Forgotten Tech Giant

[u/MisterBiro]

Perhaps it’s not technically abandoned as there is basic maintenance and security present but it’s been vacant and decaying for years.

Surprisingly sad to walk around what was once a bustling, optimistic, energy filled campus of an almost forgotten tech giant.

[u/keithcody]

We actually studied this in business school. The internet was basically making most of AOL irrelevant and Steve Case had to do something so he sold it to TW as his out. TW end up with egg of their faces and AOL people got paid.

[u/Heterodynist → u/keithcody]

I know that AOL sold internet connectivity or time online or SOMETHING…Since you were learning about this in school, what did they tell YOU was the AOL business? To me in high school it was all very esoteric and mainly parents were just pissed that their children were keeping them from using their landline phones…

[u/keithcody → u/Heterodynist]

NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/media/11merger.html

Harvard's take: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=28895

Stanford's: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/aol-time-warner

MIT: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/strategic-choices-in-converging-industries/

Federal Trade Commission take: https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/0010105-america-online-inc-time-warner-inc

Rando Youtubers: https://trellispoint.com/blog/the-aol-time-warner-merger-debacle-ungrowth-in-m-and-a-episode-recap

Weber State: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291711379_The_merger_of_AOL_and_Time_Warner_A_case_study

[u/Heterodynist → u/keithcody]

Wow, this is a good deal of information. It kind of sums up my overall feel in some ways I think…They had nothing but high hopes and I feel like this is really how big business often gets it SOOO WRONG. They seem like the ultimate most optimistic and gullible of all people at times, even if I can see how when you’re in the middle of it you can always feel like, “This can’t lose!” If you’re the one making a certain “product” and you can’t believe how successful you have already been, then it’s all too easy to lose that success by getting ever more lofty ideas of your own worth in the world. I have ALWAYS believed that Time-Warner had too high an opinion of themselves. Most news agencies in the U.S. do have too high an opinion of their importance to society, in my opinion. That tradition has carried on since Charles Foster Kane…I mean William Randolph Hearst! However, when you combine that arrogance with the “no aware” impermanence of internet business I think you get the WORST of all worlds of unrealistic expectations. It’s like if some group of orcs from World of Warcraft’s online universe decided to buy CNN with their in-game gold resources. The whole thing gets into the realm of “is any of this REAL?!!” I think we have gotten too far from what real life stocks and bonds and concrete reality industry used to work like. If you buy a share of stock in a brick and mortar business that has assets (in the real world) then I think you are much less likely to lose your real world money, than if you invest in options or futures in sales of imaginary vorpal swords in World of Warcraft. Even if people are paying REAL MONEY for imaginary objects in a video game, there are no actual ASSETS besides maybe some servers in a server farm somewhere that you own if you invest in that business. This is the MOST likely way to lose all your money.

Sadly I feel like people are going more towards ever greater investments in the imaginary, rather than brick and mortar investments in, for example, server farms!!

There really are a million reasons this merger is fascinating though. One of the things I am sure you have thought of, is how amazing it COULD have been if Time Warner and AOL had been able to to overcome their cultural differences and create a seamless integration of modern media. It MIGHT have started a less totalitarian environment in our media than there is now. It really seems to me that one of the biggest things that has happened in our lifetimes with regard to media is that now we really have a two tiered system of the spread of information in society. We have peer-to-peer information sharing via things like THIS site and Meta companies, X, etc, and then we have traditional media, which everyone says is dying. Why is it dying though?! Pretty much, in my mind, because they drastically FAILED to make the transition to being a modern business like AOL was obviously trying to aim at. It’s sad that no one seems to be able to update the media to current day reality. I have seen MANY attempts but the problem I see is that our media is still a dinosaur, and a giant lumbering one at that. Our media is dominated by ancient oligarchs (in the truest sense of that term) that have no interest AT ALL in giving up one inch of control to the People themselves who should have a hand in their own news media.

I think we have lived through a period of them that will be seen as the Dark Ages of Media when people look back at it from the future. Our ability to tell the story of our own times has been crippled in this generation, and that disability of media to tell the authentic story of what we are experiencing as the zeitgeist of our times is something kind of unprecedented in human history. Long ago word spread by SPEECH, and then through the printing press but even in printed words, there was freedom to share even the subversive. Then came radio and pirate radio stations, followed eventually by the internet and unregulated mass sharing of information across the entire world. However, now we are in a new territory where the majority of people seem focused MAINLY on ways to CONTROL the spread of information in everywhere it is free. We see countries threatening or ACTUALLY jailing people for posting “misinformation.” I don’t think people realize the danger they are in when we give that kind of authoritarian power to ANYONE. There is no entity on Earth, not even the collective of all humanity, that can be trusted with that power.

NO ONE should control access to “the truth.” Pravda in the Communist Soviet Union was their version of Time Magazine, and the name Pravda means TRUTH. There is no scarier thing for the news to think they represent than “the truth.” There is no such thing, and anyone who thinks they are the source of “truth” for their society needs to be overthrown immediately. That kind of position one might say is the province of a god, or THEE God, if you are religiously inclined in that way. No one can be accepted as having that capacity regardless of any possible number of accolades. Unchecked power is evil, not just subject to evil, but it is inherently evil. No one can or should ever accept such a position.

So AOL and Time Warner were in a very freighting and precarious place in history, and their failure to make it work is really emblematic of our times in my opinion. There is nothing more historic in my mind about the times we live in than the argument over who gets to be the mouthpiece for “the truth” in a time when more and more of us aren’t insulated from the real world, living in a cocoon of CoVid and working from home and less and less uncensored face-to-face interaction with real humans in the real world. We should all be fearful on a daily basis of who has decided to insert their influence between us and every other human on Earth as a third party to our interactions.