thought I’d be lucky enough to work with Om. He was an inspiration to watch when I first got to know him in the early aughts. His office was next to mine at Fortune/Business2.0 in 2001. I remember wondering “How does he do his blog and hold down a full time job? 

The answer, of course, was that he just ran his life as if he had two jobs. He woke super early so he had time to post to GigaOm before coming to work. At the end of the day, he did the same thing before bed.

He quit B2.0 to do GigaOm full time a couple years later, in 2006, when very very few journalists took risks like that. At GigaOm’s peak, he had 80+ people working with him and 10s of millions in revenue.

Our short partnership was smaller, but no less rewarding for me, and I hope for him too. I wanted to learn how to build a newsletter. Om wanted to do more narrative storytelling. We were both interested in tech, but in different parts of that world. The whole thing felt symbiotic.  I’d thought of starting my own newsletter dozens of times. But until I sent Om my rant, I never thought I had an approach that wouldn’t seem derivative. Newsletters are typically solo affairs.  But the idea of a collaboration with someone like Om was thrilling for me. 

And so, onward. I’ll keep doing CST until you all tell me to stop. I’ve rarely had more fun and learned so much doing something as I’ve had working with Om the last couple of years. He was a true pioneer, a font of contacts and ideas, and one of the most generous people walking. He was a busy guy who never seemed like he was in a hurry and always had time for you. It seems like I ought to keep at it. RIP brother.

Here’s the letter:

Om, my friend. You’ve always known how to start a conversation. I loved many of the stories the old Wired did, when its motto was “How technology is changing the world.” Heck I wrote some of them. But do I pine for the same kind of optimism from them today? Not for a second. 

There’s a huge amount of cool new things going on right now – revolutions in batteries, self-driving cars, healthcare, biotech, AI. I’m sure I’m leaving stuff out. I’m sure a chunk of that is getting crowded out at Wired by the bigger less optimistic stories in tech – fears about runaway AI and worries about the power of the big tech companies and their gazillionaire founders/CEOs. But to me, that’s as it should be. 

The old Wired was dreamy and optimistic. That made sense because it was writing about a future that hadn’t yet taken place or was just starting to take place. It also had fewer readers. And their interests were narrower. 

But writing about tech today is like writing about Wall Street in the 1980s. People still come to Silicon Valley to change the world. But a much bigger portion also come for the same reason they join investment banks: to get rich. So writing about the business and culture of the digital revolution now means writing about the biggest, most powerful companies on the planet. If Wired suddenly returned to  “how tech is changing the world for the better” wouldn’t many of its readers see that as misplaced?

There’s another reason I don’t miss the old Wired optimism: Its fundamental vision – that tech was going to change the world and humanity for the better – has turned out to be dead wrong, naive even.  

I’m not throwing stones at others as much as I’m kicking myself. I wrote a lot of those stories …. about the beauties of crowdsourcing and radical transparency, and how enabling everyone to be a publisher would create public fact checking and truth seeking.  I really believed the world would be a better, more democratic place because of the internet. How could so much access to knowledge be a bad thing? I believed that Facebook had a chance to not only revolutionize the way we communicate but solve the persistent problem with identity online. I believed the smartphone was/is one of the best inventions in our lifetimes. 

But the internet, and all it has created, hasn’t advanced society, humanity and the world at all. It’s just supercharged all that is already beautiful and horrific about humanity. 

Sure, good things have happened because of the internet. You and I know most of them. Communication, which used to be hugely expensive for us as kids, is now effectively free. And with video, it’s arguably better too. Google maps literally changed our sense of place. Camera phones changed the way we take photos. Translation software allows us to understand any website. And for those who know how to harness it, the internet is indeed filled with knowledge never before available in history.  

But just as many bad things have happened too. And the old Wired wasn’t as good at preparing us for the dystopian parts that come with all enormous technological advancements.   The internet as the best fact checking invention ever created? The cliche about lies traveling around the world three times before truth can put its boots on has always been true and is arguably more true now than it has ever been in history.

We now live in a world where beauty AND truth are in the eye of the beholder. I often wonder if the world we inhabit today more resembles the Middle Ages, than any utopian ideal Wired was built on. Think about the arguments we had about public health during the pandemic. It was as if a third of the US decided to stop believing in gravity. 

For all the talk about how Silicon Valley was revolutionizing humans and humanity, all it was really doing was supplying us with a new set of tools. We’ve created a better shovel. That’s important. But it’s not nearly as important as I and Wired made it out to be. We should have been better about telling readers “Yes, a shovel can enable a man to do 10x the work he could with his hands. It’s also a new kind of murder weapon. There’s good AND bad with all new tech advances.”

And we had ample examples to refer back to. Cars changed how we lived, but gave us a new way to kill ourselves and others. The industrial revolution supercharged the global economy and improved standards of living worldwide. But it also created horrific and dangerous new jobs, runaway pollution and global warming.

I know this is something of a rant. But it’s something that’s been on my mind for a long time. And your question poked exactly the right set of neurons to set it free. I’m sure you’ve thought about all this at length too. 

I still believe in the power of technology to change the world, but I – like the rest of us – also now understand that there is no free lunch when it comes to new inventions. That’s actually how it has always been since the dawn of time, and I’m embarrassed that I did not see that early on. 

Did I see the  horrid that social media would unleash on global society? Of course not. Did I see the emotional damage having interactive TVs in our pockets would inflict on our kids? Missed that too.  Did I expect that we’d get to the point where kids are dumping their smartphones for flip phones because of the damage they’re doing to their lives? Not in a million years.

I actually believe that electric cars and new battery tech will help us solve climate change and that the digitization of our DNA is well on the way to curing cancer. But I also think batteries will present a new thorny kind of toxic waste. I also think that we will end up cloning humans with the same tech we use to cure cancer,  and we will be super sorry we did that. 

If Wired made a mistake, it wasn’t forsaking its optimism. It’s that they didn’t tackle the exploding changes they anticipated more aggressively. 

I’ve long believed that if Condé Nast had been willing to invest the money, that Wired could have leveraged its position to become one of the most important publications in the world. The Wall Street Journal did this in the 1980s and 1990s under Norm Pearlstine and Paul Steiger. They saw that once Wall Street became the financial engine of the world, that gave the WSJ permission to broaden its mandate to include everything and anything that was about money. The WSJ was arguably the most important publication in the world during that period.  

Wired could have and should have done the same thing because a huge amount of what happens in the world today is driven by the billions spewing out of the big tech companies, their billionaire founders and their multimillionaire employees.  I said so ten years ago when it was clear that Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple were becoming the GM, GE, IBM, Exxon and Walmart of this generation. 

That wouldn’t have been anything like the blindly optimistic dreamy Wired of 30 years ago. But it would have been interesting, and it would have been full of both optimism about great new things and stories of greed/avarice and villainy. It would have been about what’s really going on. 

I still hope Wired broadens its definition of what constitutes a technology story going forward. I’ve seen things that suggest it will. But I don’t think being our guide to tech’s beautiful new future is the right next step. 

The end.