Ten years after Bill Von Meister had ushered Isaac Asimov onto a stage to announce, at the Plaza Hotel's unveiling of his 'Source' service, "This is the beginning of the information age," Steve Case and Jim Kimsey were leading a growing crew that was actually bringing this promise to some kind of sustainable fruition. American Online really provided masses of people with that first thrill of virtual flirtation and chatter that has become the stopgap of contemporary social existence.
Two years down the road from the testing of the American Online designation, just after George Bush had ordered the immolation of the highway of death from Kuwait, AOL became permanent, conveying its initial public offering and another West Point grad came aboard. Alexander Haig's network of money-and-military connections helped to sell twenty million shares for a quarter of a billion dollars.
Haig was on the board of directors, credited with a founding role, till the end. This congruence of military muscle, imperial politics and fanatical marketing represents an as yet inadequately developed aspect of the company's tale. A detailed presentation of this point-of-view, with the empirical richness that is hard to come by in the morass of the web today, is not possible for this humble correspondent. However, a preliminary observation might serve as a suggestion of what might be possible to create, given time and focus.
AOL represents another in a long line of technological extensions and social consolidations of media mastery by ruling capitalists. Whether the London Times' secret 1816 adoption of the Koenig Press, the New York Tribune's deployment of a Walter Press' never-ending unrolling of paper fifty years later or the development of such industry standards as Linotype a half century following that, serves as a particular case of this exemplary backdrop; AOL clearly caught the fancy of both business investors and imperial heavy hitters. In a virtual world, AOL became a sure bet.
This speculative interpretation matches the background--DARPA and other DOD-created spheres and pathways and protocols that ended up in 'private' hands. It matches the politics of the players who stuck around. It fits perfectly with the biographies and the geographies and the geopolitical priorities of those, like Mr. Haig, who 'directed' the operation.
If nothing else, one might inquire, outside of an upper-class choice to make AOL the front-runner, how this all transpired without any 'ROI' ten years down the road from the Quantum inauguration, a full decade without the profit that supposedly constitutes the mettle-testing quantum-leap of capitalism. Better financed operations, much closer to profitability, fell by the wayside. Bill Gates' threat, following a $50 million 'take-it-or-leave-it' buy-out offer from Compuserve that Case talked Jim Kimsey into refusing, was one of several such apparently insuperable difficulties that came to naught.
The standard fairy-tale, that somehow, with pluck, luck and a stumble-bum's grace-of-God, AOL went from ten years of less-than-nothing to hundreds of billions of evanescent equity, is, to say the least, a bit airy-fairy, given the reputedly hard-headed standards of tough-minded businessmen. The reply to this critique is often a shrug. 'That's the American way.'
Or, the story goes, perhaps a measure of some hidden je ne sais quoi--where the real thread of all of this undoubtedly spins out--allowed AOL to stay alive. The firm did not so much stay the course as it stumbled toward a brand, defining itself as the prime portal to virtuality for a middle-America on the verge of the dot com era.
This may be a pleasant fable. It definitely fails to correspond with the period when things began to break AOL's way, however, as followers of this humble correspondent's textualization shall soon see.
The reason to dig deep in the fashion that this narrative does is simple, by the way. This humble correspondent implores readers to take note that the merger with Huffington Post can only make sense if a clear analysis is available of what led to that merger. Otherwise, any attempt to see what Arianna Huffington's bond with AOL means will, at the absolute best, be a blind stab at a moving target. And in the period after 1992, the target accelerated markedly.
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